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Marty Skibosh had a plan. A May graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, he figured he’d break into the Chicago commercials industry, take five years to pay off his car and other bills, then move to L.A.
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| Marty Skibosh and host West Irwin |
Instead, Skibosh was accepted into the Television Academy Foundation internship program, and spent most of the summer editing at Hearst Entertainment in Los Angeles. Before his internship ended, the twenty-four-year-old was hired for a full-time job at another production company, which will take him through February. And after that?
"Jobs are always opening up," Skibosh says. "I see the path I need to take. I got the call from the Academy, and suddenly I could see a future."
Skibosh is one of seven Academy interns hired for full-time employment as a result of their internships. Two more were offered positions, but turned them down due to previous commitments.
The number of job offers set a program record, according to Price Hicks, director of the educational programs and services department. In early summer she had noted the exceptional sophistication and focus of this year’s group. "They had terrific internships, and they took full advantage of everything the internships had to offer," she says. "They all seemed to know how to make an internship work, and they were prepared to do good work.
"Companies are always looking for talented people who are committed to having careers in the industry. The people who hire the interns have gotten to know them. It’s an investment on both sides, and clearly these are good investments."
In Skibosh’s case, the investment paid off only after some twists and turns. The day he reported for intern duty, Hearst was bought by Warner Bros., and his Academy host, Wes Irwin, subsequently left. The editor he was assigned to assist on A&E’s Makeover Mamas, Mark Andrew, had his hands full when a segment producer also departed, giving Skibosh added responsibilities.
"Mark saw I was working hard, putting in my time, willing to learn," Skibosh relates. "He was always willing to teach me." And when Andrew became head of postproduction at The Talent Agency/Live in Hollywood, he hired Skibosh as postproduction manager.
"That’s a fancy term for nighttime digitizer," Skibosh says. "I go in at night and record everything into the computer." The fact that he’s working, he says, "still hasn’t hit me. I have a job. I’m in California."
While Skibosh was hired two days before his internship ended, Dana Melton, the episodic series intern on CBS’ The District, became a production assistant halfway through. "Show runner Pam Veasey helped me get the job when it came up," says the University of Alabama grad. "I didn’t get to finish the internship!"
Melton, twenty-two, had initially aspired to be a writer, but found she also enjoyed preproduction, production and postproduction. "I was having a hard time narrowing it down," she says. "I got some clarity with the internship. Not only did the writers get to be in on production, but they got to sit with the editors and give their input. Being a writer, I could still do these other things." Having begged the District writers to let her sit in on meetings and pitch ideas, she hopes the show will provide writing-related opportunities.
"I’m very pleased with how everything’s turned out," Melton says. "Once I got the clarity, I felt fulfilled."
Meanwhile, Marianna Yarovskaya opted to spend her summer as an Academy intern in documentary/nonfiction production at Termite Art Productions in Studio City rather than apply for a job at HBO in New York or Discovery Networks in Maryland.
"Price said there was a better chance [of getting hired] at a smaller company, where everybody wears a lot of hats," says the thirty-one-year-old Moscow native, who produced documentary videos for NASA before earning an MFA at USC last year. "Then I was asked to write treatments [on Russian-related topics] for the Discovery Channel show Unsolved History, and I started getting good feedback."
Still, she had to wait until the penultimate day of her internship for host Dave Harding to ask her to "stick around for a while, and we’ll see if we can figure out a payroll for you." It was, Yarovskaya says, "the most informal job offer I’ve ever had."
Hired as a researcher on the upcoming More than Human, she has been told there’s a good possibility of becoming a segment producer in a few months. She hopes to use the new job as a springboard to producing socially relevant documentaries; her short film Undesirables, about four young runaways in Russia, took second place at the Television Academy’s College Awards in 2000 and a bronze medal at the Student Academy Awards in 2001. "This is a good stepping stone," she says.
The other interns stepping up to full-time positions are Stephen Candell, Mike Mayfield, Ashwini Srikantiah and Karen Brochin. Jenny Maryasis passed on her job offer so that she could finish college, while Ashley Kennedy had already arranged to work in Australia.
–Libby Slate
With some 350 videotaped interviews of industry pioneers completed, the Academy Foundation’s Archive of American Television has begun spreading its secrets of success. In a new two-part course at UCLA Extension, the archive is training students in its research and interviewing techniques. Through Living Television, as the program is called, the archive hopes to expand its universe of skilled questioners and add interviews to its collection at a more rapid pace, all the while imparting valuable career skills to young people.
"We’re trying to duplicate archive practices so that you can’t tell the difference between a real archive interview and one done by the Living Television project," says Karen Herman, the archive’s director of production and research. "A researcher for the archive, for instance, takes two weeks to compile a timeline of the interview subject’s life and career, which is, on average, thirty pages long. We’re trying to duplicate that with the students."
Listed in the course catalog as "The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Visual History Project," the class is limited to twenty participants. The first twelve-week course teaches the fundamental methods of documentary research and on-camera interviewing. Students select interview subjects from a list compiled from suggestions made by the twenty-seven peer groups of the Television Academy. They then compose the timeline and their questions, while also learning the basics of production. In the second course – a twelve-week hands-on advanced documentary workshop – students analyze their timeline and questions using existing archive interviews and complete their own on-camera interview.
The idea for the course had been, as Herman puts it, "rolling around in our minds" for a while, and was brought to the forefront by Todd Leavitt, who became Academy president in fall 2002.
"It became clear that one of the points of frustration among the membership was – as wonderful as the archive is – there are only so many interviews that can be conducted, and the tendency was to capture above-the-line people," Leavitt says. "Part of my job was to address that and find solutions. Here, we had patented a curriculum of how to produce a living history project, and we had a dynamic education department. I thought, ‘Let’s put them together with the academic community to create a win-win situation.’"
Most of the prospective interviewees hold below-the-line jobs.
Having lectured at UCLA, Leavitt approached the university and received an enthusiastic response. Michael Rosen, executive producer for the archive, and Barbara Chase, the Academy’s director of membership services, were quickly recruited. Just three months later, all the elements were in place.
The classes are taught by award-winning documentarian David Haugland, a past president of the International Documentary Association whose credits include California Connected and National Geographic Explorer. Chosen by Jane Kagon, director of UCLA Extension’s Department of Entertainment Studies and Performing Arts, he was given hundreds of pages of archive materials, including handbooks developed for researchers and interviewers.
"David is a consummate pro with a stellar track record as a documentarian," Kagon says. "He really appreciates the vision of the Academy, in terms of wanting to preserve history."
Kagon’s department had already been working on a visual history project, so her first meeting with Leavitt yielded what she calls "a natural collaboration. The idea of working with Academy members as mentors, giving students hands-on experience, ties in with what we were doing," she says: "giving people practical experience over the theoretical. We’re honored to have the Academy as our partner."
The archive sees the course as a pilot project that can expand to colleges around the country, where interviewers will capture local television history. The Academy is also working with several of the nineteen local chapters of the New York—based National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences to connect with schools for the same purpose.
"There’s been a tremendous energy in the process," Leavitt says. "We started this in February and it came together in April. It’s a great example of the wonderful things the foundation can do, and of the working partnership between the foundation, the Academy and the academic community." – L.S.
Not everyone in television can be a performer, producer, director or writer. Nor does everyone aspire to be.
Turning the spotlight on other members of the TV team is Journeys Below the Line, a project of the Academy’s educational programs and services department, under the auspices of the Academy Foundation. Currently in the planning stage, the effort will demonstrate "that there are a lot of creative, gratifying jobs in our business other than the top four," says Bruce Bilson, EPS committee cochair.
A Journeys crew will visit the set of a hit series, videotaping cast and crew in action. A segment on camerawork, for instance, would include not just the show’s director of photography, but the camera assistant and gaffer. Later, a half-hour edited tape will be presented to university students as part of a panel discussion and Q&A session by Academy members working on that series, presided over by a moderator and an actor from the show.
USC will supply videotape crew, production facilities and the audience and auditorium for the panel discussion, thanks to Steve Binder, an EPS committee member who has taught at USC, and Don Tillman, Academy Foundation treasurer and executive director of USC Television—Trojan Vision; Trojan Vision operates a twenty-four-hour student-run TV studio on campus. The project received the seal of approval of Elizabeth Daley, dean of USC’s School of Cinema-Television and executive director of the Annenberg Center for Communication.
"Our kids are very excited about it," Tillman says. "It’s a good project, because it reveals a part of the industry that doesn’t get much attention from the students and faculty. We want to emphasize the teamwork that makes television production possible – and that’s mainly below the line."
The idea for Journeys came about during an EPS committee meeting that Bilson had called to explore educational opportunities made possible by the Academy’s increased license fee for the Primetime Emmy Awards telecast. "Someone said, ‘Why can’t we do something like Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio?’" he recalls.
Bilson hopes to profile four shows a year. Plans also call for distributing the tapes to colleges around the country, which delights Price Hicks, EPS director. "I really love this idea," she says. "I see a series like this having a very long lifespan. Many people in academia can make good use of it, get lots of mileage from it."
Bilson agrees. "I’ve always said to young students, ‘That big room we call a soundstage can help you or hurt you, so you’d better be nice to everyone. Everyone is there, mainly, because they want to be.’
"We have a great business," he adds, "and we want to expose kids to it. They can’t all be filmmakers in capital letters." –L.S.
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| Dr. John Pavlik |
Dr. John Pavlik, executive director of the Center for New Media at Columbia University, was among the scholars at the Academic Summit of the Academy Foundation’s Archive of American Television. The summer gathering in L.A. was held to review procedures of the archive, which videotapes interviews with TV industry pioneers to preserve the history of the medium. Also in attendance were: Dr. William Boddy, professor, Baruch College, City University of New York; Dr. Don Carleton, director, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; Dr. Jannette Dates, dean, School of Communications, Howard University; Dr. Ralph Engelman, professor of journalism, Long Island University; Dr. Lawrence Lichty, professor of radio/television/film, Northwestern University; Dr. Katherine Montgomery, president, Center for Media Education, Washington D.C.; Dr. Horace Newcomb, professor of telecommunications and director of Peabody Awards, University of Georgia and Dr. Robert Thompson, director, Center for the Study of Popular Television, Syracuse University.
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