Documentary First

Can thirteen letters from an 88-year-old stranger bring a dead film back to life? For two years, Heroes of Carentan , Christian Taylor's documentary about the 101st Airborne Division and the June 1944 liberation of Carentan , sat on a shelf, half made. In this episode she tells the honest story of why a WWII documentary stalls, what it costs to keep going, and the thirteen letters from an 88-year-...

What if the disappointment you didn't choose was the only door to the life you were meant to live? Three generations of one family chased professional baseball, and all three lost it to a career-ending injury. Each one found his calling in the aftermath. That pattern runs through Voices: The Danny Gans Story, filmmaker Andrew Gans's documentary about his father, the Las Vegas entertainer known as...

He Could Become Anyone on Stage. What Was He Hiding Offstage? Danny Gans was the Man of Many Voices, the highest-paid headliner on the Las Vegas Strip, and the first performer to sell a $100 ticket on the Strip. He could become almost anyone on stage. Privately, he carried a pain he kept hidden. In Voices: The Danny Gans Story, his son Andrew Davies Gans sets out to tell that whole story, the lege...

When does refusing to repeat a lie become complicity in it? The hardest question in documentary filmmaking is not how to find the truth. It is how to handle a lie. When a false story is already loose in the world, you have two choices that look almost identical on the page: refuse to repeat it, or amplify it by debunking it. The discipline of knowing which is which can decide whether your film tel...

Was the Poltergeist curse real, or did the world get Heather O'Rourke's story wrong for 38 Years? On February 1, 1988, Heather O'Rourke died at twelve years old. For nearly four decades the world has filled that silence with rumors. She Was Here , the new documentary produced by Brian Pocrass and directed by Nick Bailey, is the first authorized account of what actually happened, told by Heather's...

What is the difference between solitude and loneliness, and why does every creative person need to understand it? There are two kinds of being alone in creative work, and they are not the same thing. One makes the work great. The other wears you down to nothing. The difference between solitude and loneliness is the difference between sustainable creative life and creative burnout, and most of us n...

Adapt or die. What does that actually look like for a working filmmaker? Chicago documentary filmmaker Armin Korsos has a working filmmaker's answer to the question every documentarian is wrestling with right now. If you're not using AI, you will be losing work to people who do. In this conversation, Armin walks through how he turned 20 hours of pre-production paperwork into 30 minutes, how he use...

What does a $1.5 billion AI lawsuit have in common with your unwritten will? In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the largest copyright lawsuit in U.S. history. The reason was simple. They built first and cleared rights later. Documentary filmmakers have been making the same mistake for decades. And in this Deep Dive, host Christian Taylor argues that the lesson runs d...

How much does the average documentary filmmaker's biggest licensing mistake cost? A 30-second Jackson 5 clip can run a documentary $50,000 to $70,000 in licensing fees. Veteran ARC Producer Teddy Cannon has spent a decade in the messy middle between production and legal, and he is here to walk Christian through how to keep your film from becoming the next case study. In Episode 277, host Christian...

What if the documentaries no streaming platform will buy are the ones that could save your kid's life? Today's children may be the first generation in American history to live shorter lives than their parents. That's the central argument of The 100-Year Effect, a documentary I watched at the Julian Dubuque International Film Festival the same weekend I watched two other films that turned out to be...

Why do documentary subjects freeze for a professional camera - but open up to an iPhone? Robin Canfield shares why he films with iPhones, how he teaches documentary in twenty countries, and the communication skill he says every documentary filmmaker overlooks. Robin joins us from Saigon, Vietnam, during a four-week documentary program with international students. He shares why he switched from Can...

Someone tried to harvest Christian's voice for AI training. The pitch was polished, the project sounded real. But when she responded with ten professional questions, the conversation ended. Permanently. In this Deep Dive on Episode 275, Christian connects that experience to her conversation with Erik and Christopher Ewers , the brothers behind the PBS documentary Henry David Thoreau . Chris Ewers...

Even with Ken Burns and Don Henley attached, funding a PBS documentary is brutal. So what hope do the rest of us have? Erik and Christopher Ewers get real about PBS funding, AI’s impact on filmmaking, and how they landed George Clooney , Jeff Goldblum , Ted Danson , Tate Donovan and Meryl Streep for their new PBS documentary Henry David Thoreau. In Part 2 of this conversation, the Ewers Brothers o...

He edited nearly every Ken Burns film since The Civil War. He still didn't know who he was. Henry David Thoreau wrote that most people lead lives of “quiet desperation.” But what did he actually mean - and what does it look like inside a successful career? That’s the question Christian Taylor explores in this episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive, after her conversation with Erik and Christo...

He's edited nearly every Ken Burns film ever made. But he couldn't edit himself. What does it take to build a filmmaking career inside Ken Burns's world — and what happens when the hardest part isn't the craft, but learning who you are? Erik and Christopher Ewers are brothers who co-direct for PBS under the Ken Burns banner. Erik has been Burns's senior editor for 33+ years. Chris is a DP who's sh...

In Bridgerton Season 4, Francesca Bridgerton stands in the middle of her husband’s funeral and says something no one expects: “I want to feel joy.” Eighty years earlier and four thousand miles away, a D-Day veteran stood on Utah Beach watching children play in the water where his friends had died—and said something just as unexpected: “That’s why we came.” In this episode of Documentary First: The...

He sang the national anthem for the Colorado Avalanche a thousand times, coached 4,000 inner-city kids, lost it all, and rebuilt on the beaches of Normandy — where a WWII veteran watched children playing on Utah Beach and said through tears: "That's why we came." Jake Schroeder—former frontman of OP Gone Bad, national anthem singer for the Colorado Avalanche, and executive director of the Denver P...

What if failure isn’t the enemy—but the training ground? That’s the question Christian Taylor explores in this episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive, sparked by her conversation with filmmaker Quinnolyn Benson-Yates about the documentary Epic Bill. Bill Bradley lost his video rental empire to Netflix, went bankrupt, went through a divorce—and then rebuilt himself through extreme endurance at...

Award-winning filmmaker Quinnolyn Benson-Yates made her first feature documentary before film school—and its seven-year journey from short film concept to PBS distribution holds lessons every indie filmmaker needs to hear. Epic Bill follows an endurance athlete who lost everything when his video rental empire collapsed (thanks, Netflix). Bill’s mantra—“show up and suffer”—became Quinn’s filmmaking...

How do you know if you’ve found a Joe Amodei—or a predatory film distributor? That’s the question Christian Taylor explores in this episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive, after her conversation with Joe Amodei—filmmaker, 40-year industry veteran, and owner of Virgil Films Entertainment (Supersize Me, Restrepo, Forks Over Knives). What struck her wasn’t just what Joe said about Cat Fest 2026—...

Virgil Films founder Joe Amodei shares the hard truth: $250K is your budget ceiling, traditional marketing no longer is effective, and you must build your own audience. Joe has distributed films from the VHS era through streaming. In this episode, he breaks down which documentary genres actually sell (true crime, health/wellness, and ones that make us feel good—not adventure docs anymore), why 90%...

Imagine standing in an ancient Egyptian tomb, camera in hand, as a sarcophagus is opened for the first time in thousands of years. For filmmaker Jeffrey Roth, that moment sparked a realization: "No, this is real." This is the first-ever episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive—a new companion series where Christian Taylor takes one insight from recent podcast conversations, explores it deeply,...

“People are going to watch your movie for such an infinitesimally small percentage of their life. What they’re going to do is remember it.” That insight from Emmy-winning editor Charles Olivier—who’s cut The Jinx , The Redeem Team , and George Clooney’s Surviving Ohio State —stopped Christian Taylor cold. It cuts right to the heart of documentary filmmaking: your audience will forget most of your...

Emmy-winning editor Charles Olivier reveals how he restructured HBO's Surviving Ohio State and what it's like getting notes from George Clooney. Charles has cut some of the biggest docs of the last decade—The Jinx, Magic and Bird, The Redeem Team. Surviving Ohio State, produced by Clooney and directed by Oscar winner Eva Orner, exposes decades of abuse in college athletics. In this episode, Charle...

Jeffrey Roth has spent his career letting extraordinary people tell their own stories—Apollo astronauts, President George H.W. Bush, and now Dr. Zahi Hawass. In this episode, Christian Taylor inquires about the logistics of independent documentary filmmaking in Egypt: working with fixers, navigating permits, shooting in ancient tombs with one hour of access, and why he withholds narration. Plus: t...