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For Frontline Producer, Katrina’s Wrath Topped Iraq

"I was affected more by Katrina than Iraq, by the vastness of the devastation," Martin Smith told an audience at Columbia’s J-school Tuesday evening.

August 23, 2006

Martin Smith is hardly a neophyte when it comes to making documentaries. He’s been in television for over 30 years, much of it with PBS’s Frontline. (Since 1998, he’s run his own production company, Rain Media, which has made several films for Frontline.) He has hauled his cameras into war zones, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has investigated everything from the Iran-Contra affair to the U.S. marijuana economy. But his November 2005 report for Frontline on Hurricane Katrina was unlike anything he’s ever worked on, Smith told an audience of new students at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism Tuesday evening.

That film, The Storm, tells the story of the government’s missteps in the days leading up to and directly after Katrina. “I was affected more by Katrina than Iraq, by the vastness of the devastation,” he said.

The film’s unsparing scenes of mothers crying out for food for their children, looting, police brutality and other bits of mayhem in the days following the storm do indeed make for powerful television.

But the most damning footage is an interview Smith conducted with former FEMA chief Michael Brown (a.k.a. “Brownie”). In a clip Smith showed to students, he asks Brown why his agency had fumbled so badly during the storm. Brown is strangely jocular, and at one point rather aggressively asks Smith what he would have done differently if he had been in charge.

“At the end of the interview, [Brown] said, ‘Is that the best you can do?'” Smith recalled. “He never seemed to grasp the gravitas of the situation.”

Smith’s quiet capacity to challenge authority is a hallmark of his work. In Private Warriors, his June 2005 Frontline report about the privatization of military operations in Iraq, Smith goes behind the scenes at the biggest U.S. Army base in Iraq, which is run by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root. Smith got amazing access to the notoriously secretive company, especially for someone who’s known for his tough reporting. “We write letters, we show all our cards,” he said, relating how he managed to convince KBR to let him film on the base. “We basically said, ‘Look, you’re under a lot of fire — you couldn’t have worse PR.'”

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By spotlighting the problems with privatization in the military, Smith said he won many admirers in the military. “The Army loved the film,” he said. “The Army is very upset about subcontracting of services, and guys in the military are generally more interested in self-criticism than people in the corporate sector.”

Building a top-notch local crew is crucial, Smith said, to getting the story in a chaotic and dangerous environment. He’s just back from Pakistan, where he was at work on a film that’s scheduled to air on Frontline October 3, and getting footage there was difficult. The language barrier is another problem. “I hired and made contact clandestinely with Pashto-speaking tribals,” he said. “You form relationships. You want people you can trust.”

Smith only starts putting together his story once he has all his footage. He’s never worked from what’s known in the business as a “shooting script,” a guide that some directors develop before they start filming. It’s a luxury afforded to him by Frontline, which gives him plenty of lead time. “I do several months of research. Then some pre-interviews. Then more research. Then I shoot and edit,” he said.

For Smith, editing is writing. “It has to be done at the same time. There’s a grammar there. You learn to respect that it’s not just writing a script and putting up wallpaper to illustrate it. It’s the point at which the film leaves the rational and becomes emotional.”

Doree Shafrir writes for Gawker.