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This topic comprises 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
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Author
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Topic: Cinerama on History Channel
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 12-02-2004 08:06 AM
quote: Christian Appelt
"Those who know it do it. Those who don't know teach it."
It's very tempting to indulge in 'expert bashing', I agree. IMHO it's not just the so-called 'experts' who are the problems, but also people who seek their views without checking them out properly first.
The producers of this sort of documentary have a lot of airtime to fill, and are not just making programmes on one subject. The chances are that the people who made this programme might have worked on one about the history of sheep farming in Wales last week and the causes of the Russian Revolution the next week. They hire researchers to go and find 'talking heads', and it's that process of identifying them which I think is at the root of the problem.
Very often those researchers are pretty lazy. I'll give you an example: back in February I was asked to be interviewed on a programme about the death penalty in 1930s America, which I know virtually nothing about. They'd found me because two years ago I'd wriitten a review of the DVD release of an archival restoration of a 1931 film called 20,000 Days in Sing-Sing in a film archivists' journal. My review focused almost entirely on the restoration aspects, and specifically the use of intertitles cut into the film to indicate where missing scenes and footage would have been. To put this in context I'd read up a little bit about the real-life case on which the film had been based, but this accounted for about 50 words in a 1,500 word review.
In order to find her 'experts', the documentary's researcher had gone to an online humanities abstract index of the sort you can use in any university library. For some reason, my article came up in her hit list (probably because she hadn't specified the search criteria very well). Enticknap not being a very common name, she then Googled me, found an archived e-mail post to a listserv with my contact details at the bottom and picked up the 'phone.
Once she explained what her programme was about, I quickly told her that I had no specialist subject knowledge in the history of capital punishment and that was the end of the conversation. But sadly I know several academics who, in that situation, would gladly have taken the fee, massaged their ego and done the interview. I can think of one individual who always appears on practically every film history documentary which broadcast here. His main research area was worked to death and has not really been interesting for over a decade now, so he's aggressively pushing himself as an expert in other areas. He's charismatic in front of the camera and efficient at delivering rentaquotes, and therefore is often in demand. Sadly, a lot of what he says is either plain simply wrong or betrays the fact that he's only read up on the basics and really can't offer any more insight than a second year undergrad student who's done the same thing.
But the TV researchers are not subject experts and in most cases simply can't tell whether someone is a leading researcher in any given area or just a slick rentaquote. In this case Horak clearly made a number of serious errors which should have been caught. But this programme was made for a cable channel and on a small budget. The researcher probably found the same CV that Christian posted, thought 'hmm... director of the Hollywood Museum... he should know his stuff'; and we know what happened next. The sad thing is that Horak is a genuinely acknowledged expert in a number of areas, and some of his restoration work is univerally regarded as ground breaking.
My theory is that the more senior subject experts get, the less they feel they have to lose by giving in to temptation and accepting offers from TV producers. For somoeone at my end of the career ladder, doing that would be extremely risky because I would potentially be making a public idiot of myself to the people I might be applying for jobs to in a few years' time. But for people further up I sometimes get the impression that they don't care if if their reputation suffers among a tiny minority of people who genuinely do know more than they do - they just love appearing big and important to the 500,000 other viewers who don't, and to other more junior members of their profession. After all, for every projectionist or technological historian who saw that programme, there will have been several hundred others who will have believed that Horak knew what he was talking about.
But people in this situation do themselves no favours when they accept invitations to represent themselves as something they're not in such a public forum, and the TV researchers who don't do their jobs properly also have a lot to answer for. In the 4 years I've been in the archive business I've seen the standard of researchers coming to me drop alarmingly - one even asked me if I had any footage of Captain Cook (1711-1779)! It's going to take change on both sides before the quality of historical programming gets signficantly better.
To give you an example of this problem, I have deliberately put two factual errors in the text of this post above. Can you find them? If you can, you'll be able to find the correct information using no more than Google. If and when you do that, ask yourself this: if you were considering whether or not to hire me as an 'expert' on some TV show, would it have occurred to you to verify that information, or would you just have taken my word for it?
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