Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat…

Laura Gabbert: My big advice is do your homework. See what’s been made before you go make your film, not because you want to copy it. You need to understand the context in which you’re making something and what’s been done before. And even watching films that maybe you don’t love. What do you love about it? What don’t you love about it? What works about it for you? What doesn’t work for you? I just think it’s important people just spend more time just watching as many films as possible.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, documentary film director Laura Gabbert has made critically acclaimed films that deploy humor and emotion to tell penetrating, character driven stories about American culture and society. Among her documentaries, Food and Country premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically in October 2024. Laura’s film “Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles” explores Chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She also directed City of Gold which is about Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold. City of Gold was named by Vogue magazine among their 65 best documentaries of all time. Additional feature work includes the documentaries no Impact Man, Sunset Story and the short film Monument Monumento. Her TV work includes the Netflix Show “Ugly Delicious and Disclosure.” Most recently, Laura completed the six part non-fiction series the Power of Film. Based on the work of legendary UCLA film scholar Professor Howard Suber. The series premiered on Turner Classic Movies in January of 2024. For the record, Laura and I know one another from the Power of Film as I became involved in this exceptional project as a co-executive producer. Like Laura, I’m a UCLA MFA graduate and one of Howard Suber’s former students. Howard has been a guest on Story Beat and his episode is one of this show’s most downloaded. So for all those reasons and many more, I’m truly delighted to have the gifted documentarian Laura Gabbert join me today. Laura, welcome to StoryBeat.

Laura Gabbert: Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate you inviting me to do this.

Steve Cuden: Oh, it’s my pleasure and I’m delighted to have you here. So let’s go back in time just a little bit how old were you when you first started to notice movies, motion pictures, filming, and especially documentaries?

Laura Gabbert: You know, I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, um, in the 70s and 80s. And my parents were not big movie buffs, so they were very interested in performing arts and the visual arts, but they were not big moviegoers. And even when I went to undergrad, I went to undergrad on the East Coast. There was not a film department or a media studies department. I think I would go see movies at the local theater sometimes. But I didn’t really get the movie bug until I lived in New York City and then shortly after that in San Francisco, where there were so many great art house theaters.

Steve Cuden: Oh, sure.

Laura Gabbert:And film festivals. And I started going to film festivals and I started going to the movies, you know, three or four times a week, you know, and just completely got the bug then. Wasn’t until it was about 23 or 24 years old.

Steve Cuden: Oh, so it wasn’t as a little kid then?

Laura Gabbert: No, not at all.

Steve Cuden: That’s actually kind of unusual. Most people who are on this show, they’ve got the bug. They’re four, five, six, sometimes eight or nine. But you’re talking about in your 20s.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, well, I just. I couldn’t even. I m. Think I loved movies and I loved television shows, but I. I didn’t conceptualize it as something I could do. And it also just wasn’t. I mean, I was a big reader. I probably was more of a reader than anything else. I mean, I loved novels and was a voracious reader growing up. But I think it wasn’t until. Yeah, I think until I was well out of college that I just thought to myself, huh, huh. I guess people do this and maybe I should take a class. Maybe I should learn a little bit more about it and see if this is something I wanna pursue.

Steve Cuden: And where did you go? Did you take a class somewhere?

Steve Cuden: I did. I was living in San Francisco and I took a class, like an Intro to filmmaking class at UC Berkeley Extension. And then I took an editing class and I loved that even more. And I. You know, it was like the early 90s in San Francisco, sort of recessionary times. I was waitressing and doing odd jobs and I got a job. Well, first it was an apprenticeship working with some filmmakers, kind of independent and avant garde filmmakers in San Francisco. And I was an apprentice editor and then I became an assistant editor.

Steve Cuden: Is that where your interest first began, with docs? Was working for them?

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, I worked for some doc filmmakers early on in San Francisco.

Steve Cuden: So it wasn’t something that you thought about prior to working with him?

Laura Gabbert: No, I really hadn’t. And when I. Especially working with these filmmakers in San Francisco, there was something about watching people edit docs. I just thought to myself, I think I can do this. It felt accessible. It felt more accessible than big feature films, Hollywood films. And also I loved that it was about real life and real people. And I still. I love. I love narrative films too. But there was something about it that I felt like I could step into that and try it.

Steve Cuden: It attracted you because it had that realistic quality to it, more so than a fantasy movie might, correct?

Laura Gabbert: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: And I suppose in some ways documentaries can feel fantasy. Like if the person or persons that you’re documenting are kind of really unusual.

Laura Gabbert: Sure, absolutely. Well, you are entering into a very different world with a different sort of. With a different environment, with a different sort of language and rules. And I always loved that too, that you can. I mean, the beauty of being a documentary filmmaker is you’re granted access into somebody’s world and you actually get to live in that for a while.

Steve Cuden: Oh, sure. It’s very interesting because if you think about it, I know you have heard many people have heard famous actors talk about the reason why they act is because they can inhabit someone else’s skin in the way they are. And so you’re having a similar thing, only it’s in the real world.

Laura Gabbert:: That’s right, yeah, exactly.

Steve Cuden: Interesting. So when did you then eventually go to UCLA? How long was it before you did that?

Laura Gabbert: Let’s, uh, see, I worked as an assistant editor in San Francisco for a couple years. Then I wanted to get some production experience. So I did some stints in New York working in independent film production and then kind of came back to San Francisco. And I just thought, it’s now or never. I applied to one school, which was ucla, and got in and made the leadap to Los Angeles.

Steve Cuden: And did you learn more about documentary filmmaking at UCLA?

Laura Gabbert: I did. However, UCLA at that time didn’t have a lot of documentary classes. They had the renowned documentarian Marina Goldisskaya, who taught a production documentary class and a critical studies in documentary film. Um, she was my main sort of conduit and she was wonderful. And she was a mentor, as was Howard Suber. Because I think that a lot of the things that Howard Subber teaches are completely applicable to documentary films as.

Steve Cuden: Oh, no doubt. Well, it’s still storytelling, isn’t it?

Laura Gabbert: Storytelling. That’s right.

Steve Cuden: And we’re going toa talk a little Bit more about that over time in the show. But documentaries are still a story. It’s like I tell people all the time at night when you turn on your nightly news on the tv, they’re telling you tonight’s top story.

Laura Gabbert: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: It’s a story. It still has a beginning, middle and end. It has all those characteristics. Did you take narrative classes at UCLA as well?

Laura Gabbert: I did, yeah. And I was in the producers program. I wasn’t in the director’s program when I applied to film school. I wasn’t quite. I loved editing, but I thought I really wanted to be a producer because I thought it would be sort of overseen and kind of combining all the things I loved about movies. And as a documentary filmmaker, I produce all my movies too, usually with other producers on board. So those skills came in handy for sure. I really learned about directing more by doing after film school.

Steve Cuden: But you applied, I assume, what you learned in the narrative classes to making any kind of documentary?

Laura Gabbert: Absolutely, without a doubt. And I would say in particular Howard Suber’s class, his classes on structure and storytelling made the biggest impression on me.

Steve Cuden: Well, that certainly shows up in the Power of Film and we’re going to talk more about that too. Now you have, uh, clearly in your catalog of movies you’ve made, you have a wide range of interests, though I see that there’s a slight emphasis on food. You’ve done a bunch of stuff with food. Is there a reason why? Is that just. Was that something you gravitated toward or is it just came your way?

Laura Gabbert: Yeah. My most recent. Aside from the Power of Film, the series, my most recent documentaries have all been food related but very different from one another. The first one I did, City of Gold, you know, is about the late, great Jonathan Gold, who is the food writer here at the LA Times. Only food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize. I wanted to make a film about him because he is the person his writing made me fall in love with, Los Angeles. So he had a huge influence on me. When I moved to Los Angeles, I’LIVED in cities like New York and San Francisco and Minneapolis that are much more traditional cities. They don’t have the sort of the sprawl. And I was overwhelmed by Los Angeles and I didn’t like it at first and I kind of. I moved to LA with a lot of prejudices about it without having lived here.

Steve Cuden: It’s easy to have those prejudices.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, but I started reading Jonathan Gold and uh, he had such a beautiful way of talking about food and restaurants in la. But kind of through this sort of. He was like a cartographer. Like, he was exploring neighborhoods and cultures and communities through these restaurants. And it got me out of my comfort zone in Los Angeles, going to grad school in Westwood, where UCLA is, and I started to really discover the magic of the city. And I just fell in love with his writing and I began to fall in love with la. And yeah, I. And my kids were young at that point. And I remember I thought, I don’t want to travel. I don’t want to, like, I can’t, like, go away for three months and shoot something. I know I’ll approach Jonathan Gold. Maybe he’ll let me make a documentary about him.

Steve Cuden: Interesting. And obviously he did.

Laura Gabbert: Well, he said no for a long time.

Steve Cuden: Isn’t that part of the process of a documentarian is overcoming the many nos that you’re always going to get?

Laura Gabbert: It really is. Yeah. He said no originally because, well, I think he. He’s a writer. He didn’t really want to be on camera. He also was kind of anonymous then as a food critic. So he said, I can’t do it. Which actually wasn’t totally true because he had already won the Pulitzer in 2007, so people knew what he looked like and all of that. So we had some ground rules for starting it. He was just very tentative and very. He was reluctant. He had seen one of my films and liked it, so that’s why he was willing to talk to me. But it just took. Took a number of coffee dates with him. He was always said yes to meeting me for coffee, but at the end of the conversation, he would say, no.

Steve Cuden: You got to have coffee with one of the great food critics of all time.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, well, then I spent five years filming with him, you know.

Steve Cuden: Oh, my goodness.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, so. But the reason he finally said yes was that I said, this isn’t really a film about you, Jonathan. It’s really about the city. You love Los Angeles. And it’s really a film that’s going to be told through your point of view, but the city is front and center, you know, and I think that’s fine. He thought about that for a while and he’s like, okay, well, let’s. We’ll give it a try. We’ll give it a try for a while.

Steve Cuden: Um, and five years later.

Laura Gabbert: Five years later, yeah, we had an agreement that he could pull out for the first year or so. He could just stop. We didn’t sign a contract. We just said, let’s see how it goes. No, that’s what we did.

Steve Cuden: And I’ll bet you saw a lot of very interesting restaurants in that time.

Laura Gabbert:  I spent a lot of time in Jonathan’s big green pickup truck, traversing Los Angeles and eating a lot of places. And, yeah, it was. I mean, I now look back on that and think, God, I was so lucky that I was able to spend that time with him.

Steve Cuden: No kidding. I mean, how many people got to do that? Probably just you.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, me and his closest friends he would bring along to meals and that kind of thing. So I really was, uh. It was a privilege.

Steve Cuden: All right, so let’s break down the job of a documentary filmmaker a little bit. Where do you begin? Obviously, you need a subject. That’s the first thing, isn’t it? Because you don’t. Just don’t go out and shoot. You’ve got to have something you’re shooting about. So how do you decide I want to work on this? You clearly had a reason why you decided Jonathan Gold, and it was a good reason. M glad you said it. What do you look for for a subject to work on?

Laura Gabbert: Gosh, I think it’s a hard thing to define, and I. The documentaries I’ve made have come about through different circumstances. So. The City of Gold and Jonathan Gold. It was a film that I. I felt like intuitively I knew how to make it.

Steve Cuden: Okay.

Laura Gabbert: It was just a gut feeling, and I was excited about it. And I really thought that it could be a film that showed sort of the craft of what it means to be a critic. You could kind of get inside that process of being an actual cultural critic.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Laura Gabbert: I was really interested in that. I thought it could be very cinematic because we were exploring all aspects of Los Angeles. I thought it could kind of subvert the notions or the prejudices people have about Los Angeles. And I was. I was sort of hell bent on doing that because I had been one of those people. I thought that his writing could be a real component of the film, that we could hear his voice or someone reading his writing as we were seeing Los Angeles. And because his writing had been so moving to me and sort of revelatory to me, I really could see that film as having these different components of visual and music and the sounds of Los Angeles as well as his writing kind of woven through. So for me, that film was a little bit different in that it’s almost more of an essay film. And it doesn’t have a true beginning, middle and end. I mean, of course it does. We came up with a structure for it. So it’s A very different film than something like Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, which I did not come up with that idea. I was hired as a director. They brought the concept to me. But what I liked about it is that it did have a clear beginning, middle and end. And I was also a fan of Yotam Ottolenghi, the very well known chef and cookbook author. And that film is centered around a collaboration he’s doing with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they’re putting on an event. I knew there would be a beginning, middle and end. He was trying to pull off something right.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Laura Gabbert: There was a bit of a ticking clock kind of aspect to it. He was bringing in different pasty chefs from all over the world. It was going to be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is, you know, fantastic, gorgeous shoot. Fantastic. We were going to travel to London and Versailles, and there was enough. There is a filmmaker, just as a filmmaker, but also for me personally, somehow.

Steve Cuden: That doesn’t seem like a burden to have to go to Versailles.

Laura Gabbert: Yes. And shooting the hall of Mirrors with no tourists.

Steve Cuden: Oh, wow. Yeah.

Laura Gabbert: You know, things like that were kind of enticing. And as a filmmaker, you’re trying to figure out the story, but you’re also. Was like, is this going to be cinematically dynamic and arresting? And how can I use all these different components to tell the story?

Steve Cuden: But you had a kind of a contained story to begin with.

Laura Gabbert: I did.

Steve Cuden: Which is not always true for documentary filmmakers who sometimes just go out and start shooting a subject.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And you find your movie.

Laura Gabbert: And I always tell people, when I mentor several young filmmakers these days, and I always really encourage people to, even though they don’t know exactly what the story is, to write a treatment, you know, when they get the idea, try to imagine what the story might be. So you have a beginning, middle and end. And will there be any conflict in it? And what will the. What will the evolution of the character be? If there is any.

Steve Cuden: You know, because you still need a protagonist, don’t you?

Laura Gabbert: Yeah. I mean, I think you need. I mean, not every documentary has one protagonist. I mean, I just made a film that has one central kind of character with a large group of people’s kind of, you know, radiating out from her. I think you need to have a feeling of what you want to happen. And if you can hit those emotional beats, like what you sort of imagine happening doesn’t have to happen. But if you know what those emotional beats are or what you want to evoke, then, you know, to look for them as you’re filming.

Steve Cuden: So it helps to then have thought it through in advance knowing full well you’re not scripting it.

Laura Gabbert: Right.

Steve Cuden: So you can’t guarantee that those things are going to happen. But you can look for those.

Laura Gabbert: Yes, you can look for those. And then you can also. You’re not staging things, but you can ask your subject, your. The character that you’re following, do you do anything like this that might kind of fit what you’re looking for? I mean, you start to sort of. And you start to kind of hone in on opportunities to hit those emotional beats, if that makes sense.

Steve Cuden: Do you ver ask people to do things a second time?

Laura Gabbert: I do. Yeah. I’m not a true, you know, cinema verite. I mean, I have ethics and rules and guidelines, and I try not to do that early on in the process of working with someone. But I think as soon as you, you know, one of the key things you need to do as a documentary filmmakers, build trust with your subject. And I always say documentaries are only as good as the trust that allows them to be made. So once you have that trust, they start to understand that, okay, she just wants me to do that again for safety, or she wants me to walk in a different way, or she wants me to say it again differently. Um, so I try not to do that early on in the process and in the relationship, but I definitely do do that.

Steve Cuden: All right, so do you then have in your mind’s eye, typically, what a good story will be from a particular subject? Do you know what a good story will be ahead of time?

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, sometimes I’m wrong. I mean, I’ve started projects that I haven’t f. You know, that I’ve kind of abandoned because the story doesn’t sort of pan out. But, yeah, I feel like I have a pretty good sense for it or. And for me, it’s not just story. It is, um. Are we exploring kind of juicy ideas through making this somehow?

Steve Cuden: How often do you get off into the field and something happens that changes your whole way of going about it or the way that you’re thinking about it? Does that happen often or not?

Laura Gabbert: I would say not very often. Not often. Uh, it. Not very often. But I will say that. Elise, with City of Gold, what I found was that we would go to these restaurants with Jonathan, with my tiny crew. We would film him eating there. We would quickly run back into the kitchen and get some B roll of the preparation of the food, the work in the kitchen. And I realized we just didn’t have enough time to do Both. So what I would do then is go back a second time and just kind of shoot out the kitchen and all the details of the restaurant so I could take my time. When I started doing that, I started talking to these restaurant owners and discovered that they had these incredible immigrant stories, you know, about their families or about themselves, and how coming to Los Angeles and opening up a restaurant and cooking food for their communities, whether it’s Thai or Ethiopian or whatever, gave them this great entry to prosperity in America. And it was sort of the flip side’s. What you don’t read in Jonathan Gold’s food reviews is how do these reviews of these restaurants that impact these chefs?

Steve Cuden: Sure, of course not.

Laura Gabbert: That’s an example of spending time shooting and realizing, oh, there’s another point of view I want to weave into this film.

Steve Cuden: So that becomes a kind of sort of back ended research. You didn’t set out with that to research it. It comes out of the process itself. How much research do you typically do on most of your shoots before you go out?

Laura Gabbert: I try to do a lot. I love research. It’s like one of my favorite things about it. I just try to learn as much as I possibly can. I try to read everything I can. I mean, even when we were doing otolengi and we were shing at Versailles, I was like, I think I really need to review my, uh, history of, you know, Versailles and the revolution. And because you go there and you shoot it differently because of that.

Steve Cuden: And isn’t it convenient that that’s where they were? Let them eat cake.

Laura Gabbert: Yes, that’s right. And it was a film about pastries. So what was, you know, it’s one of the things the th was about.

Steve Cuden: All right, so what do you think are the most important steps then in the development of a story or going toward a story to make a documentary? What are those important steps that you do now? Pretty typically every time you go out?

Laura Gabbert: I mean, there’s a number of things I mean, I’d like. Like we were just talking just a lot of research and development, like reading as much as I can about it, writing about it, sort of coming up with questions that I need to ask the subject. As I said, writing a treatment, really writing out, what does this film look like? Like, uh, what does my imagination say this film could look like? What could happen? Right. They’ll be surprises along the way. It may not go exactly that way, but it’s a very critical exercise, I think. I think the other thing is really making sure. I mean, access. Do I have all the access to this subject that I need. I worked on, I can’t name names, but I worked on. After City of Gold, I started working on a film about a very well known contemporary artist here in la. And we started filming and we were, we were given access, but as we got further and further along, they started kind of throwing up barriers. Uh oh, and we had to abandon that project because without the access, I couldn’t make the film I wanted to make.

Steve Cuden: How often do you need clearance? Is that a big problem?

Laura Gabbert: When you say clearance, what do you mean?

Steve Cuden: Well, so for instance, when you went to Versailles, did you need to get clearance to shoot in Versailles?

Laura Gabbert: Oh, yes, and it costs thousands and thousands of dollars in a location fee.

Steve Cuden: And then is it the same in City of Gold where you’d go to a restaurant, did you need to get clearances from the people there?

Laura Gabbert: Uh, very different with City of Gold depending upon the restaurant. I mean, I would let them know that we were coming or Jonathan would do the favor and ask them for us. A lot of them were just tiny little places. They weren’t kind of well known, fancy restaurants. And sometimes I would be filming with Jonathan, he’d be like, hey, let’s stop here for lunch. So I’d have no time to do that. So for those places we didn’t. I mean, I always get a location agreement for liability reasons. You get them to sign that, right? So yeah, if you’re shooting at Versailles, that’s weeks of negotiation and paying them a handsome price to shoot there before it opens. But if it’s a little tiny, you know, Vietnamese FA shop in San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles. No, they’re happy to have you film there, especially if you’re with Jonathan Gold.

Steve Cuden: Well, sure, because they know that they’re likely to get a little publicity out of it.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, yeah.

Steve Cuden: And they better hope that their food is good that day. That’s for sure.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah. Yeah. So it depends. It depends.

Steve Cuden: So when you’re starting, do you usually have a specific end goal in mind? Do you know where you’re headed? Is that the one of the secrets?

Laura Gabbert: Oh, you mean an entire documentary? Do I know the..

Steve Cuden: Yes. When you start, when you begin. I know you spent five years with Jonathan Gold. I can’t imagine you knew how it was going to end over five years. Maybe you did.

Laura Gabbert: No, because that film, again, really is not a..

Steve Cuden: If there’s no kind of plot, it’s more episodic.

Laura Gabbert: It’s more episodic, it’s more thematic, it’s more evocative. It’s more of a feeling and a tone and those kinds of things. But as you know, as I said, I m. I always write out treatments and I always try to imagine how it might end.

Steve Cuden: You know, I think most docs that I’ve seen that I really like, and they meant something to me, elicit some kind of emotion. They’re emotional in some way, just like any good narrative movie would. It would hit you in your gut. Is there something that you do when you’re shooting that you’re looking for that you know is going to help you elicit that kind of empathy and understanding and. And emotional impact?

Laura Gabbert: I mean, there’s not one thing, I think, that, you know, I mean, for me, it’s really just the combination. I think there’s so much emotion. Okay. In a film like City of Gold, there wasn’t going to be. There’s no big conflict. And Jonathan told me that. He’s like, I’m not going to give you any conflict. I’m a critic. This is what I do. And I was like, that’s fine. I’m not looking for that.

Steve Cuden: Well, some people might think of the criticism as conflict, but that’s a whole other thing.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, but one of our ground rules was that I couldn’t film him in real time reviewing a restaurant that wasn’t ethical. So we were mostly going to restaurants he had reviewed before. Got it. There’s a couple times where we didn’t, but for me it was much more a way of emotion comes out of the filmmaking. It comes out of the cutting, it comes out of the music. It comes out of what Jonathan says about learning about different communities and cultures in Los Angeles. And that that’s emotional, you know, that that’s a beautiful thing. And if it’s shot the right way and cut the right way, it creates emotion. It’s. It’s moving.

Steve Cuden: Sure, of course. And some of those things come out of whatever you find in posts that are juxtapositions of one thing to another.

Laura Gabbert:: A lot of it comes out in the editing. Yeah, it comes out in the shooting and the editing. It comes out, we spent on that film. I think in most documentaries, you know, there’s B roll. It’s like kind of setting up those exterior shots and the locations and the details. And those are usually done quickly the morning of a shoot or maybe in one or two days. We spent weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks shooting B roll of Los Angeles.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Laura Gabbert:That’s a vast city.

Steve Cuden: Yes, it is.

Laura Gabbert: It’s a Horizontal city. It doesn’t say LA to you in one shot, you know, unless you have, like, the beach and a palm tree. We had a goal of shooting Los Angeles in a way that you don’t typically see Los Angeles, but people who live here recognize it. And we had all these kind of goals. If we’re going to shoot the Hollywood sign, we shoot it from an angle that we don’t typically see.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Laura Gabbert: You know, like, we had kind of some rules that when we broke them, we chose to break them.

Steve Cuden: Well, I assume you were trying to make it unique in some way.

Laura Gabbert: Well, you’re trying to make it a cohesive whole, you know, not unique just for the sake of being unique. But that somehow fits the subject matter, fits Jonathan Gold’s kind of, you know, take and view on Los Angeles.

Steve Cuden: I think I have the right person. I could be wrong, but I believe it was H.L. menken, the great writer, who once said of Los Angeles, there is no there there.

Laura Gabbert: Right, right.

Steve Cuden: But you’re saying that you went and through Jonathan Gold found that’s there.

Laura Gabbert: That’s correct. That’s correct. And it was very much informed by his writing and just spending time with him. And then I worked very closely with my cinematographer, Jerry Henry. Whereas even when we were cutting the film, Jerry would come into the edit room and I’d be like, we need shots of Koreatown sort of from this POV or these angles. And he’s brilliant. And he would go out and do that and then do all sorts of other really incredible things. He was very invested in us capturing Los Angeles in a certain way and did a great job.

Steve Cuden: So you say that you start many movies and you advise people to sit down and do some kind of an outline or some kind of a treatment or whatever you want to call it, to get them to. Or to get you to the point where you can go out and shoot certain things and make sure you cover. I assume that that’s part of the research process. I need to shoot this, this, this and this in order to make the story work. If there’s going to be a story there, it’s that.And it’s also. It primes you. So you seize opportunities that may fit those. Those points in your treatment in an emotional way, if not literally.

Steve Cuden: Do you then think about going back to UCLA now and like Howard’s structure class and various other kinds of classes in, um, narrative filmmaking. Do you then sit down and think structurally in seven plot points, or do you think that way?

Laura Gabbert: I mean, not maybe in seven plot points. Exactly. But I think about. I think more about. I. I can give you an example. When we were making a film called Sunset Story, that was one of my first films. The film takes place in a retirement home for political radicals in Los Angeles. And we originally thought we were making a film about kind of the history of the social movement through the eyes of these residents. And we discovered two women who had moved there within a couple of weeks of each other, who kind of became best friends. And we found while we were making it that the film was really about these two women in this place. It wasn’t about the place and the history. And in the editing room, I remember sort of realizing, oh, my God, we’re telling a love story. This is a love story.

Steve Cuden: Interesting. And you had no idea you were going there when you started?

Laura Gabbert: No. And I remember thinking about Howard and it’s like, you know, most love stories end with the separation of the death of one of the lovers. And like that happened in the film. But it just. It kind of. We re. Edited, restructured the film with that thought.

Steve Cuden: It evolved that way. You didn’t start out with that intention, correct?

Laura Gabbert: Yep.

Steve Cuden: And to me, that’s everything I’ve ever known about documentaries and other documentarians I’ve spoken to. And we’ll talk about Doug, pray shortly. He’s also a documentarian. That. That evolution is part of the beauty of the process is that you discover in the making of the movie. Now, narrative filmmaker can discover too, in the making of the movie. Sure. But there’s probably a little narrow of an opportunity to do that in a scripted movie.

Laura Gabbert: That’s correct. I think that’s right. Yeah. And it’s one of the risks in making a documentary, but it’s also one.

Steve Cuden: Of the great choice, I imagine it is. Do you have a particular rule or a thought as to how much footage you’re going to need to shoot in order to make a movie?

Laura Gabbert: Uh, I don’t. I mean, it just depends. Completely depends upon the movie. It depends upon, you know, I’m constantly watching things we shoot and sort of assessing if we need more in a certain place. In the case of the film, um, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, you know, we had the money raised. It was a certain amount of money. We had locations. We only had a certain amount of time. We shot it in 10 days.

Steve Cuden: That helps you, doesn’t it? Because you’re really locked in that box.

Laura Gabbert: Well not always, but I appreciate having it contained. I. I think that you can be more creative in times when you really know what the limitations are.

Steve Cuden: In the many different projects I’ve done in my life, the ones that I always thought came out the best were the ones where you were constricted in some way either. Didn’t have enough money, you didn’t have enough time, you didn’t have the resources you need in some way. And that forces you to be creative within that context.

Laura Gabbert: That’s correct. I find the exact same thing to be true.

Steve Cuden: And if you have total freedom to do whatever you want for as long as you want, it’s just a big sprawling mess sometimes.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah. Or if you don’t have like a time deadline, I always impose it. I just say we are applying to these festivals on these dates and we have to be done.

Steve Cuden: You know, that’s helpful, isn’t it? Because now you’ve put yourself in that constraint. All right, so we. You alluded to money. How difficult in the documentary world, which is not known for earning tons of money, how do you raise money? What do you do?

Laura Gabbert: It’s been an evolution because when I started making documentaries, there was mostly just grant money for documentaries. You applied for grants or you got funding through a licensing agreement with pbs. I film Sunset Story, that was a licensing agreement. They gave me a certain amount of money. I mean, I had shot most of the film and cut it.

Steve Cuden: So you were hired to work on that?

Laura Gabbert: Um, no, it was a license agreement. So I made most of the film, brought it to them. They wanted it, and so then they gave me enough money to finish it.

Steve Cuden: I see.

Laura Gabbert: And reimburse us for lots of it. And then, you know, the transaction is that then they get it for pbs. It ended up being on independent lens with other films I’ve done with. With City of Gold, I raised money on my own with Otoolengi. That came through an outside financer that my producer knew who just funded the whole thing. With Food and Country, which is my most recent full length documentary, it was a combination of equity partners and donations, but people who were donating big chunks of money. So a lot of that funding, a lot of the sort of private equity, the sort of, you know, investors, so to speak, that’s very hard to come by now because the documentary market is so, so sad right now.

Steve Cuden: Yes, it is.

Laura Gabbert: They’re just not, you know, you used to be able to take a film to Sundance and it was still hard to sell it there, but you could sell it and recoup most of your investment. It’s almost unheard of now.

Steve Cuden: So how do you then approach it? How do you approach people when they probably know this?

Laura Gabbert: I mean, the last time I did this was the last time I raised money through private equity was in 2020. And that’s before it completely. There was still hope of getting money back, recouping money.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Laura Gabbert: I haven’t raised money for a film that way since then and I, I don’t think I would feel comfortable approaching a private investor right now saying, I hope I can make your money back.

Steve Cuden: But you absolutely need people that just like any kind of risk, venture capital, they have to be willing to take the risk that they’re going to lose the money. And hopefully they look at it as a potential deduction.

Laura Gabbert: They look at a deduction. And in the case of documentaries, there’s groups of investors out there that also are investing because they love documentary. They’re hoping to get their money back, but their biggest reason for investing is they are investing in the social impact of the film.

Steve Cuden: So the companies like HBO that has had a doc division I don’t know if they still do or not HBO, but.

Laura Gabbert: It’s a shadow of its former self, let’s just put it..

Steve Cuden: So those things have started to disappear a little bit, is that what you’re saying?

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I’m not an expert in any of this, but I can tell you, I mean, mostly what happened was there was a period of time where the streamers or HBO or IFC, these companies would go to festivals, they would acquire independently made films and then they would show it and you’d make aworldwide deal with them or a North American deal with them. What those streamers kind of figured out is that they can make those on themselves, make them for themselves and commission them. So they started doing a lot of that work. I think what they realized is that they’re not moneymakers. And so the algorithm started showing them that they’re going to commission documentaries about celebrities, music, true crime or cults. And if it’s kind of falls outside those things, I mean, I’m completely generalizing.

Steve Cuden: But, but less so about food.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, I mean they’re still doing food things, but I think it’s um, I mean the most recent film, ied Food and Country is really about how broken the American food system is. They don’t see that as a very commercial topic.

Steve Cuden: No, it’s got to be a little bit challenging and attractive.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Steve Cuden: Indeed. Well, let’s talk about the power of film for a moment because I think it’s A miracle that you managed to pull that off in many different ways. And you worked on that together with Doug Pray, who has also been a guest on this show. And anyone listening to this episode, you’ll definitely want to check out Doug Pray’s episode as well, which is outstanding. How did you decide to do. To make a documentary about Howard Suber’s life’s work, basically, which is the power of film and his pattern recognition and deciding or he decides this is what he sees in many different movies and stories and this is what storytelling is.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, it, um. You know, Doug and I both, we were at UCLA Film School at different times. We were both Howard’s TAs, but Doug and I knew each other just from the documentary world and a little bit through ucla. And we were having lunch with Howard one day and Howard had always thought that his lectures could be some sort of like, PBS type series in a way.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Laura Gabbert: And he had gone down the road with a couple of other former students and nothing had panned out. And we were all having lunch and Doug and I just kind of looked at each other like, let’s just make this happen. Let’s just do this. Right. So we started collaborating on that. And, uh, it’s a long story, so I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but.

Steve Cuden: Well, how many years did you work on it?

Laura Gabbert: We started working on it in 2016 and actually shot a pilot that we ended up abandoning. Uh, okay. Approach didn’t work. I mean, it worked. It just wasn’t. It. It was Doug’s idea. Finally he’s like, Laura, let’s just keep it super simple and like shoot it all in. In interatron and just have Howard speaking to the camera and intercut it with film clips.

Steve Cuden: Explain for the listeners that don’t know what an interatron is.

Laura Gabbert:: So an interatron is something that Eroll Morris, a great documentary filmmaker, basically innovated, invented, and essentially what. I don’t have to go into the technical aspects of it, but the experience of watching something on interatron is that the subject, the person speaking, is looking directly into the audience’s size. Usually you’re set up with a camera and you’re next to the camera and the subject is looking at you, so it’s a little off. It just gives it an immediacy.

Steve Cuden: Right. It feels personal because you’re really like looking into the character’s eyes. We where typically on camera. Most characters on camera are not looking into the camera at all.

Laura Gabbert: Not at all.

Steve Cuden: Newsreaders look into the camera, yes. But the interatron is a little bit different even. It’s even more intimate.

Laura Gabbert: It’s more intimate. And what it also does, it still allows you in real life, when you’re shooting at. Howard’s actually looking at us.

Steve Cuden: Mhm.

Laura Gabbert: So we can nod and smile and kind of give him encouragement as directors do when they interview people. But the way it’s set up, uh, there’s a. I’m not. I don’t even.

Steve Cuden: You’re able to have a conversation with him basically through the camera.

Laura Gabbert: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s a big difference. Kind of like I know that the listeners can’t see you and I having a conversation, but we’re actually talking to one another on screen. And it’s not like an interatron, but it is in a way like an.

Laura Gabbert: Exactly, that’s right.

Steve Cuden: So tell the listeners what is in the power film and why they should even bother watching it.

Laura Gabbert: So I mean, I’ll start out by saying that Howard Subers’s. These classes he taught at UCLA were legendary. And that’s not hyperbolic. I mean, they really were. It’s like you.

Steve Cuden: They were legendary. I agree.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah. You landed at UCLA and people would say, you can’t leave without taking his class.

Steve Cuden: Exactly right, right.

Laura Gabbert: And I just remember like my brain exploding basically when I started taking his classes, I couldn’t believe it was. ‘s the combination of the scholarship behind it and the knowledge of film history coupled with having it be so relatable and emotional. And the thing that I loved about him is that he always made you think about your own life in your own trajectory, even when he was talking about a movie. He’s a powerful performer, I would say. He finds a way to engage you and then weave in these sort of examples, whether it’s from, you know, Greek mythology or a funny anecdote from a set, you know, of the Graduate that just keep you kind of listening and. And wanting to learn more. And they teach you how to look at movies and understand movies differently.

Steve Cuden: Once he tells you this stuff, and his book, the Power of Film is absolutely fantastic as well. But once he starts to talk about these different elements of storytelling, you realize how obvious they should be. But aren’t. They’re not obvious. But he makes it obvious to you and then you can never forget them. And the thing that I think you were talking about a moment ago, which is really wonderful, is that he. Which I had never thought about before his class, that what’s happening in storytelling and especially in movies, the power of it is that stories are really about us. And so that’s how we relate, why we relate and how we relate to movies and TV shows and books and so on. Is that storytelling? I never thought of it that way. Thought of it as kind of a separate thing. But he makes it personal.

Laura Gabbert: He makes it personal. So you too, are understanding that you’re having a m catharsis, Right. Because there are things that are being set up in the movie. For example, like one of my favorite things. It’s an entire. It’s the name of one of our episodes. It’s called Trapped.

Steve Cuden: Trapped, Absolutely.

Laura Gabbert: We go to movies to see people in these traps and then figure out how to get out of them. Because we all feel trapped in our lies to certain degrees and at, you know, varying amounts. And throughout our lifetime, as he says.

Steve Cuden: Almost every movie that’s of any value, what he calls memorable, popular movies could be called Trapped.

Laura Gabbert: Trapped. Yeah. So that’s one of his kind of overarching themes that you just like then every time you see a movie, you’re thinking to yourself, how is this character trapped? And how are they going toa get out of it? And you start thinking about your own life. Oh, I do feel trapped by this circumstance in my life, you know?

Steve Cuden: Absolutely. So the Power film, which is six parts, it’s about. They’re about 40, 45 minutes per episode. How long did it take you to gather up the hundreds of clips that are in this documentary?

Laura Gabbert: A huge part of making the Power of Film was really the editing process, of course. And we had two editors on board at different times. Avel Camboan, who was our first editor, and then Philip Owens, who’s our second editor, who did a lot of heavy lifting. But then Doug Pray, my collaborator, is an editor as well, and he was the supervising editor, but did a lot of the editing in the last several months to really make the series come together and sing. So I just wanted to mention that. But, um, yeah, the clips were tricky for legal reasons. And, um, also because we’re cutting to films all the time. And so we really wanted to find a balance in terms of contemporary films, old films, different types of films to cut in, under or over or cut away from. Howard speaking about whatever he was speaking about. Um, and that was a process that was just. It was really a process of trying things, seeing if they worked, editing, re editing, swapping out clips, trying new ones, finding the balance. And we were able to use all the clips through Fair use, which is part of the U.S. copyright law.

Steve Cuden: Right, Fair Use Being that you have the right to use it, especially in.

Laura Gabbert: An educational sense, because it’s transformational. We’re actually. Howard is actually explaining something that’s going on in a clip.

Steve Cuden: 100%. What the listeners should know about it is there’s no one else in this six parts except Howard talking into the camera about these various elements. But then it’s intercut with tons and tons of clips from very famous, memorable, popular movies. This is not some offbeat little. Nobody’s ever heard of movies. This is Chinatown and the Godfather and U. Uh, Citizen Kane and famous, famous, famous movies.

Laura Gabbert: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: So how did you then decide which clips to go? I know you were saying you’re swapping them in and out. How do you make that decision?

Laura Gabbert: You know, I mean, this is where Doug and Howard and I worked the most closely. We just watched every single iteration of a cut and would give notes to each other and say, I think we should, you know, swap this out. And then we’d like, brainstorm of which clip we would use. Or Philip Owens would have an idea of a clip we would use. It just. It was like a group effort in terms of figuring out how to find that right balance. Or someone would go back and rewatch a film and be like, wait, hey, I know we should use this. This particular scene in do the Right Thing or whatever. Whatever it was that was probably one of the most collaborative parts of the process was really giving notes to our editors talking about it. Howard and Doug and I zoomed a lot just to review kind of where we were and which episodes needed more work and which episodes were not that great yet and how to make them better. Even when Doug was doing a lot of the editing in those last several months, he would just try out new clips and then send them to us and see. What do you think of this? Is this better? It was a process. And then the other final part of the process was that we had to send it to our entertainment attorneys, to their fair use experts, and then we would. I wish I could show you the spreadsheet of the entire series with all the clips in it and all the columns, you know, whether it was approved or not approved. And then the note from the attorney, you need to cut this clip down by three seconds.

Steve Cuden: So the approval was based on time, the amount of footage?

Laura Gabbert: Well, some of it’s based on time. As our attorneys would tell us. It’s more of an art than a science.

Steve Cuden: Yes.

Laura Gabbert: So sometimes it was time. Sometimes Howard wasn’t talking about the movie specifically enough.

Steve Cuden: Ah, okay.

Laura Gabbert: So we’d have to go get some voiceover from Howard to make true, fair use. But then that would mean, like, reshuffling things and recutting things. It was a puzzle, you know. It really was.

Steve Cuden: Well, yeah, I imagine, uh, when you watch it, you can’t help but thinking this was a great big jigsaw puzzle to put together.

Laura Gabbert: It was a great big jigsaw puzzle. Yeah. And so that was the last phase of editing was really. And at times it was heartbreaking to have to cut something down and then at time again, back to this idea of constraints. Sometimes it made it better.

Steve Cuden: Sure. Made it tighter.

Laura Gabbert: Tighter. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s one of the things that screenwriters and movie directors and producers go through all the time. How can you make it tighter? And that’s one of the things that Howard talks about is removing the excess on a, um, story that you don’t need.

Laura Gabbert: Cutting in as late as you can into a scene and getting out as early as you can, you know?

Steve Cuden: Well, his famous. I call it the E equals MC squared of storytelling, which is his definition of structure, which is the relationship of the pieces and parts to each other and to the whole. And that’s a very simple sounding phrase. Just like E equals MC squared is simple sounding.

Laura Gabbert: Right.

Steve Cuden: But it’s actually profound.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: The relationship of the pieces and parts to each other into the whole. It means that everything has to be of a piece.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And ultimately, I think that that’s. I’m, um, going to pay you a very high compliment. I think you folks made such a spectacular series because it’s so tight and so well drawn and so clear and understandable that something that could be completely a mess and very difficult to fathom is quite easy to understand. And it’s really entertaining. That’s the other part of it. It’s super entertaining. It’s not boring at all.

Laura Gabbert: It’s really isn’t. I know. I love that you emphasize that because I think people can be a little scared off by it. That it’s going to be a professor sort of lecturing at you. It doesn’t feel that way.

Steve Cuden: No, not at all.

Laura Gabbert: What happens to people is they watch it and they’re like, oh, my God, I need to go see that film again. Or I haven’t seen that film. It also just gets you excited about Cinema, you know, 100%’what we need.

Steve Cuden: It’s like you’ve got a wise old shaman of movie making, telling you the profundity of what is in a story. And it’s absolutely wonderful to watch. And it’s. You would think that it could drag or be slow. It isn’t. It’s very exciting to watch. How long did it take you to actually shoot all of the footage that you shot of Howard?

Laura Gabbert: So we shot very quickly. We shot in six days.

Steve Cuden: In six days.

Laura Gabbert: But there was a lot of prep. We spent time with Howard kind of talking about. I mean, as you know, Steve, because you were his student, you know, he would lecture for three to four hours.

Steve Cuden: Yep.

Laura Gabbert: And then you’d have him for an entire quarter. And, um, remember, we had all those handouts, like the. The outlines and outlines and outlines. So one of the challenges was like, okay, we need to focus this down and kind of do the greatest hits, you know?

Steve Cuden: Well, you don’t cover the entire book. You cover the best parts of it.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, cover the best parts. And what would sort of. Which parts would lend themselves to kind of the best clips was also a factor.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Laura Gabbert: And Howard spent a lot of time kind of honing some outlines he thought he wanted. I think we had seven or eight different episodes at first. And then we also had another collaborator, another former student in ta Howard, Joey Sierra, who really sat with Howard and helped him hone and hone and hone. And then we just got on the stage and went through them. And, you know, Howard, he had notes next to him, and Joey would sit off to the side while Doug and I were directing and feed him, you know, character names or titles if he had forgotten them or something like that. Right, right. Kind of prompt him a little bit. But mostly, Howard just had the lecture idea and he would just talk, and he was not reading off of a script.

Steve Cuden: As memory serves, you’d go into a class with Howard and he had no notes in front of him, and he d talked for three hours. You’d think it was extemporaneous, which in a way it is. But he’d been teaching it for 50 years. Yeah.

Laura Gabbert: Ah.

Steve Cuden: And so it was like the back of his hand. And that’s part of the beauty of what you get in the Power of Film is that it feels like he’s just rattling off these wonderful things to you without it being difficult in some way or he’s having to dredge it up. No, it’s just flowing off of his tongue.

Laura Gabbert: It’s flowing. And he’s a great storyteller. That’s the thing.

Steve Cuden: You absolutely is. And the book, which, of course is based on the lectures and the whole things based on the lectures. The book is very little tiny bites of stuff. And that’s what the TV series feels like as well. Little bites of information that are very interesting and compelling to watch. Where can people find the power film if they want to find it?

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, you know, we premiered on Turner classic movies on January 4th of this past year, 2024. It is now available to stream on Macs as well as Amazon and itunes. So if you have Macs, you can stream it for free. TCM will still continue to play it, but it’s, you know, they’re kind of old, they’re not a streamer. So sometimes they do a marathon run of it the day after Thanksgiving. They ran all six episodes. But, uh, Max or any of the other kind of places you find your content now, you can find it there.

Steve Cuden: And not that anybody’s buying or watching DVDs anymore, but are DVDs available?

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, thank you for asking. We will have DVDs and Blu Rays, which are exciting because we actually have a lot of cinephiles who have contacted us about Blu Ray versions of this for their collections on our website theoweroffilm.com and those should be available in early January.

Steve Cuden: I know, I want to copy on Blu Ray.

Laura Gabbert: Oh, well, you’re just going to get one. We’ll send you one.

Steve Cuden: I look forward to that.

Laura Gabbert: The other thing I would just add is that we’re also available for educational distributions so colleges and universities and community colleges can purchase it for their libraries. And to purchase it for that type of use, you go to a company called Good Docs, G O O D D O C S and you can purchase it there too.

Steve Cuden: Cool. Good docs. Last technical question I’m go going toa ask you. Obviously the manufactured production and so on about making a movie, any movie, is that it’s all about working with other people, collaboration. What for you makes good collaborations work?

Laura Gabbert: Oh, uh, gosh. Well, first of all, I will say that for me, my chief cho in making films is the collaboration that is my favorite part. Because there’s nothing better than sitting in a room with people you respect and having ideas accumulate so you get to a better idea. I think a lot of it’s chemistry. Oftentimes it’s complementary sort of skills, but a lot of it is just chemistry. And I think sort of a. An openness and a willingness to listen to other people. You know, I mean, I love to have. I am someone who is like, if someone has a better idea than I do when I’m directing, I say, thank you very much. Let’s try it.

Steve Cuden: You’re open to that.

Laura Gabbert: I’m very open to that, and I want that. And that’s more fun for everybody that way too. And if it makes it better, then why not?

Steve Cuden: That’s absolutely right. Because you can’t help but work with other people. It’s almost impossible to make any movie literally by yourself.

Laura Gabbert: It’s impossible. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Well, I assume some, over the course of the history of movies, that’s happened, but that’s going to be very unusual. Most of the time, you have to be willing to work with other people.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah. And I. I think even Howard used to. I remember this vaguely, and I don’t know if I can remember the examples, but he used to talk about collaboration a lot and that some of the directors zoom but did their best work. If you look back at their work, it’s because they worked with a certain cinematographer for those two movies.

Steve Cuden: Oh, sure.

Laura Gabbert: There are these partnerships, these creative partnerships that are just gold.

Steve Cuden: Well, we see that all the time where Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg. They work with the same collaborators over and over again. Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoomacher and, you know, Steven Spielberg and Michael Kah. And you see the same people over and over again.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And that’s because they actually are able to communicate on a different level at some point.

Laura Gabbert: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: They become simpatico in some.

Laura Gabbert: That’s right.

Steve Cuden:  So I’ve been having just the most fun conversation for not quite an hour now with Laura Gabber, the documentarian. And we’re going to wind the show down a little bit. And I’m just wondering, and all of your experiences, are you able to share with us a story that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or maybe just plain funny?

Laura Gabbert: Yeah. I will say that one of the things I found fascinating was to shoot. When we shot Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, we shot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a lot. And I just have never shot anything, like, in a place like that. And what was crazy about it was that. So we had. They have met employees with you the entire time with our crew. And we were shooting there for maybe a full week every day.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Laura Gabbert: So I literally had someone behind me the whole time who would, like, hold my shoulder. Really, if I got a little. If I was backing up with a camera and got like, uh, maybe like six inches too close to a piece of art. I mean, she was like. It was like she was stuck to me for a week, this woman.

Steve Cuden: That’s weird.

Laura Gabbert: It is kind of weird. I mean, it was. I was grateful Because I don’t want to damage anything in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But it was a very different way of working, is having this person literally glued to me, the entire town and my camera person.

Steve Cuden: Well, that was your safety buffer.

Laura Gabbert: Exactly. So.

Steve Cuden: Because otherwise you very well might have damaged something.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah, exactly.

Steve Cuden: Because there’s a lot of stuff in there that you can damage.

Laura Gabbert: And then the other thing that was interesting about there is, like, there were certain. You know, there’s all these tunnels that connect the Metropolitan Museum of Art and all these back alleyways where they store art. There are places where you had to turn your camera off because there are security issues about where they store art.

Steve Cuden: Really?

Laura Gabbert: Yeah. So they would say, okay, all cameras off right now. Like. And so we’d go through this long tunnel with these huge crates of, you know, ancient art, and we couldn’t film it because there could be possible security breaches.

Steve Cuden: Really? Isn’t that interesting?

Laura Gabbert: Fascinating.

Steve Cuden: You know, did that feel like the end of Citizen Kane bit?

Laura Gabbert: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Great big crates of.. But probably not a giant room like they have?

Laura Gabbert: Uh, yes.

Steve Cuden: Not Warehouse. Giant warehouse.

Laura Gabbert: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: That’s very interesting. So. All right, last question for you today. Laura, you’ve already given us huge amounts of advice throughout this entire show, but I’m wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice or a tip that you like to give to those that are starting out in the business, or maybe they’re in a tiny bit and trying to get to the next level.

Laura Gabbert: It’s an easy one for me, uh, because I talk to so many young filmmakers, like, on a weekly basis. I enjoy mentoring people, and I meet a lot of people who have kind of who watch a lot, who consumed a lot. I also meet a lot of young people who want to be in film who haven’t watched that many movies, they haven’t watched that many documentaries, if they want to make documentaries. They don’t really know the history of making documentaries. And right now it’s so easy, you can see almost anything. Right. My big advice is do your homework. See what’s been made before you go make your film. Not because you want to copy it. You need to understand the context in which you’re making something and what’s been done before.

Steve Cuden: Well, that is absolutely spot on advice because I taught at a school here in Pittsburgh called Point Park University for more than 10 years, and it is evident that a lot of young people today are not studying the history of the motion picture industry or movies or storytelling. And yes, that’s what you need to do. And you need to understand what came before us so that you’re standing, as the old phrases. You’re standing on the shoulders of giants. That’s. And then you can take it to the next level. Otherwise, you don’t know what you’re talking about most of the time.

Laura Gabbert: Or if you want to reference it, you can, but you’re doing it in a knowing way. You know, there’s, uh, there are ways because we all mimic each other. I mean, there’s. It’s not like, you know, I mean, yes, people, uh, people are innovative and they sort of invent new formal things about filmmaking, but I also find it just inspiring. And it’s also just, you know, it gives you ideas. It’s sort of. And even watching films that maybe you don’t love, like, what do you love about it? What don’t you love about it? What works about it for you? What doesn’t work for you? I just think it’s important that people just spend more time just watching as many films as possible.

Steve Cuden: I think that that’s absolutely right. The more that you understand how it works and the way that things cut and how performances work and tone and all those kinds of things, how the story is told, you can only get better by studying more and more of it.

Laura Gabbert: Absolutely.

Steve Cuden: Laura Gabbert, This has been a fantastic hour on Story Beat, and I cannot thank you enough for your time, your energy, and especially for your wisdom in all things filmmaking and documentaries. Thank you so much.

Laura Gabbert: Oh, it’s been delightful, Steve. Thanks so much for inviting me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to? Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden, and may all your stories be unforgettable.