Three or four years ago, at a trade show in Nebraska, Peter Murphy Lewis introduced himself to the man who ran the foundation of the state health care association and made an unsolicited pitch. “Why don’t we do a documentary about the caregivers of Nebraska?” The answer was that it sounded interesting, and to say more. Lewis had spent about a decade making television in South America, including a show he likens to Dirty Jobs in which he says he worked 125 different jobs, and he wanted to point that format at nursing homes.
On Autumn Is Here, host Francine Crawford sets out to ask how the film came about. The conversation lands somewhere more useful than an origin story: what an organization actually does with a documentary once it exists. The brief was a staffing film for a single state. What Nebraska ended up holding was a piece of footage its members now cut up for advocacy meetings, fundraising, event promotion and virtual tours for prospective residents.
That gap between what a video was funded to do and what it turns out to be good for is the real subject here. Lewis is unusually specific about it, partly because none of the extra uses were planned and none of them needed another day of filming. Anyone who has ever signed off a video budget on one justification will recognize what he describes. There is a written companion to this episode in our article on where documentary films actually land.
Key Takeaways
1. The brief was a staffing film and the asset ended up doing several other jobs
Lewis is candid that the ambition started small. “Our goal at the beginning was to have some type of visual marketing asset that Nebraska could use to attract younger generation to combat the staffing crisis in long-term care,” he says. “Really quickly we realized that it was going to do more than staffing.” He lists what followed: showing it to politicians, using it for fundraising, using it to lift attendance, and using it for marketing. None of that sat in the original justification, and none of it required new footage.
2. Communities that were never filmed use the clips as virtual tours
The reuse Lewis singles out is the one nobody scoped. Members of the association who do not appear in the series take clips of it and, in his words, “show as virtual tours to prospective clients and residents before they come in,” as a way of showing how much life there is in a building. A recruitment film had quietly become a sales asset for a different audience. That is a decent argument for releasing footage to a whole membership rather than only to the buildings that appear in it.
3. The decision to go long was made two days into filming, not in the brief
The plan was a 20-minute short for YouTube. Two days into shooting, Lewis rang the association’s chief executive and told her “the quality of this is insane,” then asked whether they could move from one video to a seven-part series with 20-minute episodes. She agreed. A friend from his television years later took the finished series out to streaming platforms, and he says that is how it reached “every single smart television in the United States” about six weeks before this recording.