An old friend of mine used to show up to dinner parties with a mini-cassette stuffed away somewhere on his person, covertly recording our conversations. Weeks, maybe months later, he would let me hear the tapes, and it was always a startling experience.
Something happens when you remove visual elements from an equation. Suddenly you become aware of meanings missed while you were distracted by facial expressions and body language. The words, the intonation, the pauses, the ambient noises, they all tell a revealing story.
In a sense, my friend’s tapes were a form of radio documentary, a genre of sound and story that is at home primarily on public radio. This month, Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ-FM 91.5) presents the Third Coast International Audio Festival, a series of events for radio producers and the listening public, now in its fourth year.
`Listening room’
In addition to seminars and an awards competition, this year’s lineup includes so-called “listening room” performances, in which selected documentaries are played — much like a movie screening, minus the picture.
Also scheduled is a one-night performance by Joe Frank, an avant-garde radio producer and playwright who specializes in free-associative, surreal monologues. He describes his upcoming piece as an evolving set of “stories and moments of philosophical inquiry — which sounds way too high-minded. I want to be weird and funny, and take the audience to a place that they have never been before.”
The fest concludes with a two-hour national broadcast of the winning docs and interviews with the producers on Thanksgiving weekend, airing locally on WBEZ.
“In the beginning, we called ourselves the Sundance of radio,” says Third Coast executive director Johanna Zorn. (Zorn is the wife of Tribune columnist Eric Zorn). “There was a gaping need for this. You see other fields do this all the time, but there was nothing for radio documentaries, which have gone through a renaissance in the past five or six years — and a lot of that is due to `This American Life.'”
In fact, the impact of “This American Life,” a weekly collection of stories developed by WBEZ and Ira Glass (who also hosts), cannot be overlooked.
“If you ask the average NPR listener about radio documentaries, they don’t understand what that means exactly,” says independent producer Ben Shapiro. “People hear `This American Life,’ particularly younger listeners, and it gives them an idea of what you’re talking about, and often they want to do it themselves. The gear is relatively inexpensive compared to filmmaking. Same with the editing software. I know a lot of people who have fallen in love with radio because of that show.”
Shapiro is producing the Third Coast Thanksgiving broadcast, a show he says “allows listeners to get a look behind the scenes about what it means to make this kind of radio.” Because truth be known, few people know who independent radio producers are.
Radio docs blend elements of journalism with the artistically ambitious storytelling techniques we’ve come to associate with independent film. Rather than showing a moment, radio producers use music and other elements to create a mood.
Hoping to start dialogue
“We have a vocabulary for talking about film,” Zorn says, “but there none for radio. You don’t see critical writing about radio docs the way you do about film, and we’re hoping the festival is a place where that vocabulary is starting.”
Unlike the indie filmmaker with dreams of mainstream (and big budget) success, there is no equivalent crossover point for radio producers, most of whom are stuck in an endless cycle of grant writing.
Funds are always limited — and so is the glory. But the results can be incredible.
One of this year’s entries, called “Sweet Phil from Sugar Hill,” is a 30-minute piece from producer Phyllis Fletcher about her father — now dead — who purportedly sired 14 children with 13 different women.
In the documentary, Fletcher’s oldest brother reads from her father’s letters.
“It hurts me to have left so many kids out there in this world,” he wrote, “but believe me, at the rate that I was going, if somebody were to have to go, it was always best for the kid and the mother that I was the one that go. It’s sad but it’s true.”
Other letters are humorous, as when he bragged about his cooking skills: “I can boil water and make it taste good. I’ll put some of my barbeque sauce in your nose and you’ll eat your boogers.”
He could be mean if she didn’t write back fast enough: “Sometimes I wonder if you’re loose in the head, half retarded, emotionally slow, don’t give a [expletive] or just plain lazy.”
But in his own way, Fletcher says drolly, he always tried to make it up to her: “You look like you sweat honey and your dookie don’t stink.”
For a long time, many producers used an unidentified, authoritative narrator to guide the listener through a piece. But Fletcher’s documentary falls into a category that might be termed personal narration, a format that is gaining in popularity. And in some cases, producers are forgoing narration altogether.
Producer Pejk Malinovski’s “Thirteen Ways,” broadcast over the summer on the radio show “The Next Big Thing,” is simply an edited collection of recordings he made of a teacher and his class of 5th graders as they playfully analyze the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
“The festival is an outgrowth of our general interest in the unique, creative things independent producers are doing,” says Torey Malatia, WBEZ station president and general manager. “How do we not lose this? How do we make sure this doesn’t slip away?”
As radio has become more formulaic over the past three decades, listener habits have changed, as well. Today most people use the radio as a utility — a place to get small bites of music, news and information. But radio docs, by their very nature, are about long-form chunks of entertainment.
“Radio is infinitely flexible and completely ephemeral. And it’s immensely portable.” Malatia says. “It’s a mighty powerful tool to reach the mind and spirit.”
Third Coast organizers hope their fest becomes as popular with the public as the annual Humanities Festival.
“This is a Chicago fest,” Malatia says, “and we want Chicago to be excited about it. It was Chicago, after all, that went nuts for this stuff when we first started airing these docs 10 years ago.
“It must have something to do with our civic character.”
———-
The Third Coast Audio Festival, “ShortDocs: Stories about Darkness,” presented Thursday at the Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 N. Halsted St., and Sept. 30 at the Evanston Public Library, 2026 Central St.
“Lend Us Your Ears” audio installation, Oct. 9-Dec. 5 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.
Joe Frank in Performance, Oct. 29 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Some events require a ticket purchase; others are free. For more information, call 312-948-4682 or log on to info@thirdcoastfestival.org.
