Alan Berg: Storyteller

Story by Sara Scott

When Alan Berg's son, Christian, was in preschool, his teacher asked him what his parents did for a living.

"My daddy tells stories," the little boy said proudly.

"That's not very nice," the teacher replied, thinking the little boy was calling his father a liar.

"No, no, he does, he tells stories," said Alan's son, and after a bit more prodding, the teacher understood - Alan Berg was a reporter.

Alan has made a career out of storytelling, first as a news reporter and now as a documentary filmmaker, and his success proves that people are eager to listen to what he has to say. Broadcast journalism students at the University of Texas regularly hear the adjunct lecturer's stories as he teaches Television Reporting. Next year the world will be his audience when one of his most recent tales heads to PBS.

"He sincerely cares about journalism," says Matthew Franklin, a friend and frequent collaborator of Alan's. "He has a very direct passion for telling stories. It's not always topical; it's like life experience kind of stories...deeper stuff."

One of Alan's most recent storytelling endeavors, a feature-length documentary called "A Place to Dance," was just screened at the 2006 Austin Film Festival and is bound for PBS in 2007. The Jefferson Orleans big band ballroom in New Orleans is the central setting of the film, and the stars are the senior citizens who jitterbug their troubles away to the music of the Pat Barberot Orchestra.

"I think one of the beauties of old age, if I can paint with a broad brush, is you're less guarded about what you say," Alan comments on his subjects. By casting seniors, he got absolute candor. The single women gathered across the room from the single men and scanned for the most enticing dance partner... or maybe for their next husband or wife. Alan and his crew captured every pick-up line on film.

During a year and a half, Alan made between 12 and 15 trips to New Orleans. Production began long before Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana, but Alan was there after the disaster to witness the remarkable effort to put the swing back into the Jefferson Orleans. The enthusiasm with which people returned to the ballroom after such hardship speaks to the positive impact it has had on their lives.

"I don't have a place to live, but as long as I have a place to dance, that's all I care about," says Shirley Dimm, one of the film's stars summing up the story at the end of the film.

"A Place to Dance" was one of 11 documentaries to be screened in the feature showcase at the Los Angeles Film Festival earlier this year, chosen from more than 3,700 entries. Many of the film's cast flew to Los Angeles to work the red carpet for the world premiere of the documentary.

The next stop for the documentary is PBS, where it will debut in April as an hour-long program. That means Alan has more than 20 minutes to trim. For many artists, cutting away part of their work is a painful process, but one of things associate producer Jason Wehling loves about Alan as a director is his objectivity.

"He does have the parts that he likes, but he's really good at approaching his film from a bit of an outside perspective," explains Jason. "It's because, I think, he has so many years of experience in journalism, he knows you can't use everything.... Unlike so many people I've worked with, he doesn't get as attached to things. He can look at it with a kind of calculating eye and make it better."

Staying Creative

Even the master storyteller must find ways to keep his creative juices flowing. For Alan, that means getting his blood pumping, too.

A "hot yoga" class consists of taking the body through a series of hatha yoga postures, with the added twist that the studio is heated to at least 98 degrees. Practicing yoga in such intense heat helps oxygenated blood to flow through the entire body and restores all systems to healthy working order. Alan likes the challenge of the full-body workout that hot yoga provides, but he laments that he hasn't been practicing it much lately.

"It's really distracting in the [film] studio - there's a lot going on. You go in the yoga studio for an hour and a half, and there's no stimuli coming at you except the instructor," says Alan. He has noticed that in addition to keeping him in shape, yoga focuses his mind and even pushes him forward with his work. He has had ideas come to him in yoga class after being blocked at his office. "The creative process is mysterious. Some things come right away, and some don't," he points out.

To further compete against distraction, Alan frequently works early in the morning, when nothing else is competing for his attention. "When I was editing on the doc, I'd get up between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m.," he says. Alan's wife, Kristin, adds that a lingering side effect of this habit is that the family's cats, Spalding and Nick, now like to start their day that early, and if the Bergs aren't out of bed yet, Spalding or Nick will wake them up.

Television Career

At his production studio, Arts + Labor, a large poster-sized frame hangs on Alan's office wall. Inside the frame are traces of a 15-year career as a television reporter: dozens of press badges for events ranging from the Gore-Lieberman running mate announcement to Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic, television station I.D. cards, and photos including one taken outside the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. There's a handwritten letter dated Nov. 7, 1989, from Alan's former news director that says they've got to get something to keep his hair from standing on end. "It looks like you're frightened or a punk rocker," the letter concludes.

"He always wanted to go work at WFAA, and he did. He's pro-active," says his wife, Kristin Johansen-Berg, scanning the mementos in the frame. "There's Lloyd and Paul, his photographers," she says, pointing at a photo of the men smiling on some stairs.

Alan's journey to WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas, began with getting a journalism degree at UT. His first job was at KVUE from 1987 to 1991, which he followed with a 15-month stint at WWL in New Orleans. Once he made it to WFAA, he only stayed in Dallas for two years before becoming the station's bureau chief in Austin in 1994.

The evolution of the broadcast business during the time he was bureau chief influenced Alan to leave the news behind and take the leap into documentaries. Network affiliates in competition with cable news channels were down-sizing their staffs, causing reporters to have to produce more stories, with less reporting time on each one.

"I don't mind being on the air, but that's not why I got into it," says Alan earnestly, sitting back in a chair in his office. "So this having to churn stuff out just wasn't that interesting to me.

"The other thing that happens," he continues, "is that to disguise the fact that you have less substantive content because you don't have the time or the investment to do it, they start shortening the length, so you just run your story count up and hope that if you put 20 stories in a half hour people won't notice they didn't learn anything. That wasn't something that appealed to me either, because I wanted the opposite, I wanted to do longer and longer form."

After getting stuck in Florida for a month covering the 2000 election, Alan received a grant from PBS to make health educational programming, and he took that opportunity to leave the news business. The result was "Addicted: The Shocking Story of Heroin Use." He had covered the Mexico drug cartels during time that Plano underwent the heroin crisis in the late 90s.

"That interested me because I grew up in Denton, so all these kids that were sort of like me are out there banging smack, so I was curious. I never got to tell that story because I was covering the Mexico end of it. It was about five years after all the media attention on Plano... and I wanted to catch up with some of these kids who had gotten caught up in that, in the busts and everything, and see what had happened to them."

During this time, Alan and Kristin, who teaches computer graphics at Austin Community College, started Boa Vista Creative, a multi-media production company, in a garage apartment in their backyard. A year and a half ago it expanded into Arts + Labor, which has a large state-of-the-art production studio on Burnett Road and staffs photographers, Web and print designers, 3D animators and more. The next big project coming up for Arts + Labor is a 30-minute documentary on the risks of tropical storms and inland flooding for the Weather Channel.

Working with Students

Alan sits in dimly lit corner Studio 4F in the UT communications building recounting a tale from his border-coverage days in Juarez, Mexico. Even during a day scheduled to the minute, he manages to find time for a quick story.

"We were covering bad guys who were killing people," he says, explaining why he was actually not scared during his time on the volatile beat. "Risk to a mainstream American journalist is pretty low as long as you don't do stupid things. I wasn't that worried about it. You just sort of keep your game face on."

Alan's cell phone rings and he takes the call. "You're saving me," he says with gratitude to the person on the other end of the call. "You're saving me."

Alan has got a lot going on. When he is at Arts + Labor, people often duck in and out of his editing suite, or he in and out of theirs. He takes many calls about many projects. And for his Television Reporting class at UT, he fits in office hours on campus on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

"I'm teaching skills that are transferable. If you can gather and distill [information] into some sort of cohesive story, you can take it to any medium," he says. For that reason Alan chooses to teach future journalists, despite his own desire to step away from the news industry.

"Journalism's journalism," he says. "The industry goes through cycles, but the ability to tell a story has value independent of what the business is doing." By teaching these skills to his students, Alan is passing on his passion in life.

"I like teaching here because I feel like this is what I know how to do. I tell stories. It's fun to get to do that."