In the Life: Interview with series producer John Catania

My name is John Catania and I indeed wore many hats at "In The Life." I began working with them as a volunteer and I worked in uh...uh... really my...in stage production, because my background was acting and directing in theater, so I came to "In The Life" and I started stage managing as part of their news magazine shows that they had. So they had like a...like a desk and correspondents and all that and they had...so we had a stage shoot and I was stage managing that a lot. At the same time I had two tracks it "In The Life" the entire time I was there and actually even after I left- which was a producing...there's a producing track and then there was a communications track. So, just when I was starting to stage manage for them and produce stories for them I also became their communications director. So, we all had to wear many hats at "In The Life." So, over the course of I guess the eight years that I was full-time there: I was a stage manager, segment producer, I wrote several episodes and I was a writer. I was also an editor. I edited my own stories. And then, I think, I was actually the producer of the show for two seasons...co-producer with Katherine Linton. And then on the communication side I was in charge of the national promotion effort to promote the show to all the gay press as well as all the mainstream press. So I was always on two tracks at "In The Life" and then I left "In The Life" full-time, I guess, around 2000 but I continued to produce stories for them. And then the final role we had with uh... with "In The Life" was they, they tapped us to be on a committee to find a home for all the vast archive of "In The Life," which is all the tapes and also the written materials, but uhm...and all of that, of course, landed at the UCLA Film and Television Archive and that was the last thing we did for them. Now what we're doing for them is we are speaking...we have some speaking engagements connected with "In The Life." We're here in Los Angeles, which is just a stopover really, because we're on our way to Hong Kong to show some "In The Life" stories to the audience there. Well, the way I found my way to "In The Life" was in 1993 I socially met Charles Ignacio, who became my life partner and now my husband, and uhm...just met socially and he had talked about this gay television series he was producing and I was shocked that there even was one. I was not a person that watched television at all at the time. I didn't own a television. I'd come to New York City to...to...to be in theater, to be an actor but after about two years here doing that... I just found out, you know, Bill Clinton was just selected in 1992, it just seemed like there was a lot of energy around LGBT issues and I just felt there was something...I, I felt like I wanted to do uhm...kind of, kind of... straight-on, play-on-words there, activism. I didn't really know how to get into that community. I come from the Midwest...Wisconsin. So I didn't have any of that context. So I thought, "Oh, well...this is a creative way possibly to, to try to make a difference." We were also...I was also rather angry because the airwaves were just absolutely full of... I don't think people can... I mean, certainly people old enough can remember but I think for young people it's hard to imagine the kind of things that were said about gay people and lesbian people on television at the time. It was...it was...it was unbelievable. The initial response to "In The Life" happened before I actually got there but of course I read a lot about it and uh...I believe...and uh... other people that were there can, can...uhm...confirm this but Bob Dole went on to the floor of the Senate and denounced the program before it really even aired and it was part of the whole attack- Public Television Wars- that went on, also went on for a long time that people forget. You know, Public Television was constantly under attack by the conservative right as being a waste of money and it should not exist So "In The Life" got swept up into all of that and so... but it turned out to be great publicity for "In the Life" actually. "In The Life" only began airing on 12 public television stations. The only, the only stations that...that felt they could air it and then eventually picked up to a few dozen and then, you know, there's...and it became in the hundreds of stations by the end of its history. But the initial response was, you know, this should not be on television. Uhm... the gay community was, was wanting it to be more representative of them. You know, the gay community is very diverse. So it was hard to figure out with our limited programming and at the time it was only a half an hour a month, I believe. I was producing these stories and then...starting to produce stories to be in "In The Life" and I became personally frustrated that people didn't seem to be watching and I also knew that we had to explain what kind of show this was to the public. We had to, we had to kind of tell them what we were doing as what we were attempting to do. So I worked through...getting the tapes out. Since then there was VHS and putting them in the mail, getting tapes out to all the major television critics around the country and when they started to review us, beginning with John O' Connor at the New York Times, John O' Connor at the New York Times was a very important television writer for "In The Life" because he saw that this kind of programming was important and he started to review us. He eventually wrote seven New York Times articles about "In The Life" which is a lot. Seven New York Times pieces. And then I was able to take his his reviews and I was able to call Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune or John Voorhees at the Washington Post and I was able to call these these writers and say, "You need to start writing about 'In The Life." And they would say, "Well, you're on so late at night. We don't generally...I generally can't review anything that's on after 10 o'clock. That's our editorial policy." And I would say, "Well, we can't be on before 10 o'clock. Yet, there's nothing like us on television. You really should do this." And they did. They came around and they would say, "Well...yeah I saw O'Connor wrote about you in the New York Times. So, I guess, let me take a look." So that was really important for us because then we were starting to get, you know, a stack of reviews and uhm... analysis by The Times, the LA Times, the New York Times. I mean, I'm sorry...the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post. And once we started to explain a little bit what we were trying to do then uhm... then we started to get some momentum and then we were able to start raising money, which was always a problem, and that was in the mid '90s and that's when we were able to start to roll with this concept of a news magazine program. The, the absolute biggest obstacle "In The Life" had in its early years, and actually through its two decades on the air, was trying to get public stations to broadcast "In The Life." I don't think...it's hard to understand exactly how it worked, how "In The Life" worked because what it is, is we would produce this program and we would give the program to APT, which is American Public Television. American Public Television was, along with WNET Channel 13 was...was...WNET was our presenter, American Public Television was our distributor and we would put it on satellite to give free-of-charge to any public station that would air us and even with that...and we would go and we would try to get into a new market and I was involved in this very heavily too, especially in about the middle period of "In The Life's" history, of trying to get us on more stations because I know the more stations we got on, in the more different regions of the country, the more legitimate we would become as far as a real place to have a conversation about lesbian and gay issues in America. And so the biggest resistance we had, an obstacle, was getting on to these stations. Now, it wasn't that they were hostile to us, they were just afraid. I mean these were generally family men and women who were wanting to preserve their jobs and they would know that this...only this gay TV show that you-we have to realize was being written about now in the New York Times, in the LA Times and all these major newspapers- all these public stations people knew about us. And I remember I would call the station sometime and the program director would be, "I've been, I've been expecting your call. I said I'm not too sure what they do with you. I don't know what to do with you." And we're talking in rural Kansas, where Fred Phelps was...home was, you know, we're talking...and, and that was the biggest obstacle. Because we had to: "A"- come up with a program that was well reviewed and legitimately quality enough to be on public television, that was balanced, that was...that was as unbiased as possible, you know, uhm...and...and then get them to air us. One of the most important...I mean, I remember Blue Ridge Public Television. I can't remember the gentleman's name but he was very, very frightened to put "In The Life" on. And I...I kind of tried to massage that relationship over a series of months and finally got him to air us. And I remember talking the night before, he said, "John, I haven't slept. I'm, I'm, I'm up at night in a cold sweat." He said, "I do not know what the reaction of putting this gay TV show on is going to do to 'In The Life.'" I mean, to...to him, his job, his [unintelligible]... and he's...and, and the next day he was just... he was like, "I'm getting nothing but good response. I've had a few people of course say, you know, everyone's going to hell and everything" but he was so pleased by that response and he also felt that he had done his job. So we had to...with the critics and with the station managers and the... all the programmers at all these hundreds of stations around the country, we had to convince them that...it was in...it was...it was...to do their job, they needed to do this and we had to make it a kind of a gentle approach, yet, forceful too. And if we got it, if we got enough problem from a station...we just kept resisting. I would go to the gay press. I would go to the mainstream press. I would have the show reviewed without even being on the air and the critics would say, "Why isn't this show on?" And I remember we had a big battle to get into New Orleans. So we had this constant... constantly trying to expand the reach of the show to places in the country that we knew needed it, needed this show. When we were producing "In The Life," especially in the early years, but really throughout its entire history, anyone involved at the show, I think, we were very aware that we were making history especially in that first decade. Uhm...I knew that because we were hearing that from mainstream writers in the newspapers. You know, they were aware that we were trying to do something important and different. I was always aware that all of these television cameras rolling that we had was going to be...eventually become very important to an archive and so that it's at the UCLA Film and Television Archive is, is a place where we always were aware was going to end up, not necessarily here, but we knew that that was important. And Charles Ignacio can talk more to this but he made a decision very early on that we saved every tape we ever recorded. Now, it's very unusual in television because it's very expensive. You have your, you have your beta tape at the time and they're not cheap, they're like 30 bucks apiece. And you go out and you tape a story and you record that entire story. You might do...maybe five or ten hours of interviews and then you might take those tapes... and every other television series basically on a budget is going to reuse that tape two or three times until...it's not, it's not...you're not confident in it anymore. And then you'll toss it or whatever. We saved every tape we ever shot and because we knew how important that was going to be eventually for... I shouldn't say, "I knew," because I wasn't there when that decision was made but when I came in I certainly understood and we had walls...walls full of tapes. We were reminded every day that we knew this was a historic project. We knew there was not one...there was never one like it before and we knew there would likely never be one again. What I enjoyed most about working at "In The Life" is, is very simple- I enjoyed going out and interviewing these people and hearing their stories and we always said at "In The Life"... You know, people would talk to us and say, "Wow...you got your name scrolling... on, on television every month, aren't you nervous about that? You guys are really brave." And we would get death threats. We would get, you know, we would...when we would, especially in the early years, you would air show and the fax machine would come in "we're gonna set your office on fire" and all this stuff but we were...that was nothing. I mean, the brave people were the people that were going on camera and everyone that went...and in our stories had to be out. That was a, that was a...a condition... I mean, if we were gonna tell their story obviously. These people were going on in the, in the... mid and early '90s and, and continuing on... telling very, very personal stories. And that is why we made a decision very early on in our producing that we are not going to sensationalize the stories. You know, we were just going to tell it as directly as possible. That was a privilege to be able to go out and get their stories and they were willing to go on television with all of that...with all the blow back they could get from that- and some did get from that from doing...from going on our program- that to me was the most rewarding thing. One of the great privileges, for me, was to be able to do stories on all these great Broadway shows. My first story ever for "In The Life" was about "Angels in America." I got to interview Tony Kushner. I mean, total hero of mine. My very first story was...was...was uhm..."Angels in America." Then I went on to do "Love! Valour! Compassion!" where I interviewed Terrence McNally and Joe Mantello and Nathan Lane and Stephen Spinella and all the amazing talent that was in that show. I did...uh... the "In The Life" story on "Rent." So I got to interview all of that original cast of "Rent." Another story that meant a lot to me actually and that is playing into this very trip that I'm on now, is I produced a story in 1998...the, as far as we know, the first American television story on the gay movement in Hong Kong and and among Chinese, you know, in China...in China. So I did a story about the gay movement in Hong Kong and China in 1998 and now we have been invited to show that story in Hong Kong this next week in 2014, October 2014 and we're inviting activists to see what has happened with, with the gay movement there since then. So that was also a very rewarding story for me to do and I'm so happy it's finally going to be shown there. I think that there's great potential for continued outreach with the "In The Life" material and that's why it's so great that it's found a home at the UCLA Film and Television Archive because... because people, producers, historians, documentarians need to find a way to access this and to... because it's very valuable material that will have...that will be important for many, many years. As far as personally my, my husband and I, Charles Ignacio who worked on the show for many years, we are starting to find and look for opportunities to present the material, to discuss it, to put it in...to, to put it in a time and place, to discuss what was going on then, to discuss what's happened since, to discuss what can happen in the future. And this material becomes very useful because this...this Hong Kong story just this...this Hong Kong...uh...trip and invitation and, by the way, we are being uh... the trip...we are being supported and invited by the US consulate of Hong Kong working with a gay group, a gay group called "Pink Alliance," so they, they see it as important for us to come and talk. See, where is the gay movement? What's happened in the last 15 or 16 years? And that is...it's always good to get a historical perspective while you're also looking at the current climate. So now historians and documentarians and archivists can go in and listen to those interviews and they will always be there as a historical record of what happened in these two amazing decades for LGBT rights. It will always be there to be mined, to be discovered. So, you know, we...we had a certain story to tell in our 5 or 10 minute story and we use the material for that purpose. Now there can be another purpose- which is to understand all of the history that happened in these two decades and it's an extraordinary time for the LGBT movement.