Continuation of Ira Glass's talk about the public radio program This American Life.
Okay. My background. I started at NPR as an intern myself when I was 19; I'm 38 now. And the first summer that I worked there I did on-air promos for all the shows. And they had one producer on staff who did experimental documentaries — this is 1978 — and his name was Keith Talbot. He did a show that was on about once a month, and every show would have a different sound to it. He would have music composed, and he just did really interesting work.
He was interested in a different way to structure an hour of radio. He did an hour-long show with segments about the ocean. You would meet different people, like a guy who does this really beautiful description of what he thinks about when he's scuba diving. And somebody else who lives on a beach and literally lives on stuff that washes up from the ocean. And he does a little fable about Sea World.
There's like a bunch of different documentary stories, and each of them was edited so you never heard the interviewer. The person just starts talking and then just continues, which, if you've heard This American Life, we still do sometimes. And there would be music and stuff kind of washing underneath their voices.
But what was different in the form of the thing was that he was interested in taking the authoritative voice out of the center of the story, and so to get from segment to segment, the device that he came up with was two guys sitting on a pier.
One of the guys is telling stories about this imaginary friend that he had when he was a kid. And the imaginary friend really loved the ocean. And he tells a little story and that spins you into the next segment. And it's really like this lush little thing. So I produced promos for Keith where I would basically recreate in the 30-second promo, the sound of whatever the show was that he was doing, and he hired me the following summer as his production assistant.
And what I got from him was that I learned not to be scared to play around with structure of things. I think a lot of people who come up in public radio feel the one way to do a story is the way you hear on All Things Considered and Morning Edition. But I knew from the time I was 19 that you could just follow a kind of pleasure and feeling and instinct and build around that, and you can get something that also can be good. After I worked for Keith, I started being a tape cutter for All Things Considered and Morning Edition. I produced stories with Nina Totenberg and Scott Simon and Robert Siegel — I was his producer for a very long time . . . [he whispers:] and never revealed the two wives until tonight.
Periodically, I would try to be a reporter. It took me longer to learn how to be a reporter than any person in the history of broadcasting. I started in public radio in 1978 when I was a freshman in college. I was not really capable of writing a radio story that I would want anybody to hear today for 10 years. It took me 10 years, partly because I thought that a lot of the way that people write radio stories is a little corny and I couldn't figure out how to make it okay.
And I just was not a very good writer, and it took a really long time to learn.
But then I became a reporter. And after I moved to Chicago, there was an assignment in 1990 that made this huge change in the way I thought about what a reporter does. It was for a series on race relations, and they were going to send me into Lincoln Park High School for six weeks, to report on how black and white and Latino kids got along.
I really had no idea how to go about it, because nobody in the school had a perspective that would satisfy the story. I was just trying to get this thing in a set of very personal stories, very novelistic stories. And I didn't know how to go about it.
And at the time I saw this film called "Seventeen" [note], done by a filmmaker named Joel DeMott and her boyfriend Jeff Kreines. And it had the most incredible footage I'd ever seen. It just was so real. And I called her up and asked. And she said basically what you should do is you go into the school, and you'll find that you're drawn to someone or some thing, and you should just follow that instinct.
She did this documentary on high school, and she started off following this group of kids. One girl in particular, by the middle of the school year, was turning out to be one of the few white kids who was dating a black kid. And there was this huge racial incident over it, where crosses were burned on the kid's lawn. And it turned out that Joel, the filmmaker, who was drawn this girl, had herself been the one white girl in her high school who had gone out with a black kid. And something had just unconsciously pulled her to it. If you're a reporter, a lot of times you're just depending on luck. You're waiting for an interesting moment to happen.
But after I had that talk with Joel, I really started to organize all of my reporting around the notion of waiting for the lucky moment and just trying things. I switched my style of reporting much more than I think most reporters do. And now, I have a whole team of people who do that.
At Taft High School, there was this teacher named Jerry Patt and I don't know why I liked him so much but I just did. And he was like the Quote Machine. He and I just got to a point where we just really relaxed with each other, and stuff would just start to unfold in front of the microphone. I would be standing in the hall, and kids would come up to me and say, "We're cutting school. We're cutting school. Come with us." And I just taped the whole thing and got incredible tape. Jerry Patt was a really good teacher, really struggling. This is from the story about why like a third of the kids at this school would do their homework. It was a massive, massive educational problem.
Patt on tape: Now here's a kid that maybe you would want to talk to.
Glass on tape: Math teacher Jerry Patt pulls an embarrassed teenager over to my microphone.
Patt: Pablo is — now tell me when I'm wrong, Pablo. Pablo is exceedingly lazy in math. However, if I lean on him constantly, he does well and he does his work and he does well. His father is up here a couple of times talking to me already. I don't know how many times with the other teacher. This is a kid that, if we push him and motivate him any way we know how, he'll do the work. If we don't, he won't.
Glass: Pablo then launches into a description of the speeches that Mr. Patt made first semester to warn him he was going down the tubes.
Pablo: Yeah, Mr. Patt tells me that I'm looking at Burger King in front of me. Like he's looking at the future.
Glass: Like you'd be working at a Burger King.
Pablo: Yeah.
Glass: And then we do this, huh, Pablo?
Pablo: Um hmm.
Patt: This is a gesture of flipping hamburgers.
Glass: They're standing there going like this.
Patt: But let's see. You got your makeup work there.
Pablo: Yeah. That's 166.
Glass on tape: And at that moment, by handing in makeup work for two units, Pablo successfully completed the first semester of geometry. Just two months before he was failing the class. But victories like this can be fragile and short-lived. On Friday of last week, Pablo stopped coming to school. By Tuesday of this week Mr. Patt was worried and headed down to the office to call Pablo's house.
Patt: I tell you, you know, I haven't seen him in like three or four days and I started asking the kids and they said he had transferred out or he's going to leave because he was threatened to be beat up. I don't know the first thing about it. Let's see if my key will get me in here. No. They stole the phone out of here, you know that. Yeah. Fourth period. Everyone was in the office.
Glass: You can just hear him saying they stole the phone out of here. Fourth period. Everybody was in the office.
Patt: Got in a crowd and swiped our phone.
Ira: Someone lets us in the office and Jerry Patt dials one of the remaining telephones.
Patt: Yeah, Pablo? This is Mr. Patt. What's going on? Yeah. What's happening? Why haven't you been in school?
Glass: The story went like this: some students decided they wanted to keep their clothes and shoes in Pablo's gym locker. Pablo said they were gang members; he didn't want them there. And after a while he took his stuff and the combination lock to another locker. Then they came looking for him, saying their stuff had vanished, demanding he pay for it all. They told him people get killed for this kind of thing.
Patt: So, well, what are you going to do? Are you going to come back to school?
Glass:Pablo told him he was too scared to come back to Taft.
Patt:Well, what are you going to do? Just blow off the rest of the year?
Glass: Pablo and his parents had requested a transfer to another school, Von Steuben. But the principal at Taft would only give him a transfer if he revealed the names of the kids who were threatening him. By the time Jerry Patt got off the phone he was angry.
Patt: It's just bad, you know. What the hell? He's not coming back here. But, you know, if the kid wants to transfer, let him transfer. I mean, the longer he sits home and not being in Von Steuben, he's the one getting punished for these jerks doing what they did to him, you know. [Tape ends.]
Glass: Anyway, what's interesting to me about that tape is just that the whole thing is unfolding as you're there. We're walking down the hall. You can hear us moving through space and it's really, really visual radio.
It's your most visual medium. You know, I've said that so many times and it's not even true. But I just feel like if I keep saying it — it just seemed like such a good quote. "Radio is your most visual medium."
I wish it were true. It can be true. In the story, we try to put in stuff to look at, like when they're flipping the hamburgers, to give you something to see. And it really was just luck that I happened to be in the classroom when Pablo turned in his last assignment and then Jerry and I happened to run into each other in the hall three days later as he was going to call the kid. To do this Taft series, I was getting 30 hours of tape a week. That's a lot of time. Especially when you realize that when you record 30 hours of tape, to figure out what you've got, you've got to listen to 30 hours of tape. That takes 30 hours.
I hope you all will remember that the next time we're asking you for pledge dollars — all the work we're putting in.
The first thing [you want] when you listen to the radio, even when you're watching TV, I think, is to be surprised. That's one of the things that our electronic media do not do well. This is from a story, from Taft, where I went to the high school senior prom.
Glass on tape: On the dance floor there was a certain amount of copping feels and kissing. But the sexual tension of the prom hit a kind of surreal zenith when the deejay told the boys to bring chairs down to the dance floor — the girls were seated in the chairs — and the garter ceremony began.
Emcee at dance: We will count down on 10.
Glass: Over a hundred teenage girls presented bare legs with garters.
Emcee: All hands — you have to put your hands behind your back.
Glass: Meaning, grab the garter with your teeth.
Emcee: All right. I'm going to count backwards from 10. Ten, nine, eight . . ."
Glass: This is the kind of activity that separates the "just-friends" prom dates from the real dates. And dozens of just-friends stood around the edges of the hall in various states of discomfort. [Countdown continues in background.] A hundred kneeling teenage boys bring their faces up against the slightly sweaty thighs of their dates, grip multi-colored garters with their teeth, and drag them off their legs. It's a shocking and amazing sight. But when I ask teachers about it later, they all say, "Where have you been? They've done this for years!" At homecoming, apparently, things get even more explicit.
Emcee: Okay, let's move the chairs and we'll have a slow dance.
Glass: These next two clips are from the '92 Clinton campaign, from the bus tour. This was a really, really wonderful assignment. You know, NPR has the nation's best political reporters. And they sent me out, who knew nothing about politics really, with the idea that I would be really observant and document what I saw. So I was on the bus tour, right after the Democratic National Convention.
I feel like it's part of my job, to make stories more interesting, to express my own amazement when I am amazed. That piece with the garter — it's like, I am truly amazed and I am letting you know. And we're all going to share in that experience together, because it's just going to be a more fun radio story.
Glass: Anyway, there were all those town meetings where Clinton and Gore would take questions from the audience. One of the big moments in the story is when somebody finally stumped him. Clinton, you can't stump him. So somebody finally stumped him by asking the question, "Do you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?" And Clinton goes, "You know, I believe that Senator Gore would like to answer that one first." [Glass laughs.]
You know one thing with the Gores — they were so affectionate, and clearly just adored each other. Sometimes she would just stand there with her hand on his butt until Robert Strauss, high-level Democratic consultant, advisor, one of these wise old men, told her she had to stop because she was going to get photographed. Or someday somebody might tell an auditorium full of people.
Anyway, so this is from the town meetings:
Glass on tape: Like any good politician, Clinton's message as he goes around the country is: I am one of you. In Pennsylvania, he says:
Clinton: I know a lot, I think, about Pennsylvania. My wife's family is from Pennsylvania.
Glass: In Illinois, he remembers another branch of the family:
Clinton: My wife is a daughter of Illinois and she wants you to vote for me for President.
Glass: When someone in Louisville complains about the drug problem in their community, Clinton empathizes:
Clinton: I've got a brother who's a recovering addict, so I know more about this subject than I wish I did.
Glass: When someone asks what he'll do for people whose relatives have Alzheimer's disease, Clinton begins:
Glass: I have had a great aunt and an uncle suffer with . . .
Glass: The way he stumbled, I almost thought he was going to say, "I have Alzheimer's."
Clinton: . . . so I know quite a bit about it.
Glass: I mean, these are moments that I thought revealed a lot about him. He's so smooth. And it was early on in our eight-year love affair with him as a nation.
It was the kind of moment that as a reporter you come back and you tell your friends, you tell your friends in the newsroom. And reporters as a group tend to be very, very funny people. Like, I mean, most people tend to be very funny people. But reporters, they'll be really funny when they talk about their stories, and then their stories will be really boring. Or the funniest moment won't be in the story.
So I was with a group of reporters at NPR; we were going to be funny in the story, too, not just around the office.
We are really careful to build surprises into This American Life. And we kill stuff that's really good, and perhaps might appear on another radio show, that we just do not find surprising enough. For example: About a year ago, we did an hour-long show on Frank Sinatra. And we had this plan to, like, conjure the myth of Frank Sinatra really fast, at the top of the show.
The story we had was by Will Friedwald, who had written a pretty definitive book about Sinatra. And, you know, with Sinatra there's literally a moment in 1942 when he became the Frank Sinatra that we think of today. Like before this one show at the Paramount Theater, he was just another nobody from Hoboken. And after that show he was Frank Sinatra.
So Will Friedwald goes into the NPR studio in New York and he tells the story in a very straightforward, Fresh Air with Terry Gross kind of way. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Actually, Fresh Air is my favorite show. Terry Gross rules! Seriously — it is the most consistently good show on public radio, for me anyway.
So we have this story, a perfectly fine narrative. It just wasn't surprising. In fact, this is just like the damned Discovery Channel, and we are not going to do it because it's not surprising. So we put together this:
Announcer on tape: All right, Mr. Ken Lane, whenever you're ready, we're gonna sing a few of these songs. We hope you enjoy 'em.
Glass on tape: Yeah. We hope you enjoy them. From WBZ, Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.
Sinatra: What're you staring at? Brassieres. [He sings:] I dig a broad with no brassieres.
Glass: This is a recording from 1962 of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr., performing in a club outside Chicago. And like everything else about Frank Sinatra, what's fascinating about this recording is how many different people he's able to be all at once, cutting up on the one hand and then turning around and singing the most vulnerable possible love songs on the other.
Sinatra singing: When you're alone, who cares for starlit skies? — [he makes a crack:] Where does it hurt, baby? — [he continues singing:] When you're alone . . ."
Glass: Not three minutes later he's lashing into a gossip columnist he hates, Dorothy Kilgallen.
Sinatra: I never met a . . . I mean, I've met many, many male finks, but I never met a female fink until I met Dorothy Kilgallen. How's that for an opener? [Club audience laughs.] I wouldn't mind if she was a good-lookin' fink.
Glass: Anyway, he goes on. "That such beautiful music should emerge from such vulgarity is one of life's great mysteries," the Washington Star once wrote.
Sinatra: The town where she came from, they had a beauty contest when she was 17 years old, and nobody won.
Glass: Don't laugh at that, public radio listeners. Uphold a standard.
For me, what I liked about that, it was not the Discovery Channel. You know, everybody's got their standards, I've got mine. You know, there's something really vivid about it, and there's something surprising about it. And you just feel like you hear this thing that you don't normally hear about him.
That's a very hard show for us to do — Frank Sinatra — because it's something that other people have written about. And when you hear Frank Sinatra, you feel like you already know everything, so it's hard to stake out a territory, as a public broadcaster, where you feel like nobody's said this other thing yet. So that was our challenge.
The length of a news spot — if you listen to like the newscast at the beginning of All Things Considered or Marketplace — is 45 or 50 seconds. Usually, there's a couple of sentences from the reporter, then they do a quote from somebody, and kind of two or three more sentences from the reporter, and you're at 50, 45 seconds.
It turns out that we public radio listeners are trained to expect something to change every 45 to 50 seconds. And as a producer you have to keep that pace in mind. For example, in a reporter's story, every 45 or 50 seconds, you'll go to a piece of tape.
So if you have a four-minute story, you figure you're going to have four quotes or maybe five. And even in a format like ours, where it just sounds like people talking and music washing all over the place, we have to adhere to that pace.
I bring this up because I produced this writer named David Sedaris, and from the very first time I saw him read, I knew his work would work for the radio — not only because it was completely original, and not only because it was really, really funny, and not only because he had a great reading style that was totally his — but he told anecdotes that ended every 45 or 50 seconds. And I knew I could make it work for Morning Edition.
This is from the first piece of his that we put on the air. He told the story of when he was an elf at Macy's department store, around the Christmas season. This is 52 seconds. Carl Kasell could talk his way into it and play it during the newscast.
Sedaris: Twenty-two thousand people came to see Santa today, and not all of them were well-behaved. Today I witnessed fistfights and vomiting and magnificent tantrums. The back hallway was jammed with people. There was a line for Santa and a line for the women's bathroom. And one woman, after asking me a thousand questions already, asked, "Which is the line for the women's bathroom?" And I shouted that I thought it was the line with all the women in it. She said, "I'm going to have you fired."
I had two people say that to me today: "I'm going to have you fired." Go ahead. Be my guest. I'm wearing a green velvet costume; it doesn't get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? "I'm going to have you fired."
And I want to lean over and say, "I'm going to have you killed."
Glass: The fiction that we have on the show, we edit it exactly the same way that we edit the nonfiction, which is that it proceeds in a rhythm of: anecdote, reflection, anecdote, reflection.
To me, the reflection in this piece is where he says, "Who do these people thing they are?" It tells you the meaning of the story.
If you work in radio, you've got your writing and you've got the way you read it. And we spend a lot of time working with people who've never been on the radio before. And sadly for me and my little radio staff, not all of them read as well as David Sedaris.
Here, for example, is the first take of a story. A real good writer had never done a piece for us before. Here he is in the studio:
[Tape: writer sounding sing-songy.]
Glass: Hear that kind of sing-song. That's the way a lot of people read when we send them into the studio, and we try to get them to talk and just like you really talk. So this is after an hour of working with him:
[Tape: writer sounding less sing-songy.]
Glass: Okay. Still not so great, but better. Then we inserted pauses. An image will stay with you a little longer if we put in more of a pause. When we were using regular old tape, you'd put in a pause about this long for a second.
But now we do all this digitally. So what you do is you record the sound into a computer and then you can move pauses around and stuff.
Here it is after three hours of editing his voice tracks, five hours adding sound and music and all the quotes. People ask, "Why do you put so much music?" It's because music is like basil. Everything's going to go better. Put it on, don't think twice. Chicken, vegetables — it's just going to be better.
[Tape: writer with music, sound effects]
Glass: Doesn't he sound better?
Note: This web page
contains a correction. Glass originally cited the film as "High School,"
and said it was distributed by PBS. Kreines provided the correct title and
said PBS declined to distribute it.
Web page originally posted May 25, 1998, corrected April 8, 2000
Current
The newspaper about public TV and radio
in the United States
Current Publishing Committee, Takoma Park, Md.
Copyright 1998