In July 2008, journalism professor Joe Saltzman sat down with Norman Corwin to discuss his documentary "Black on Black," on racial dynamics in Los Angeles.

Norman Corwin: For a long time I have thought of myself as The Old Man of USC. I’ve been alluded to as a visiting professor (sometimes called “lecturer,” sometimes “a member of the Adjunct Faculty,” sometimes “Writer in Residence,” although I actually live 12 miles off campus), but for the past 33 years I have been a Trojan. I admit to being four months beyond 98 at this writing, having been recruited for USC in 1975 by a professor who was already well known and active at USC, so there goes my age distinction, if ever I had it. Doesn’t a recruiter rank higher than a senior citizen? Well, yes, because he’s in this case Joe Saltzman, younger in years but older on the sacred soil.

Anyway here we are, two viejos, the older having been granted an interview by the younger; for the weekly USC Chronicle, a publication which is younger than either of us. Do you remember, Joe, when and where you enlisted me?

Joe Saltzman: Soon after I started the broadcasting sequence in the School of Journalism in 1974, it was suggested that we should add radio to the curriculum. You have always been my hero – no one on radio or anywhere else wrote the way you did – and when I found out you were living in Southern California, I could think of nothing else but to get you on our faculty. When you told me you would consider teaching at USC, it was a very happy day indeed, not only for me but also for USC.

NC: Did I take long to decide?

JS: To my surprise, no.

NC: Did I haggle?

JS: Like me, you never thought much about money when it came to teaching. If I remember correctly, everyone who taught part-time received about $800 a class and you accepted that fee gracefully.

NC: I remember that after I saw a documentary film that you made at CBS in 1968, titled Black on Black, I wrote: “Notwithstanding the many fine films, which have been made during and since the ascendancy of the civil rights movement, Saltzman’s Black on Black gets inside the minds and hearts of its subjects as no other documentary has quite done. It demonstrates beyond peradventure of doubt, that nobody can speak as revealingly and cogently about how it is to be black in an essentially white world, than blacks themselves. It is a film that achieves high effect at ground level.”

Black on Black won many major awards including the Edward R. Murrow Award for “distinguished television reporting and best documentary,” an Emmy and the first NAACP Image award. How did you happen to produce such a groundbreaking documentary in a time when there were very few programs featuring African-Americans on TV and very few working in TV?

JS: It wasn’t easy to do such a program at that time. I had wanted to do a documentary told without a narrator depicting how it feels to be black and live in South Central Los Angeles. African-Americans referred to themselves as “blacks” in the late 1960s. I wanted to do this program for years prior to the race riots that were taking place throughout the United States, but no one was interested in doing it. In fact, I talked about it so much, that it was referred to by some of my colleagues at CBS as “Saltzman’s N----- Project.” But thanks to my executive producer Dan Gingold, who fought to get the program on the air, we were finally given permission to do the documentary in 1967. Only Dan understood what I wanted to do: my conceit was to treat the South-Central Los Angeles area as a foreign country, exploring the culture, the music, the hairstyles, the language, the daily life of what it was like to live in that area day in and day out. I didn’t want any Caucasian reporter or written narration getting in the way of the story. The idea was to tell the story with the words of the people who lived there, to form a narrative out of their own words and feelings, to tell their story without censorship or compromise. CBS management never understood the concept and up until two weeks before the program aired, they hoped we would use news anchor Jerry Dunphy to narrate the program. But we won the day and the documentary went on without any changes.

Even though the program was an enormous success and defined my career for the next 10 years, I wasn’t prepared for the hatred the show engendered. The program, which begins in black (another innovation of the time), almost broke the CBS switchboard with hundreds of hate calls from people who weren’t watching the program but had seen it advertised in TV Guide. My life was threatened several times and the LAPD revoked my press credentials. Copies of the film donated to the Los Angeles Public Library were mutilated within days. I didn’t realize how much racism there was in Southern California until I did this documentary. It was an eye-opener.

It was a very difficult documentary to do. After the riots, whites were not welcomed in South Central Los Angeles and the news camera crew assigned to the program had run for their lives during the Watts Riots when a mob set fire to their CBS camera truck. They didn’t want anything to do with this project. I remember taking the cameraman and soundman to Gardena for lunch so they could spew their racial garbage and then order them to keep their mouths shut when we went back into the black community. It was emotionally very difficult for me to be in the middle of such hatred – from the camera crew against blacks, and from the blacks against whites.

I had spent several months in South-Central Los Angeles as a lone reporter to get a feel for the people and the neighborhoods, and then I tried to capture what I had seen on film for the documentary, and then through editing, to make sure the final product reflected the world that I had seen without cameras or any other interference. I judged the success of the documentary on its acceptance in the black community and felt the highest compliment I received was that no African-American believed a Caucasian was capable of producing such a program.

NC: As you know, I once wrote about your documentaries: “I believe the documentary films of Joe Saltzman rank among the finest in the world. If I am wrong, I have wasted 15 years as chairman of the Documentary Awards Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In that span I have seen about 2,000 documentaries of all lengths, and based on that experience I make the flat statement that there are no other filmmakers alive who more consistently, effectively – and often daringly – deal with basic aspects of social concern.” Another critic wrote that Black on Black was
“The best documentary ever made on what it feels like to be black and live in the urban ghetto.” Would you tell us something about the scheduled celebration of it?

JS: You have always been generous in your praise of my documentaries and I appreciate it. To my knowledge, there had been no other programs like Black on Black on commercial TV and, unfortunately, not many programs like it after Black on Black.

I’m very excited that USC Annenberg plans to hold a 40th anniversary celebration for the program in October – it will be first time Black on Black will be screened in its entirety in about 35 years. USC Annenberg Avid Editor Lee Warner and I spent a month reconstructing the program for this event – the picture and sound may be a bit faded, but the program is intact and it will be interesting to see how an audience in 2008 responds to a program that was so controversial 40 years ago. The program seems to get “longer” as the years go by since it is an old-fashioned documentary in which the word is as important as the picture. There are no fast cuts or short sound bites and you really have to listen to the documentary to absorb its full impact. I will introduce the documentary and hope to give the audience a sense of what it was like to produce such a program in the late 1960s. My problem is there are so many stories to tell about the production that if I’m not careful, I’ll go on too long.

NC: I want to get your latest take on a tragedy that befell your son, David. Your family suffered a devastating loss in the early death of your son, not long after he graduated with honors from Yale University. You and your wife Barbara collaborated brilliantly in the establishment of a living memorial based on a massive printing of David’s comedy-fantasy about a jester and his friend, Pharley. It attained best-seller rank throughout the country. I understand the Saltzmans created a charity based on the book that is helping ill and special-needs children. How is that going?

JS: It’s been one of the most amazing experiences of our lives. David’s book The Jester Has Lost His Jingle is the basis of our charity, The Jester & Pharley Phund. More than 57,000 books and 57,000 Jester & Pharley Dolls have been donated to ill and special-needs children.

Barbara and I will never forget the phone call from Yale in 1988 telling us that our young son David, a senior majoring in English and art, had developed Hodgkin’s disease. It was a particularly bad diagnosis, and despite a bone marrow transplant, which we all hoped would save his life, David died 11 days before his 23rd birthday, on March 2, 1990.

We all handle tragedy differently. For the next five years, I disappeared into the USC libraries to study the image of the journalist in popular culture. My wife, Barbara, who was daily Calendar editor at the Los Angeles Times, handled the tragedy differently. She had promised David, whose senior thesis was a children’s book, that she would see that the book was published just as he had envisioned it and that copies would be given to children with cancer to bolster their spirits. Working with our son, Michael, they achieved that goal in five years. We mortgaged our house to publish the book and The Jester Has Lost His Jingle – a 64-page, fully illustrated in color, hard-cover book – became an overnight publishing sensation on bestsellers lists throughout the country. Barbara then quit her job at The L.A. Times to oversee The Jester and to establish a charity called The Jester & Pharley Phund. Its mission is to get David’s book and a Jester Doll based on that book to every ill and special needs child who needs it. Barbara worked with oncology nurses to create a doll that would help them treat and care for their pediatric patients.

The Jester has taken on a life of its own. And it keeps on going – a Special 10th Anniversary Edition of The Jester was released two years ago and there are more than 300,000 copies in circulation. We also have a Web site – www.thejester.org – that chronicles The Phund’s programs and community efforts.

NC: I was lucky enough to be invited to a memorial service for David at Chadwick School, from which he graduated, and it was one of the most moving programs I have ever attended.

I know your most recent project has created a new academic field for journalism, the image of the journalist in popular culture. Tell me about it.

JS: The mission of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture, a project of the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, is to investigate and analyze, through research and publication, the conflicting images of journalists in film, television, radio, fiction, commercials, cartoons, comic books, music, art, video games – demonstrating their impact on the public’s perception of newsgatherers. I founded it in 2000 and today the IJPC Web site and the IJPC Database are considered the definitive worldwide sources for this subject and are used on a daily basis by scholars, students and professionals who want to do more research in this area.

We now have more than 175 IJPC Associates representing 110 academic institutions around the world, the new 2008 IJPC Database has more than 67,000 entries. We just inaugurated the peer-review IJPC Journal and hope to have our first issue out by the end of the year.

I could go on forever talking to you about the IJPC….

NC: I know you could, but we have reached the ordained length of this interview, and I wish to thank you, not only for this interview, but for the inspiration you have given me over years that incorporate my longest and most fulfilling tasks. It has been my privilege to enlist my energies at USC.