[Ecommerce] Cash rescues Eyes on the Prize

[Manon Ress]

Cash Rescues Eyes on the Prize
By Katie Dean
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,68664,00.html?
tw=wn_story_top5

02:00 AM Aug. 30, 2005 PT

With a new infusion of money, the landmark documentary Eyes on the
Prize is one step closer to educating a new generation of students.

The 14-part series, which chronicles the history of the civil rights
movement in America, has been blocked from television rebroadcast and
DVD release by a thicket of copyright restrictions on the hundreds of
photos, music tracks and video clips used in its making.

But thanks to a $600,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and a
philanthropist's $250,000 donation, the process of re-licensing that
material has begun.

"We're up and running and we're going to move forward with rights
clearances and any production work we need to do to prepare the
programs for public television broadcast and distribution in the
education market," said Sandy Forman, a lawyer for Blackside, the
production company that created the Eyes series.

The series is considered the most important film account of the civil
rights movement and is a staple in history classrooms around the
country. The six-part Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years/
Bridge to Freedom 1965 first aired on PBS in 1987. Eyes I, as it's
called, detailed the movement's early years, including the 1955
Montgomery bus boycott and the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin
Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. The eight-part
Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads chronicled
what came later, including the rise of the Black Panther Party and
affirmative action. It was broadcast in 1990.

When filmmaker Henry Hampton first created the series, the owners of
still photos, video footage and music granted permission to use the
material for various lengths of time. Many of those rights have since
expired, and it is more costly now to re-clear them.

The task of reacquiring those rights has fallen on Forman and a team
of film industry veterans who worked on the Eyes series. They have a
formidable job ahead: Blackside used video footage from 82 archives,
and approximately 275 still photographs from about 93 archives,
according to Forman. About 120 song titles were used as well.

Veterans of the civil rights movement and copyright activists were
outraged to learn of the Eyes situation following a Wired News report
last year. The situation also caught the attention of Henry Louis
Gates Jr., chairman of the African-American studies department at
Harvard University.

"I called my friend Richard Gilder and I told him about the situation
and he put up $250,000 on the spot," Gates said. "He did it purely
because he believes in the civil rights movement and African-American
history."

That donation, plus the $600,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, will
pay for the re-licensing costs and any post-production work needed.

It's the music played throughout the series that comes with some of
the heftiest price tags because commercial music has gotten so
expensive.

"When Eyes was done, it's wasn't the kind of cost that it is today,"
said Rena Kosersky, music supervisor of the re-licensing project, who
also worked on Eyes II. "There (are) some sticky situations. Rights
changed hands over the years."

The group hopes to license the music for a set fee from each publisher.

But even with the new financial support for the project, Kosersky
said she is anticipating that some of the music rights will not be
able to be cleared, and that they will have to replace some of it.

"We have to be prepared for that," she said.

If Eyes cannot get the rights to a particular song, it has to be
removed and replaced without "damaging the integrity of the
sequence," Kosersky said. "We're not talking about digital formats,
we're talking about actual reels of material. It's difficult and very
time-consuming."

Forman said that the PBS series American Experience, out of WGBH in
Boston, is interested in rebroadcasting Eyes on the Prize, though no
final plans have been made yet.

"We're extremely interested and we're in discussions," said Daphne
Noyes, a spokeswoman for American Experience. "We'd be honored to be
the presenting station."

"We couldn't ask for a better place on the television schedule,"
Forman said.

Forman said the group hopes to get Eyes on the Prize back on the air
by the fall of 2006. She's optimistic that the DVDs, for educational
distribution, may be ready by next summer.

"You can only understand the issues of today if you look back into
our history," Kosersky said. "This is why we have the Holocaust
Museum. This is why we have the Nuremberg trials. How else are we
going to learn?"





************************************************
Manon Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org
www.cptech.org

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