My 5 Year Journey to Winning an Emmy as a Documentary Producer
by Ken Aguado
In 2020, a documentary I produced called Miracle on 42nd Street won the NY Emmy for Best Documentary. Wow, how did that happen?
The journey that led to me winning an Emmy began seven years ago when I got a call from a casting director I knew. (Note: I’m leaving out names because I didn’t ask everyone’s permission and I didn’t want to leave anyone out. Suffice to say there was no way to include all the talented people who contributed to this film in this brief journal.) The casting director told me about the documentary she was producing about Manhattan Plaza — a legendary apartment complex in New York City that still exists today.
Set mostly in the 1970s, the documentary would chronicle how the complex came into being in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen — the most blighted section of New York — hoping to revitalize the area by attracting middle class residents. But when the twin buildings were completed, the builders soon realized that middle class people had no interest living in a neighborhood infested with crime, drugs, porn shops and prostitutes. The buildings sat empty — a monumental financial catastrophe — that is until someone came up with the inspired idea of re-purposing the complex as subsidized housing for struggling people who worked in the arts. This bold social experiment was a wild success and is now widely credited with the dramatic revitalization of the seedy midtown area, including Times Square, the home of Broadway. The casting director and her family were amongst the earliest tenants and could testify to the profound impact Manhattan Plaza had on their lives and careers. She had to tell this story. You have to give back.
The casting director assembled a small group of filmmakers and raised a significant amount of money to turn good intentions into good cinema and soon everyone was marching in the same direction. Kinda. Unfortunately, filmmaking takes more than good intentions and the production ran out of money without ever making a film. It was a disaster. The enterprise looked like a total loss. Everything was put into storage and the filmmakers drifted apart, with more than a few bruised egos, and plenty of finger-pointing.
I had been hearing bits and pieces about all this, but that day the casting director called and asked (begged?) me to take over the production and reboot it. She said she’d help find more money and, for reasons passing understanding, I said “yes.” We quickly drafted an agreement for my producing services to complete the film in nine months.
It would take me five years to finish the film. There were two major reasons for this.
First, because documentaries rarely turn a profit, finding money is not easy. We were a nonprofit production meaning we had donors, not investors, so at least we could entice donors with a tax deduction. But still, finding money was tough and it would take five years. Second, because it took so long, the people working on the film tended to come and go, taking other gigs to pay the bills. This led to many delays.
At this point, let me add that I am often asked, “What does a producer do?” If you work in showbiz, that probably sounds like the set up for a joke. The best real answer I can offer is that, like Sisyphus, a producer’s job is to push the boulder up the mountain, inch by inch, every day. It’s not a job for all temperaments and because Miracle on 42nd Street was underfunded, I would have to do twelve jobs on the film, only two of which I was probably qualified to do. It was a lot of boulder rolling for one person. Honestly, most days it felt like the boulder had rolled back down the mountain and right over me.
So, I came aboard but was immediately met with suspicion by the director and her team along the lines of, “Who is this Hollywood low-life and how dare he think he knows how to make a documentary?” (Okay, both were fair points.) I tried to assure everyone that I was not there to make a documentary, I was there to finish a documentary — their documentary. I would continue to repeat this line like a mantra for the next several years. It took some convincing, but they eventually came around.
When I took the helm, I had to do a lot of historical archeological and soon discovered the records were a mess. This was actually quite terrifying because there’s lots of potential liability in filmmaking and here I was diving into a dark pool where you couldn’t see the bottom. Every few months I would uncover some “complication” from the original production. This lasted for several nerve-racking years. Additionally, none of the key participants had agreements for their services. This a big filmmaking no-no and getting deals done was my first order of business. It took almost nine months. Why so long? See aforementioned “bruised egos” and “finger-pointing,” with some “Hollywood low-life” thrown in, just for fun.
After that, my second order of business was getting a script written. (There was no script from the original production.) The problem was we had no money. The director had applied for, and received, a nice matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, but we could only access it by coming up with an equal amount of cash.
Luckily, I had just started teaching a film class at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA and learned I was eligible to apply for a faculty grant. I applied and got the grant. A nice break. The NEA matched the ArtCenter grant and I was able to hire two very talented writers who also had journalism experience. This latter aspect was very important because the ability to assemble facts and history would be key. One month later, they delivered a great script that would become the blueprint for the next few years of production.
By now, we were making progress finding money and I hired a great LA-based editor to bring a fresh perspective on the story. The editor did an “assembly,” which is an initial editor’s cut, based on the script, then we made further refinements. It was finally starting to look like a film, when we were low on money, again. Ugh. At this point I didn’t know what to do. I decided I had no choice but to go back to the original editor/producer on the film. This was tricky because the original editor still had scars from the first time around. But she also had skin in the game and the director and I were able to get her to come back onboard for less than her rate using a combo of Jedi mind tricks and begging. The editor really came through and several months later we had a cut that really looked great. The casting director got back in the mix and reached out to actor Chazz Palminteri to narrate. Chazz said yes, lent us his authentic New York voice, and that was the final piece of the narrative.
However, before the film could be seen by the public, I had to license all the music and the dozens of stills and archival clips that were already in the film. Sounds easy, but this would take me weeks and weeks, working ten hours days with our tireless archival producer. Archival video can cost between $50 to $150 — per second. And we needed a lot of it. (We had about 100 archival clips and 82 music cues.) To find the money to pay for all this required a big push on many fronts. I am happy to say that several of the people who were involved with the original production came back to help. It was really the only time in five years I felt like I was part of a team. The truth is that the time I spent making this film was a very lonely pursuit for me. I usually worked alone and if I did work with others, like the director (who also worked tirelessly), it was just the two of us, one on one. This feeling of finally being part of a team was a happy ending to a very long and lonely journey.
Postscript: After completion, Miracle on 42nd Street spent a year on the prestige film festival circuit and screened for various housing and arts-related interest groups before its broadcast premier on WNET (PBS in the NY tri-state area). The broadcast qualified the film for 2020 NY Emmy consideration. We won, adding to the legacy of the amazing artists who pioneered Hell’s Kitchen way back in the late 1970s, and those who followed them.
Final Note: Miracle on 42nd Street in now available on VOD and will soon get a wider, international release. The film features interviews with many people whose lives were improved by being there, including Larry David, Alicia Keys, Terrence Howard, Giancarlo Esposito, Donald Faison, Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Lansbury.
Ken Aguado is a an Emmy-winning producer, screenwriter and author. His most recent films are the award-winning PBS documentary “Miracle on 42nd Street” and “An Interview with God,” which he wrote and produced. He is also the co-author of The Hollywood Pitching Bible and Based On. You can follow Ken on Twitter @kagaudo.
