NBPC's Haddock (center) often put the first money into producers' projects. In photo, she's flanked by her successor, Jacquie Jones, and NBPC Chair Curtis Jewell. (Photo: Jon Kalish.)
Many of the country’s top African-American documentary producers turned out for a reception at the Museum of Television & Radio in Manhattan last month to thank Mable Haddock for being their voice in public TV for more than 25 years.
Haddock retired Oct. 1 [2005] as executive director of the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC), and is now a Revson Fellow at Columbia University, working on a book about blacks in public television. Jacquie Jones, a producer, film festival director and critic, is her successor at NBPC. Jones edited Black Film Review, worked as producer/director on Africans in America and served as v.p. of Orlando Bagwell’s Roja Productions.
Haddock founded NBPC, one of five CPB-supported groups that help bring ethnic programming to public TV, in 1979. Originally based in Columbus, Ohio, NBPC now has its office in New York’s Harlem. The group funds, commissions and acquires film and video projects about African-American life and the African diaspora. Among the high-profile productions NBPC has supported or acquired are Julie Dash’s feature Daughters of the Dust and Stanley Nelson’s The Murder of Emmett Till.
Nelson, who is currently finishing a documentary on the Jonestown community for PBS’s American Experience, praised Haddock as a woman who took risks and helped get many docs off the ground.
“A lot of times she would be the first money into a project, which is critical because that’s what makes a project go from being an idea to real,” Nelson told Current. “For so many of us, Mable was the one who made the project real. I can’t overstate the importance of that.”
A number of Haddock’s colleagues at the farewell gathering kidded her about being sassy and “a major party girl.” But they made it clear that when it came to advocating for black filmmakers, Haddock has been quite serious.
“Mable has been a fellow warrior,” said Frank Blythe, executive director of Native American Public Telecommunications, another CPB-backed minority consortium. Also attending the reception were reps of the other minority consortia, which advocate for Latinos, Asian-American and Pacific Islanders.
Also on hand to honor Haddock was Orlando Bagwell, who worked with Henry Hampton on the landmark PBS series Eyes on the Prize and went on to produce major films dealing with African-American history and culture for public television. Bagwell now serves as a program officer in the Ford Foundation’s Media, Arts & Culture unit.
“Mable has been a behind-the-scenes fighter for the respect and the dignity and the authenticity of black filmmaking and black filmmakers,” Bagwell said. “She believed our voice should be part of the PBS scene and she was a tireless champion. Often times [filmmakers] are not there in the room when the decisions are being made about whether or not you have the opportunity to do what you do. Mable was always in the room and taking on that battle and representing us. And representing us because she knew us.”
In a period when leaders of the dominant political party often criticize PBS, African-American filmmakers at the Haddock farewell seemed of two minds on pubTV’s prospects.
Julie Dash, director of Daughters of the Dust, a 1991 feature film set in the Gullah culture of Georgia’s sea islands, said: “It’s not the same as it was years ago. In a funny way, PBS and CPB are just as demanding now as some of the larger Hollywood studios, and you’re saying, ‘I thought this was public television, public access and alternative voices.’ But things have changed. Let’s put it that way.”
But for Stanley Nelson, PBS is, in many ways, still the only game in town.
“There’s nobody else besides PBS that takes the projects, doesn’t meddle in them and shows them,” Nelson said when buttonholed in the Museum of Television & Radio lobby. “Look, PBS isn’t perfect, but PBS does not control your project editorially. PBS will take risks. Who else am I going to work for?”
Referring to Haddock’s work-in-progress about African-Americans and pubTV, Louis Massiah, an award-winning producer and director of the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, declared in a champagne toast: “This will be a text that we all will be quite afraid of because this will be the lowdown and dirty and true story of this public broadcasting business that so many of us here are involved in.”
Haddock's title in the July 2005 article is corrected from the print edition.
Web page posted Aug. 20, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee