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Real(ly) Good Stories

Published on November 22, 2010

By Sarah Sherman

It’s not a typo. No graphic designers have been fired. “Film” is intentionally missing from DOC NYC’s subtitle, “New York’s Documentary Festival.”

Of course, film is featured prominently in the form of interviews with big guns Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, spotlights on classics and warm welcomes for new pieces. But other “styles of storytelling” were also represented, including cartoon, photography and radio. One event, hosted by Dean Olsher of The Next Big Thing (WNYC, New York Public Radio) entitled, The Medium Formerly Known as Radio: The Evocative Power of Sound, explored the world of radio documentary, touching on production, inspiration, the act of listening and how radio documentary, sometimes so close in structure and concept to much of film documentary, achieves such a singular texture and strength.

There is something uniquely intimate about radio and radio storytelling. Perhaps this is a result of the speaker’s necessary proximity to the microphone, the soft, breathy static, and the quiet stick of saliva—like the squeak of shifting fingers on vinyl guitar strings. The musical incidentals of voice are right there, no matter how far you are from the speakers, and this amplified closeness is powerful in its contradiction. Listening in a group is also “intimate,” Olsher said. In a group—and surely in the cavern of the NYU Kimmel Center Eisner Auditorium—the contradiction of closeness over speakers is made even more stark. It’s uncomfortable, different; there is no screen, no accompanying images to anchor us and make uniform our experiences of the story. In this case, there is just a man, a laptop, a music stand and a soundboard. He told us to close our eyes and “see pictures.”

Dean Olsher

Radio documentary is often comprised of the same elements of film documentary: stock footage (or audio), interview segments, narration and scene recording. For Olsher, films like Hoop Dreams and Lost Boys of Sudan, both hard-hitting classics, have been a great inspiration. One of the pieces Olsher played, Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair, which aired on Radio Diaries, felt particularly cinematic. Even the blurb introducing the piece sounds like the treatment for a screenplay:

“On the night of May 7th, 1951, close to a thousand people gathered around the courthouse in the small town of Laurel, Mississippi.

They had come to witness the execution of Willie McGee, a young black man convicted of raping a white woman.

The local radio station was there at the courthouse…broadcasting the event live.”

With a charming combination of satisfaction and ambivalence, producer Joe Richman told Olsher and the audience that the story could become a fiction film. Surely the subject matter is compelling for any medium, but there is no accident about the power of the radio approach.

With radio, you can’t see the story unfolding in front of you. In eliminating visuals, we eliminate the sense of sight in the perception of the story, making our sense of hearing stronger and more acute in its attention to detail, it seems. We also literally can’t see what’s coming. Both characteristics make for a uniquely powerful moment of reveal and poignancy.

Laura Rothenberg

In My So Called Lungs, one series from Radio Diaries, which “works with people to document their own lives for public radio” and creates documentaries for NPR’s All Things Considered, Laura Rothenberg, a 20-year-old girl with Cystic Fibrosis, chronicles her heartbreaking struggle with the disease. Her voice is overwhelmingly “authentic,” as Olsher put it. She is young, cheerful, and alarmingly mature in the way she conveys humor, fear, age and wisdom in just a few words. Listeners feel instantly close to her, not just because she seems so nearby—speaking into her hand-held recorder—but because we see her hospital as she experiences it and describes it to us. In one segment Laura is driving back from the hospital with her dad, describing the most recent series of treatments.

“This is Laura back again. Dad and I are on the Bruckner. We’re driving up to Providence. I agreed to let him drive. I just spent about four or five days in the hospital again for a partial bowel obstruction, so that was thrilling as ever. And luckily it was only a partial obstruction, so they were really excited about that. But of course at the moment I wasn’t as excited about it because I had a tube in my butt, and it’s a little bit hard to be excited when you have a tube in your butt. Wouldn’t you say dad? Why are you crying?”

As she feeds us details (the car, the Bruckner, the playful dynamic she has with her dad about driving) we begin to see them on the road. But in many ways it’s still just us and Laura, no sounds of traffic or her father chiming in. In the recording, after she turns to him looking for playful agreement—“Wouldn’t you say dad?”—there is just silence. And when she asks him why he is crying, the audience is socked in the stomach with a power that film would have been hard pressed to achieve. As listeners, we’ve been ambushed. Told—and shown—her father’s tears with Laura’s question, we are instantly even more with Laura. We are entirely part of her process of responding to reality and her surroundings, not the surroundings in and of themselves. Without visuals to help us anticipate a reaction, we hang on every word. Sometimes the quieter people make you “lean closer,” says Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. Here, it is the quieter moments.

“Radio is good at the truth between the lines,” Richman said at the event, “the emotional truth.” In Radio Diaries, producers focus on “teenagers, seniors, prison inmates and others whose voices are rarely heard. We help people share their stories—and their lives—in their own words, creating documentaries that are powerful, surprising, intimate and timeless.” With this format, Radio Diaries achieves an extremely personal tone, and gives the feeling that you are alone in the room with the speaker; it is the ultimate example of the intimacy of the medium.

The Next Big Thing, not exclusively documentary/non-fictional in content, is “about tickling that part of the mind that only radio can reach, using all the forms at which the medium excels: literary journalism, one-on-one interviews, interpretive essays, comedy, drama and music. It’s about personality, ideas, companionship, and speaking to the heart and soul through the eyes and ears of interesting, unusual people,” says Olsher. The Next Big Thing takes a different approach to the same closeness—and realness—that radio can achieve. “The Next Big Thing may actually resemble a city or town near you: listeners find it a fascinating place to visit, full of little-known street corners, compelling stories, lively music, and original comedy.” Regardless of the stated mission, structure or content of the most popular radio storytelling programs, some more “documentary” than others, there seems to be a common understanding of the closeness and intimacy of the medium. And somehow, with its lack of visuals, there is a sense that the experience of listening can feel more private and more yours.

Radio storytelling is having a resurgence. This resurgence has created a complex intersection between ever-advancing technology and our affection for the vintage and old school. Podcasts and mp3 players have made it possible for us to take radio with us whenever, wherever we want. In this way, the new modern radio story is reliant on developments in communications technology. But simultaneously, its popularity demonstrates a rejection of technology, and a preference for the simple and intimate—for a much older form of entertainment. No one is glued to their sofa chair, next to their wooden RCAs, waiting for Ira Glass’s voice to fill their living room. But often presented in a classic three-act format, This American Life (and other massively popular radio story programs) maintain the romance of a bygone era, and suggest that there is something inherently resonant about a voice and a real, good story.

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