Doug McConnell, host and senior editor of the Emmy Award-winning TV series Bay Area Backroads, is a good friend of mine. He and his production partner, Executive Producer Carl Bidleman, gave me my first job in television right out of film school. I immediately learned how to find a story throughout the course of a day as opposed to weeks, months. Over the next few years, Doug and Carl mentored me, not only in how to write and shoot for evening television but also how to interview. It is not so much a skill in production as it is a human quality. How to truly listen. How to treat others. Doug and Carl taught me more about life – and American history – than they did about TV. For that I am extremely grateful and lucky to be in their good company.
“Discovering a story is just as fun as telling it. Welcoming serendipity with an open lens. Directing is not to create order, but rather to harness the precarity of feeling and balance.”