Behind the Curtain

 

If you stick around long enough, you’ll get your own TV show. At least, that’s what it seemed to me. My entry into the world of television, Idaho Reports was a steady, respected, and, to my inexperienced eyes, untouchable nightly half-hour public affairs program, Host Marc Johnson could carry a thoughtful conversation for thirty minutes on any topic thrown at him. Later, he would go on to serve Governor Cecil Andrus, first as press secretary and then as chief of staff. Now a political historian, Marc is one capable dude, and I was truly impressed.

Jean McNeil, Gary Richardson, and Peter Morrill helped him behind the scenes to create segments, with Ricardo Ochoa and Al Hagenlock shooting and directing, quietly shaping what went to air. Together, their Idaho Reports became the crown jewel of Idaho Public Television and racked up awards and the all-important public trust. The show spoke to a small but influential audience, and it gave this star-struck log-cabin dweller a glimpse into a different reality than one I occupied.

For three months each year, beginning in January, Idaho Reports’ entire production team migrated to the basement of the Capitol to cover the Idaho legislative session. Cameras, cables, lights, video-production gear, computers and everything else to make a television show traveled to the “puzzle palace” for a three-month stint. Other reporters from around the state also converged on the Capitol. One day during lunch, twenty reporters gathered on the Capitol steps for a photo representing every corner of the state.

Looking back, it’s fair to call the late 1980s and early 1990s a golden age of statehouse coverage. We sensed that what we were doing mattered and that we were doing it together. Idaho Reports’ makeshift studio was on the fourth floor. Legislators were on the third floor, so it was relatively easy to find someone to talk with for our daily programs unless lobbyists were wining and dining them that evening, often the case.

To call our digs a studio is generous. We took over one small corner of the fourth-floor rotunda, a space so tight that one of the camera people had to sit on the windowsill to film guests on the set. With cables strewn everywhere, one wrong step could knock the signal off the air. The engineers worked miracles bouncing the signal from the Statehouse to Bogus Basin to the station, where staff added graphics live and saved the recording for later playback. From there it was sent to our eastern and northern Idaho transmitters. Technologically fragile, everything was analog, blasting through some of the lower 48’s most demanding environs.

Associated Press reporter Bob Fick rightly called the early weeks of the session “GMA—General Milling Around.” Filling a daily half-hour program in the first weeks of the session with something exciting and important could feel like stretching taffy. I still remember a painfully long segment with the chairman of the House Transportation Committee on the pros and cons of asphalt. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but in television it can also be the mother of boredom.

For me, still a rookie in this television business, it was a crash course in state government. I could see why seasoned reporters called it the “puzzle palace.” Almost daily, Republicans met behind closed doors, usually before a key vote and often for several hours. Democrats figured they should caucus also, even though they didn’t have the votes to make much of a difference when bills made it to the House or Senate floor. We were always impressed that Republicans seldom had defectors in their ranks when it came time to vote. I’m not sure any of us knew what threats were employed to ensure such loyalty.

During the three months of the legislative session, the favorite after-hours hangout was the Interlude Bar & Grill, half a block from the Capitol on 8th street. It was second home to many legislators, lobbyists, judges, regular Joes, and some reporters. No doubt a lot of state business was on the table for discussion, as well as a sandwich known as the “drunken chicken,” a fillet marinated in vodka and cooked to perfection. The regulars back then remember the ‘Lude’s Tilted Tuesdays, Slam poetry nights, Idaho nachos, a Jagermeister chilling machine and hardcore backgammon games. In January, February, and March the Interlude was the place to be.

The puzzle palace started to wear on everyone by mid-March, when interviews eventually got around to the same question: “Why haven’t you adjourned yet?" Veteran reporters knew the answer depended on the weather. This was a citizen legislature, made up of a lot of farmers. As the days grew warmer, the urge to plant crops became too strong to fight, and lawmakers usually headed to their fields in late March.

Still, I was where I wanted to be, in a culture I was beginning to appreciate. Learning. Watching. Becoming useful. After the session ended and we returned to the Idaho Public Television building and our own desks, I always suffered a decompression period. Life at the station seemed slow-paced, not as exciting. It was definitely time for me to get outside and back to the woods.

The culture of the legislature had some unreported traditions in the 1980s. On the session’s adjournment day I had wandered to the Revenue and Taxation committee room, also on the fourth floor. I knew the room well, because each morning at 8 a.m. fifteen legislators would meet there to debate tax matters. Back then it was my “beat.”

On that particular morning, I saw the large table looking like a well-stocked bar, with free bourbon, scotch, vodka, and gin and being appreciated by handfuls of lawmakers only too happy to escape the legislative session. I wasn’t too surprised. There were times during the session when I would head down to the third floor to beg legislators to join us on the Idaho Reports set that evening, and I would catch the unmistakable scent of bourbon and Coke. It was a different culture in those days. I’m told that there are no longer public displays of alcohol anywhere in the Statehouse. The Interlude closed permanently in 2003. Several doors down the street from the famous bar is Dawson Taylor Coffee Roasters, apparently a suitable replacement for the good old days.

In 1990, House Bill 625 defined that year’s session and affected me more than most. The most restrictive abortion measure in the nation sparked nightly candlelight vigils and divided the state in ways that felt new, even for Idaho politics. The sharp debate was often personal, but the bill passed both chambers and landed on Governor Andrus’s desk. Reporters couldn’t agree what would happen next. Some, like Bob Fick, figured Andrus had no choice but to sign the bill. I figured the governor had to go home every night and face his wife and three daughters, and they would have some influence over his ultimate decision. Who knows, they probably helped him write his veto speech.

Andrus called the bill in question “without compassion, further harming an Idaho woman who may find herself in the horrible, unthinkable position of confronting a pregnancy that resulted from rape or incest.” What surprised nearly everyone, including the governor, was that the veto didn’t hurt him at all. He won reelection with 70 percent of the vote. For one moment, Idaho politics balanced on a knife’s edge, with a 21–21 split in the State Senate. That proved to be the high-water mark for Democrats in Idaho so far.

The next month I informed General Manager Jerry Garber that he might have to fire me, because I had served my time covering the Idaho Legislature and would not be going back. Soon afterward, Idaho Public Television became the sole producer of Outdoor Idaho, and I found myself spending less time in the Capitol and more time in Idaho’s outdoors, producing stories that didn’t require a vote count. I was told I would have to carry a lot of the show, with little money and not much support to get the job done. I happily accepted the challenge.

Further state and federal budget cuts led Jerry Garber to reduce the daily Idaho Reports program to a weekly presence. There were a few groans, but not many. Outdoor Idaho eventually got graded up from a monthly show to a weekly show, airing Thursday and repeating Sunday evenings. That major change gave the program a fighting chance to grow its audience. We leaned very heavily on repeats. We had no choice. Outdoor Idaho had a three-person staff with mostly old equipment. I took a certain pride in hearing from someone that watching an Outdoor Idaho episode a second time “wasn’t so bad.”

People could see we weren’t just phoning it in. They could see we were on the road, hauling unreliable gear up mountains and often bouncing cameras around on the back of a pack animal until they stopped working. The camera, that is. One disastrous trip into the White Clouds required two 100-mile trips back and forth from Boise, first to replace the camera’s video tape recorder that only recorded the snow you used to see when stations went off the air and then back to Boise to fix batteries that wouldn’t hold a charge for more than ten minutes. Not surprisingly, the outfitter assisting us had left, no doubt thinking we were a two-bit, shoestring operation. We also began wondering if we had taken on more than we could handle. Maybe we should just stay in the studio, said my visibly angry colleagues IDFG writer Royce Williams and IdahoPTV director Jeff Tucker. Getting around the state had turned into a crap shoot.

Still, we were taking people to places they’d likely never see and talking to people who rarely got asked their story. Viewers could see we made it a point to stay away from Boise and politicians whenever possible. The landscapes of Idaho made that easy. When your ingredients are as fresh and beautiful as Idaho’s, it’s hard for even a lousy chef to fail. I’ll occasionally stumble across an old episode I haven’t seen in decades and flash back to all the troubles we had with ailing camera equipment, flat tires, and gremlins in the edit bay. The show seemed better than I remember.

Not all feedback was flattering, even when it was meant to be. One mother told me she used an Outdoor Idaho DVD when her young twins refused to go to bed. A few minutes into a show, she told me, they were out cold. I’m sure she meant that as a compliment. After all, I had been told that my sonorous nasal voice, coupled with extraordinary video, exceptional music, and comfortable pacing seemed to trigger a viewer’s parasympathetic nervous system, unlocking the auditory cortex, lowering the heart rate, and reducing the stress hormones. Who was I to question science?

 

Quite content being one of the handful of producers on staff, I didn’t ask to be the executive producer of all the local productions for Idaho Public Television; but I had changed since those early days of just wanting to make television. I saw the importance of helping to create an atmosphere where good people could tell Idaho's stories. Besides, I was becoming one of the old-timers at the station. Even though I was convinced that the people I was supervising knew more about television than I did, there came a time for me to step up and offer my services.

Years before television seduced me with its power and ability to manipulate reality, I had read a syndicated newspaper columnist who answered people’s questions. I remember one question: “What does an Executive Producer (EP) do?” His answer was, “No one really knows.” There are so many answers to the question. In the movie business, an EP usually devotes time and energy to finding the money to pay for the dream. In the TV world, EP usually describes the person who gets the final say and handles the budget. He or she is also the one who usually takes the hits when things go south. At IdahoPTV, things are a little different, because the general manager (GM) has to answer to the Idaho Legislature and the Idaho State Board of Education. If something really spirals out of control at the station, lawmakers will haul the GM before their budget committee to exact their pound of flesh.

 

Over time I came to define the role of EP as trust your excellent producers, try to be helpful, and don’t interfere unless there’s a real need. Also, pay attention to what works and what doesn’t work, so we don’t repeat mistakes. I was pretty sure my value to the agency was not to play traffic cop, but there were times when that was needed. Sometimes an editor would tell me the producer couldn’t come into the edit bay while the show was being constructed. I realized that often an editor knows things that a producer doesn’t know, because the editor has battled with the video for hours and knows what works and what doesn’t work in the creation of a sequence. Some editors figured the last thing they needed was a producer to tell them how to do their job.

Occasionally I’d have to tell the producer to give me the script to narrate, and in the margins list the cover footage to use. The editor and I would take it from there. Our production department made all kinds of arrangements like that to keep things flowing smoothly. EP as WD40. There’s some truth to that. The work of a producer was always more impressive to me than that of an EP. Producers develop a particular story idea and follow it through to completion. That involves arranging interviews, working with a videographer, writing the script, and working with an editor to make sense of it all. Sometimes, this could take a month or more.

Often the placing of Executive Producer in the show credits was simply a nod to a TV hierarchy. The producer, editor, and videographer do the heavy lifting. Happiest when I was writing and producing OI shows, I usually worked on more than one at a time, with another two or three somewhere in the docket. Deadlines kept the pressure on. Being both the host and executive producer of Outdoor Idaho made me pay particular attention to public-policy issues, because it’s easy to get tripped up. Luckily, I had people like BSU professors John Freemuth and Jim Weatherby to offer assistance before the show hit the air waves.

There was one notable occasion when we decided to do something we hated to do, make adjustments after the show aired.  It’s not as easy as it sounds. It often involved adjusting music and closed captioning and making sure the program still came in at exactly 26:46. We were producing a segment on U.S. Forest Service law enforcement. Two elderly loggers in an old truck with a trailer loaded with logs got pulled over near Lucky Peak, and we were there when the woman Forest Service officer stopped them. Our camera was rolling as she ticketed the men for hauling logs out of the forest without a permit.

I considered it serendipitous and good TV, and we worked it into the script. After it aired, I received a call from one of the men’s attorneys. I ignored that, but then came a call from the wife of one of the men. She told me her husband had not been able to sleep since the show aired, and she didn’t know what to do. She said they were both suffering. I figured we had no choice. We spent half a day re-editing the program so that the faces of the men were not obvious. The final product wasn’t as exciting, but the wife was appreciative, and the segment still made its point that you might wind up facing a fine if you take logs off public land without a permit. Good thing I didn’t know that while building my log cabin from downed lodgepole pine trees.

Like Idaho Reports before it, Outdoor Idaho became a training ground where eager young people learned to make long-form television. There are so many individuals to thank for their contributions over a 40-year span. Television is never a solo act. No mistake about it, we had a department of racehorses on staff, and they wanted to run. These talented, driven, occasionally difficult individuals already knew no one got rich working for public television. They had an opportunity to make quality long-form television, something that rarely happens in the Idaho commercial TV market, where three minutes constitutes a long video segment.

Ask any rancher what happens when you put racehorses together in a pasture. There’s gonna be a fight, sometimes even after a pecking order is established. The horses’ high energy and competitive natures can lead to an occasional dust-up with charging, kicking, biting. Some horse people learn to prevent resource-guarding by keeping plenty of hay in several locations.

For the longest time Idaho Public Television’s resources were in short supply. A TV camera could cost $30,000, not counting tripod, batteries, and video cassettes. Equipment and videographers also had to be “checked out” and scheduled when one producer wanted to conduct an interview in Idaho Falls and another producer needed a shooter up north in Sandpoint on the same day. Sometimes the only other videographer was busy editing an hour show with a deadline barreling down on him. Just trying to make it all work was a logistical nightmare. We put effort into developing software to reduce the bottlenecks, but never solved all the problems when everything was a moving target and vehicles that could survive lousy dirt roads were in short supply.

It took expert grant-writing and much-appreciated contributions from the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation and other generous Idaho supporters before the shortage problem partially disappeared. Occasionally, kicking up one’s heels could make life less fun behind the curtain. Sometimes human racehorses just refused to work together over questions of style or over shooting twenty videotapes and the producer deciding not to use any of them.

One could imagine how an air traffic controller feels, keep the peace and adjust the pairings so that producers, videographers, and editors all pulled in the same direction. I don’t think the final product ever suffered. In our minds, the desire to create enduring television overruled everything else. And thanks to Jeff Tucker and then Aaron Kunz who played production staff wranglers, making sure the cameras, the batteries, and microphones worked and people had a vehicle when they needed one.

Often someone asks where Outdoor Idaho gets its ideas and are  surprised when I tell them “from butcher paper.” In what passed as our annual production Christmas party, we’d gather at the home of Director of Content Services Jeff Tucker and wife Karan. We’d pull the 3x5-foot butcher paper, tape it to the walls, and people would start tossing out ideas while I would madly try to keep up with the swarm of possibilities buzzing around the room. All ideas, some suggested by viewers and some from producers and shooters themselves, made it onto the paper. We even considered questionable ones like “Dogs and Pickup Trucks.” The staffer who suggested it was convinced it would make an exciting show. When the party wrapped up, we’d have maybe 20 or 30 usable story ideas for future OI shows.

A hell of a way to run a railroad you might say, and definitely a strange way to conduct a Christmas party. I might have agreed with those who say it was just a fun way to make people feel they were listened to and appreciated. One day a colleague spotted sheets of butcher paper folded in a back closet. We pulled them out and were surprised to find years of past Christmas cheer. Just for fun we taped them to the hallway walls between our basement offices. It was like being in a Wayback machine. Everyone marveled at how many program ideas we could check off from those lists. Still, even after 20 years, the one show left hanging involved a dog in the back of someone’s pickup truck. Sorry, Peter.

There does seem to be a PBS “type.” Thoughtful and curious, the kind of person you just know will stick around for a decade or two. It’s true, hang around long enough, and chances are good you’ll get your own TV show. That occurred with Joan Cartan-Hansen and Marcia Franklin. Like everyone on staff, they had served time on Idaho Reports. In 1994 a series debuted with the two of them as co-hosts. Dialogue, a live call-in program, put viewers directly into the conversation. Ricardo Ochoa and Al Hagenlock steered the program from the control room. It all worked because they were driven, competitive, and committed to making the show matter.

In 1999 Joan stepped away to become the sole host of a program that brought science into classrooms across the state. Science Trek wasn’t just television. It became an educational resource, with lesson plans, real scientists, and kids asking real questions. It filled a gap no one else had thought to fill. With the internet gaining traction, the show’s content and lesson plans benefited students and teachers across the U.S. and even overseas.

Marcia took the occasion to reshape Dialogue, broadening it beyond politics into conversations with writers, historians, filmmakers and other people who carried ideas rather than legislation. She and her crew also attended the annual Sun Valley Writers’ Conference to interview world-famous authors.

The program that had been my first love, Idaho Reports, has evolved more than most. In 2014 a new host of the TV program, Melissa Davlin, proved it’s possible to get a show without a long apprenticeship. She had been a sharp newspaper reporter from Twin Falls and effortlessly made the jump from print to television. Good journalism is good journalism. She has given the longest running public-affairs show in the West a new look that still breaks stories and makes waves.

Outdoor Idaho may have been a male-dominated series in its inception, and I can certainly see why many assumed that to be the case. We did have strong male producers over a period of several decades.  Roger Fuhrman, Jeff Beaman, John Crancer, Greg Hahn all produced thoughtful programs, and not only for Outdoor Idaho. That changed with significant contributions from Marcia and Joan, Sauni Symonds, and Victoria Osborn. Marcia’s full-length OI programs included “Camp Rainbow Gold,” “Cycling Idaho,” and “Idaho Tribes and the Environment.” Some of Joan’s OI programs included “A Trip to the Moon,” “Health of our Lakes,” and “The Foothills.” 

Their perspectives often differed from mine and that kept the series evolving and improving. Thirty years ago, producer Vicky Osborn convinced me that the show could benefit by occasionally tackling environmentally sensitive issues, if handled correctly. Sauni Symonds spent years as an Outdoor Idaho producer and editor and videographer, and has many shows that still air, like “Family Ranch Heritage,” “Wild Horses,” “Idaho Fairways,” and “Idaho’s Middle Earth.” Sauni was one of those special types who could do it all and often had to. A one-woman band.

We also relied upon part-time producers like Kris Millgate from Idaho Falls. She gave us an eastern-Idaho perspective, with shows like “Helping Henry’s” and “Caribbean of the Rockies.” Before I retired, Lauren Melink became lead producer of Outdoor Idaho, shepherding programs like “Women Who Hunt,” “Spud Country,” “Urban Wildlife,” and “The Next Chapter.” After I retired, videographer/editor Mya Long joined producer Lauren Melink. For the first time in its 40-year history, Outdoor Idaho had become essentially an all-woman team.

It was perhaps inevitable that a new series would emerge one day. Outdoor Idaho couldn’t possibly cover all the stories that begged to be told in a state like Idaho. It was easily ten years in the making, involving two general managers, Peter Morrill and Ron Pisaneschi, before Idaho Experience made the scene in 2017. Prior to that, Governor Butch Otter had included it in his annual budget to the Legislature, but the legislative budget committee declined to fund a television program, perhaps for the better.

After several years of searching, Ron and Jennifer Johnson and her Development team finally found private funding from the Albertson Foundation, and Jeff Tucker and independent producer Jennie Sue Weltner took the helm and translated the concept into a real television series. They modeled it after the PBS documentary series American Experience and began covering a wide range of topics, including Idaho’s role in securing women’s suffrage, Harmon Killebrew, Ligertown, Idaho’s Chinese immigrants, the New Plymouth utopia, and a program on Idaho’s mail-order messiah.

One of the benefits of IdahoPTV is that our production team got to work on different series. Writers and producers tended to have more freedom with Idaho Experience. Narrators were chosen from outside the station and did not appear on-air. That meant, unlike Outdoor Idaho, there was no host demanding ultimate control over the words he was expected to utter. The pressure was now on to make Outdoor Idaho’s stories interesting enough to entice production staff to want to spend time on OI. Each program required a commitment of a month, and it was impossible for a small team to produce all the shows the viewing public wanted.

Luckily, the new kids on the block, Aaron Kunz, Forrest Burger, Bill Manny, met the challenge with shows like “Sawtooths on My Mind,” “Barns of Idaho,” “Women Who Hunt,” “Salmon Reckoning,” “Idaho’s 12ers,” “Barns of Idaho,” and “Off the Beaten Path.” I co-produced some of those shows, but usually they were happy to handle it all themselves with a videographer and editor.

In 2022, createid offered a different kind of program only available online and featuring artists moved by the beauty of the state. Shorter than half an hour, it is unfunded. It broke a lot of rules in its inception. Expertly led by Marcia, with a changing, talented team, it relies primarily on shooters and editors Troy Shreve and Andy Lawless, with assistance from Jennie Sue Weltner, Morgan McCollum, Logan Finney, and Jenessa Carson. The segments are consistent winners, bringing home regional Emmys in the “Arts/Entertainment—Short Form Content” category.

When President Trump and the Republican Congress eliminated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2025, Idaho Public Television put createid and Science Trek on hold. Both programs may return when funding is secured. Only Idaho Reports, Outdoor Idaho, and Idaho Experience are still produced by the station. For several decades, what set Idaho Public Television apart from other PBS stations was simple. When the going got tough, we continued to make local programs, including solid stand-alone documentaries like Capitol of Light, Trial of the Century, and the 90-minute concert documentary Rosalie Sorrels: Way Out in Idaho. A documentary on teacher astronaut Barbara Morgan and Color of Conscience both aired nationally. 

Local programming binds viewers to a station. Viewers feel they matter, because they do. Speaking from 40 years’ experience, I can say that our production team always felt fortunate to have the love and support from Idahoans of all walks of life. So, here’s to another bunch of years, with a mostly new staff of talented individuals. The old guard has left them. They’ll be fine.

Television changes. Equipment changes. People retire. The privilege of telling Idaho's stories never really leaves you. As King George III in Hamilton sings, “You’ll be back, soon, you’ll see. You’ll remember you belong to me.”  That’s certainly been my experience in retirement. It’s hard to completely quit. As the Eagles’ song “Hotel California” says, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

 

 

 

Ew. Seared chicken would be poisonous. Negative connotation.