A bit of a personal note this time. I doubt many people notice “post by LEE SHACKLEFORD” at the top of these pages, but yes, so far it’s been me writing these little updates. I volunteered to build this website just because I felt we needed one, and then it seemed natural for me to write these little posts as well.
But I got carried away. I posted a lot of news items while we were still in Israel, and by the time we were leaving I had learned a lot. Now I’m going back into the posts and making revisions, some of them major.
So if you’ve read the posts, I encourage you to skim through them again! Start with Anniversary: a letter from Johanna and just keep clicking “NEXT” at the bottom of the page…
And I promise that from now on I will post things only when I have all the facts.
I work on the website when I’m taking a break from the larger and more urgent work of writing the script for the miniseries. ITV wants all four episodes to air in early 2024. And they want a “draft version” of the first episode in the fall of 2023 so they can show it around to the secondary markets (Prime, Netflix, Hulu, AppleTV, etc.) … which means we need a solid script for that first episode sort of, well, now.
I am very grateful to be working on this with the invaluable help of creative consultant David Duncan, who has a special genius for this kind of narrative creation and also happens to be my best friend. We have a relationship that borders on the telepathic, and right now that’s incredibly useful.
Some people have asked me why a documentary needs a script at all. “Aren’t you just telling the truth the way it happened?” they may ask, or “Aren’t you just telling it the way Matthew Rozell told it?”
These are fair questions and deserve answers.
Making a miniseries like this isn’t simply a matter of collecting interviews and editing them together. Since our primary goals are to educate and inspire, the audience has to be drawn into the story and then held there despite all the competition and distractions that abound for the home viewer. We can’t get our message across to people who’ve changed the channel.
We want it to be thrilling, accessible, and thought-provoking — all without deviating from the things we know to be true. In other words, we’re not going to make anything up just to create a moment of drama. Tempting as that may be.
And since it’s in four parts, we know that each episode has to end with — for want of a better word — a cliffhanger. We want to structure the presentation of this true story so that the audience will get to the end of episode 1 and say, “Oh, man, I gotta see episode 2!”
Plus there is the added complication that we’re telling stories about three different people or groups of people: the liberators, the liberated, and the history teacher who brought the story to light. Those plot threads are separated by time and space; the stories of the liberators and the liberated obviously overlap on April 13, 1945 — but Matthew Rozell doesn’t enter the story for another 56 years. So where do we begin? In the long run, whose story is it?
I remind myself, every day, that what we do here has been called a Ḳiddush ha-Shem (קידוש השם) — a sanctification of the name of God. It bears also the more secular sense of bringing praise and honor to the Jewish people.
We are all determined that what we make here will be worthy of that name.