The Proposal

Every Tishah B’Av since 2008, Project Inspire has been putting out an inspirational video that is watched by hundreds of thousands around the globe. We produced their video last year, and in November, their executive director Rabbi Yossi Friedman reached out to discuss the plan for this year’s masterpiece: a documentary highlighting the life of Rav Nota Greenblatt, a world-renowned posek who was based in Memphis, Tennessee. Rav Nota’s erudite scholarship was matched only by his efforts for the klal, and the Project Inspire team felt that giving viewers a glimpse into his life would inspire them to realize the potential for a single individual’s powerful impact. We were excited to work with Project Inspire, and we drew up a proposal to produce a 45-minute documentary, along with a five-minute trailer version for them to show at their winter convention.

Pre-production

Painting an accurate picture of someone, especially after his passing, means that the narrative relies heavily on the perspective and memories of those who knew him best, and the key way to convey that is in interviews. Project Inspire’s program director Danielle Haas made dozens of calls to people around the world. She started with family members and Memphis locals, following lead after lead to get the strongest, most comprehensive content, because the strength of a documentary relies heavily on the caliber of the interview subjects. When Danielle reached a promising candidate, she conducted a phone interview, asking basic questions like, “What was the nature of your relationship with Rav Nota?” and, “What sort of stories and general perspective can you share?” Her research helped lay the groundwork for our longer on-camera interviews.

This documentary was unusual, because we often do the legwork of finding interview subjects — their interviews shape the story we’re producing — but in this case, Project Inspire’s partnership on this element was invaluable. It gave us a head start by supplying us with a comprehensive outline, which allowed us to spend less time on logistics and to allot more resources to capturing the essence of our subject, Rav Nota.

Interviewing Insight

Interviewing is a combination of art and skill, and different interviewers have personal styles that will elicit different responses from subjects. This means that deciding who will conduct which interview plays a significant role in gathering our content. When a project calls for multiple rounds of interviews, we’ll divide the workload, both to simplify the logistics and to vary the content and style.

Our senior production manager Moshe Niehaus has an engaging, vibrant personality. He instantly connects with people, and when interviewees speak to him, they tend to open up in a more vulnerable way. During one of his more emotional Rav Nota interviews, he had to pause questioning to allow the man reminiscing to stop crying and regain his composure.

One interviewee who stood out for me was Rabbi Tzvi Rosen, a Star-K kashrus administrator. He reminisced about when he was a rav in Birmingham, Alabama, in the ’80s and was contacted by a trucker who was transporting hundreds of pounds of kosher meat; the trucker was running late to his next washing station (meat at that stage needs to be washed periodically to retain its kosher status). Unsure of what to tell the frantic trucker, Rabbi Rosen called “the rabbi’s rabbi,” Rav Nota.

“Tell him to bring the load to the local fire station — he can ask them to hose it down,” Rav Nota advised, without missing a beat.

Hearing about Rav Nota’s creative solutions made such an impression on me. I also appreciated his unwavering conviction to get the job done. Someone told us that once in his later years, Rav Nota was driving to a time-sensitive meeting when a broken-down train blocked his car. He immediately climbed out of his car, walked into the stopped train car, crossed through it, and walked out the other side so he could make it on time. Post-9/11, Rav Nota got special TSA clearance to bring a safrus knife with him when he flew.

Going Off-script

My wakeup call that I had left the Tristate area was when the counterman at the kosher deli pegged me as a newcomer and warmly welcomed me to Memphis. But as nice as it is to meet new people, being on the road and away from my family isn’t ideal, so when one segment of our itinerary ended earlier than expected, we immediately drove to the airport to try to fly out on standby. We caught a connecting flight, but there was a waiting list of 18 people ahead of us for our second leg of the trip, from Atlanta to Newark. This was pretty disheartening, because had we known we’d be stuck in the busy Atlanta airport, we would have stayed the few extra hours in Memphis enjoying the out-of-town community’s warmth.

Perched on the edges of our chairs, we watched the numbers move slowly — it was agonizingly slow — making their way down the waiting list, as one standby passenger after another was allowed to board. When the list reached number two — me and the videographer — we excitedly started gathering our things, sure we would make it.

Then, the dreaded announcement: “At this time, we are at capacity.”

Ironically, we had just heard in an interview earlier that morning that Rav Nota flew so often and was so beloved and respected by the airport staff, they actually once called a plane back to the gate to pick him up, but clearly we weren’t deserving of such special treatment.

Road Trip

Part of servicing clients on a national level is, well, travelling nationally. We work with videographers around the world, but there are certain shoots or interviews that require more direction, in which case either I or Moshe Niehaus will be on site. For Rav Nota, I flew down with one of our veteran cinematographers to coordinate and run the seven Memphis interviews. We had to take more than 70 pounds of equipment with us, so we used the “media bag rate” when we flew. The way it works is a media professional can check as many as 25 pieces, each weighing up to 100 pounds, for a reasonable flat rate, significantly discounted from the overweight fee you pay when your seminary-bound daughter doesn’t believe they sell hair products in Israel. (You do need a valid media ID, so please don’t try this with her shampoos or your seforim!)

Cut ’n Paste

Four weeks and close to 35 hours of interviews later, all of the footage was ready and backed up on our custom servers. Next stop was the desk of our senior editor and story builder, Mrs. Rivky Liebenstein. The two of us had an initial 25-minute meeting — that’s considered long at Mint Media — and I gave her a brief overview of the content we had amassed, as well as an outline for the final video. Now she had to go through the content, shaving down all that footage into a 45-minute masterpiece.

Having so much material is a two-sided coin; it can be overwhelming to sort through, but it affords the opportunity to pick out the absolute best clips. Building a documentary is an immersive, long-term project, but it’s really about the day-by-day efforts of going through each interview and isolating the strongest and most relevant content. What makes Mrs. Liebenstein a fantastic storyteller is her ability to mentally file all the stories and anecdotes we’ve shot and then to seamlessly weave them together — and to know what to keep and where to cut. When I was still doing the editing myself years back, I learned that a good editor needs to have the ability to let go. Sometimes you’ll put together an extremely powerful segment, only to realize that, fantastic as it is, it doesn’t flow with the general narrative of the project. Though it can be tempting to “make it work,” a real pro knows that omission is as crucial as insertion.

Outside Input

A documentary like the one about Rav Nota, which encapsulates the life of a person, can be basically divided into two sections: the more technical, chronological timeline of his life, providing the scope and magnitude of his impact, and the “sidebar stories,” showcasing the human element and giving a sense of who he was as a husband, father, and leader. Deciding how much focus each of these divisions should take up in the final video, along with which stories were the most powerful and most relevant, was a fluid process, and we made adjustments constantly as the documentary began to take real shape.

We kept Rabbi Friedman in the loop the whole time to ensure our vision matched Project Inspire’s; clients can be helpful because they have unique perspective into their audience. For example, we were struggling with the placement of a Rav Nota story about how opening Memphis Hebrew Academy completely altered the trajectory of the life of Rav Nachum Lansky of Ner Israel Baltimore, as he was originally enrolled in the local public school. The story is an incredible one, but the interview itself didn’t fit properly into the narrative. Rabbi Friedman suggested splitting the story in two, with part of it in the beginning and the second half at the end. His creative idea was the perfect solution! Our video expertise and his keen eye for what would drive home the message combined to fashion a powerful presentation.

Callback

Speaking to so many people about one person and immersing yourself in all of the interviews to build a picture of him gives you a glimpse into his world — and with a project of this magnitude, it becomes part of you. Something that resonated with me was Rav Nota’s message, transmitted in conversations he had and even more so in how he lived his life, that it’s possible and perhaps incumbent upon every one of us to really make a difference in the world. I hope this presentation does this giant of a man justice, and that viewers walk away from the documentary not only with a sense of awe, but even more importantly, with a sense of purpose.

Moshe Shindler is the founder and director of productions at Mint Media, a full-service promotional video firm for corporate and non-profit clients, based in Lakewood, New Jersey.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 970)