Isaac Mizrahi
He knows where he's going -- someplace new

Originally published in Current, Dec. 12, 1994

By Steve Behrens

Picasso was on a collision course with Isaac Mizrahi. It was one of those nightmarish, slow-motion trajectories: an exhibit called "Picasso and the Weeping Women" was coming to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Mizrahi was then the cultural segment producer for KCET's nightly Life & Times program.

"Everybody thought, 'How can we not do Picasso?' But then I thought, 'Oh shit, how do you do it differently?' That's my first instinct," says Mizrahi.

His first and guiding instinct, by all accounts.

"The museum tour piece can be a dread cliche, if you're a producer," says Joyce Campbell, who was Mizrahi's boss. "But it really ended up being wonderful; it had some content, but we were able to make it very accessible."

He decided to get a woman's take on Picasso and the women he painted and slept with; a production assistant Sboshi Buge, suggested the droll feminist standup comic Paula Poundstone as the tour guide.

The comedian, who was neither a know-nothing nor a know-it-all about Picasso, riffed on Picasso's serial infidelities, and Mizrahi alternated her impertinent observations with clips from the museum's respectful audio tour of the exhibit. The camera meanwhile studied a series of paintings that were beyond words anyway.

"I try to have more than one thing going on at one time in a show," says Mizrahi. The inclination may come, he thinks, from his five years at interactive media companies before he hooked up with KCET.

In the two years since then, the 31-year-old producer has moved from Life & Times researcher to producer of 10-minute roll-in segments like Picasso/Poundstone, to producer of half-hour documentaries for the program's Wednesday edition. This month he's shooting an hour-long nostalgia special, and in January 1995, he'll join Blaine Baggett's team making a World War I history series for PBS, The Great War.

Clearly, management likes what he does. Val Zavala, the executive producer who now oversees him, says Mizrahi is a complete producer, "strong across the board," capable of getting along with difficult coworkers, making subjects comfortable, seeing the big picture, bringing in hip graphics and music, and thinking visually in the edit room.

"It's a pleasure to go over his script," says Zavala. "A lot of times, you're fighting a producer if they're wedded to a script, so you have to spend half your time arguing. If you see a problem, he'll get it immediately. Instead of arguing back and forth, you spend your time coming up with a solution."

Even with Mizrahi's talents, however, it may take him years before he becomes the Isaac Mizrahi, or even the other Isaac Mizrahi. A young New York fashion designer, no relation, has recently made the name moderately famous on labels in expensive clothing.

"In Hebrew, Mizrahi is 'Eastman,' as in Kodak, but I'm sure there's no relation there, either," says the Mizrahi at KCET.

His grandparents brought the name from the Middle East to Mexico, he says. "My parents came here for their honeymoon and stayed 40 years." He grew up in L.A., but went to Berkeley for college. While finishing his degree in English, a neighbor's friend, the late producer Marlon Riggs, taught him video editing. He became assistant editor on Riggs' documentary Ethnic Notions.

Riggs' dream was to correct injustices, Mizrahi says. "Just coming out of college, it was amazing to be linked up with this guy who was doing something so clearly meaningful."

He didn't find more documentary work, however, so he joined up with a top-rate interactive disc publisher, the Voyager Co., dreaming up cool things to do with the laserdisc's multimedia capacity. Buyers of the 12-inch disc of Taxi Driver can switch on the second audio track and hear director Martin Scorsese's running commentary, in an interview with Mizrahi. He spent four years with Voyager and a year with Robert Abel's Synapse Technologies.

One day, after watching the station's earlier local series By the Year 2000, he called KCET on a whim. When Life & Times was gearing up for its January 1992 premiere, a researcher position opened up and Mizrahi got it.

Life & Times became a hot show, though Mizrahi admits it's the interaction of the three politically diverse cohosts that created the buzz around town. Four days a week, one or more cohosts preside in the studio. For one day, Wednesday, KCET makes 20 Life & Times half-hour documentaries a year.

In the roll-ins for the studio segments and more recently the documentaries, Mizrahi has distinguished himself by always "pushing the envelope," says videographer Peter Stone, one of his partners in pushing.

The resulting distinct little movies don't all seem to have been hatched at the same desk. Mizrahi and L&T cohost Ruben Martinez take us to discos to witness the Banda craze that has revived traditional Mexican band music, put many young Mexican-Americans into cowboy hats, and become a symbol of ethnic pride. The tape swirls along with the infectious music; young women testify to its old-fashioned pleasures; Mizrahi makes a hypertext leap to their fathers, who also approve. Meanwhile, the camera cruises the disco, catching throw-away moments of boy-girl intrigue and bouncers patting down the patrons for handguns. As he says, Mizrahi likes to have more than one thing going on. His favorite example: Martinez on the dance floor, doing his standup in English and in Spanish.

"The Mystery of the Pygmy Mammoth," aired in October, appears to have been made by an entirely different producer, perhaps because Mizrahi gave it a look and feel so appropriate for an entirely different subject. During the week's dig, the KCET crew shoots four days and two nights. Stone brings back sequences panning the preposterously wild island landscapes off Santa Barbara, framed as perfectly as Ansel Adams stills, leading without fanfare to the sudden discovery of a prehistoric elephant spine protruding from the sand on a steep cliff. By day, scientists are shown coaxing the bones out of the cliffside; after dark, seemingly lit by Coleman lantern at their campsite, they're speculating about how dwarf elephants ever got to the island.

Mizrahi's versatility will be tested once again by its forthcoming local version of "Things That Aren't There Anymore." He doesn't ordinarily indulge in MTV video mannerisms anyway, but Zavala has warned him not to be too hip on this one. These nostalgia shows are most popular with viewers who have a few decades behind them. After studying the prototype nostalgia shows by Rick Sebak at Pittsburgh's WQED, Mizrahi has been out all week, taping interviews with people who have long memories and are thrilled to talk with the host, famous former KCBS anchorman Ralph Story.

Stone, who has shot many of Mizrahi's programs, says that, despite all the envelope-pushing that they enjoy, they don't use excessive amounts of tape. Instead of rolling 50 or 60 half-hour Beta cassettes, as some producers would, Stone says, he and Mizrahi shoot 18 or 20. "We know when to stop," Stone says. "We have an idea of what we need."

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