Latest news with #ImagineDocumentaries
Yahoo
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Barbara Walters Documentary Director Explains Why Journalist's Daughter and Diane Sawyer Aren't in Film
Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is far from a tell-all on the esteemed journalist, but the film produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard's Imagine Documentaries does go beyond the headlines Walters made during her career as a broadcaster to explore her childhood, her drive and the relationships, personal and professional, that shaped her life. 'We really wanted to make sure that we understood all angles of her,' director Jackie Jesko tells The Hollywood Reporter. 'It's not only her record-breaking insane television career in which she interviewed dictators, celebrities and all these different kinds of people with equal skill and publicity, it's also who she was, what made her tick, and really her greater contribution to the industry.' More from The Hollywood Reporter How to Watch Emmy-Winning Series 'The Bear' Season 4 Online Sarah Michelle Gellar's Goal Is to "Bring Back Everyone Who Has Died" on 'Buffy' for Reboot Sterling K. Brown Stars in Hulu Adventure Epic 'Washington Black' Trailer Through footage from ABC News archives where Walters both became the highest-paid news anchor at the time in 1976 and ended her career in 2016 following her final act as creator and co-host of The View from 1997 to 2014, as well as interviews with prominent women journalists such as Katie Couric, Oprah Winfrey and Connie Chung, Jesko and producers Sara Bernstein and Betsy West detail Walters' climb through the news ranks, the sexism and inner feelings of inferiority she battled, as well as her lasting impact in media following her death on Dec. 30, 2022, at the age of 93. Below, Jesko talks with THR about piecing together Walters' career and personal life for the doc, which premiered on Hulu on Monday, the figures she wishes she would've been able to talk with — as well as those who declined participation — and why there'll never be another Barbara Walters. *** I imagine a lot of journalists, women journalists especially, were clamoring to tell Barbara Walters' story. How are you the one to do it? The story actually began with Imagine Documentaries. The executive producer of the film is Betsy West, she directed films like RBG and Julia, and she and Sara Bernstein and Imagine were talking about doing a Barbara Walters film shortly after she passed away. To do that, they approached ABC News Studios who, of course, holds all the archives of Barbara's five decades on camera, and they decided to do it together. But they needed a director and they gave me a call. Of course, I was like, 'Please, please, pick me!' because I actually used to work at ABC News. It was my first job. I was a news producer for 10 years, a lot of that at ABC, so I knew how important Barbara was to the news industry, not just to ABC and to women in the industry, and what a tremendously big career that she had. You really can't tell the story of American Broadcast News without talking about Barbara Walters. So I was lucky to get the opportunity, but it was also a huge responsibility and one I did not take lightly. Was there any overlap between your time at ABC and hers? Did you ever meet? There was. I mean, it's not like we worked together. I was the lowest possible rung on the ladder. I was an assistant, but I would see her sometimes — catch a little glimpse in the halls. She was kind of winding down at that point, but she was doing The View. It would've been a couple of years of overlap. I obviously knew that she had had this tremendous career — although I have to say I wasn't a perfect student of it, but I did see her on The View all the time, and I was very aware of her presence in the building. I think everybody was. So, when did you officially start working on this? We started talking about it in late 2023, and then I think production would've kicked off about April 2024, so it's just been about a year. It actually ended up going pretty quickly, but I think a lot of that was just that it is archival-driven, so the time frame for those films can be shorter. It really feels like Barbara is narrating this film. What was it like for you going through those tapes? Do you have any sense of how much footage you all went through? It had to be thousands of hours of footage. Our amazing partners at ABC News studios opened up this archive, which I don't know that anybody had been allowed to look through to this extent prior to this project, and in there were all kinds of different gems. They had this idea from the outset that maybe we'd be able to learn things about Barbara from both the questions she asked other people, and also little moments that we could find in her tapes where she was sort of off-camera — obviously, not literally off-camera, but sort of an unguarded moment where she's having a normal conversation with a subject or being off the cuff — and seeing if we could piece that together to create a more intimate portrait of her. But as far as her own voice, we actually didn't know how much of her voice we were going to be able to include from the outset. She had done a bunch of interviews surrounding the publication of her autobiography, Audition, in 2008, so we had some raw tapes from that. But really it was our incredible archival producer team that was able to find all these other interviews she did with the Television Academy, NPR, [etcetera]. It was really a patchwork quilt of sources for that audio, and we were really happily surprised that there was a lot of it. What sources did you use to fill in the details of Barbara's childhood, her experience with motherhood and her romantic relationships in the doc? A lot of it was just different people in her life who felt like they could weigh in on that. It's interesting for her childhood, we ended up just relying on her own voice, but it's because she spoke about it so well. We don't always have the best perspective on ourselves — I mean all of us — so there are other aspects of her life we felt like it was useful to have friends and colleagues speak to. I was really struck by Oprah Winfrey saying Barbara impacted her decision not to have children. How did you get to that moment with her in the interview? I didn't know that she was going to say anything like that. I didn't know she felt that way — you don't really get a pre-interview with people like Oprah; you get one swing at that. So, it was an amazing interview. I felt like she really came to talk about Barbara and they had a very real relationship. This wasn't just like a talking head for a documentary thing. She really wanted to talk about their relationship. And when she said that, I was surprised. But it's really interesting: Barbara and Oprah have careers of a stratosphere that 0.0001 percent of any people will ever achieve, so far be it for me to doubt their reasoning for their decisions or what it's like to be on top like that. But the whole topic, that whole section [of the film], it was really important for myself, and for Betsy West and Sara Bernstein, who are working moms, to be careful about what we were saying and to not have the same boring conversation about the balance of work and motherhood. I mean, look, it's easier now than it was for Barbara and Oprah, but it's still not easy. We thought it was kind of an interesting, nuanced conversation. And Oprah, I thought that was really interesting that she shared that. And I understand. I understand both choices. We don't see Barbara's daughter, Jacqueline, in the film. Did you reach out to her about participating? We did a couple different times, a couple different ways. People who know her told us in advance that it was unlikely that she'd want to do anything with the film. She was aware it was being made. Has she seen the finished film? Do you know? I don't know. Bette Midler is sort of the outlier in that she's the only celebrity talking head. Why was she the chosen one? She and Monica Lewinsky were in the same category, mentally, for me, which was we wanted to hear from people who spent time on the other side of the interview table from Barbara. She interviewed Bette a bunch of times, and they certainly had a really good rapport. So that was part of it. And we wanted one of her celebrity friends that she would interview a lot and moved their relationship past just being subject and interviewee. And then Monica, of course, being probably the biggest get of any news magazine show of all time, [I was] sort of curious — Monica's a very lovely person, by the way — to understand what it was like for her to be on the other side of that kind of campaign and what Barbara did differently that made her choose Barbara, and then what her experience was. Diane Sawyer is one of few women news anchors who doesn't participate in the documentary, though you do touch on the perceived feud between her and Barbara, which leads into the larger conversation that people assume Barbara didn't support other women in her field. Was your aim to kind of recontextualize their relationship or that belief? Barbara would say it wasn't a feud. But I do think it's interesting that the way that Diane came into ABC was that Roone Arledge, who was a very famous ABC news president, really helped pioneer the whole news as entertainment philosophy. He was among the first to do that, so he intentionally would set up his anchors to compete with each other. It was no accident. And I think that's a tough situation to walk into for anybody so that's, I think, an important part of the context. But a lot of the women in the film, Cynthia McFadden, certainly Katie Couric, Connie Chung, felt like Barbara was really great to them and defended them at different times in their career. I think perhaps it's not a monolithic answer; relationships are individual. Did you ask Diane about participating? We wanted to find out if she wanted to participate, but I understand that perhaps she didn't. It's sort of interesting that none of the men who created the environment of sexism Barbara had to contend with are around to address their behavior. Was there anyone else you wish you would've been able to speak to for this that you weren't able to? Obviously, I would've liked to talk to her daughter, but that's kind of it. I think because Barbara was so important, and she had such importance to so many people in the news industry we really did have great luck with talking to the people we wanted to talk to. What surprised you most overall in your research? I think it was her childhood. I just didn't know much about it, period. I didn't really know anything about how she grew up. So when I started reading her book and watching other specials that were made about her, and understanding that she grew up in this interesting nightclub environment. Her dad was a showman, maybe a scoundrel, depending on who you ask. And she grew up in the backstage of his nightclub, meeting famous people, hanging out with them, seeing that they were real people. I thought it made a lot of sense for her approach later to famous people and to how she'd never really seemed afraid of anybody. Also, the whole riches to rags storyline. Her dad lost it all when she was in her early 20s. This is an era when a lot of women didn't work at all. And she felt like she had to save her whole family financially. And she probably did. I mean, her dad had nothing. Her mom wasn't educated, had no ability to work, as most women of that generation, and then her sister had some mental disability of some kind, and it was really up to Barbara. I think that that fear and that experience really propelled her entire life. In one of the last scenes in the documentary, Oprah says that there's no place in this world now with social media for a Barbara Walters interview. How does that make you feel as a fellow journalist? It's true. Television news interviews used to hold such a huge audience power. The number of people who regularly watch television news was much bigger. There weren't other sources of information. There was no other way to hear from politicians or from celebrities; they had to use the medium of television news. Obviously, that is over with the dawn of social media and all these different podcasts. There are so many different ways to get information, and there are pros and cons to that. We have more varied things, you can really get into your niche interests. But I think the hard stuff is [part] of the whole idea of disinformation and lack of trust. There's a lack of trust in the news media and a lot of debate about which channel can you trust, and it depends on where you are politically. I think that we've really swung the other side of the spectrum, and we've lost a lot of things in the process. *** Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is now streaming on Hulu. Best of The Hollywood Reporter The 40 Best Films About the Immigrant Experience Wes Anderson's Movies Ranked From Worst to Best 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts
South China Morning Post
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
How US star Barbara Walters opened the door for women in television
Barbara Walters became a star on US network NBC's Today in the early 1960s, raising the stature of the morning franchise. She opened doors for women as a network anchor and turned newsmaker interviews into major television events – 74 million tuned into her interview with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, whose affair with Bill Clinton ended his presidency. She also created one of American daytime TV's longest-running hits with The View, which evolved into a major forum for the country's political discourse. 'The audience size that Barbara was able to capture and harness is unmatched in today's world,' says Jackie Jesko, director of the new documentary Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, debuting on Hulu after its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month. 'Everything she did sort of made a difference.' Play Jesko's feature – produced by Imagine Documentaries and ABC News Studios – is the first in-depth look into Walters' storied career. The film also serves as a sweeping historical review of the decades-long dominance of network news that made figures such as Walters a gatekeeper of the culture, as Jesko describes her.
Los Angeles Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Before social media, Barbara Walters said ‘Tell Me Everything.' And many did
There is no single figure in television history whose longevity and influence match Barbara Walters'. She became a star on NBC's 'Today' in the early 1960s, raising the stature of the morning franchise. She opened doors for women as a network anchor and turned newsmaker interviews into major television events — 74 million tuned into her 1999 sit-down with Monica Lewinsky. She created one of daytime TV's longest-running hits with 'The View,' which evolved into a major forum for the country's political discourse. 'The audience size that Barbara was able to capture and harness is unmatched in today's world,' said Jackie Jesko, director of the new documentary 'Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything,' debuting Monday on Hulu after its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month. 'Everything she did sort of made a difference.' Jesko's feature — produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard's Imagine Documentaries and ABC News Studios — is the first in-depth look into Walters' storied career. The film also serves as a sweeping historical review of the decades-long dominance of network news that made figures such as Walters a gatekeeper of the culture, as Jesko describes her. Before the advent of social media and podcasts that allowed celebrities to control their messages, going through the X-ray machine of a Barbara Walters interview delivered exposure on a massive scale. David Sloan, a longtime ABC News producer who worked with Walters, recalls how the screen images of her specials flickered through the windows of Manhattan apartment towers. 'Tell Me Everything' came together not long after Walters died at the age of 93 in 2022. Sara Bernstein, president of Imagine Documentaries, approached Betsy West, executive producer and co-director of the Julia Child documentary 'Julia,' about taking on a Walters project. Sloan, who oversaw an Emmy-winning tribute after Walters' death, also wanted a deeper exploration into the impact of her career. West, also a former Walters colleague, and Sloan became executive producers on the film. 'Tell Me Everything' taps deeply into the ABC News archives, which contain thousands of hours of interviews Walters conducted over her 40 years at the network. Imagine not only gained access to program content but also outtakes that give parts of the film a cinema vérité-like look at Walters on the job. The newly unearthed footage provides some surreal moments, such as Walters — in a pink Chanel suit — exploring the damaged palace of Libya's deposed leader Moammar Kadafi. 'The archive gave us a the perfect canvas to relive her scenes and her moments,' Bernstein said. Walters' story also gives a guided tour of the obstacle-ridden path women faced in the early days of TV news when it was dominated by patriarchy and self-importance. Female reporters were relegated to writing soft features and kept at a distance from hard news. But Walters shattered those barriers through her grit and wits. She toiled as a writer in local TV and a failed CBS morning program before landing at NBC's 'Today' in 1961. ('They needed someone they could hire cheap,' she said.) Walters went from churning out copy for the program's 'Today Girl' to doing her own on-air segments, including a famously beguiling report on a Paris fashion show and a day-in-the-life look at being a Playboy bunny. More serious assignments came her way. The morning viewing audience loved Walters even though she didn't believe she was attractive enough to be on camera. Her career trajectory was slowed down only by male executives unwilling to embrace the idea that a woman could be the face of a network news operation. By 1971, Walters was the main attraction on 'Today' when she sat alongside host Frank McGee every morning. But she was denied equal status. A respected journalist with the demeanor of an undertaker, McGee insisted to management that he ask the first three questions of any hard news subject who appeared on 'Today' before Walters could have a chance. The restriction led to Walters going outside the NBC studios to conduct interviews where her subjects lived or worked. The approach not only gave her control of the conversations but added a level of intimacy that audiences were not getting elsewhere on television. Walters also had written into her contract that if McGee ever left 'Today,' she would be promoted to the title of co-host. NBC brass agreed to the provision, believing McGee was not going anywhere. But McGee was suffering from bone cancer, which he had kept secret. He died in 1974 and Walters was elevated to co-host, making her the first woman to lead a daily network news program. (Or as Katie Couric candidly puts it in the film, 'She got it literally over Frank McGee's dead body.') Walters made history again when she was poached by ABC News in 1976. She was given a record-high $1-million annual salary to be the first woman co-anchor of a network evening newscast, paired with Harry Reasoner, a crusty and unwelcoming veteran. Walters was mistreated by her colleague and roasted by critics and competitors such as CBS News commentator Eric Sevareid, who, with disgust in his voice, described her as 'a lady reading the news.' The evening news experiment with Reasoner was a short-lived disaster, but Walters found a supporter in Roone Arledge, the ABC Sports impresario who took over the news division and had an appreciation for showmanship. He recognized Walters' strengths and made her a roving correspondent. Walters scored a major coup in 1977 when she was the first TV journalist to speak jointly with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin during Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem. 'She was a household name in the Mideast,' Sloan said. Over time, Walters would become known for her prime-time specials, where lengthy interviews with world leaders aired adjacent to conversations with movie stars. She could be a blunt questioner in both realms, asking Barbra Streisand why she chose not to get her nose fixed and former President Richard M. Nixon if he wished he had burned the White House tapes that undid his presidency ('I probably should have'). News purists clutched their pearls, but the audience welcomed it. 'She had a vision back then that celebrities are news,' said Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger in the film. 'She was practicing the art of journalism when she was interviewing them.' The film explains how Walters developed an understanding of celebrities after growing up around her father's nightclub, the Latin Quarter, a hot spot in Boston. Sitting in the rafters above the floor show, she observed how audiences responded as well. Even though Walters' programs earned significant revenue for ABC News, she still had detractors, including the network's star anchor Peter Jennings. A clip from the network's political convention coverage in 1992 shows Jennings surreptitiously flipping his middle finger at her following an on-air exchange. But Walters was unstoppable, and as the 1980s and 1990s progressed, she became a mother confessor for perpetrators and victims of scandal. During a memorable jailhouse meeting with the Menendez brothers in which Eric describes himself and Lyle as 'normal kids,' a stunned Walters replies, 'Eric, you're a normal kid who murdered his parents!' As always, she was speaking for the person watching at home. 'She always wanted to ask the question that was percolating in the brain of someone who didn't have the opportunity or was too afraid to ask,' said Meredith Kaulfers, an executive vice president at Imagine Documentaries. Walters became a pioneer for women broadcasters out of necessity. While in her 20s, her father's nightclub business collapsed and she became the sole source of financial support for her family, which included her mentally disabled older sister. The terror of the insecurity she felt during that period never left. 'There was a survival instinct in her that drove her,' said Marcella Steingart, a producer on the film. 'Not necessarily on purpose, but in her wake, she opened doors for people.' 'Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything' is not a hagiography. The film explores her fraught relationship with her adopted daughter Jacqueline, who did not sit for an interview. Walters' unhealthy obsession with colleague and rival Diane Sawyer is covered, too, as is her willingness to use the social connections she developed through her career, and not just to land big interviews. Walters had a friendship with unsavory lawyer Roy Cohn, who pulled strings to make her father's tax problems go away. She carried on a secret romance in the 1970s with a married U.S. senator — Edward Brooke — while she was a fixture in national political coverage. While the film draws on interviews where Walters laments not being able to have both a successful career and a family life, Jesko sensed no regrets. 'I think if she could live her life over again, she wouldn't change anything,' Jesko said.
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Barbara Walters grills Taylor Swift, Oprah in doc trailer on pioneering newswoman
For nearly five decades, the hottest seat on the publicity circuit was the same – the one across from Barbara Walters. Now, Walters' brass knuckles interview approach and unrelenting pursuit of a viral sound bite is getting the documentary treatment. In "Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything," a new project from ABC News Studios and Imagine Documentaries, documentarians take a fine-tooth comb to the newswoman's career, exploring her interviews with Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, the Menendez brothers and others. A trailer, released May 28, shows Walters asking hard-hitting, sometimes eyebrow-raising questions, as she presses Swift on her dating life, the Kardashian family on their so-called lack of "talent," and Russian leader Vladimir Putin on whether he's ever had anyone killed. What we know about Barbara Walters, from her notorious pal to the 'SNL' nickname she hated Inversing the interview equation, the documentary features commentary from some of her most famous subjects, including Winfrey and Bette Midler, along with Disney CEO Bob Iger, who paint a picture of a tenacious and unapologetically nosy woman, who was married to her career at a time when women in the workplace were outnumbered, even more so in a newsroom. The documentary will also stitch together interviews of Walters, who died in 2022, taking an "in her own words" approach to the journalist's personal life and career struggles. "She didn't just report the news, she made news. She was a true American original – and trailblazer who broke ground for women," a release announcing the trailer said, promising viewers "an intimate and raw look at her astonishing career, personal life, and the challenges she faced trying to balance it all as a woman in a male-dominated industry." Making its world premiere June 12 at the Tribeca Film Festival, the documentary will be available to stream on Hulu June 23. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Barbara Walters interviews with Trump, Kardashians make up new doc
USA Today
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Barbara Walters grills Taylor Swift, Oprah in doc trailer on pioneering newswoman
Barbara Walters grills Taylor Swift, Oprah in doc trailer on pioneering newswoman For nearly five decades, the hottest seat on the publicity circuit was the same – the one across from Barbara Walters. Now, Walters' brass knuckles interview approach and unrelenting pursuit of a viral sound bite is getting the documentary treatment. In "Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything," a new project from ABC News Studios and Imagine Documentaries, documentarians take a fine-tooth comb to the newswoman's career, exploring her interviews with Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, the Menendez brothers and others. A trailer, released May 28, shows Walters asking hard-hitting, sometimes eyebrow-raising questions, as she presses Swift on her dating life, the Kardashian family on their so-called lack of "talent," and Russian leader Vladimir Putin on whether he's ever had anyone killed. What we know about Barbara Walters, from her notorious pal to the 'SNL' nickname she hated Inversing the interview equation, the documentary features commentary from some of her most famous subjects, including Winfrey and Bette Midler, along with Disney CEO Bob Iger, who paint a picture of a tenacious and unapologetically nosy woman, who was married to her career at a time when women in the workplace were outnumbered, even more so in a newsroom. Watch Barbara Walters documentary trailer The documentary will also stitch together interviews of Walters, who died in 2022, taking an "in her own words" approach to the journalist's personal life and career struggles. "She didn't just report the news, she made news. She was a true American original – and trailblazer who broke ground for women," a release announcing the trailer said, promising viewers "an intimate and raw look at her astonishing career, personal life, and the challenges she faced trying to balance it all as a woman in a male-dominated industry." Making its world premiere June 12 at the Tribeca Film Festival, the documentary will be available to stream on Hulu June 23.
