#The lost tapes la riots series#

Working at the paper in Santa Monica - it was a pretty good-sized paper - and when I first saw both the King video and the eventual verdicts of the trial, I was in the newsroom. But there are key moments I recall distinctly. Because you just went on autopilot when the thing started and woke up six days later like, 'What just happened?'. TJ-В A lot of the riots at the time, especially having been a reporter, are a blur to be honest. IвЂ™m curious if you remember when you saw the Rodney King video and the emotions you had after that initial viewing? ДЄB-В I love that, 'YouвЂ™re waiting for the narrator, and he never comes.' So IвЂ™d like to touch on, having been there at the time, some of the more personal things and your feelings about being there. YouвЂ™re interacting almost with the story in a way that other forms donвЂ™t. But itвЂ™s hard to check out of this format of storytelling. Images bounce off your eyes while you're listening to something, and itвЂ™s easy to check out.

And the narrator never shows up (laughs). I always joke that when we do a film like this, people are waiting for the narrator to come and save them. ItвЂ™s intended to just reach out and grab viewers. But for younger people, whoВ really donвЂ™t know about something that is relatively modern American history, I think itвЂ™s better to let them live through it, experience it, like we did. There are wonderful and important stories to tell in that format. TJ-В I started out doing History Channel docs after I was a reporter, and it attracted a certain audience of people who were really into history. The other interesting aspect is you are telling it for the first time to younger people, who may have never seen images like this before.

How has the world changed today compared to that experience I just had from watching this? Has it changed?' So the point of doing it was to make it come alive in a way that other documentaries, that have people telling stories from the past, just can't do.ДЄB-В And I think you did a great job of that, as someone who kind of lived through it. Then in your own mind, be able to say, вЂњGee, thatвЂ™s what it was really like to be around in LA in 1992. Hopefully you experience it in a way that is unique to other accounts of what went on. With the state of the world today, so much division in the country, picking a story like the LA Riots to do in this format felt very right and necessary. We wanted people to feel like this is happening right now. So we're taking factual information and presenting it in a way that I think viewers will find much more experiential. The difference is, everything in this documentary is real and accurate. The story would just continue to flow, almost like a movie. Then it becomes this huge jigsaw puzzle to use other people's words and reporting to put it all together in a way that makes it feel like you're actually experiencing what went on. So we go out and gather all of this material that we can get our hands on. We didnвЂ™t do any interviews, and we relied just on the media from that time to tell the story. ItвЂ™s been done a few times over the years, but itвЂ™s a very difficult format, in that we got rid of the narrator. And I had reached a point a few years ago where I thought thereвЂ™s got to be a better way to make people really experience what these events were like. When I changed to doing documentaries for television, it was great to interview people and put together pieces with a narrator to explain. I used to be a newspaper reporter here in Los Angeles, and I worked at the old Santa Monica OutlookВ and after that the LA Times, but thatвЂ™s where I was at the time.

#The lost tapes la riots series#

The series is called, The Lost Tapes, and weвЂ™ve done a few of these before that have no narration and no interviews. TJ-В Well, we do a series for the Smithsonian Channel, of which this is a part. Can you take us through the editing and what your primary objective was in creating this piece? I'm curious if you could describe the process in deciding to create it the way you did. And you are correct, I remember what you remember (laughs).ДЄB-В I really enjoyed the way you've told the story, through your use of images and video. TJ-В Happy to speak with you as well, Adam.

I remember seeing tanks roll across Ventura Boulevard and having the curfew, knowing everyone across LA had to be home by a particular time. I'm actually from Los Angeles, and I was there during the time frame when the riots occurred. AB-В Hi Tom, happy to speak with you today.