To survive in the world of documentaries, everyone knows, a filmmaker needs to develop a pretty broad skill set, technical and artistic. But to all the requisite talents, award-winning producer/director Fern Levitt has added one that may be as important as all the rest, at least when it comes to getting projects off the ground.
"I'm good at begging," she says.
Nothing demonstrates this better, perhaps, than her latest film, Gorbachev's Revolution, (airing tomorrow on History Television, 10 p.m.), part of the Turning Points of History series.
Actually, most of her begging was done for an earlier film in the same series -- on Andrei Sakharov, the late Soviet physicist and Nobel Prize-winning peace activist. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who, as president of the Soviet Union, had authorized Sakharov's release from years of internal exile in 1986. Naturally, Levitt wanted to interview him for the film.
So she made a cold call to the Moscow-based Gorbachev Foundation, which the former Soviet president now runs. "I said, 'Can I please talk to someone who speaks English?' And it was like the gods were smiling at me," Levitt recalled in a recent interview. "Because the person they connected me with was Pavel Palazchenko," who is Gorbachev's translator and general factotum.
"And Pavel is never there. He travels constantly. But that day, that time, he was there. So I pitched him and he said, 'I don't think so. Gorbachev is very busy, but call me when you get here.' So I get to Moscow and I call Pavel and it's still, 'I don't think so, he's very busy, I'm not Barbara Walters, it would help if I was.' So it was no. And so I begged him. 'Please, Pavel, please. It would mean so much to me, to my country. I really want to meet him. He's the person I admire most.' And all that obnoxious stuff. And my own translator said to me afterward, 'You have no pride, do you?' But grovelling does work. Pavel finally relented and Levitt (with filmmaker husband Arnie Zipursky, who flew over for the occasion) had her Gorbachev interview.
Having begged her way into the first interview, the second go-round was easier. She kept in touch with Palazchenko, and eventually pitched him on doing Gorbachev himself as a Turning Point. The documentary, she explained, would be timed for the 20th anniversary of his rise to power in the politburo and the dawn of perestroika, the revolution that effectively ended the Communist era in Eastern Europe. The Foundation considered several film proposals to mark the occasion, but only Levitt's project was given the green light.
She credits Palazchenko with making it all possible. He not only delivered Gorbachev for several hours of taping, but a heap of archival footage, as well; he persuaded Gorbachev's only child, Irina, to grant an interview. (Palazchenko was also instrumental in gaining her access to Czech president Vaclav Havel for her next documentary, The Velvet Revolution, which she has just finished shooting.) She held a private screening of the finished film for Gorbachev last fall in San Francisco, where he was on a speaking tour. "He was thrilled," she says, "but it also must have been extremely painful for him, because in addition to all the things he did, which the film recounts, it also deals with the coup that forced him out of office and how people later turned against him. He said to me afterward it was very honest."
Indeed, history, Levitt maintains, has not yet fully reckoned with the role Gorbachev played in freeing Eastern Europe from the shackles of Communism -- and how he deceived his own Communist Party apparatchiks into thinking his elevation to Kremlin leader meant business as usual. It meant anything but.
As awed as Levitt was by meeting Gorbachev, whom she genuinely regards as one of the 20th century's most important figures, she was even more nervous about meeting former U.S. president Bill Clinton. She arranged to interview him for an earlier documentary on the Little Rock Nine -- the nine African-Americans students who, under police escort and amid searing racial tension, first desegregated the Arkansas city's Central High School in 1957.
The interview took place at Clinton's home in Chappaqua, N.Y., a few months after he left the Oval Office in 2001. "It was so surreal. I was beside myself. Again, I brought Arnie along in case I fainted. And Clinton was so generous. After the formal interview, we sat in his den for three hours and he talked about the 2000 Camp David peace accord and why they had failed. The Secret Service kept trying to hustle him out for some dinner, but he just didn't want to leave."
A job that allows her to meet Gorbachev, Clinton, George Bush Sr. (he appears in the Gorbachev documentary), Vaclav Havel and other important figures in modern history is, Levitt allows, nothing to complain about. But the actual interviews are nothing compared to the time she spends preparing. "Most of my time is spent reading and researching. When you only have 45 minutes [a TV hour]for the show, you really have to know the material."
A trained social worker, Levitt, now 50 and the mother of two daughters, left the field 15 years ago to work in television, after noticing that "my husband was having a lot more fun than I was." She initially found work as a researcher at TVOntario and when Mike Harris's Tories cleaned house there in the mid-1990s, she hooked up with Laszlo Barna of Barna-Alper Productions, creator of the Turning Points series. She calls Barna "the best thing that's ever happened to me."
She's recently returned from two weeks in Prague, filming the 1989 story of the bloodless Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia. Coinciding with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the Czech revolt went ahead with Gorbachev's de facto consent. Indeed, as George Bush Sr. told Levitt, when he called the Soviet leader to ask him what he would do about the uprising in Prague, he had to ask the question twice to be sure he correctly understood Gorbachev's world-shaking answer: that the former Soviet republics were free to chart their own destinies without Moscow's interference.
All of her Turning Points docs have been shot for modest budgets of about $200,000. "You don't do it for the money, says Levitt. "But I love telling these stories because if these people, Gorbachev, Havel and others, can take a stand under such impossible circumstances, then I have a responsibility to do it, too. So, I want people to know these stories."