Alumni Portrait: Mike Welt on his third film with Ken Burns

Have you ever wondered what’s in the basements of CBS, NBC, and ABC? Alum Mike Welt knows. He’s spent the last few years in some of those basements, sifting through history.

Welt co-produced the upcoming 10-part series, “The Vietnam War,” directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. This is the third project Welt has worked on with Burns and Novick, with the series airing on PBS in September. As a co-producer, Welt wore several hats, but he primarily devoted his time to sourcing archival footage. The 18-hour series contains 7 hours of archival footage from nearly 100 sources.

“There was a mountain of archival film footage to go through,” says Welt, and he spent the better part of a couple of years in CBS’s vaults, pulling film reels and viewing footage that sometimes hadn’t been seen in a half-century.

The mastery of this side of production is being able to recognize something anomalous when you see it.

Welt found rare film from the Kent State shootings in 1970, when students at Kent State University, protesting the Vietnam War, were shot by members of the Ohio National Guard. Four students were killed and nine were injured.

CBS had physical copy of the footage, but couldn’t license it out because they didn’t know where the film originated. Welt says this kind of thing is common with archival research. “At the time of the shootings, someone sent this film in, and likely they broadcast it, but then as years passed, all they knew was that it wasn’t shot by a CBS crew, but as documentarians they can’t license it out because they don’t know who actually owns it.”

So Welt and his colleagues had to solve a mystery and find the owner of the original footage. Some people they were connected with from Kent State who had participated in the protests put him in contact with Ray Kline, whose brother David had been a journalism student at the university and a stringer for the local CBS station. He was filming during all four days of the protests, and after the shootings sent his film to CBS, which later lost track of who had sent it to them.

Ray Kline sent them a large cardboard box with film reels that hadn’t been opened in over 40 years. They took them to their lab, Technicolor, and the reels were opened and transferred carefully. Not only did they find the footage they were looking for, they found more film that CBS didn’t even have.

Welt has also worked on securing music clearances for the project. The series needed some 120 music clearances, an unusually high number for documentaries. Big names from the 1960s like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Santana will provide the musical narrative.

“The music is very much content. It’s not background. It tells the story of what a generation was living, feeling, expressing, during this really difficult time period as they’re struggling to understand a war that doesn’t seem to make any sense, a government that they no longer understand, a generational gap that seems to be growing wider,” says Welt. “The music from this time period is an expression of all of that frustration from an entire generation.”

Welt also spent five weeks in Vietnam working with producer Ho Dang Hoa and collecting footage from the country’s National Archives. Welt says those providing the footage from the archives were curious about the project.

“They were so interested in our filmmaking process and our historical process,” says Welt. “We spent so much time communicating to them the meaning of this material to us, why it was important for American viewers to see footage from the Vietnamese side of this war,” says Welt. “They responded to that. That meant something to them, and people there worked so hard on an individual basis to get us the shots we wanted to transfer to really good quality, to deal with our thousands of technical questions.”

The time spent searching for footage overseas will pay off, Welt hopes, because it will allow Americans a glimpse into the Vietnamese perspective. “Americans will see that these were young people, sons and daughters who were fighting this war from their side just like we were from our side. They show incredible footage from the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And you’ll see young men, and maybe even more often young women, driving trucks, hauling gear down these jungle mountain passes,” says Welt. “I think you can’t help but empathize with what they’re going through.”

“This series is a kaleidoscope of perspectives,” says Welt. “I hope an American viewer hears a Vietnamese person tell their story and is able to put him or herself in that person’s shoes and empathize and feel what that person’s feeling. And I hope that a Vietnamese person is able to see what even American soldiers were doing, even as horrible as some of the effects of what they may have been doing were to the Vietnamese and their families, I hope they’re able to understand from an American soldier’s perspective what their experience might have been like.” Welt says they’re working on a Vietnamese translation and have screened the series privately to Vietnamese with differing perspectives on the war, but will be unable to broadcast the series on Vietnamese television.

“I think it’s all about trying to build a deeper understanding on a human level from what was happening during the war.”

Welt says he landed his job with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick thanks to “a serendipitous turn of events.” Before working with Florentine Films, Welt was a J-School student in Prof. Jon Else’s documentary film class, working on his thesis, when he got a job working on historical documentaries with Lucas Films in Marin. He moved to New York several years later, with no specific job lined up. A year into his job search, someone who had received his resume elsewhere forwarded it to Florentine Films.

“I actually hadn’t even known at the time that Florentine had a New York office. So in a way I got the job without ever really applying for it.” says Welt. With Florentine Films, he also worked as a co-producer on “Prohibition,” a three-part series released in 2011, and as an associate producer on “The Tenth Inning,” a two-part series on baseball, released in 2010.

“I decided to work in documentaries because I love the opportunity it gives me to explore new subjects and engage with people who might otherwise remain separate from my life,” says Welt. His passion for journalism was inspired by a summer spent at a paper in Durham, N.C., between his first and second years at the J-School. “It showed me that good journalism requires me to broaden my own range of experiences and understanding,” says Welt.

And his thesis experience with Jon Else and his classmates only deepened his engagement with documentary work. “Working with Jon Else and my talented classmates on our thesis projects gave me the foundation for everything I do as a documentarian,” says Welt. “The work we did together remains the high-water mark that I work to achieve in my professional life.”

By Katherine Rose (’18)