Frontline ’s reputation rested to a considerable degree on its choice of topics. Fanning, who likens his role at Frontline to that of the executive editor of a newspaper or magazine, says conversations about potential topics were ongoing. He maintained a running list of contenders. “We very often sit and talk about ideas,” he says of his executive team and producers, “and an idea begins to emerge.”

It’s not actually so much what the subject of the film is going to look at, it’s the angle of vision. If you can find a way to kind of move the chisel over to another place, and hit it sharply, you might just crack it open in a new way. That’s the heart of what we’re trying to find. ^[3]

Listen to Fanning on brainstorming ideas.
Length: 46 sec

But where newspapers typically were looking for a story that would resonate the next day, and magazines the following week or month, Frontline had to work six to nine months in advance. “I think a little bit of it’s crystal ball stuff, a little bit of it is us trying to second guess where the zeitgeist is going to be,” notes Fanning. One technique Frontline employed to identify unique angles on stories was to give producers the time and resources to research a topic before any film was shot. “The greatest gift of Frontline , the thing that distinguishes it from everything else in television, is the time that we give people to do that, the time to research and the resources to research,” says Fanning.

Producers. Frontline chose its producers carefully. It maintained contractual relationships with some 20 independent producers across the country. Frontline might work with seven or eight of them in any given year. The producers ran independent businesses, but once they signed a contract with Frontline , editorial control passed to the program. In producers, Fanning looked for “this very peculiar combination of real journalistic instinct and reporting skills, and then I’m looking for filmmaking. I’m looking to marry those two.”

Once he had assigned a producer to do a film, Fanning took on a more literary role. He helped frame the narrative, focused always on what would fit into an hour of video. “It’s a very old-fashioned blue-pencil kind of idea, saying ‘I think you buried your lead,’ or ‘You want to impose some shape on it.’” He tended to think in terms of acts: “There’s three acts or five acts… and sometimes there’s a prologue and three acts and an epilogue.” Executive Editor Wiley calls it film architecture:

How do we create an architecture in picture terms that does service to the journalism?... It’s very challenging work to sustain a program without commercials for an hour, and sometimes 90 minutes.” ^[4]

While Fanning played the role of narrative guru, Wiley was in charge of maintaining uniform editorial standards, as well as reviewing scripts with an eye to such elements as bias, wrong word choices, or missing information. “My job is trying to maintain the journalistic standards and practices that we use,” says Wiley. But mostly, Fanning and Wiley acted as intelligent cheerleaders, encouraging quality work. Says Fanning:

The job of an editor, in the literary sense, is to encourage an author to find the enthusiasm firstly, and secondly the obsession. Because they’re not good if they’re not obsessives; they do have to get pretty obsessed by the film.

Fanning was prepared to support his producers if things did not go as expected. He was also ready to take the tough decision to pull the plug on a project he deemed irretrievable. But in the end, Frontline producers enjoyed significant autonomy. Fanning says trust was essential to the institutional relationship:

We are only as smart as our producers are smart. We are as honest as our producers are honest. We are as trustworthy as our producers are trustworthy. You’ve got to give them their freedom to do the work.

Listen to Fanning on qualities in producers.
Length: 37 sec

In the fall of 2004, Fanning thought it might be time for Frontline to take a look at the state of the national debate over abortion. It had not addressed the subject for over 20 years, since a landmark 1983 film called “ Abortion Clinic. ” That film took viewers for the first time inside a clinic to talk to patients and doctors. Fanning thought he had just the producer to tackle such a topic: Raney Aronson.