Make history come alive — with video!

According to a cousin of mine who’s a museum consultant in Northern California, museum theater is up and coming. Sometimes this is in the form of costumed interpreters, sometimes it’s in the form of actors who assume historic characters. In my mail from the Autry Museum comes an invitation to Lewis & Clark, The Musical. People raised on television need the visualization. Such live action can help draw communities — not just school children — into museums, stimulate pride in local history and “Make history come alive.”

A friend of mine with a long work history in the marketing business recently got involved with a local historical society in Fountain Hills, Arizona, which is outside of Phoenix. They went from around 100 members two years ago to approaching 400 today. How? Well, getting a facility was a focal point. They did some smart public relations and marketing; completed and promoted a website; expanded the size and cosmetics of their newsletter; emphasized good speakers at bimonthly meetings. They expanded newsletter and flyer distribution, promoting those speakers to include all city council and chamber of commerce members, community center employees, service club presidents and other historical society presidents and museum directors within 100 miles. They also included a very important audience: the directors of assisted living and senior centers, of which there are many in that area. These people have active networks that organize day trips, tours, events and shows, and they are always looking for more interesting activities.

Another thing they did was introduce audiovisual tools at meetings. This included a rolling Power Point slide show promoting future meetings, society events and needs, and introductory features on organization leaders, all while people are gathering, mixing, getting ready for the evening’s program. It’s kind of like the multiple stimuli of a modern sports bar, but that’s what people are used to these days.

If you don’t have somebody with that expertise in your organization, maybe there’s a college around, or a corporate alumni association or professional group that can loan you somebody. People are picky with their time these days, but volunteerism and philanthropy are still alive and well, and you’ve got a good message. Might as well take advantage.

I came to my role as a documentary producer by way of a career in the public relations business. In my corporate ivory tower days, I used to hire people to make business films. Now I’m a career volunteer, doing it myself. The combination of all that communications experience with a love of history has turned out to be a dangerous mix!

Forgotten Journey started as a slide presentation for the Oregon-California Trails Association. I went to a seminar up at Donner State Park (where there was a pioneer reenactment camp going on) and I met this gentleman, Jim Rose, who the year before had organized the renaming of Mt. Elisha Stephens up in Donner Pass. He was chairman of the Nevada County Historical Landmarks Commission at the time. He had become enamored with the overlooked story of the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party and how they were the first ones to get wagons over the Sierra, five years before the Gold Rush and two years before the Donner Party was trying to follow the same path. He presented a slide show talk on the subject — wow, what a story!

Well, that dangerous mix came into play, and I volunteered to put his presentation into a slide show that others of us could take to schools and historical groups (one of which was Chuck Tichenor’s group out in Canoga Park.) Well, one of the responses that came back from teachers, especially, was, “This is great. We need this because the only teaching materials we have on this period of history are either about the Donner Party, which was a total tragedy, or the Gold Rush, which was a totally different evolution. So we need this positive story, but we need it in video.” My response was, “Yeah, and I’m Ken Burns with a budget of 10 million dollars!” But one thing led to another and I learned a lot in the process.

One thing I learned is that you can convert slides to video, and you can do that cheaply but it’s not going to be very good. If you want to do something at a quality level that will hold people’s attention, it’s got to have movement and it’s got to be done at a professional level that’s way beyond home video. You’re dealing with a generation out there that’s been brought up on MTV. That of course takes money. If you are going to seek funding from private or public sources, you may need to assure enough of a public audience to make their investment worthwhile. This may mean public television — which means you’ve now got to be good enough to compete with all the other stuff out there, including the History Channel and Ken Burns’ epics. Now you’re talking serious money.

It becomes a wicked cycle. I wound up spending five times what I thought it would take to produce Forgotten Journey, but it turned out to be most worthwhile. We had seven premieres, starting in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where the trail started, and it was a major civic event. We wound up with the one at California State University, Northridge, last fall. One of them was hosted by Santa Clara University as part of their sesquicentennial celebration, since one of the Murphys was a founding benefactor of that university. I met descendants of the two babies born along the trail — one of them born in a blizzard in the Sierra. The program was broadcast on PBS stations all over the country and won some awards, and thanks to some nice articles in library publications, I’m still peddling videos to schools and libraries. So there is a market out there for good history.

We are going to show you tonight a video called Saving a Legacy, done last year for the Oregon-California Trails Association, with matching grant funding from the National Park Service. This is probably more like something you’d be interested in doing. We needed a video to get the message out about the importance of preserving what’s left of the historic western trails. We started out hoping to make a 12-minute educational piece but we wound up with about 21 minutes. That’s what happens when you get into interesting subjects.

History can be fun. There’s enough drama in our forebears’ real-life accomplishments to compete on any stage. Thanks to people like you, I hope we’ll have our history and our heritage to savor and celebrate for generations to come.