Inside NBC’s “Inside the Obama White House” — Part II
How They Did It
NBC News VP Mark Lukasiewicz briefs camera crews during a pre-production meeting in the Old Executive Office Building on Thursday, May 28.
Mark Lukasiewicz (a.k.a. “Luk”) was the Executive Producer behind one of NBC’s most revealing portraits: “Inside the Obama White House, Brian Williams Reports.” WHC Insider reported Luk’s production plan to create the most personal look yet at the White House and this President. Today, we go behind the scenes with Luk as he tells us how they got the “get of the year.”
Linda Rozett: How long did it take to get the administration to agree to appear under this sort of microscope? How did you convince them to cooperate?
Mark Lukasiewicz: We began that conversation very early with Robert Gibbs and other Obama advisers. The conversations got more serious in February, and then got even more serious after the White House Correspondents Dinner in May. NBC has done this kind of show with virtually every administration since Nixon; it’s a very long tradition. President Ford was the only exception, since he wasn’t in office long enough. It’s been our practice to approach each new administration to participate, because it’s an opportunity to introduce the nation to them and how they work.
After that, we had a number of meetings on the details: the number of people involved, equipment to be moved in, where we would have cameras, and work space. We had a space in the Old Executive Office Building. Finally it became a matter of finding a date that worked.
From the outset I had the strong impression it really was only a matter of when, not if. The White House understood the value of this project in terms of introducing this administration to the country, to their key players. I didn’t sense any hesitation on their part.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.Were there any restrictions on what you could shoot (rooms off limits, security, etc.)?
There were conversations with the Secret Service to make sure we weren’t doing anything inadvertently to compromise the President’s protection. And there were definitely areas we would have been happy to shoot, but were told no. Not the residence floors of the White House where the Obamas live. Not the Situation Room, for example, and limited opportunity to shoot in the areas occupied by the National Security people.
But the restrictions were really minimal in terms of where we could shoot; and almost all of them had to do with security.
How about the staff — any restrictions there?
No. But there were some logistical issues — making sure we could carve time out of the day to have access to the key players. Once we had agreement, we needed to make sure Brian Williams could stop in on certain people, that they’d have a free 15 to 20 minutes on their calendar.
How did you set this up? With crews following people around?
I produced our last “Inside the White House” special in 2002 with the Bush administration, and I learned than just how small the West Wing is. It’s pretty tight and pretty crowded; narrow hallways, small offices. Having camera crews on the move through that space all day long would be too difficult. So we set it up as a zone system: cameras and crews in different areas were responsible for shooting what went on that area. So, if Larry Summers moved, we didn’t have a crew chasing him. The crew in his office area saw him leave and the crew in the Oval Office picked him up arriving.
The only exception: a crew moved with Brian Williams everywhere he went. So any time Brian Williams arrived somewhere, I had two cameras on that area; the one with Brian and the one that was geographically assigned to that area.
In 2002, I had actually created a floor plan of the White House to map this out. That special was shot in the aftermath of 9/11 … and there was tremendous sensitivity about a floor plan showing the interior of the West Wing. I couldn’t get one from an official source, so I basically sketched a map of the West Wing floors to get where crews could be and what they’d be covering.
South Portico, L to R: Lighting Director JoAnne Fyanes, NBC News VP Mark Lukasiewicz, Director Jim Gaines, Technical Director Leonard Venezia – courtesy Antoine Sanfuentes
For the Obama program, we began setting up our workspace on Wednesday, May 27. We moved equipment in on Thursday the 28th. We had a production meeting for the crews Thursday afternoon in the Old Executive Office Building, and met with all the producers on Thursday evening. The call time, our arrival time, was 5:00 a.m. Friday, May 29, for everybody to be at the White House. We kept the Secret Service busy at the gates with all our crew arriving, but we got set up in enough time to get shots of the staff arriving and turning on the lights.
The last crews stopped shooting around 9:00 p.m. on Friday.
Where were you stationed, outside the Oval Office?
I was in our workspace in the Old Executive Office Building.
You spent whole day in OEOB?
No, I went over to the West Wing a couple of times, like when we interviewed the President, but basically I was mostly in the OEOB where I could be in contact with all the producers and crews and monitor what was going on. Whenever a tape was finished shooting, it was popped out and brought over to OEOB, to be tagged, identified and labeled. As they came back, I sampled the tapes, so we knew exactly what was there. Every few hours, a courier departed with the tapes to New York to be ingested into our Avid system and logged for the producers and editors to work with.
How many people, crews, cameras, were there at any one time?
In the West Wing, easily 35 to 40 people at one time. Every beta camera crew — there were 16 of them, with two-thirds located in the West Wing — included a camera, plus a sound engineer, a producer and an associate producer. Certain parts of the West Wing are notoriously dimly lit, so overnight on Thursday we were allowed to put up a minimal amount of lights, including in the Oval Office and the outer Oval.
NBC News VP Mark Lukasiewicz (second from right) huddles with producer Meaghan Rady, Senior Producer Subrata De and NBC News Washington Bureau Chief Mark Whitaker in NBC's workspace in the old EOB during the filming of "Inside the Obama White House" – courtesy Antoine Sanfuentes
How did you pull your team together?
It was definitely a handpicked team. We combined people from all over NBC, virtually every program unit and geographically from different parts of the country. I was looking for a mix of people who had experience doing it before, who had done the last “Inside the White House” project, as well as producers who were able to shoot their own video and who had different sensibilities. We had White House veterans, but also people who were new to the White House, who would be able to see everything with fresh eyes. . And we had a lot of producers from our long-form unit, Dateline, who were skilled storytellers and could help craft this special in the short amount of time we had to get it done.
One of the real challenges is you get all of this material on Friday and you have to put into a prime time project by Tuesday. Remember, we finished shooting at 9pm on Friday and it was on the air at 9pm on Tuesday, just four days later. To get it done, we basically took over the editing infrastructure of Dateline in New York. We had 12 edit rooms cranking off a single Avid server. It’s a complex process. Tapes were hand-carried by a series of couriers back to New York, where they were immediately pulled into digitizing and logging. There was a special coding and tagging system set up so that every frame of usable video would be logged and digitized, and available to all the producers and editors.
Any mishaps; cameras go down, lights fail?
No, we were very lucky. The rain gave us some issues; and at one point we had to shut down our outside crew because we were worried about the risk of electrocution
It was interesting to me that in the past, we’ve used radios and I had a set of two-way radios with every team again this time. But this time we didn’t use them very much; we ended up using essentially text messages. Every producer has a BlackBerry or a smart phone. We had a common, shared e-mail group address that anyone could use to broadcast to everyone else on the team. So anytime I needed to say something to all the crews I could broadcast a message to everyone. Early in the day, for example, I could see on the tapes coming back that some of the teams were getting into each others shots too much and I sent a message about being careful about that. Producers upstairs could alert crews downstairs that someone was coming down. It turned into literally hundreds of messages that kept everybody in tune with what was going on — or if the President’s schedule was slipping a bit.
It really worked. At the end of project, we assembled 14 single-spaced pages of those messages. The first one was at 6:48 a.m. and the last one was at 8:07 p.m. They provided an accurate time line of the day, and we used them to find certain events, and shots, that we wanted to use.
That’s a big job, managing such a large team and a big project.
I’m very lucky in that I often get the call from Steve Capus or Phil Griffin to help put together unique projects like this. Going back to our 9/11 coverage and the Iraq war, I’ve had the opportunity to assemble these teams of great producers and editors for short-term projects
And frankly, NBC News is uniquely capable of doing these big organization projects, because we have the horses, both in broadcast and cable and online. And it’s always a thrill to watch a team come together — often people who haven’t worked together and maybe even haven’t met before — and see them operate like a well-oiled machine, attacking a project like this one. We used people from across the organization and it came together in a great collaborative project. This team was truly extraordinary … and projects like this – intense collaborative team efforts – are exactly why I got into TV in the first place.
