hello welcome to a very exciting segment of true today with gloria thomas my guest today is i'm going to learn as you're learning about him but i already know he is truly one of the most talented gifted filmmakers of this century really and the beauty of this man's life is he's our own bay area he's one of us he belongs to us today so i want you to welcome to the show the very very very very very and i'm not saying that mildly very talented don gomez welcome don thank you very much gloria way too many varied and way too much talent and it's a pleasure to be here and yes i do claim the bay area yes i worked in in northern california television forever it seems like wow dating back in one nine hundred seventy four wow wow see i took he's he's modest but you're going to learn a lot about his filmmaking either the kinds of things he's been able to do but as you can see here there's a newspaper article about don i want you to go into this a little bit don and let us know but don has been grammy i mean the emmy nominated the list goes on and on and on and on so on this day in particular i want to bring this in early so you will just get a of what you're looking at here but this is an article in the title is hispanics and i'm a festival a first well this festival was twenty something years ago and i was a the town's a film society honored my career from four thirty to nine o'clock at night they played all my movies you know that for a young guy that was a big thrill one of the biggest thrills was that my father who was convinced that film and television and news was a dead end job for me i know that i got to have him come down wow the last time he drove a car he was eighty years old and before i started talking i had the audience honor my father asked him to stand up and wow that was seen and you can imagine for sure and i was in a lot of trouble when i was a kid i was double some kid but to be able to introduce your own father wow and how in a big auditorium  else there so i made a film that broadcasting magazine called the first film done about the nicaraguan revolution and then we did films about salvador i had four films about his son with or one of them was called el salvador diary and for any of your filmmakers out there young students that want to know how do you do it believe me i went till salvador in one nine hundred eighty with the with a a rented camera phone numbers didn't know anybody and  no one of the phone numbers was no good and how when i came out i did this phone call so i would have died but the beginning of the civil war there and it was awarded both associated press and united press international award for best feature refugees were flown back to sourdough and never heard from again wow the government murdered these people who we departed and finally after our film aired alive the airlines stopped making those flights last film on here was a film we went to a salvadoran one nine hundred eighty four to an area where the u s green berets the american advisors were working with the salvadoran government troops and i had a crew of guys from vietnam i had been in vietnam and i was a newspaper reporter and we lived in this town for two years and in this little town we live with a family that had three kids in the armed forces and over the course of two years what i want to do was build a film there would be relevant in one hundred years what was it like in this town in the middle of a civil war wow and you know that the power would go out the water would go on the highway we would be blockaded the town will be bombarded and the girls would come down off the volcano because the army had the town and they realize how the volcano and that's where my luck ran out i got shot three times and had to be carried on  horseback practically to to get iowa and my knee was shot up so bad they told me i never was never walk again and i dance now so who walked in here ah but that film  we came back and wrote a hollywood film about it a hollywood script called salvador and it was about two guys who go to all salvador live there and all these things happen and was directed by oliver stone wow this was all over his first hit as a director he had done the script for midnight express about turkey but that was as a writer but this was his first turn around we're leaving we're going to go so we film the man you go but the bill france between having a hollywood film and a documentary is of course it's enormous right and sometimes we  time a group that we work with and forty one kids were cut down inside two minutes and there was a loony gloria who used to carry my camera when i was tired because already then i was thirty seven thirty eight years old and this young kid was half mountain goat would carry my camera for me and he had a he always chewed sugar cane and he had a little tooth that was a decayed from where the sugar cane sat in there and when they brought his body in the sugar veterans coming back from places like iraq and afghanistan we did a show in sacramento for a whole season called vets house where what we did is we tried to convince young men and women who had been in iraq and afghanistan they needed to get help that the p t s d that's right and now it was was horrific and and nobody who comes back from a war wants to talk the that they had already paid for their services that the services they gave our country that's where i you know that's were were all they needed to go to the veterans administration to be able to get help and you have and and value is probably the most rewarding thing or a filmmaker can do that is to be able to stretch out a little bit from your own position of comfort  burning they are burning chemicals and toxic waste and nobody in god's earth knows what's in there and people come back with long ailments and they think they're just being weak they don't know that they have been exposed a toxic chemical soup and that that there's we don't know what that stuff that wow how could we there's no research done on it sure even the v a doesn't know so if anybody is out there listening watching  now this happened when you were only twenty years into this so you were a veteran of twenty years before now which now we're talking vietnam so here you were already a veteran because you had done all this magnificent work in vietnam and so war correspondent and you you were a kid yeah i was a kid when i were a kid and you know my opposition to the vietnam war hasn't changed ye we saw was that the united states had gotten into a conflict that was unwinnable you know with them when the end came in saigon i'm the most decorated member of the vietnamese air force a man that nixon and l b j had pinned medals on was bombing and strafing the american embassy because he was really v c wow ok so for the the lesson from that your viewers is that that we need to be very careful about getting involved in wars where we don't know who side anybody is on yeah you know and in vietnam that was the case in iraq afghanistan right now it doesn't mean that those conflicts and that we don't have to sweep have to seek an arm or ending and i hope that our present congress will do that but in the their and it's not true in afghanistan and it wasn't true in iraq that war is far more complicated then what they want to make into a thirty second sound bite you're sure one of my pet peeves is that it used to be that the press we weren't on anybody side nowadays the conservatives say that m s n b c is communist and the democrats say that fox news source of news i hope we go back to that because it is not than the work of news man and women to be cheerleaders not for anybody now that's entertainment that's right entertainment that's not news anchor and the job of a war news person is to be in the middle you know i was when i was in el salvador one time when we were on both sides that didn't happen until central america nobody in east war civil war was on both sides right you know if you were with the army you were with the army you didn't go over and go with the germans right for two or in korea  vietnam you couldn't go with the viet cong used had to be a large force that's right in in afghanistan iraq in kuwait you couldn't go be with the kuwaiti ok and you had to be with our forces but it is central america the opportunity presented itself overseas some of us to go and cover both sides well now that's a costly process yeah we lost more photographers and newsmen in central america than we did in world war two wow they were shot up all over the place and the reason being usually when you're leaving when you're in no man's land and both shots feel welcome to take a shot at you  we were stopped even though we had military permission we were put under gunpoint and taken to the brigade headquarters and the lieutenant colonel not the colonel had given us a position but the lieutenant colonel said that we were going to be arrested that our film was kind of they want to look at our film which i can't show you the film because we went as journalists and they let us film them sewer you have to show it to  stuff and said i'm going to send you to be deported but instead of being deported we were driven to an abandoned roadside and the armed guards began drinking liquor to get up their nerve to shoot us wow they were going to shoot us in the van wow and my sound man and my camera man were crying and my other camera man and i say well if it's got americans up in san salvador wow and so we were safe he actually countermand while i order from a lieutenant colonel which is who does that who does that and i hate to rovers to san salvador and then the americans came in but very took our footage and then looked at it and not supposed to look at our food is either you or i and my camera man a phony milgram had been he's mentioned but they took his still photographs and they placed them in the hands of people guarding the rebel areas and those those photographs were used to kill people wow there's a film that i had a part in helping the script console called under fire in the great actor ed harris is on the perimeter of one of those conflict zones and he has still photographs of people who were civilians who are helping them wow and he said if you come in here your butt is mine wow and my camera man was so depressed by this he never got over it because we knew that people were killed and these are the kinds of stories you don't here on fox news or c n n you know i spent often on from one nine hundred seventy to the first documents and they told me if i want the american embassy to stay there because if i didn't i would go be a minor somewhere in the south of south america and you know it took me thirty years to go back and when i finally went back i went to that building where because this guy would spin the  went and thirty years later this big book the man place it was just a parking lot it was just a parking lot wow maybe i'd grown up a little  his body that saw all those things and you can't tell anybody else but there are people who know what you're talking about yeah and the v a can hook you up with them that's right hook you up with support groups with classes with has services the veterans eighty g s want to hell yes and please i want to i want to beg neil young men and women who know men and women to seek help yes because you know the shooting in santa cruz the guy was a vet that's right and p t s d extract a horrific toll that's right when people come back here and it's on dreams very good yeah yeah it's just as we all know in our generation how many guys came back from vietnam didn't get treated get treated didn't get didn't get the very things that you go into the armed services for g i benefits education benefits medical benefits for you and your family we grew up at a time where people went into the armed forces for the stability of life as we know it and so to a goal to serve a deck a pass that easy and that's a come home and not even get not even be able apply for a welfare check let alone for the benefits that you were told you would receive if you served you go and serve you come home and not only are those benefits not available to you nothing is nothing is in it's place and to come home you're right to families and have the person who served b n that pain and agony and then the families watch them the famil suffer the families do everything they can but would do families know about p t s d would do families know about treating people who've been in war would do families know about anything that has to do with what the person has experience absolutely nothing at all nothing has prepared effort for such an experience so i really appreciate how you're making a plea to the public and especially the persons who served were down to the last of our show it went so fast but i just want to piggyback on the please please please get yourself some hell you you've earned you've earned the benefits that you should be accessing right now and you and your family deserve it you deserve it i were ever i go i when i see any kind of military people i say thank you for being of service i know i can go and apply for a passport blah anywhere in this country if i want to work out a time so don thank you so much for coming and i hoped we could could say some more but call and you got his number email him you provided your information you know what call him and see if he can guide you through some student projects or just answer questions you have about filmmaking it's a great it's a great service so thank you for tuning in we will see you next time down we'll have you back we'll do all my plans to take great care remember i'm praying for you i am praying for you are praying for you please pray for me and i will see you next time