Documentary First

What does The Velveteen Rabbit, a 1922 children's book about a stuffed toy, have to do with old home movies and AI? In Margery Williams' classic story, an old toy called the Skin Horse tells a stuffed rabbit that being real isn't about how you are made. It is something that happens to you when you are loved for a long time. In this episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive, Christian Taylor foll...

What can a few seconds of a stranger's home movie do for your documentary? Archival footage does not have to come from the National Archives or a big footage house. Home movies, the 8mm and Super 8 reels families shot from the 1930s through the 1980s, show ordinary life the way it actually looked: the clothes, the cars, the Christmases. For a documentary filmmaker, home movie footage carries a tex...

Do you have a documentary, or do you have a Wikipedia entry? Somebody decides whether your documentary gets made. Sophia Dilley is one of those people. She runs Concord Originals, the division behind Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. on HBO, and she is Co-President of RKO, which Concord bought in June 2025 along with more than 5,000 titles including King Kong, Citizen Kane and It's a Wonderful Life. In this...

Who finishes your film if you can't? This episode is about how to make a documentary with no film school. Andre N. Jackson had never made a film. He had twenty years in technology and security, an idea that arrived while he was sitting in a barber's chair, and no way into the industry. He finished the film anyway, and he came on the show with three lessons for other filmmakers. Two more came out w...

When did your audience stop being people and become a number? Most independent films and podcasts do not fail because the work is bad. They fail because no one ever felt like they belonged to them. This Deep Dive is about how to build an audience for your documentary before it is ever released, and the one ingredient that decides whether people stay with what you make. In this Deep Dive on Documen...

How do you fund a documentary when the whole industry says no? How do you fund a documentary without film funds, grants, or a commissioning broadcaster, and still reach a huge audience? Dutch filmmaker Jonathan de Jong did exactly that with Human Forever , the most-watched human interest documentary in Dutch cinema history. The government pulled his funding two and a half years into production, an...

Who believed in you before you could believe in yourself? In this Deep Dive, documentary filmmaker Christian Taylor makes a quiet case that we rarely overcome self-doubt on our own. Almost no one finishes anything hard alone. Someone has to see it in you first. This is a reflection on the power of belief, on the kind of encouragement that shows up right when you are ready to quit, and on how a few...

What does it really take to make a documentary that finds an audience and earns its money back? “You have to have the passion for the story and the passion to do the work, because it will not be easy.” — Joe Amodei If you want to make a documentary, the hardest questions are not the ones about cameras. They are about access, money, and whether anyone will ever watch it. In Documentary First Episod...

How do you make people care about your documentary? Facts alone rarely make an audience care. The emotional core of a documentary lives somewhere else. In this episode of Documentary First, filmmaker Christian Taylor tells the story of how she found the heartbeat her film about the Battle of Carentan was missing. It was not in the archives. It was in the memories of a man who was six years old whe...

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...