Re: [dinosaur] Prehistoric Road Trip,Tiny Teeth, Fearsome Beasts

[Mike Habib <biologyinmotion@gmail.com>]

Great suggestions, Tom. From my own experiences working on documentaries, I 
would add âget in early, if possibleâ to the list. Iâm sure you (and many 
here) have run into the problem far too often where a narrative and script are 
already locked in on a production, and the talking heads are intended to simply 
promote that existing story. If there are factual difficulties on the front end 
then this creates serious downstream problems.

Your points about recommending topics and people helps to combat this issue, 
because (over time) production crews accumulate more robust lists of go-to 
folks over time, making it more likely that they hire someone for fact-checking 
near the outset. The last couple of shows that I worked on, I actually got to 
help steer the scripts, talent choices, and an on-screen âexperimentsâ, 
because I was on board back from a very early stage (before the shows were even 
pitched). This typically means doing some pro bono work in the early stages 
(production companies usually canât hire until the show has the green light), 
but I think itâs worth the downstream benefits.

Cheers,

âMBH

> On Jul 22, 2020, at 7:00 AM, Thomas Richard Holtz <tholtz@umd.edu> wrote:
> 
> Good question. A couple of issues:
> * Give advice to production teams as to what are the good topics and 
> interesting people they should interview. Despite what some have posted on 
> the list (but they wouldn't know, since they don't have professional 
> experience in the topic), the talking heads are often selected not because 
> they are necessarily the world experts. Instead, because production studios 
> are businesses, they have to be frugal in choices. So they find who has done 
> successful (entertaining & informative) interviews in the past, and 
> preferentially choose them (better a known person than risk an unknown whom 
> might waste their time.)
> * If possible, see if you can help out in fact checking.
> * When you find one that is good, spread the word on social media!
> * I will post more thoughts when I don't have a bunch of back-to-back Zoom 
> meetings...