THE
GREAT MUSEUMS® STORY
• MOVE OVER SISTER WENDY
By Amanda Kraus, Museum News, 2002
• THE ON-AIR MUSEUM
By Amanda Kraus, Museum News, 1999
MOVE
OVER SISTER WENDY
By Amanda Kraus, Museum News, 2002
(Interview with Chesney Doyle, Creator, Great Museums®)
The creative goal of Echo Pictures, Inc., the independent
production company that created "Great Museums,"
is clearly stated: "to knock people out with a
half-hour of T.V. that sends them to the Web or their
local museum, library, historical society, or school…"
Now, imagine that statement spoken with determination
and a melodic Southern accent and you have a sense of
Chesney B. Doyle, who with her husband Marc Doyle is
executive co-producer. She compliments the museum field
as she explains the series’ format: "We don’t
have a host, or a bevy of our own experts, or a Sister
Wendy," she says in reference to public television’s
popular art historian-nun. "We rely on the museums’
own curators, archivists, and archaeologists who have
dedicated their lives to their fields. We couldn’t
imagine a host who is as passionate and knowledgeable
as the people from the museums themselves."
She and her husband work closely with museum staff to
bring the museum’s key stories to a television
audience, envisioning each half-hour episode as "an
extension of the museum’s mission." From the
start, it was a priority to portray the diversity of
America’s museums and though the series certainly
includes crown jewels like the Field Museum in Chicago,
the Doyles have concentrated largely on mid-sized and
smaller museums. Since starting the project in 1998,
they’ve covered institutions that range from South
Carolina’s Charleston Museum and the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia—among the nation’s
oldest museums—to newcomers like the California
Surf Museum, Oceanside. From their base of operations
in Atlanta, the Doyles have traveled to L.A. to feature
the Hollywood Entertainment Museum; to Denver to cover
the Molly Brown House Museum; to Washington, D.C., for
the National Museum of Women in the Arts; and Clarksdale,
Miss., for the Delta Blues Museum….
Stations that pick up "Great Museums" can
air the episodes in any order but Echo Pictures’
recommended line-up has the show on the New York City
Fire Museum coinciding with the one-year anniversary
of Sept. 11. Just a block away from Ground Zero, the
Fire Museum’s 1904 firehouse structure and collections
of historic and modern firefighting equipment survived
the terrorist attack (see "Telling the Story: New
York City Fire Museum," Nov./Dec. 2001). The museum
is staffed largely by firefighters, retired and active.
The close-knit firefighting community suffered greatly
in the attacks, and it is one part of the larger story
that the NYC Fire Museum tells.
Former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani appears in the show,
speaking about his uncle who was a fireman. He made
time to be interviewed for "Great Museums"
says Chesney Doyle says with gentle pride, "and
Giuliani gets an overwhelming number of interview requests
every day. But really," she says, "Deputy
Director and retired firefighter Tom Walters and Curator
Peter Rothenberg are the stars of the show."
Excerpts reprinted, with permission, from Museum News,
September/October 2002. Copyright 2002, American Association
of Museums. All rights reserved.
THE
ON-AIR MUSEUM
By Amanda Kraus, Museum News, 1999
(Interview with Chesney Doyle and Marc Doyle, Co-Executive
Producers, Great Museums®)
Even the most avid museum-goers would agree that there
are days when the comforts of home, in particular, the
couch and the remote control, win out over trekking
to a local museum. [W]atching the tube doesn’t
have to be the polar opposite of visiting a museum.
The television series "Great Museums"…goes
even further in bridging the gap.
Each half-hour episode takes T.V. viewers on a virtual
tour of an American museum, combining on-location footage
of the museum and its permanent collection with staff
interviews, music, scripted narration, and, often, archival
film and photographs. Chesney Blankenstein Doyle of
Echo Pictures, Inc., Atlanta, co-producer/director and
creator of "Great Museums," says that in developing
each program, the production team aims to "partner
with each individual museum, understand their mission,
lean their story, and showcase it through the medium
of television."
Seeking to portray the breadth and diversity of museums
in the United States, Chesney and co-producer/director
Marc Doyle consider a variety of factors when choosing
which museums to feature, including type of collection,
geographical location, size, and visitorship. For their
first season, they consciously avoided institutions
they describe as "megamuseums" (places with
annual visitation of more than 1 million) and concentrated
on mid-sized and smaller ones. After an initial scouting
visit to each museum, "we came away convinced that
the story they tell is a national story," says
Chesney. To present that story to a T.V. audience, the
Doyles work with museum staff to determine mail focal
points for the content of the show. Each on-location
shoot lasts approximately three days and includes extensive
two-hour interviews with three to five people associated
with the museum, usually the director, curators, and
a board member. The Doyles maintain close contact with
the museum as they finalize the script; then they assiduously
edit hours of footage down to a polished, half-hour
program.
The Doyles, a husband-wife team who work out of their
farmhouse near Savannah, Ga., …describe it as the
ideal merger of their professional experience. While
working as an attorney and management consultant, Chesney
assisted a variety of non-profits and became passionate
about museums because of their mission to "edify
people and preserve our history, our past, interpreting
it in a way that helps us as a society." Marc has
worked in the television industry for 30 years, earning
three Emmys for his work as news director at WAGA-TV,
Atlanta. [In 1988], he became an independent producer….
Getting Started
To prepare, the Doyles attended the 1998 AAM Annual
Meeting in Los Angeles. There they established contacts,
visited museums – including the Autry Museum of
Western Heritage and the Hollywood Entertainment Museum,
which they would later profile—and were sensitized
to the concerns of the field. Marc says he realized
that independent television producers and museums face
many similar challenges in cultivating audiences. One
session of particular interest was "Exploring Differences,
Finding Connections: Curators, Historians, and Documentary
Filmmakers," during which Marc and Chesney "took
copious notes" and learned that many museum professionals
are wary of working with T.V. producers. Panelists spoke
of negative experiences where museum resources were
commandeered by the filmmaker only to result in problems
such as inaccuracies or insufficient crediting of the
museum’s contributions. Echo Pictures doesn’t
anticipate such conflicts of interest because the company’s
clearly defined mission "starts off with a presumption
of respect and admiration for what museums do and builds
on that…to communicate their message and story
to a much broader and more diverse group of people than
is normally available to them," says Marc.
The typical "Great Museums" viewer tends to
have the same psychographic profile as the museum-goer,
with a drive for life-long learning. While the series
provides this knowledge-hungry audience with what Chesney
calls "healthy brain food," it simultaneously
draws awareness to the institutions it showcases. Speaking
of the episode that featured the National Museum of
Women in the Arts (NMWA), Washington, D.C., Chief Curator
Susan Fisher Sterling says, "First and foremost,
it lets people know that there are women artists out
there in the world, and that there’s a place they
can get in touch with, either through the Internet,
or by becoming a member, or by actually coming to the
museum…[The program] whets people’s appetite
in a form they are used to."
"The production is about them, it’s not about
us," says Chesney. "[Museum staff] figure
out the best way to communicate their story to the general
public, and they’ve done it very effectively. We
don’t think we can tell their story better than
they – with all of their scholars and museum professionals
– are already telling it." The Doyles’
approach impressed Phyllis Caskey, president and CEO
of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. She says that
the Doyles looked at her institution not only from the
outside, to see the visitor’s experience, but also
from the inside. "They asked questions like, ‘What
did it take to create this museum?" she says. "This
piece obviously was done by people who are passionate
about the role of museums and understand them….[The
‘Great Museums’ programs] really send a very
important message about the multiple roles that museums
play in the community." She adds that members of
her board – most of whom are veterans of the entertainment
industry – were thrilled when they saw the piece
and complimented its high production values.
"Forty and 50 years ago, television was spoken
of as the Internet is spoken of today, that it was going
to bring the world together, entertain, inform,"
says Marc Doyle. He laments that these days T.V. is
rarely a "source of inspiration and knowledge"….[A]fter
the episode featuring the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta,
Ga., aired, the museum received "fan mail."
"Because of the efforts that the museum industry
has made to be entertaining as well as educational,"
says Chesney Doyle, "we only had to look to the
industry itself to find our formula for success for
this T.V. show." – Amanda Kraus
Excerpts reprinted, with permission, from Museum News,
May/June 1999 Copyright 1999, American Association of
Museums. All rights reserved.
Back
to Top
