Mark Lieberman (l), Alan Light (r)

Inside Thirteen recently spoke with Live from the Artists Den’s Executive Producer, Mark Lieberman, and Director of Programming, Alan Light to discuss the fourth season of the popular music series. Joining the Artists Den’s lineup this season are artists Adele, The Fray, Death Cab for Cutie, Kid Rock, Iron and Wine, and Amos Lee. Here, Lieberman and Light discuss what planning a season of the show entails, and what makes Live from the Artists Den so unique.

Season four of Live from the Artists Den premieres Friday, February 3 at 10 p.m. on THIRTEEN.

Enter to win an Artists Den prize package, including Adele’s hit album, 21, and a Live from the Artists Den season three compilation DVD.

Inside Thirteen: What does planning a season for the show entail, in terms of selecting artists and venues?

Alan Light: There’s not a simple equation — it’s lining up a lot of different moving parts. Certainly where we start from is trying to find the artists who are active during that time who we think are the strongest live performers that are out there. We’re in the fortunate position of not really having to worry about one genre or one style; we can really just look for excellence from whichever musician we really love out there, and that’s where the conversation starts. Simultaneously, a search is going on and venue possibilities being amassed and gathered, and then comes an elaborate jigsaw puzzle of trying to schedule when they’re free, when they can be available, where they’re most interested to play, and what’s the most perfect spot that lines up with that. It can vary – sometimes there is a break in somebody’s schedule in a city and so we try to find the best spot that’s close by. Sometimes, as with Kid Rock playing Graceland, we were in conversation with Kid Rock and the Graceland opportunity presented itself, and his team said, “We’ve gotta do that, that’s the coolest thing ever. So, we will work our schedule around that to get ourselves to Memphis for the show.”

The challenges are, who’s out there working, what’s the right timing, when can we get to them, and then, where is the right place to put them and when is that place free? So, we spin the wheel until they line up.

Mark Lieberman: Really for us the goal is to try to create a once in a lifetime experience for television viewers and for that audience. We spend a lot of time trying to put the right artist and the right place together. When we do, we end up with something really magical that has the ability to be of interest for many, many years.

Season 4 Trailer from Artists Den on Vimeo.

IT: What makes Live from the Artists Den unique, especially to public television?

ML: I think it’s a couple of things. The first is that we’re re-imagining the stage for music, and what’s important to us about finding these locations is we believe that they inspire a rare and very creatively inspired performance that you won’t see that artist provide in a traditional venue setting.  The second is that we are able to honor some of the great historic landmarks of our country and tell a local story. So, in the Tucson Amos Lee episode, there’s a real strong tie between the artist and Tucson, where he made his last album, “Mission Bell.” A band from Arizona called Calexico performed on that album and ended up playing in our episode, and we were able to tell the story of the historic Fox Theatre and the redevelopment effort around culture in Tucson, all in an hour. We think that’s really interesting for public television viewers, who care about the arts and culture and music, that we’re able to do all those things in one. There’s even a taste of architecture and the history of some of these great buildings and iconic landmarks, whether it be the Brooklyn Museum and its rich history with Death Cab for Cutie, or the Angel Orensanz Center, which used to be an old synagogue and has been part of the cultural fabric of downtown New York for the last 30 years. There are so many interesting stories to be told — we believe we do a really nice job of telling them, and they’re contextualized with a wonderful performance of music.

IT: Are there any artists or genres that haven’t yet appeared on the show that you’d like to feature?

AL: Well, I think there are lots of directions to go. With the right hip hop artist, I’d love to feature them if we could find the right way to present that on our stage. We’ve had a couple of country and R&B singers, but I think there are still lots of opportunities to do new things in those communities. I don’t think that we look at it with any kind of limit on what we would do…it’s more a matter of if we think somebody makes sense in that setting, who really can play without hiding behind anything, even we when we get the big, arena-sized stars up there. Obviously, they’re in a room in front of 300 people, no pyrotechnics, no explosions – it’s about who we think can really work that stripped down and up close.

ML: We try to celebrate both the greats in music — the Robert Plants, the Elvis Costellos — and also provide an element of discovery where we’re introducing a public television viewer to an Amos Lee or an Iron and Wine. So that opens us up. We’re always able to have flexibility to just put what we think would be exciting from a television standpoint and from a music standpoint on the stage, being genre agnostic.

IT: What are you most excited about this coming season on Live from the Artists Den?

Grammy nominee Adele kicks off the fourth season of Live from the Artists Den from Santa Monica.

ML: Adele was an artist that we’ve been following for quite a while, from her album “Nineteen” back in 2009. When we had the opportunity to be a part of her week of release in the United States, we really had no idea what the year ahead was going to entail. I think what that episode presents of her and her music is a real innocence, and a real preview of things to come, and obviously honors the greatness of her music. We’re very excited about that episode.

AL: Adele very quickly became the absolute biggest star music has seen in recent years in the months that followed our shoot with her, so it’s an incredible thrill that we got to her just immediately before she really took over the world. And certainly shooting Kid Rock – no one has ever done a shoot inside of Graceland, with a performance inside Elvis’s home, and it took a lot of disparate pieces aligning to enable us to do that. For Kid Rock, he approached it as a highlight of his career and a real landmark appearance for him. So, the fact that we could enable something like that and take a multi-platinum artist and get them access to something that they couldn’t otherwise do, I think that’s always what’s most exciting for us. They have a lot of choices about the things that they could do – the shows that they could play, the stages they could appear on; we have the ability to do something that they can’t do, which is to get them into these really unique spaces and otherwise inaccessible spaces. So when we can do that on that kind of scale, that’s a new level of accomplishment for us.

ML: Overall, I think this season takes us to the most cities that we’ve ever been in a season. The majority of season four is outside of New York – whether it be Santa Monica, Tucson, Memphis, Atlanta – and what we’re seeing as we go into pre-production on these shows is a real excitement from the local arts community about the Artists Den coming to town. People know the show, they like the way we’re honoring their city, their connection to music, their connection to the arts, and they’re very proud of their own Artists Den that we jointly selected. Many times the selection process now comes with the Mayor’s Office and the film office and people locally who help us define what’s special in their city and what would be a great place to showcase music. We think that is a unique piece of this for public television, in that public television is about the local community and the arts community, and we involve public television in these shows, their guests are in the audience, and obviously they get to celebrate when the show comes on to television. We’re told that for most of the season four episodes, they’re actually doing premiere parties in the venues where we did the taping.

IT: What’s your favorite part and the most challenging part of your job?

ML: The favorite part is being able to make very big artists really excited and inspired in a unique way that no one has done for them before, and to translate that into making a local, national and a global audience excited about that artist’s music in a way that no other vehicle may provide. The fact that we’re able to deliver an hour-long performance of that artist really separates the show from what has become a world of clips. We think we can help create new fans. So that is the most important part I think of what we do at the Artists Den – it’s very creative, it’s dynamic – we’re constantly trying to push the envelope of what adventure we can come up with next. It’s no fun to plateau, so we’re just going to keep on hunting for more exciting, more creative venues that inspire even better performances. All of that is also all the challenges we have in front of us. We set the bar high, and the artists that we’re now working with are looking back at past seasons and saying, “I want something even more interesting. I want something even more special than what you’ve done.” The creative challenge that presents makes our jobs very hard, because we can’t just show up with a good idea, it just isn’t going to cut it.

AL: I think the most rewarding and the most challenging are pretty much the same thing – continuing to find ways to spin that wheel and to line up artists and locations and timing, and to get bigger and better artists, better and cooler and more unique spaces, and produce more frequently. Any one of those you could compromise to make it easier, but we’re still at a place where we want to keep making each of them more interesting and more exciting. So, that’s the greatest reward, but also the most difficult task.

For more information and Web extras, visit the Artists Den site for behind-the-scenes photos of each show, check them out on Facebook for “Inside the Den” videos about the venues featured each week, and watch previews of all the episodes on Hulu.

On December 15, PBS and WNET hosted a Downton Abbey: Season Two screening and cast panel at the Times Center in New York City. Cast members Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Michelle Dockery, Dan Stevens, and Joanne Froggatt were all in attendance, along with co-creator Gareth Neame and Masterpiece Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton, who moderated the discussion.

Check out photos from the event:

Season Two of Downton Abbey airs Sundays January 8 – February 19 at 9 p.m. on THIRTEEN. This season, get caught up with episode recaps on The Downton Dish, and learn more about the series with videos clips and extras.

Watch the full panel discussion here:

When Downton Abbey returns this Sunday, viewers can expect major changes as World War I makes its presence felt throughout the household and the lives and conventions of Downton’s residents are turned upside down.

Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, and Elizabeth McGovern are back with an all-star cast for the second season of Julian Fellowes’ Emmy Award winning drama.

Matthew Crawley and Lady Mary (Courtesy of (c) Carnival Film & Television Limited 2011 for MASTERPIECE)

Learn more about the series with video clips and extras, along with our brand new blog, Downton Dish, featuring episode recaps.

Season two of Downton Abbey airs Sundays January 8 through February 19 at 9 p.m. on THIRTEEN. Full episodes will also be available to watch online the Monday after broadcast, and available through March 6.

Neal Shapiro, President and CEO of WNET, recently sat down with Downton Abbey star Elizabeth McGovern (Lady Cora) to discuss season two, similarities to her character, her career in the theater, and much more:

Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton are co-founders of Gravitas Docufilms in California, and the producers of These Amazing Shadows, which premieres on THIRTEEN on January 1, 2012 at midnight. Their film is a departure for both men, who have worked together on mitigation videos in death penalty cases, and usually work on other tough human rights projects. But a passion for cinema and an innate curiosity led them to this project — a love letter to celluloid, and a call to action to preserve America’s film heritage.

Interview courtesy of Independent Lens. For more interviews and other Independent Lens film content, visit their blog.

What impact do you hope this film will have?
We want viewers to remember why they love the movies. We hope that our film will remind people how important movies are to our individual memories and our cultural heritage, and why we need to preserve them.

Aside from an obvious love of cinema, what led you to make These Amazing Shadows?
Becoming aware of the existence of the National Film Registry (its scope and purpose) and becoming aware of the shocking loss of American film.

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The wait is over! Well, almost. With Season Two of Downton Abbey less than forty days away, get a closer look at the premiere with THIRTEEN.

Check out our Facebook page for Season Two photos, polls, and more.

If you want to catch up on Season One, THIRTEEN is re-airing Downton Abbey at the following times:

• Parts 1 & 2 air Sunday, December 11 at 8 p.m. & 9 p.m.

• Parts 3 & 4 air Sunday, December 18 at 8 p.m. & 9:45 p.m.

• On New Years Day, a full Season One marathon, starting at 3 p.m.

Visit Shop Thirteen to purchase the complete first season of Downton Abbey for $25 (Thirteen Members get 15% off).

The series returns on January 8, 2012, but in the meantime, check out a preview and go behind-the scenes with the cast and creator, Julian Fellowes:

Season Two preview:

Downton Abbey cast interview:

Interview with Downton Abbey Creator Julian Fellowes:

Filmmaker Anne Makepeace took some time out to answer a few questions about her film We Still Live Here — Âs Nutayuneân, which premieres on THIRTEEN on November 20 at 11 p.m. In tandem with this film, Makepeace collaborated with Cultural Survival to create Our Mother Tongues, an interactive website highlighting efforts to revitalize native languages across North America.

Here, Makepeace discusses her inspiration for the film, and what didn’t make the final cut.

Interview courtesy of Independent Lens. For more interviews and other Independent Lens film content, visit their blog.

What impact do you hope this film will have?

I hope that the film will serve as both a cautionary tale and an inspiring model for Native communities whose languages are endangered. Language revitalization programs are springing up on reservations and among urban Native American communities across the country, but reviving a language is a hugely difficult and slow process. The film is already being used in this way to wonderful effect. Also, as I travel around to film festivals, I am finding that the film has an equally important impact on non-native communities. Few people are aware that the native people of New England who ensured the survival of the Pilgrims even exist, much less that they are having a cultural revival. Seeing the film has made them see our early history in a brand new way.

What led you to make this film?

I was transfixed by the unprecedented and astonishing story of the Wampanoag Indians of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard bringing back their language. No one had spoken the language in a century, at least not in any fluent way. They were literally bringing it back from the dead, though they would say that the language was only sleeping. I found Jessie Little Doe — whose visions moved her to lead her fellow Wampanoags in reclaiming their language — enormously compelling, entertaining, moving, funny, and inspiring, and her daughter Mae, the first Native speaker of Wampanoag in a century, added another level of the story that made it impossible for me to resist.

What were some of the challenges you faced in making We Still Live Here?

Making a film about the resurrection of a language is an enormous challenge. How do you make learning a language, or language itself, visually exciting? It’s nearly impossible. Fortunately two things enabled me to do this: the talents of my fabulous animator Ruth Lingford, who made language come alive in a new way, and the existence of absolutely beautiful 17th and 18th century documents handwritten in Wampanoag by the ancestors of the people in my film. And of course the beautiful and compelling people who are bringing back the language.

What would you have liked to include in the film that didn’t make the cut?

I would have liked to have included a scene in which a Wampanoag extended family are looking over their genealogy, which extends back to 1612 when their ancestor was the sachem of Nantucket. The family includes members of every color, from black to white, but all identify as Wampanoag. To me this scene embodies the native values of acceptance, of inclusiveness, and of family, but since I couldn’t make it relate directly to language loss or revival, it didn’t quite work in the cut. I’m glad to say that I did use this scene as the centerpiece for the video extra, Are You an Indian?

Tell us about a scene in the film that especially moved or resonated with you.

I am always moved by the scene in which Jessie discovers that her advisor at MIT will be the linguist she insulted a few years before at a meeting in Aquinnah. She knows she screwed up and is ready to apologize, but Ken Hale apologies first and becomes her beloved mentor. Then later in the film when Jessie is speaking Wampanoag at his memorial service after his untimely death, and says it’s because of him that she is speaking her ancestral tongue, I always tear up.

Photo by Brian Hamill, courtesy of MGM

In American Masters’ upcoming documentary on Woody Allen, the film legend allows his life and creative process to be documented on-camera for the first time. The two-part film follows Allen’s career,  spanning over 40 years, and tracks his story from his childhood and first professional gigs as a teen to his most recent box office hit, Midnight in Paris.

Check out Woody Allen’s “My New York” feature on MetroFocus.

Join THIRTEEN for a look at some of the most memorable New York moments in Allen’s films.

American Masters — Woody Allen: A Documentary airs Sunday, November 20 and Monday, November 21 at 9 p.m. on THIRTEEN.

Get a closer look at the film with these excerpts:

When Woody Met Diane: See what happened when Woody Allen first met Diane Keaton and learn what they both first thought of each other.

Woody Allen at Taminent: Woody Allen describes how he began writing comedy sketches at the Tamiment, a Poconos resort.

Woody’s Improv – The Punatorium: Dick Cavett recalls Woody Allen’s legendary improvisation skills.

Jonathan Silvers (Saybrook Productions)

Inside Thirteen recently spoke with Jonathan Silvers, the filmmaker behind Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals. The film investigates the global search for the 20th Century’s greatest criminals — fugitive Nazis — and the determined individuals who sought to bring them to justice.

Here, Silvers discusses his inspiration for the film and the motives of the so-called Nazi hunters featured in the documentary.

Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals airs Tuesday, November 15 at 9 p.m. on THIRTEEN.

Inside Thirteen: What inspired you to make this film?

Jonathan Silvers: Back in the late 80s and throughout the 90s, I covered a succession of wars, atrocities, and genocides.  Anyone who observes conflict is obviously going to be sympathetic toward the victims and survivors.  But I also became increasingly curious about the perpetrators, their psyche, their methods, and their objectives.  In the aftermath of these conflicts, the majority of perpetrators not only went unpunished; they were absorbed back into the societies they had devastated.  I saw this time and again — in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Kosovo, Congo.  In most cases, the number of those brought to justice was a fraction of those who participated in unspeakable crimes.

In 1997, I was working for ABC in New York when I got a call from a friend who’d been my fixer during the Balkan wars.  He was then based in Vienna and had heard a rumor that a basement vault of a psychiatric hospital contained human remains dating back to World War II.  On the strength of this tip, I flew over with a cameraman to Vienna and we broke into the basement vault.  Inside we found several hundred human brains.  They were the brains of disabled or handicapped children who’d been murdered during World War Two as part of the Nazi euthanasia program.  These brains had been used for research during the intervening 50 years by the hospital director, Heinrich Gross, who during the War had been a Nazi doctor and had ordered these children murdered.  After we breached his vault, Dr. Gross disappeared, and we spent a week trying to track him down.  We’d been staking out his daughter’s house and just as we were about to give up, he appeared.  We ran out of our vehicle with our cameras rolling, and Dr. Gross stood there, shaking in his boots, speaking to us on camera for a half hour.  Our story aired on Nightline and BBC, and we exposed this great, unknown atrocity and this criminal who had been living not only freely, but had risen to the very highest levels of the medical profession in his native Austria.  The exposé forced the Austrian prosecutors’ hands.  The international outcry led to the first Nazi-era trial in 30 odd years in Austria.

So these experiences – the war reporting and exposing the Nazi doctor – started me thinking about the legions who’d participated in the Holocaust but had gone unpunished. And I started researching the post-war lives of the worst of the Nazi perpetrators, which was a revelation, because the vast majority of them went on to lead normal, prosperous lives.   And then it struck me that the only people who tried to hold accountable these enemies of humanity were the so-called Nazi hunters, the individual men and women who believed that enemies of humanity must be punished – if humanity itself is to survive.   In the aftermath of no other war that I can recall do you have individuals relentlessly, obsessively pursuing justice on a mass scale.

I officially launched this film in 2008 because I recognized an urgency: the generation of Nazi perpetrators was dying off.  So was the generation of Nazi hunters, and I thought that the lessons they offered were appropriate for the 21st Century, in which we unfortunately still have these kinds of atrocities, maybe not to the same scale but with similar intent.

IT: What do you think was the primary motivator for the men and women who tracked down the Nazi fugitives — a personal connection, or something larger than that, a desire for justice?

JS: So many different motives. I think all of them had a personal connection. In many cases, the connection was the loss of family, or they had experienced the Nazi atrocities themselves.   The motives are as varied as the hunters.  Most of them cling to higher principles, and to the law, which says that murder, mass murder, must be punished.  How often, in post-war environments, do you hear people talk about that? Almost never.  A few that I met were motivated by vengeance.  They were so affected by what they had lived through or had lost that vengeance was a simple and obsessive motive.  A couple didn’t even attempt to sugarcoat, they just said explicitly that it was about vengeance.

As a journalist, I have to be objective, but as a human being, I think vengeance can have very dangerous consequences.  The film opens with a segment on Jewish avengers, who lost their families and survived and decided that they were going to take it upon themselves to revenge themselves not on the Nazis, the troops who pulled the trigger, but on the German people as a whole. It’s a horrible thing to consider, especially as not all the Germans were guilty.  But to these avengers, there was no doubt that the Germans were guilty, because it was the German nation that had committed this crime.  I deliberately start with them because that was the rawest expression of justice, but I also like the ambiguity – what is justice? What do we mean by justice, and how can we ever have justice for crimes on such a scale?

IT: In the film, journalist Peter Finkelgruen says, “Politics and society didn’t want these trials, and when they could avoid it, they did avoid it.” Why was this the case?

JS: It comes down to this: no nation wants to prosecute its own people for crimes against humanity, especially when those crimes were state policy.  What child would prosecute his own parents?  If you look at the broader issue, tracking down and prosecuting war criminals is enormously expensive, time consuming, and exhausting.  Who has the money and the strength to do this?  I’ve never seen it done with any measure of success, whatever that may be.  So when Peter says politics didn’t want these trials, he’s absolutely right. Nobody wants to look in the mirror if the reflection is ugly.  And much as I believe in higher principles and punishing war criminals, in this era of economic uncertainty the question arises: can we countenance spending limited resources on prosecuting octogenarians?  Maybe if I’d survived the Holocaust I would say absolutely, go after them until their last breath.  But, pragmatically, as a nation, do we want to take on that enormous effort?  It’s a very confusing question.

IT: What was the experience like confronting Dr. Heinrich Gross, who murdered children at the Spiegelgrund clinic?

JS: It was amazing, because we had a sense when we were talking to him that he knew the jig was up – and that he’d been fearing this moment for fifty years.  Incidentally, I start the film with a similar scene of exposure, filmed in the early 1970s by a cameraman name Harry Dreifuss.  He’d been working with Serge and Beate Klarsfeld to expose Nazi criminals living openly in West Germany, and he found a guy name Kurt Lischka.  Lischka had been an SS Colonel and Gestapo chief during the war, and had sent tens of thousands of Jews to the concentration camps.  In the 1970s, when Dreifuss found him, he was a successful businessman and judge in his hometown of Cologne.  But the frame of him walking along a rain swept street when he suddenly realizes he’s being filmed is momentous.  There he is, in black and white, raising his briefcase to conceal his face and fleeing.   It’s obvious that he feared this moment, feared exposure, every day and that his worst fears were about to come true.

IT: Was there anything you were surprised to learn while making Elusive Justice?

Personnel records of fugitive Nazi criminals. (Photo courtesy of Jonathan Silvers/Saybrook Productions)

JS: I think the psychology of the Nazi hunters and their single-minded pursuit and determination – to do this for decades and decades and decades…in one sense it’s amazing and honorable, and in another, it’s an indication of how damaged they were that they wouldn’t let go of this. But, if their psychological damage led to the prosecution of mass murderers, who’s to say they were wrong? What’s also interesting is that you don’t see a lot of people who do this who weren’t directly affected, but occasionally you do. At the U.S. Justice Department, you have Eli Rosenbaum, who is probably the most determined investigator out there now, in an official capacity, and what he’s up against – he says, “we’re racing against the grim reaper,” but he’s also racing against political apathy around the world.

Over the decades the intent or methods of the Nazi hunters got larded in myth.  Most people, when hear the words Nazi hunter, envision guys in trench coats walking down dark alleys looking for sinister characters. And they think probably of Simon Wiesenthal and a couple of iconic cases. I don’t think they understood what individual investigators and prosecutors actually did.   So, in a sense I wanted to clarify or debunk the myth, and introduce viewers to people they might not have heard of, to bring them closer to the truth.

IT: What message do you hope viewers will take from the film?

JS: I don’t want to be too strident, but I think the line that concludes the film’s introduction is key: enemies of humanity must be pursued if humanity is to survive. I really believe that. You can’t have a functioning society with killers at large.

Bill T. Jones (Photo courtesy of Keith Walker)

In Bill T. Jones: A Good Man, American Masters explores the creative journey of acclaimed choreographer Bill T. Jones. The film follows Jones as he embarks on the most ambitious work of his career and leads the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in the creation of Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray, an original dance-theater piece in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial commissioned by Ravinia Festival.

Bill T. Jones: A Good Man premieres Friday, November 11 at 9 p.m. on THIRTEEN. Go behind-the-scenes of the documentary with these video interviews and scenes that didn’t make the film:

Interview with Bill T. Jones: Bill T. Jones discusses his creative process, the origins of the documentary Bill T. Jones: A Good Man, and how President Abraham Lincoln and related subject matter has inspired his work for Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray.

Filmmaker interview: Co-directors Bob Hercules and Gordon Quinn discuss making the documentary.

The Cutting Room Floor: In this mini documentary, originally produced for ITVS, see how the directors chose which scenes and storylines to cut from the final edit of the film and see footage from one of the cuts that was made.

Judd Ehrlich

In Run for Your Life, filmmaker Judd Ehrlich chronicles the life of Fred Lebow, the ambitious founder of the New York City Marathon.

In 1976, Lebow united the struggling city by bringing the race to all five boroughs.  He continued to defy the odds by running the marathon for the first time three years after being diagnosed with brain cancer. Run for Your Life tells Lebow’s unique tale with archival footage and interviews with prominent New York figures like Mayor Ed Koch, as well as Lebow’s own family.

Inside Thirteen recently had the chance to sit down with Mr. Ehrlich to discuss his inspiration for the film and the impact of the race on New York City.  Run for Your Life airs Saturday, November 5 at 1 p.m. and Sunday, November 6 at 7:30 a.m. and 12 a.m. on THIRTEEN.
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