in reading your bio it really knocked my socks off and it's really good to welcome to the program and in new york one city and swack i'm very much conversations a great part pleasure to welcome to the program our guest up howard weinberg and howar veteran television producer and filmmaker he's a documentary filmmaker and a television journalist in a very deep sense to hear the story from him but he was involved with the dick cavett show and getting robert macneil going a whole lot of other names that are legend and in the industry and howard welcome so very much conversation thank you harold my great good pleasure young man could you share with me your background born and raised well i got to tell you when i started in television i tried to do a good friend of mine son is very high up on the daily show oh really and i said i think they're doing some of the most important journalism now couldn't because they have this ability to search and say look what you said last year look what you said five years ago but what you're saying now it's really different was so that kind of ability is fantastic and i admire them also a funny story in terms of where we get our news i used to produce these dupont  forms for the dupont columbia warts and we would have i did four of them and one of my theories was that we were getting our news from television yeah and from the talk shows from comedy yeah and so we had a panel th cavett was on and some others and ted koppel moderated it and we had a prior panel that was on campaign finance ok so the fellow from the pew charitable trust who was on that panel right andrew know they did listen to the panel that we did on comedy and he said he took a poll afterwards and he proved i thesis and really a few months later in the cover front page in the york times was most americans are getting their news from stand it was a small city yeah i mean when i went to school there was actually wilderness behind the school there was a but we were it was edge of a city i were in for my uncle that he could walk downtown and did on occasion but anyway i i went to dartmouth ok and when i was in college documentary was on television everywhere and why was documentary on because of the quiz show scandals so everybody was trying to look good  i would do that i tried to get a job then i decided well well i did you study television in no i mean i want you to get a degree and i went to dartmouth and my degree was in government and government right ok i was editor of the newspaper also there was a journalism yeah school ok you went to harvard law i mean you know i did last after last stand for three months and i started a film society i wrote a column for the stanford daily and i said what my doing and i don't really want to be a law school so i transferred to broadcasting in film we had to add a lawyer no and then i realized that was oriented i've got to meet pauline kael while it was fascinating program but it wasn't oriented toward television documentary or journalism towards speech so i by chance scandinavian student travel tour right and because i ran into somebody who was going and i was in copenhagen they said if you stay for ten days you get a visa you can go and yeah that was a summer my junior years and then i went back or would that have i can understand where people get angstrom in or upset or some but i can understand i'm going to get bored because there's so much going on at all levels of everything and it's like walking around in a movie and it's so exciting and everything just life and  we understand just like playing a piano or something but but they're coming in there pretending that their dog or cat was just run over by a steamroller and their cat and dog was not rolled over by a screamer or and so they're like in a certain sense learning how to conjure or one minute he was a loaded word lie and in terms of what they're going to draw upon it's like getting over it well not but if the person is cat and dog verit actually was run over by the steamroller then the emotions all but the assumption that everybody interested in documentary wants to eventually make a feature some do and that's fine they don't i mean because they believe as you do that reality is more interesting also you know there's sometimes you miss things  bad actor so i don't want to ask them to i want to say what was the emotion that i missed what was the and then let's be on the lookout for something equivalent so i can capture that and that's that's what you want to do is i think is a documentary whole the whole television world and let's share a couple because i see on your bio are just eye popping really interesting you were for instance among other things the producer our executive producer vic cabot effort the well that have i had think credible big i'm i mean that was a great experience because i got to meet a couple of my heroes yeah i mean i got to meet and he mantle for example and you know when i was a kid my we came to new york and i'm going to go to the bronx and see him play a out at st base from center field and he said yeah i did that more than once i loved doing that yeah said he said i would kind of like pretend i didn't quite catch it early before i was muffling the ball and just when i got him and they were on their way to  he had such good people on it was such a major show and you helped put that one together although i don't want to get ahead no i wouldn't say that i did it because you know honestly kevin had his own production company ok and my job was to be the executive producer for channel thirteen ok at that time we had something in public television called the station program cooperative and you had to pitch programs to them and you had to sell it to them basically the group of stations had to say we want this next year also the value for example it would be like two chairs like this and i said we need a beginning and i wanted him to come out and tell a joke well he didn't want to tell jokes but he agreed to come out from the wings and opened and we enlarge the set and we figured out a then you and you've been involved in that for so long it must have been really satisfying to be in touch with them cavett was very clever he was also was that scripted or how much was it scripted or how did they put it together in terms of the on camera people he was spontaneous he would fly as you would he would bring up what he was interested in you know i never know what i'm going to say when i was i'm out well until because it just grows like copyright larry and real life and i think that's what you get i mean now i will tell you this the side bar macneil lehrer what i want to tell you about either he was there that was a program that really was scripted in the beginning it was extraordinary to work with robin and jim because they devote all their time to it and we tried to think well if we ask this question where will the person go will he slip out and we and i developed the idea of having a live television show unfold as a documentary would so you would have an anecdotal lead for example or a magazine article which also it will go up and now this was revolutionary for television when i wouldn't introduce every guest in the beginning because i figured if it would be like at a party where you meet or you can't remember who was who you may remember one or two right right so i said let's introduce people as they have a function in the story so sometimes somebody would come on they were the metaphor they trigger the event and then you'd was a real gentleman or it is a real yes yeah right right and he was the consummate television journalist you know it was merle well i know but i mean you know i know in our time you know because he really could do the full range of yeah he could anchor he could do documentaries he worked at the b b c and did documentaries in a couple of weeks he was a wonderful you think to people that are in front of the camera other news like dan rather or whoever and we had a whole go cronkite towering figure and th they're all very very gifted people who have a wide understanding of the human condition are what we call intellectuals or do they are they people who can just keep to the script or what is your idea about well all of that are fluke yeah i had harry reasoner for about a week and i saw him get into the story get smarter and smarter in how he asked questions and how he understood what was happening and he hadn't done the prep preparation work he'd read can't but i have to work in a different way he said the only solution to overcoming money in politics is to change the law every three years and before the lawyers can catch up with that and figure out ways around it and i that must be an issue then a big issue now what we did show was philip stern who would go around and embarrass congressman in their local districts for taking money from industries on whose committees they were supposed to be trying to make that point yeah it's like it shouldn't have to be made i think it's being made increasing and it's only growing i think the influence of money in it though so there's a couple problems you were addressing that you have not yet been addressed your sense of the human cost i think you know maybe and you know you would have thought we would have learned you know all the evidence was there we did learn in small ways and yes there's more energy efficiency but not in a big way not in really making a difference in society no we see that big difference to me is like is so when they only like galileo off the hook about the catholic church well years ago for in saying that we were not the center of the universe and iran was by schmidt all those paintings because it was such a traumatic blow to the human identity that proposition that it held for so long and were in a pit period now of transfer my own personal we're in a period of shift that we're going through now so we still have a lot of the problems we've been addressing singularly but is an overall comprehensive change that might be in the offing now i did a program if i may share with you with who's a generations this is the single most impressive and important generation i think it was thinking seventy five years or something seventy five to two thousand and fifty ever in the evolution of humanity because we're at such a transition point in terms of coming to in a certain sense the end of one if era and the beginning of another and i think that's true that we live in a time of quote it's not a little change it's not a quantitative change the industrial revolution no no no no the investor is just far too tiny it's a tiny little part of you know what it is that we're going through a thing that affects every institution every notion of human nature everything like now we get to the end of it and one of the existential signals of that is that a program with robert j lifton we're just the other day back some time ago but no question he said that we finally got to the point with our cleverness of extending consciousness and technology and tools that the weapons systems that have always led the research for the geo political advantage are one tribe over another they finally got to the point where if they were to be in the potentiality that exists not an inflection  quantitative change and then there's a quickening and then there's what they call punctuated equilibrium in the new appears the way new species appear and so we're at a time of qualitative maybe coming to the end of the human experience coming to the end of our experience or relating in a different way at another comprehensive level that encompasses everything so it's a bit much to do but when you can destroy the species and we may have as some people said transcended material scarcity is an ontological reality which all our scourges james joyce that history is a nightmare from which i'm attempting to awaken it's been always in just it's always been a few people read everything and and we may be coming to a time of real like liberation i don't say millennial but coming to a time that has been in the future always and i just read it might be now i just read today that one of the founders of facebook chris hughes who then went to work for obama and did this phenomenal you know  would that that's true another thing i just did a program that aired last week do you are you aware of the thing called the leadership directory that's a very interesting thing at the journal thirteen volumes like telephone book right and it's got in depth the with the technology and a lot of it's technology and a lot of it is and i think that they're going to find new ways of getting out and doing things now ok yeah so i it's just a different thing that we experience i mean it's a sea change yeah and i really because of this program that trying to do right t v lab which it is this one let me i'm going to try and hold this up because they're gonna card and it's going to take them a while to come and i'll just hold your dog to it right well and come in tight if you can with the robotic tired of their yeah he asked me this is this is we designed this when i got into independent film week selected for the spotlight and documentary competition ok and it's sort of reminiscent of his installations that i was senior producer when i inside story with hiding card ok when i did this store the thing with mr them off right yeah i looked it up and who's who or whatever in there he had written about seven hundred dollars books where he would write a book on every subject under the right under the sun like i would write a letter home to mother write you need written so instead of when i started the thing i said instead of saying what have you written on is there anything that you do not write and it was really funny because there was only one discipline that he did physics all  your job was to make a documentary and you got to do it in eight weeks or two months or whatever or three months or six months or whatever you got that dead you got the deadline you got the budget you make it when you make something independently it's not like that the whole it's can you raise the money can you get all the resources etc etc so there's nobody there to take care of the copyright issues you have to do it so but people say as for independent documentary and it was unobtrusive and it was intimate and so you could have a good encounter god person yeah yeah so my friends said to me two sisters one of his good friend the other was a neighbor and they said you know our dad is going to be ninety right you must have some of his commercials and i can find the feature films it was in its center and center right and so they said yeah so we put it together and quite by accident i was in the park at a concert and i ran into a woman i knew from one of my other organizations in new york film a video counselor and she says to me whatever happened that film you were doing about the old jewish to me and i said well you know it's almost finished i'm still trying to raise some more money she said listen show it to me so i showed her and she said to her road if you can finish this in six weeks i will give it to our festival committee wow and i did i just bit the bullet and cost me eleven thousand dollars out of pocket and i finished the damn thing yeah he said i don't know if it's in this clip but i related to him because whatever you do you have to find something that you relate to you know and so what i thought about well not only did i like stand up comedy but i liked the fact that he was a because your life experience or major both where we played almost every little theater from coast to coast i would say to the audience of these soldiers tell me where you're from and i'll tell you the hotel i stayed at the theater i r you know without the union saying your name your heart david locks that actually made the video art accessible to the public it would be comparable to putting  the paintings in the guggenheim on subway walls sixty four year old organization really i don't pay i got to get him aware of that and i'll tell you what this is an interesting story about how i happened to join it would van dyck who is headed up a little bit what is it what is the new york film a video  volunteer organization that does monthly programs wide variety of things on international issues or films that you wouldn't see otherwise on honoring masters of the craft like al  and they're being done in flash is damn near television it can be seeing on cell phones in anywhere in the world there's a rumor that the penguins in antarctica are watching the programs well i hope they all i hope they are we finally got the tuxedo the st time they showed that the people the french said too many penguins died so they said we can't have that we have here to reality a little bit well a great thing and it looks like we've gone