Accolades
NEW YORK TIMES:
"everything you need to know about history."
NEW YORK TIMES:
"For anyone who believes that the documentary form is exhausted... this is a stunning counterexample."
WALL STREET JOURNAL:
"stunning... a narrative whose clarity and discipline are equal to the best contemporary documentaries"
LOS ANGELES TIMES:
"this one-hour documentary is a must... a first-rate telling of a story of enormous sacrifice and bravery"
EMMY AWARDS/NOMINATIONS
Big History
- 2014 EMMY AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING GRAPHIC DESIGN & ART DIRECTION
History of the World in Two Hours
- 2011 EMMY NOMINATION FOR OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVMENT IN CRAFT: GRAPHIC DESIGN & ART DIRECTION
A Distant Shore: African Americans Of D-Day
-2008 EMMY AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING HISTORICAL PROGRAMMING – LONG FORM
History Channel
Producer/Director: Douglas Cohen
Executive Producers: Dolores Gavin, Louis Tarantino
Producer: Samuel Dolan
Life After People
- 2008 EMMY NOMINATION FOR OUTSTANDING WRITING FOR NONFICTION PROGRAMMING
Life After People
- 2008 EMMY AWARD NOMINATION OUTSTANDING SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS FOR A MINISERIES, MOVIE OR SPECIAL
Life After People
- 2008 EMMY NOMINATION OUTSTANDING SOUND EDITING FOR NONFICTION PROGRAMMING
Shootout!
-2006 EMMY NOMINATION FOR OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN A CRAFT:
GRAPHIC AND ARTISTIC DESIGN
Wild West Tech
-2006 EMMY NOMINATION FOR OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN A CRAFT:
GRAPHIC AND ARTISTIC DESIGN
NEW YORK TIMES
By Neil Genzlinger
Published: October 5, 2011
It’s every high school student’s dream: Sit through one two-hour lesson and be done with history classes for life. It’s also, at some point in adulthood, every grown-up’s reality: “I sat through all those history lessons in school, but today what I remember from them would fill up about two hours.”
Dream and reality meet on Thursday night on History in “History of the World in Two Hours,” a spunky recap of what’s been going on since the Big Bang that really does, by the end, feel like everything you need to know about history. No analysis of troop movements in century-old battles here. No who cut off which wife’s head in what European monarchy. Just the very-big-picture stuff: creation of complex elements; continental drift; fire; human migration; industrialization. And — here’s the important part — how they all fit together.
“More than 12 billion years ago stars are already forming the elements that will spur the Iron Age,” the narration says about the young universe. The history here may be compact, but it doesn’t feel dumbed-down; this little program — first seen on Sunday on History’s sister channel, H2 — might also qualify as almost everything you need to know about physics, geology, paleontology and a few other subjects.
“Within a fraction of a second the Big Bang creates all the energy that will ever exist,” we’re told. Everything that has come after that formative explosion has been a variation on the theme of finding and using that energy, whether the entity doing the finding is a coal-mining company or a primitive plant. Bringing matter and energy together is what has spawned bursts of innovation, whether we’re talking about matter slamming together to form complex atoms or humans taking up residence near a water source and trading ideas.
The program gives attention to the usual suspects when talking about pivotal moments in history: ice ages, Christopher Columbus, the first steam-driven machine. But it also notes some game changers that might not immediately spring to mind: grasslands, for instance, which appeared seven million years ago and forced apes out of trees, with profound consequences.
“It’s a landscape better suited to primates that can walk on two legs, keeping their heads up above the tall grasses to watch for predators,” the narration notes. “Standing on two feet is a revolutionary advance because it frees up our hands — hands we will need to shape human history.”
That tidbit is heard over a picture of an ape hand that transforms into a human hand, then into a human hand holding a stone ax, a sword, a pistol. All because of grass. Might leave you with a new respect for your lawn as you’re giving it that last mowing of autumn.
NEW YORK TIMES
By Virginia Heffernan
Published: February 24, 2007
With his garrison cap, steady gaze and square jaw, Allen Price of the 3275th Quartermaster Service Company, Omaha Beach, looks like another avatar of the Greatest Generation. He even complains as those superhumans do: levelly, economically, without anger or sadness.
"You see these movies," he says. "Like 'The Longest Day' - you don't see no African-Americans. "Private Ryan' - no African-Americans."
"Where was the balloon barrage outfit?" he continues. "Service company? Fort battalion? They didn't show you any of that."
Sixty-three years after he and nearly 2,000 other African-Americans participated in the American invasion of Normandy, he allows himself a trace only of irony. The significant contributions of African-American soldiers to D-Day - little known, even to the buffs to end all buffs who manage the minutiae of Second World War history - are the starting point for "A Distant Shore: African Americans of D-Day," which has its premiere tonight on the History Channel.
With this enlightening program, the History Channel continues to home-school viewers on a complex national history of its own devising, complete with a thoroughgoing aesthetic and ideology. This time, the channel's idiosyncrasies mean that black octogenarian servicemen appear on screen: a rare sight indeed during Black History Month, which is known more frequently for featuring civil rights advocates, artists, musicians and academics - men and women with leftist or pacifist aspects who, let's just say, leave their garrison caps at home.
What we hear tonight are not Toni Morrison-style home-front lamentations, but war stories from a foreign land: slain buddies and precision equipment that was blown to smithereens its first time out. The armed forces were entirely segregated until 1948, and the black companies at D-Day were typically kept from combat. But, as another veteran, Carl Watson, says: "We did anything that the combat soldiers needed. Set up gas dumps. Set up ammunition dumps. Processed some of the soldiers that were killed."
That "processing," as we all know, was some of the grimmest and most necessary work on and after D-Day, and the African-American soldiers who were there, like all soldiers at the beachhead, remember the trauma of the gore above all else. But some also recall the bruising prejudice of basic training in Texas, where they were forced to ride in the back of the bus when they went to town, as well as the way white officers interfered with the heroes' welcome they received in England while they waited to ship out across the channel.
Having served valiantly, the seven who are interviewed here - and who returned from the war to face contemptuous discrimination in the very country they had defended - appear to be living well, in bright and well-loved houses that the documentary permits viewers to examine discreetly. That's where the channel's aesthetic comes in: in a style that matches the reserve of its subjects, the film refrains from spending time - any time at all - on their wounded bodies.
Instead, they're all shot in dignified light, many in uniform. One man, whose leg was lost in the war, describes the injury; while he's talking, the camera leaves him to his privacy, showing instead a ship from the period, its hull torn open by enemy fire.
For anyone who believes that the documentary form is exhausted - and certainly that there are no more documentaries to be made about World War II - this is a stunning counterexample. For American schoolchildren, it ought to be required viewing, during Black History Month or any month.
Dolores Gavin, executive producer for the History Channel. Produced by Flight 33 Productions.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Dorothy Rabinowitz
November 3, 2006
The season's first episode of the unfortunately named "Shootout!" comes with more than a few surprises, all of them commendable, a few stunning. This History Channel series, which provides meticulously detailed views of historic battles, begins its second year (Friday, 8-9 p.m. EST) with the battle of Iwo Jima, recounted with the aid of former combatants. The result is a narrative whose clarity and discipline are equal to the best contemporary documentaries in this genre -- a film that sketches the characters and acts of some of the battles' heroes with unadorned dispatch.
The facts are more than enough, the filmmakers know -- more than enough to produce the bedazzlement that results from encounters with impossible heroism. Of the 82 Medals of Honor awarded Marines in World War II, 27 were for combat in Iwo Jima. Among the recipients was Cpl. Tony Stein, who single-handedly charged and took out a fortified Japanese bunker with his improvised heavy machine gun, then ran barefoot under fire to get more ammunition, stopping eight times along the way to pick wounded Marines up and move them to safety.
Above all, this is the story of the bloody battle, just 1,200 miles from Tokyo, whose loss by Japan signaled the end of its military hopes. Another quite different film on Iwo Jima, "Flags of our Fathers," hasn't been doing terribly well at the box office, it's reported -- a disappointment that's been attributed to waning interest in World War II; the film's dark themes, i.e., the exploitation of veterans; and its lack of big stars. Filmgoers interested in the story of Iwo Jima might do well to consider this television documentary, free though it is of issues like fraudulent patriotism, victimized soldiers, and other currently hot themes. It is, rather, an authoritative account of the battle for Iwo Jima, and one that will leave no one in any doubt as to the significance of this history.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
November 3, 2006
'Shootout! Iwo Jima' brings perspective to flag-raising
By Tony Perry, Times Staff Writer
There is an inadvertent distortion in the famous flag-raising picture from the World War II battle for Iwo Jima: It seems to imply that the battle was won once Marines fought their way atop Mt. Suribachi. It wasn't.
A month - a solid month - of virtual hand-to-hand fighting followed as Marines struggled to take control of three airstrips. More casualties occurred after the flag-raising than before.
"Shootout! Iwo Jima," tonight's premiere of the second season of the "Shootout!" series on the History Channel, follows the battle from the landing on the volcanic sand beaches to the fight for Mt. Suribachi to the weeks of savagery and heroism that followed.
For anyone whose interest in Iwo Jima has been aroused by the movie "Flags of our Fathers," this one-hour documentary is a must.
Produced by Flight 33 Productions, the "Shootout" series makes good use of historic film, re-creations, computer graphics, and interviews with Marine veterans and historians. You could argue that the background music for "Iwo Jima" is too modern and the narrator could use more oomph, but these are smallish matters.
"Iwo Jima" is a first-rate telling of a story of enormous sacrifice and bravery by both Japanese soldiers and U.S. Marines. Although the focus is on the Marines, the Japanese are not demonized and their grit and ingenuity not discounted.
Any battle is the sum of many mini-battles, and "Iwo" captures this reality by telling of Cpl. Tony Stein, who used a modified aircraft gun to assault a bunker; of Lt. John Keith Wells, who led a charge toward Mt. Suribachi; and of Sgt. William Harrell, who lost both hands to grenades but continued fighting.
"Iwo" also suggests there were tactical screw-ups that led to American deaths, such as an order for personnel to turn in their ammunition the night before they were to be evacuated. That night, the Japanese pulled a surprise raid and 55 Americans were killed, many without weapons to fight back.
When the battle for Iwo Jima was over, 6,800 Americans and 20,000 Japanese were dead. Twenty-seven Medals of Honor were awarded. Uncommon valor, the saying went, had become a common virtue.
"Iwo Jima" captures that valor and virtue in detail and with respect.
MAXIM MAGAZINE
May 2006
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