Sorry I haven't written in over a month.... I promise you'll understand why if you read this.

I have definitely learned the meaning of legwork and the value of good research through this job. 

As the Discovery Channel series "Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero" is nearing it's air date, I have transitioned into the point person in charge of all archival requests and licensing procedures. In other words any requests for any photo or footage that we haven't filmed or shot ourselves goes through my desk. For example, a producer can approach me with a request for footage of the cleanup of Ground Zero circa October 2001 and I then pull footage and/or stills from our known resources and compile a series of screeners for them to chose from. Pretty easy barring the fact that the archival footage for this project mainly revolves around September 11th and the Twin Towers, which is, to say the least, heart-wrenching.

Or someone could come up to me with a photograph of someone and say, "I want to use this picture. Find out who took it and license it for me." Not as easy.

Frequently when people want an image they merely google search and copy one of the first ones that they find. However, that image frequently is not credited properly, let alone licensed properly. So I have to track down the photographer of a photo that I have no information about.

Four months ago one of the producers made such a request. They wanted to license the famous photo of the 3 FDNY firefighters raising the American flag at Ground Zero. Easy enough right? It's famous, so somebody should know about it. Ironically wikipedia gave me the photographers name and led me to a New Jersey newspaper in Bergen County that hired the freelance photographer and had originally published the picture. So I put in a request for licensing information and waited. And waited. As time went on I decided to take a new tactic, call the paper and have them give me their archival dept. After going through transfer after transfer somebody asked me for my contact info so they could get in touch with me when they knew who to talk to. I finally got an email that said, "We as the copyright owners are fine with it". Cool. All set. WRONG!

I try sending them our release form and after several rounds of telephone tag was informed that the NJ paper only held the copyright and not the publicity rights so they couldn't sign our release. They would have to alter the release to cover their portion and then I would have to get the lawyers for the firefighters in the picture to sign off on their behalf for the publicity rights.
It takes the other lawyer over a week to get back to me only to say "Please contact this 3rd lawyer to work this out". Seriously?! Come on!

So I contact lawyer 3 with the information about the program, my interaction with the paper in NJ and the release. He can't sign the release either.
So both of them need to edit our standard release. Ummm... Can they do that? Are they royally screwing me over?

I talk to the legal people at work and they say, "send the word document version and tell them to 'track changes' so we can see what they change." Easy enough right? Wrong again.

 
After awhile I check in with all parties to see how progress is. The newspaper wants $1000 and lawyer #3 won't show me his release until he can see their completed release but I can't show him that they're asking for a grand, so I have to negotiate with them before I can get the changed release approved and then show Lawyer 3. I do manage to talk their price down and the changes are accepted and it is finally signed and faxed over to our offices. Now it's over a week sine lawyer 3 asked to see their release and I finally send it over. Within minutes he sends his with the asking price of $2,500 to be donated to the Bravest Fund as well as mention in the credits.

Call me stingy, but despite the great cause it would be going to, I cannot agree to pay 10 times the amount I offered the newspaper for the copyrights. I tell him "we would like to compensate both parties equally and would like to offer the same amount we are paying to the newspaper." Don't I sound lawyerly?

 
He now says "you'll have to discuss that with lawyer #2, (who originally referred me to #3) in order to work out the donation amount and procedure." After 3 days of emails and calls I get an email from lawyer #2 that says, "Trish and Lawyer 3, Please work this out and I will sign. Thanks." So I call lawyer 3 yet again to discuss the amount and hopefully convince him to drop an entire decimal point off his original asking price.

I'm sorry but when did I go to law school? Shouldn't somebody with experience of over a year be handling something so delicate and intricate?! How is it that I'm handling 3 lawyers and 2 contracts and all the negotiating that goes along with it?! And this is just for one photograph!

So I'm on the phone with lawyer 3 and he says they want a donation, credits and a dvd copy of the finished product. I give him the donation amount we're willing to pay and tell him "I'll have to check with our in-house counsel to see if your other stipulations are agreeable to all parties."

I feel like that guy from the new show "Suits" who pretends to be a lawyer even though he has no law degree. The only difference is that I learned everything I know from Law & Order reruns.
 

Anyway, he agreed. I sent over our agreement to our legal team, we made the final alterations to the release, he approved the changes, and we're now finalizing the document to be signed and returned.
4 months of work and I finally received the signed release, this week.

Soon after, I had to tackle another similar situation. The first cut of the episode about the 9/11 Memorial Museum was completed in early June and in it was a photo of Captain Paddy Brown of Ladder 3 in New York. He was quite a hero both on 9/11 and before and we highlight his story in the show. However, the editor did a google search and grabbed the first cool picture of him they could find of him. Since we didn't know the origin the interns and I scoured the internet for information about that photo or another that might work. We contacted the city of New York, his sister, fellow firemen, the Museum offices, the FDNY, website owners.... Nothing. All we had was the file name of the photo "Paddy Brown Time".
 

So after a great deal of time and effort all we deduced was that sometime before his death he was in Time Magazine. No idea when or why. And Time Magazine was little help because they only license the cover photos for their issues and had no idea who the photographer was or for what article or issue. Dead end... 

So in late July I took one of the interns with me to the New York Public Library to try and find the right issue. By this time we had tried every single combination of keyword searches, had reached out to multiple archival research resources and had grilled anyone and everyone who may have had any information related to this picture.

After struggling to find someone at the library who even knew where we should begin to look and then being directed to the microfilm department we finally started our search... Halfway through searching the 2001 Sept 24the edition it dawned on both of us that if the photograph was taken for Time Magazine then it had to have been taken before his death... Thus not in that issue and we were clueless again. 

There were drawers full of film for years worth of magazines and there was no way we could go through it all, especially since the technology of a microfilm reader was seriously vexing the 2 of us.
As I search the microfilm pre-Sept 2001 the intern whips out her iPhone and starts frantically searching for the date. Excitedly she says "1999!!"
 

"Umm.... Caroline that only narrows it down to 52 issues.... And 3 rolls of microfilm..... We'll be here all night".

 
So in a final effort Caroline prays to Paddy Brown and searches one last time for the issue date of the Time magazine article, to which we had no title and no author. Just a picture, a subject and a year. Obviously someone was listening to our pleas because shortly after her desperate prayer she turns to me and say, "September 6, 1999". Apparently the Captain was featured in an article about extreme hobbies and jobs and being a firefighter is definitely what one would call extreme. So we attempt to set up the microfilm machine (to little avail) and within minutes we have found the picture in question. And it has a photo credit. And the photographer has a website. With contact information.

Unbelievable. I couldn't believe that good old fashioned research had out done the almighty Internet. No matter how hard we tried, it took a trip to the library to finally get the information we were looking for. And it was remarkably satisfying.

So that's just 2 stories about 2 pictures, equaling about  8 seconds of screen time in one episode. And there are six 1-hour episodes. So I've been a little busy.

I hope everyone has set their Tivos and DVRS for this Thursday night, 8-11pm on the Discovery Channel!

THE SERIES BEGINS ON AUGUST 25TH, 2011.           

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/the-rising <http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/the-rising>