This is a story about a story that got caught up in history, collided with the present and ran off with the prize. First prize.
It's the tale of a team of three Graduate School of Journalism students of the Class of '95, broadcast majors, who set out to make a documentary on the history of the atom bomb for their thesis project only to see it explode into something entirely different--one of the major news stories of the year. The spark was the controversy that erupted over an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum marking the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay.
Their resulting story, a 24-minute video titled "A Plane Hanging," won first place in Documentary in the 17th annual College Television Awards of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The academy also presents the Emmy awards.
The trio, Shachar Bar-on, Alexander Kambouroglou and J.P. Olsen, were in Los Angeles at the Century Plaza Hotel Mar. 10 to accept their first-place honor and a $1,000 prize. The winning entries were screened the following evening at the Directors Guild of America headquarters on Sunset Boulevard.
Professor Rhoda Lipton, their faculty adviser at the Journalism School, said that getting this dream team in her first year at Columbia was a wonderful introduction to teaching. "They were fabulous--very professional," said Lipton, who joined the faculty in fall '94 after a career as a network producer at ABC News. The documentary also won the school's James A. Wechsler Award for national reporting.
"A Plane Hanging" chronicles the debate engendered by the Smithsonian's planned exhibition, a debate that pitted veterans against historians, caused anguish among Japanese- and Chinese-Americans, and brought accusations that the museum was unpatriotic. In the end, the Air and Space Museum backed away from its original concept of mounting a major historical exhibition about the dropping of the bomb and its aftermath. Instead, it simply hung the fuselage of the Enola Gay.
Told through original videotaped interviews with scholars, public officials, veterans and others, historical footage, and film provided by CNN and CSPAN, "A Plane Hanging" examines all the issues involved in the ill-fated Enola Gay exhibition. It reviews the contested theories regarding Truman's decision to drop the bomb 50 years ago and the recent history of the Smithsonian Institution and describes how the exhibition came to epitomize a long battle over the role and responsibility of the national museum.
The students' focus originally targeted the Manhattan Project and its genesis at Columbia, said Kambouroglou, "but the story shifted as the debate over the exhibit heated up. Actually, we had to keep revising the script to keep up with developments. We were frantically editing to make our project deadline." The decision on the exhibition wasn't made until March. They also put in many hours of research in Columbia's archives and at the National Archives, where much of the literature regarding the bomb is now declassified.
One of their biggest problems, said Bar-on, was the museum itself. "The Smithsonian shut us out--shut everyone out. We had to do a story about a place that wouldn't let us in." But they got a lot of cooperation everywhere else.
"Every time we asked for an interview, saying we were from Columbia helped," he said.
A native of Israel who had worked there as a field producer for ABC News before coming to the Columbia Journalism School, where he won a prestigious Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship upon graduation, Bar-on is now a producer for national and international news at Fox News in Washington. He travels to the Middle East to cover breaking stories, such as the Rabin funeral and, more recently, the Peacemaker Summit, where he joined the news pool flying out on Air Force One.
Kambouroglou, a native of Greece who came to the United States to attend Grinnell College, from which he was graduated in 1993, is now producing radio documentaries for Hellenic Public Radio in New York. Olsen, who was a reporter at the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y., works in Manhattan for the investigative unit of ABC's "World News Tonight." He said the three generally shared the production responsibilities of "A Plane Hanging," although he did a lot of the script narration, Kambouroglou did a lot of the historical research, and Bar-on "pulled it all together. But it was definitely a process by committee."
This is the second time a Columbia production has won first place in the College TV Awards. "Who's Going to Care for the Children," a 14-minute report produced by Columbia Journalism students on foster care of children with AIDS, won first place in News and Public Affairs in 1991. "You Got to Let Me Out One Day," a 25-minute documentary about repeated incarceration of young black men, won second place in Documentary in 1992. It was the solo production of Josh Schroeter, J'91, now director of strategic planning at the Center for New Media at the Journalism School.
Columbia University Record -- March 29, 1996 -- Vol. 21, No. 21