Frank Doelger — TV Producer

Frank Doelger is a multiple Emmy Award-winning TV producer whose credits include HBO’s Game of Thrones, Rome, and John Adams. Frank begins by talking about Williams and the professors who had an early influence on his career path. He then discusses his time as a graduate student at Oxford, where a chance encounter led to his becoming a theater producer. Afterwards, the conversation turns to how Frank broke into the TV business, initially as a script reader for network television. During the remainder of the episode, Frank details his role as an executive producer on Game of Thrones, one of the most successful TV series in history, and other HBO hit productions. Lastly, we hear about Frank’s latest project, The Swarm, produced by his new production company, and the Winter Study class he taught this past winter. 

00:00 Introduction
00:44 Time at Williams
01:40 Discovering Passion for Narrative
04:30 Exploring Career Options
10:14 Journey into Theater
14:33 Struggles and Triumphs of Early Career
17:48 From Unemployment to Columbia Pictures
27:05 Joining HBO and Learning to Produce
31:40 Mentorship Under Linda Gottlieb
35:23 Frank’s first hit—“Taking a Stand” (ABC)
44:09 Rome (HBO): Creating Problem Solving
52:04 Game of Thrones (HBO): Creating Worlds
56:03 John Adams (HBO): Bringing Historical Figures to Life
01:12:00 Balancing Fantasy and Reality on Game of Thrones
01:16:54 Reluctance to Work on Game of Thrones
01:27:53 Working with Writers
01:32:51 Deadlines and Stress
01:35:39 Critics, Criticism and Controversy
01:45:08 The Swarm and New Projects
01:51:58 Winter Study at Williams: Getting to the Big Idea
02:09:52 Reflections on a Career in Television Production

This interview was recorded in February 2022 at CDM Studios in New York City.

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Senior Producer: Jon Earle ('09)

Transcript

NOTE: This transcript is machine-generated and has not been edited. It may contain errors.

[00:00:00] GORDON EARLE: Welcome to A Williams Life. I'm your host, Gordon Earle. The purpose of the show is to explore the lives of Williams alum, particularly the class of 1975, and today we're privileged to be talking to Frank Doelger, who's led an extraordinary life as a television producer. In the last 20 years for HBO, he has produced such hits as John Adams, Game of Thrones, the Rome series. I think most of you have probably seen those programs in all or in part. So today we'll explore Frank's life and career his time at Williams and what happened both early in his career and later his career, he's developed a reputation as one of the top television producers really in the world. So Frank welcome. And, uh, let's begin with your time at Williams. Tell me about any memories that stand out from your four years at Williams. 

[00:00:54] FRANK DOELGER: I think like a lot of our classmates, I arrived at Williams, not having any idea of what I really wanted to do. It was yet another stepping stone on one's progress to an ultimate goal.

And I had not yet defined that goal. And my first year was interesting, but I think I really had no clear direction. And I think at the end of that first year, I had soured a little bit on college in general in Williams because I felt that somehow I hadn't connected in a way that really was meaningful to me.

And I pretty much decided that it was going to be. My experience at William was simply going to be four years getting his good marks. And then that would lead to the next step, whether that was law school, wall, street, whatever. Um, and then I had this remarkable experience. The beginning of my second year I enrolled in two literature courses, one on the 19th century, novel taught by Larry graver and the other one introduction to poetry taught by Bob bell and both were quite extraordinary.

I began to sense that this was a field that I really liked and fortunately having to very good professors who I think sends something in my work as well. I remember that halfway through the fall semester of my sophomore year, I met with Larry graver who told me that he thought I had a very interesting take on the connection between characters and plot, and that I seemed to be very good at analyzing stories from a character point of view, and that he had, that was something you don't see quite a bit.

He felt a lot of students, they were very analytical about the text. They talked about themes and obviously the way the stories developed some plot, but there was this quality I seemed to or instinct. I had seemed evidence, which really was this understanding how characters drove stories. And that resonated with me.

And I thought it was interesting. I was not aware of that, but it certainly made me more interested in literature as a subject. And about the same time I was taking a course, the course with Bob bell and he'd assigned a poem. I believe it was designed by Robert Frost. And he asked me once if I wrote poetry and I was really surprised about this because I'd had never written poetry.

I still don't. I never done any creative writing, but he was asking me because he thought I had a very good ear for language and what language can suggest on one level and other levels. And because of those two conversations, two things happened. One of which I embraced my education. I thought, actually, this doesn't have to be a stepping stone to what happens next.

I maybe can really dig into a subject that inspired me and find that time valuable in it itself. And also it started me certainly clarified that I should major in English literature, but it planted a little bit of a seed that this may be something that also I would pursue in the future. So those two professors in that year, Completely reversed.

I think the rather negative feeling or the disappointing feeling that I'd had that first year, and I began to understand that this was a fantastic opportunity and I also became very interested in other courses because of that. So it was, it was quite a remarkable passage for me. And it certainly was proved that I had probably of all the colleges that I had thought about probably ended up making the right choice.

But 

[00:04:30] GORDON EARLE: you weren't thinking television at that point, right? 

[00:04:34] FRANK DOELGER: No, I had, I had still had no idea what I wanted to do. My default position at that point, uh, was a law school. I thought perhaps maybe wall street. It seemed to be where a lot of my friends were going. And my last year, those were the two options. And then I remember when I had my final meeting with Larry graver, who was my faculty advisor and my oral examination.

I remember I was sitting in Stetson library after this oral exam and he sat down next to me and he said, listen, very carefully to what I'm about to say, this is absolutely the worst time in the world to try to get a job in academics. I'm not quite sure why he said that, but I seemed to remember that there was very high on enrollment in academia.

He said, If you are thinking of it, I think you might have a shot of it, but I beg you. If there's anything else you can do, please do it. . So I remember thinking at that point, so now there were maybe another choice, maybe academics were a choice. I thought also, maybe working for a foundation, but again, those all seemed real jobs.

To me, the things that I really loved, some of the extracurricular activities were more like hobbies. I had a lot of friends at Williams who were very involved in the arts as well, but again, I think in my mind, they were much more passionate about it. They seemed to be headed for that career track. I seemed a little bit of a Deton.

So I had, again, I graduated from Williams. I went off for three years, courtesy grant. I got to study at Oxford, still thinking I would probably come back and pick up where I had left off the end of my senior year. Thinking about those more predictable tracks, 

[00:06:17] GORDON EARLE: if you hadn't had those two professors, would you have gone to law school?

I mean, did they make enough of an impact that they, um, gave you a new direction and without their input, you wouldn't have gone 

[00:06:31] FRANK DOELGER: there on balance? I would say yes. I think that without getting that very important steer, that sense of I had a specific talent or gift, I think I certainly wouldn't have taken advantage of the education I had and I probably wouldn't have dug as deeply into literature.

And I think I was. Practicing skills, developing skills that came into aided me later and probably attributed to my getting jobs later on. So I think I would say I'm balance, uh, yes, very much so. I mean, again, my career has been very much a matter of chance meetings, um, or moments like that where suddenly a door opens doors said, I hadn't even thought about opening.

And most of the time I had the courage to go through them, but that was definitely the first door that opened. 

[00:07:25] GORDON EARLE: So it sounds like, um, cuz we're all deeply involved in the liberal arts education at Williams that it did in fact, you know, have a meaningful impact, uh, on you as becoming a successful television producer, liberal arts and, and what you did and what you achieved and accomplished in the direction it gave you impacted your, your not only your career choice, but your success in 

[00:07:49] FRANK DOELGER: that career.

Absolutely. And one of the things I'm often asked is what is the value of film school producers, writers, directors always ask me, do I think it's necessary? And I always I'm on the fence about that because I think again, it's very valuable for some people, but what I really have appreciated in my career about having had a liberal arts and education.

Is how my frame of reference for a lot of the projects on which I have worked has been enriched by that. I had a situation on game of Thrones repeatedly when I'd be meeting with all the department heads. And one of the tasks, one of the challenges in game of Thrones was how to avoid all the medieval cliches.

The novels take place in a vaguely medieval area. But again, we didn't wanna be specific about it. And of course, one of the giveaways for a medieval show is armor. I remember one of the very first meeting I was for my first meetings, the directors were there, the writers and various department heads. And I suggested that to get away from the medieval cliche, they should look at samurai armor and there was dead silence in the room.

One person finally said to me, is that like the armor that Tom cruise wore in the last samurai. And I said, no, that's the armor that was designed by a costume designer. I said, you should go back and you should look at semi armor. And of course, once they did, they found it was this treasure trove of images, materials, textures, colors from which they could draw.

And that has been very true of my experience in a lot of my projects that. Very limited frame of reference that people have where they always refer back to other television shows other movies in their terms of their thinking visually story wise, I think it's a real liability. And I've always tried to tell people that yes, maybe film schools, a good idea, but the more important thing is to have a full visual and also a more expansive education across disciplines, because I guarantee you you'll have a much more interesting treasure box from which you can pull to create worlds and define characters and enrichen stories.

Let me ask 

[00:10:15] GORDON EARLE: you, uh, after you graduated from Williams at that point, did you know you were gonna focus on television, interested in stories and characters and at what point, but did, was television in your focus 

[00:10:27] FRANK DOELGER: then? Not at all. I received, um, scholarship to Oxford and expert, and I had a very good tutor and I met with him and he asked me if I was interested in academic career, I was at that point planning to get my fill, uh, my doctorate.

And I said, quite honestly, I'm here because I wasn't quite sure what else to do. uh, I said probably I, after this experience, I imagine I'll probably go back to where I was before I came, which is thinking now about maybe law, maybe wall street, maybe an academic career, but I think that's unlikely. And I also said I was very interested in just traveling as much as I could while I was in Europe.

And he suggested that I concentrate on the work of Milton and Spencer. He said, once you get through paradise loss in the ferry queen, there's not that much of it. And he actually was very generous because I ended up spending, I would say about 80% of my time, either on the river rowing or doing other things.

Um, except for the last six months when I buckled down and actually managed to get a good degree. But I talked about earlier, um, about how doors open my second month at Oxford, I had stopped for lunch in a restaurant and I had happened to have a copy of a new Yorker magazine. It was a, I had brought some new Yorkers with me that I hadn't read.

And I was flipping through this magazine and this man came over and looked over my shoulder and he said, are you from New York? And I said, yes. And he sat down next to me. And he said, I've just been asked to direct, uh, production of cabaret at the Oxford Playhouse. Do you ever go to musicals? And I said, occasionally, I said, growing up in New York, one goes, but he said, well, tell me everything you know about musicals.

and this is a chance encounter. This is a chance encounter someone I had never met before, who happened to see that I was reading the new Yorkers. So we spent two hours talking about the musicals I had seen at the end of the, which he simply said to me, how do you feel about directing cabaret with me? I said, yes.

So it turns out the man that I was seated next to was named Alex Cox, Alex Cox, after graduating went on to direct sit and Nancy repro man, and had quite a, a early spectacular career before burning out completely. But as a result of that, I, um, I started directing, um, at the Oxford Playhouse and I co-directed a series of very successful shows there.

And it was a time also when it was quite an interesting group at, at Oxford Richard Curtis, who went on to write four weddings in a funeral nodding hill and oone Atkinson. Mr. Bean was there the whole group that created black adder. We same time. We had a lot of projects in tandem with Cambridge when Emma Thompson was there, Steven Fry.

So I suddenly found myself involved in the theater and my final year there after I had taken six months off and gotten my degree wound up to the Edinburgh festival. and Richard had written a man named Howard Godel who then did all the music for black adder had done the score and Ron Atkinson Stard in an adaptation of even Wallace, a loved one, which is about a mortuary in Los Angeles.

And it got a lot of attention once in prizes. And as a result of that, I was offered a job working for a theater company production company in London, which I accepted three weeks later, there was a knock on my door and it was the immigration authorities. The unemployment in the arts was incredibly high.

At that time. I had a student visa which had expired and I was given three weeks to leave the country so, um, so I did not go into my time in England thinking about the theater. And then I had a rather rude awakening because suddenly what I thought was going to be interesting career ended, uh, I came back to New York and it was interesting because at this point I thought this is a nice chapter and it's over.

I thought probably law school is looming yet again. Or maybe wall street. 

[00:14:39] GORDON EARLE: I'm already saying Frank, don't do it. I'm saying don't do it. 

[00:14:43] FRANK DOELGER: Well, the next chapter was rather dark, but ended up rather positive. I, it was November and I decided I would give myself a year to see, to try to figure out what I wanted to do.

And I was. Having dinner with some friends on the west side. And I was walking back and I happened to walk on 54th street and I walked and I'd heard about studio 54. I'd never been there, but I saw this huge crowd on 54th street. And I suddenly realized this was the FD 54. And I stopped looking at the crowd and I suddenly realized, uh, the doorman was pointing at me and signaling me to come forward.

I wasn't quite sure what this meant, but I came to realize actually he was scanning the crowd and deciding who would come in and who would not come in. And so I was chosen. I came in and I realized at that moment, why one of the reasons studio 54 was so successful because it's like winning a race. You know, when you get in the door, you've won something.

And everybody else is in a very good mood because they had won admission as well. That one night led to soon. I was going two nights a week, three nights a week, pretty much six nights a week, and staying very late and sleeping through the day. And I realize now, in retrospect, I was just delaying, I, this is a wonderful way to, to get through this period without really having to make any hard choices about this time.

I was. Occasionally, I would send out a resume to different theater companies. I got a little bit of work editing. I got a little bit of work interning, but it really nothing was really developing. And then I had another door opened, which was about six months later. I was leaving about six o'clock in the morning as was my habit.

And again, I was walking down 54th street and as I was leaving, the woman who worked at the coat check was leaving and she was someone we noded each other. I think there was a sense that we were both amused, that we were both there. She didn't fit in. I certainly didn't fit in. I had never spoken to her and we were walking down the street going east.

I discovered she had gone to Wellesley. She had graduated in 1975. She had grown up about 600 feet from where I had grown up. My parents had a house in Connecticut and we got to fifth avenue and she said, I have to go to work now. And I said, what are you doing? What do you mean work? She said, I'm a reader at Columbia pictures.

And I said, what is a reader? She said, well, all the studios in New York, the networks, they get unsolicited manuscripts, um, and screenplay. And I go on the Monday morning, I pick up a pile of these and then I do book reports and they're always looking for new people. So anybody with an English degree, you've got a pretty good chance of getting a job.

So. I went off. I slept, slept off the night. Uh, I put on my jacket and tie and I knocked, went up to Columbia pictures and handed in my CV. Uh, the next day I was called, as it turned out, they were looking for readers and I was given a test read. And one thing you should know, after four years at Williams in three years at Oxford has had to do a book report.

So I did a book report and I suddenly had a job at Columbia pictures. And what was so strange about it was that I remember for six, almost for six months at six o'clock in the morning, I was walking east on 54th street. And I would see all of these young men and women dressed in their business attire, heading to their office, all very eager, going to ABC and CBS MGM was there, Columbia, and suddenly six months later, I'm now in my jacket and tie heading down 54th street, passing all the people coming out of 54 as I was going to my office.

So that was a point when I thought that, uh, yes, finally, I would, I would make a career of this. 

[00:18:56] GORDON EARLE: And tell me a little bit about what you were doing during those early years, literally. So you were reading these scripts, um, offering notes on scripts and giving your opinions on scripts. Was that the, the 

[00:19:07] FRANK DOELGER: essence of the job?

Yes. What I would do and of everybody else with me, uh, we would be the first read. So we would read material. And then we would do reports. And most importantly, we would recommend it to our bosses if they should read something or consider it. And then of course, if these reports would then be sent along, uh, up the food chain, so my boss would read it.

If he liked it, he would then send my report to his boss. So it really was just giving, there were three things you were doing, one of which you were giving a log line, you had to put in two sentences, you had to reduce the story down to a pitch. You'd give a very good synopsis and then you'd give a recommendation and the pitch and the recommendations were the most important.

And the recommendations were very much dependent on your analysis, a little bit of the marketplace, your own judgment, or, um, obviously referring to other work. And I, I had a very interesting experience. So I was doing that, I think for about four or five months and whether this was just luck that I was getting good material or my reports were good, but they kept getting sent pretty high up the food chain.

And I remember quite a few got to the president of Columbia pictures in the west coast. And I really, I enjoyed this and I began to think that the next step would've been the next step after that is you actually part of the story department, you would be instead of just reading the material, you would then meet with the, the writers and you sit it on the meetings to discuss the material.

And I was showed up one Monday morning. And instead of my pile of scripts, there was a note to come see my boss. And I went in to see him. And even before I sat down, he said, your work is not up to par. Um, you're out of here and I was fired. No explanation. I was just, and I was stunned because I had thought I'd done a good job.

So that sent me into a bit of a tailspin. And I also, it was interesting about this time I was getting in touch with a few of my friends from Williams. And it was interesting to me that one by one, my friends who had thought about being poets or painters or sculpture musicians, those dreams were falling by the wayside.

Um, I think some were getting married. Some had children, some financially, but it was, I was a time when I thought maybe I was kidding myself, that we all, we all had these dreams of doing something different, something a little bit, um, outside the expected path. And so having been fired now, um, I really thought, okay, maybe I have to rethink this, but I was also very lucky at this time.

And I can't quite remember. I think one of these quotes came from Shirley hazard. The novelist I had read while I was a reader. There's nothing safer than wanting nothing. And. I also realized at that time there was probably nothing sadder than wanting nothing. And I also had read this obituary and again, I believe it was a man named Samuel Rose and he was very successful and he was interviewed at the time of his hundredth birthday.

And they asked him, you know, for a man who was accomplished so much, you must have been very ambitious. And he said, yes, I was always very ambitious. And my ambition was to have an interesting life. I think when you and I had spoken earlier, you talked about north stars in one's career. Yeah. And I think those two quotes were, had actually become a little bit of a north star for me.

So I decided not to give up quite yet. And then I did something very fool hearted. I knew that I had to get a job again quickly. And, um, there's a painting that I had admired for years. Um, since I'd been back in New York and actually it was at a gallery before I even, um, had graduated from Oxford and I went down to this gallery, it was still for sale and I bought it and I absolutely could not afford it.

But I knew that if I had bought something that I couldn't afford, it would be a great incentive to get another job. And as it turned out in my career, I was fired two other times. And every time I was fired, I would do something equally extravagant as a motivational tool. Yes. Fortunately the week after I bought the painting, I got a call from the head of ABC.

Man named ed vain, who was head of the miniseries movie week division and something that I had a book that I had read, and I had done a report on Columbia pictures had to deal with ABC. It had ended up in his desk and he was looking for someone in the story department. So he called me in and he offered me the job.

He said, by the way, you probably don't remember this, but we have a personal connection. And I said, I don't remember what is the connection? He said, my wife was your dead mother when you were a Cub scout . And I said, are you calling me in for that? Or, or because of my resume, he said, no, I'm calling you in from that.

But it, it, the name stuck with me. And I remember calling my parents, who I had once asked, you know, anybody in the entertainment business. They said, not at all. This is not a world they felt comfortable in. And I then called my father again and said, did you know that Mrs vain was my Cub scout leader? He said, yes, we seem to remember that.

But we thought it better not to tell you . So I found myself employed about two weeks later, a man named Henry Gettel, who was at that point head of the Columbia pictures office in New York, he was coming into ABC and I was leaving. And he said to me, I have a bone to pick with you. I said, what do you mean?

He said, I was really offended that you quit without telling me. I said, what do you mean? I wasn't, I didn't quit. I was fired. He said, I was told that you quit. And I said, I guarantee you Henry. I was fired in no uncertain terms. So what I realized that that moment, that obviously I probably was doing too good, a job.

And the man from mine was working, uh, decided it was probably better to get rid of me. And, and you were a threat apparently. And, um, that ended up being very good advice for the next job. But just to finish that story, about six months later, I was, um, invited to a party that was being given creative artists agencies, which is one of the new agencies came to New York and there was a big party.

They were giving. And I was invited as a representative ABC. And as I walked into the venue where this party was being held, I saw to the corner of my eye, um, a man in a white jacket and a black tie walking through the room with a tray of Orde with canopy. And I realized it was the man who had fired me that the story he had lost his job.

Wow. And I had this moment when I thought I was thinking, this is an absolute, fantastic moment for revenge, but then actually I suddenly felt so sorry for this man that he was. Serving or DURs to people in the industry and that he really must have needed a job badly. And I left the party. I just thought the idea of running into him for him to see the person that he had fired, who was now at this party would actually make his situation worse.

So it was the one chance in my life. I was presented an opportunity for revenge and I didn't take it, but wow. Looking back, I think it was the right decision. Yeah. If you're a 

[00:26:58] GORDON EARLE: thoughtful kind considered person, you don't like to do that kind of thing, 

[00:27:02] FRANK DOELGER: um, tempting as it was at the moment. Yeah. 

[00:27:06] GORDON EARLE: So how did you make your way to HBO?

Or is there something you want to talk about between ABC and HBO? 

[00:27:14] FRANK DOELGER: Um, I think we, when we were speaking earlier, you asked if there was a moment when I really became convinced this was the right job for me. So I'll tell you that step. Um, having learned my lesson at Columbia pictures again, I was very much the low man of the totem pole at my job at ABC.

And I had pretty early clocked that there were a couple of people between me and the head of the vision. Two people were incredibly ambitious and really were keeping their eyes behind them as well in front of them. So I decided that I would keep an incredibly low profile, do my work and keep my head down and.

Six months into the job. There's a very good producer named Linda Gottlieb who went on to produce dirty dancing in other projects. And she had a project that we were working on and there was a screening of the director's cut. And we were invited from ABC to go to the screening. And I had never been to an editing room and I'd never been to a screening of a director's cut.

And they, we sat, we screened the films for 90 minutes. And then there was quite a protracted conversation among the director, the writers, the producers, Linda, and my bosses from ABC. There were some significant problems with the film. And as I was listening to the conversation, not saying anything, I began to have a sense, what was actually really was wrong, that they were talking around that.

And I also begin to have an idea what the solution was. And as I was leaving, I said to Linda, I think I know what the problem is. And I think I know how to fix it. She said, what do you mean? And she, um, and I had never spoken at that and I'd never spoken in any meetings we had with her. I made a note to, um, two scenes that I thought to start with.

She should change the order of, she said to me, what are you doing at seven o'clock? I said nothing. She said, come back and meet me at seven. So I went back at seven that night. Without telling my bosses and the director was there, the editor, and I spent 45 minutes telling them my thoughts about rearranging the scenes and the director.

Wasn't quite sure what to make of this directors were, he was very attached to his version. The editor was more open and Linda just said, let's try it. So at the end of the two hours, I think about 60% of my notes had been affected. And at the end of which it was better. And I, Linda invited me to dinner afterwards and she said, you're really good at this.

And she said, did you enjoy the last two hours? And I realized that those two hours are probably the most ly exciting I'd ever had in my life. It was much more exciting than anything I did at the theater. And I suddenly realized, yes, this is probably what I should do. And maybe I had a real chance of succeeding at it.

Yeah. 

[00:30:20] GORDON EARLE: And we, when we talked earlier, and this is an example of it, is that when you observe something, you see th something that others don't see and that's a talent. So they were looking at that. They were invested in the movie you were watching, but you could look at it objectively and see something differently and something valuable for.

[00:30:42] FRANK DOELGER: I think so I had a very much of a fresh perspective. I also think having learned my lesson at Columbia by not saying anything at the screening, cuz I, I had a feeling that probably if I had made my comments in front of everybody, they probably would've not been as well received. But the fact that I had the moment to actually not be afraid to make mistakes, I mean, Linda encouraged me when ideas weren't clear, she said, let's just try it.

And so it was very much, it was different than just giving notes. I was actively involved and because it was all new to me, I didn't know about the 14 drafts of the scripts had been written. I didn't know about all the other cuts I was coming to it with a completely fresh perspective. And that was definitely very valuable.

And it's something that I've very much tried to do in my career. I always try to have screenings for people, not test groups, um, which a lot of studios do. They're just screenings of people that get together just to hear their thoughts on things. 

[00:31:40] GORDON EARLE: Did you receive any advice early in your career before you became an executive producer that was meaningful for you from someone that you respected and listened to and you took hold of that advice?

[00:31:54] FRANK DOELGER: I think early on it was Linda Gottlieb. So after that event, Linda called me about a month later. Uh, and she said, I can't afford to match your salary, but if you come work for me, um, I'll teach you how to be a producer. And I said fine. She said, however, you have to quit from ABC. I said, why? She said, I can't poach you.

Mm. So you have to go to ABC, quit, and then I will hire you. . So I had a very good friend at ABC and I said, how is this gonna go down? And he said, not well. Um, so I, I renegotiated with Linda. I said that I would go to my bosses at ABC and say, I'd been offered a very good job and I'd like to take it. Um, and I'd be very happy to give them another year if they wanted and then take it.

But it was important to me. And I thought I'd learn a lot. 

[00:32:55] GORDON EARLE: Um, and Linda was gonna give you that flexibility 

[00:32:57] FRANK DOELGER: if you wanted. Yes, I, yes. She said, yes, that's fine. I, I can wait a year if you feel you really, I said, I've only, I have been there less than a year. Um, there, and fortunately ABC said yes. Um, I think they felt that I they're making investment for the future as well.

So I worked, I went to work for Linda and two things happened. One of which was, I was very pleased. There was a novel that I'd always loved and the rights had gotten into turnaround and I was able to get this novel and I sold it back to ABC to develop for a minis series. And Linda told me to go find a writer.

And I found a very good writer, actually was loing Mendel, who ended up writing conspiracy. And which we'll talk about in a minute. Yes. And so I had my first meeting with Lori, Lori and Linda and Linda had never met loing. She had admired his work and she sat down and she said to Lauren, the first thing I want you to understand, the way I work is I tell writers, read the book twice, then throw it away.

And I was completely shocked to hear this. It was a very well respected book. We had paid a lot for the option, but she was making the point that we had to make it something different. It wasn't enough to say we're adapting a novel. And I, I certainly learned in the course of my career, that was actually incredibly good advice because the creative process has to allow you the freedom to transform things in every aspect I think to be truly successful.

The other thing she told me was a few months later, I got my first pickup of small show that I was doing for ABC, got a green light and I raced into her office and I said, we got a pickup. And she said, okay, what's next . I said, what do you mean? She says, what's next. I said, well, we make it. She said, no, I'm not asking that question.

What's the next project, because this company won't succeed and you're not gonna succeed. If you go off put all your time and energy in producing this and you don't have a second, a third and a fourth project. Wow. Okay. Backed up. So I said, well, can we just celebrate for five minutes that we got the pickups before you're making me feel bad about the fact that I don't have the second, third and fourth projects, but I remember that as well.

And so again, I find myself often saying to the people with whom I'm now working, what's next, every time we get a pickup. Oh, that's 

[00:35:23] GORDON EARLE: funny. Um, do you wanna talk a little bit more about your, uh, early producer days? Or should we go to your executive producer role? Cause that plays very much into the creative process and we can pick up on that role now and, and delve into how you look at projects creatively.

[00:35:44] FRANK DOELGER: So I had another great opportunity, which really was key to development. My, of my creative judgment, which was I had done a film for ABC called taking a stand. It was a very simple story about a black family, wanting to move into a white neighborhood in New Jersey and the evening before. This family was to move in.

There was this horrible racial graffiti sprayed over the side of the building. Everybody in this town knew exactly who had done it. And the police were determined to find who the perpetrators were. There was a conspiracy of silence between all the neighbors and no one would talk to the police, uh, except for one 14 year old boy who happened to know the son of a policeman.

And then he casually let it slip who had painted the side of this building. He was a single witness to this and the whole town turned against this boy and his mother. This kid was beaten terribly twice hospitalized. Um, by schoolmates, his mother was fired from two jobs. Um, they tried to burn down her house, all of which to bring pressure on this young boy and family, not to testify.

And this young boy, actually, every time they struck out against him, he was more convinced that he had to do the right thing. So he did take the stand. He testified and the people who had done it were thrown in jail. The show appeared on ABC and the next morning or two mornings afterwards, there was an op-ed piece in the New York times, which said this show should be required viewing for Ronald Reagan and the Washington establishment who feel that civil rights is no longer a problem in the us.

About 20 minutes later. My phone rang and said, Mr Dolger please hold for Michael Fuchs. Michael Fs got on the line. He said, you know, Mr. DOR, this is Michael Fuchs. I'm president of HBO. I said, I know who you are, Mr. Fuchs. . He said, um, I read the New York times this morning and I saw the article. I was wondering if you would have some time to meet this week.

And I said, how about now? um, I thought about flipping through my calendar and I realized that it would probably not a good idea to pretend I was very busy when I wasn't. And I went to see Michael fus and he introduced me to a woman named she Evans in the documentary division, other executives. And he, they said to me, we want you to come work here.

We don't care what you do, as long as you get those kinds of notices, because for HBO to be successful, we have to get off the entertainment. Pages. Reviews are great, but what's more important. If we can get journalists who cover politics or social, social, um, areas, science, religion, if we can get them paying attention, we think that will make us stand out from the networks.

And I then went to work for HBO. And that actually, even when I must recently started my, the two companies, I'm now part of after leaving game of Thrones, That's how I've always defined the projects. Can I find projects that can get off the entertainment pages? So that was very much the, the next north star that I think I probably had was.

Um, and again, it doesn't apply to everything, but it's something that I've tried to keep very much in mind and either find projects that speak to that, or develop them in a way that will get that sort of attention. 

[00:39:21] GORDON EARLE: Well, let's, let's focus now, um, on your role as an executive producer, and you've now, uh, gone to HBO, um, where you've had a long string of success.

And I read in the notes that you provided me, that you defined a role as wholly creative. Is that a unique role for an executive producer? And you can define what that means. 

[00:39:44] FRANK DOELGER: So let me just start off by saying that anybody who is ever watched the credits for a Phil, a film or television will see dozens of people with either executive producer, co-executive producers, producer co-producers credits.

So there's a lot of confusion about that title, what those jobs are. And I won't go into all of that, but in television, particularly television series, where you have more than one director, often the creative vision has to fall to. the executive producers. Sometimes it's the writers. Sometimes a director will come in early on, but in my experience, it really is for the executive producer, particularly if you've developed a project and you're the person putting the whole thing together, that job can very often be creative.

It can be logistical and it can be financial. I very early on discovered a couple of things that I was not good at. I never have responsibility for budgets. I will give away the shop to get what I want. And I realize that was a not particularly helpful. Um, when you're trying to budget a show, people come to me.

If there's a financial problem, I know what the budgets are. I always stay within them, but I don't wanna be responsible. I'm not the person signing the checks in terms of logistics. I don't wanna worry about where we're gonna park trucks. I don't wanna worry about crew salaries. I don't wanna worry about any of the physical things that go on in production.

I think my strengths and my interests were very much completely on the creative side, essentially. I think as my career developed about creating worlds. So it is quite unusual because what I do in large part is also what writers do and directors do. But I've had the luxury of working on projects where writers and directors have been very receptive to having a bit of a, a larger overview that I've provided sometime because I've been involved in projects longer.

And I can take a step back. You know, I, I wrote quite a bit and I directed a bit, and I honestly felt that I was good at both of those, but I wasn't as good as the writers and directors that I wanted to work with. So the fact that directors know that writers know that they don't feel threatened, I'm there to help, to help them define, find their way into something, drawing on my own experience.

And it wasn't, it was a role that served me well, because quite a few of the projects that I've been offered are ones where HBO or other people evolved feeling. There was a little bit of a hole in that side of things. And so I've been asked to step in and help out, you know, on that side. And it's been, it's been very interesting and very rewarding.

And I think, again, fortunately, it's been a good match for my talents. I've also a lot of times I've compared it to conducting an orchestra. If you think about a production and you think about all the people, everybody has a screenplay or a script, the words are on the page, but if you think of musicians sitting at their music, stands with a score, think of how many different ways you can interpret it.

so what a conductor does is help bring the music to life by getting from the score to what is actually being created. And I think my job is the same. I'm trying to find a way to make sure all the people looking at the screenplays, looking at the scripts, I can help them figure out a way how we're gonna get to the screen to make sure that we're very clear about what the ideas are, helping them realize that.

And I think also making sure we're we have the same goal in mind makes a lot of projects can go terribly wrong. Uh, if they, if there's confusion about that. So 

[00:43:43] GORDON EARLE: you've created a role that plays for your own strengths and your own talents. Um, what's the best part of the job. I'm I'm gonna tip my hand a little because we've had previous conversations.

I think it's just creating the world that you want for the productions you want, but is that the best part of the job for you? 

[00:44:02] FRANK DOELGER: It's certainly the most creative part of the job. And I'll give you one example why I find it so satisfying. I was asked to come into a series called Rome. HBO had, uh, green that the show it was filming for.

Quite a while. And I think the footage was good, but they perceived it wasn't as good as it could be. And I happened to be in Italy at the time, uh, shooting my house in embryo with Maggie Smith. And I wrapped that in HBO, asked me as a favor to go down to the set, to look at some footage. And I was very impressed with what they were doing, but I did perceive after my course of conversations and looking at the material that the pieces weren't quite fitting together.

And so I began to speak to people. I knew some of the department heads, um, I even knew some of the actors and it was really interesting to me that I asked everybody about, I said, do you, again, what was, what is the big idea? What were you hoping to accomplish? Without exception? Everybody said the brief is to create a vision of Rome that no one's ever seen before.

So after about four or five of these conversations, I then asked the following question, all right. You've told me what it isn't supposed to be, but you're defining it by a negative. What is it supposed to be? What does that mean? And no one could answer that. They just kept saying it had to be different.

And I . And I realized at that point, that was the problem. No one quite had figured out what an alternate version of Rome should be. I was very fortunate in that there was a man named Jonathan stamp, who at that point was working at the BBC in the factual division. And he was a consultant on Rome. He was only working.

I think he was coming down previously, maybe one day, every two or three weeks. I sat down with Jonathan and over a course of a long dinners. I asked him everything. He knew about Rome. John Jonathan had gone to Oxford. He had done his degree in classics and also modern history. And Jonathan held me completely spellbound for two evenings telling me about Rome.

We then went down to Pompe. We went to the museum at Naples to look at the artifacts they had from Pompe. And at the end of this, I suddenly realized that what Jonathan was describing was exactly what I had experienced five months before, when I had been in India, I had been in India. I had spent a week in Calcutta and as Jonathan, at the end of these conversations, I realized that everything that Jonathan was saying about Rome applied to Calcutta, this incredibly vibrant, dirty, chaotic city, a city with a rich and poor lived side by side, too many people, too many languages, too many religions, a city where the air is thick with a smoke from all the fires.

I think Jonathan told me at one point. I forget how much, but tens of thousands of lumber were burnt every day to, in Rome to heat, water and everything else. And so, so I went to HBO and I said, what I think would work is if we actually imagine that we're not telling a story of ancient Rome, we're telling the story of a city like Calcutta.

And I presented that idea. I thought I was done. And they said, well, can you stay around and produce it? And I said, yes, because the process of discovery of what I learned about Rome, how I made the connection with Jonathan Calcutta, realizing again, that this was an incredibly interesting way forward. I loved that part of that.

And we did this and it worked, I mean, it completely transformed people's experience. They were no longer, they were no longer defining the project about what they didn't want it to be. They were defining it by what they wanted to be. But you were 

[00:48:12] GORDON EARLE: the one who were, who was doing the defining. 

[00:48:15] FRANK DOELGER: I was the one after my conversations with Jonathan who came up with a definition of it.

Um, and then again, going back to the orchestra, um, analogy, suddenly they had a different score on the music stands. They know they didn't just have the scripts, they had images of Calcutta and they. We're very much suddenly they were on the same page. So once they were there, then it was a question of, of pushing them along.

And the other thing that was very gratifying about this was so part of it is obviously getting people to understand the same brief, but also we had a crew of 400 people. And how do you make sure, um, that they stick to it? So occasionally there was, there was a little bit of correction be done, but what was most rewarding was that one day someone in the makeup department came to me and he had said that he had been looking at pictures of Calcutta and also India.

And he kept coming up with these photographs of people, with their faces colored in bright colors. And there are a lot of Indian holidays where people celebrate by painting on themselves and throwing colored powdered into the air. And he said he was doing research. He was really wanting, he was really hoping that he could find a similar ceremony or ritual in Rome, but he hadn't, but he had discovered some something very interesting.

He had discovered that followers of Jupiter painted their faces red. And he was wondering if when Caesar made his triumphant reentering in to Rome, since he was a follower of Jupiter, we could paint his face red. What was remarkable about that moment? I thought this is a man who took the lead, thinking about Rome's Calcutta, found something.

In Indian rituals, did the research came back with an absolutely fantastic idea because Caesar's reentry into Rome has been dramatized filmed dozens of times, it's written about no one's ever made the connection between the fact that it's quite likely that as a follower of Jupiter on high holy days, which these events were, he might have painted his face red.

So this was quite out there as an idea. And everybody got very excited about it. I spoke to HBO about it and they said, yes, but please make sure you do it twice in case it doesn't work. So 

[00:50:53] GORDON EARLE: you shot both scenes one way. Then one without the red 

[00:50:58] FRANK DOELGER: face we did. And HBO was still very nervous about it. But, um, if there's one image that's been reproduced most often from Rome as a series, it's Kirin HS as Caesar reentering Rome with his face painted red.

[00:51:17] GORDON EARLE: The question that I wanted to ask, and it comes from another story you told me before we sat down is. one of your joys is that you have the vision you're conducting the orchestra, but people then are listening, coming back to you with their own ideas. You're not telling them what to do. They've understood what you're trying to say, and they are bringing you their own ideas about how to execute it.

So it's come full circle and you're all working 

[00:51:42] FRANK DOELGER: together. It is an interesting cycle because again, I present the ideas and people come back to me with ideas that have been spawned by my ideas. And that's fantastic when that happens, but what's also fantastic is how I've been able to use the big ideas as we've all agreed to help people find the right solution.

Game of Thrones was a very, very complicated production. We sometimes had as many as four different units, uh, shooting simultaneously. So I was very concerned about making sure the crew really understood the, some of the briefs we had talked about. And one of the briefs that we had talked about very early on was that to give each world a very, very specific visual reality.

And what I suggested early on was that everybody had to imagine that every group, every world we visited, what people built with, uh, what they dressed, what they ate, what they made weapons of all had to come within a 50 square mile radius of where that place was. So clearly, if you take a simple example of what people drank with at the wall, they drank with cups, made a bone in the north.

They had cups made of some sort of metal King's landing. There was glass because King's landing was a place where trading was possible. And some of the more suddenly kingdoms they were terracotta. That's just one example. But early on in the second season, we had a scene at dragon stone, which was a very Northern, hostile wintery climate.

And I came under the set and there was a bowl of red roses on a table. And I said to, uh, the prop master who was a new hire, I said, I'm just curious about the red roses. What are they doing here? And he said, the director asked me for something red. And I said, okay. So those can stay. If you can tell me where they came from.

He said, what do you mean? I said, so we're in a Northern climate in the middle of winter. There are no greenhouses. There's no FTD, there's no federal express. Where did they come from? And he said, got it. He left the set. And he came back with a bowl of red BES. So my hope would be by simply asking the question and having him think about the answer in the context of what we had thought about.

He would find the answer. 

[00:54:15] GORDON EARLE: Yeah, it sounds like what you're doing either consciously or unconsciously is creating a production team. And I mean, team in quotes where you're all working together for a common objective and a common goal, and you've all bought in to this big idea and what it means. 

[00:54:33] FRANK DOELGER: Yes. And again, I, I've never been a captain of a sports team, but I'm certainly reading what Harry was able to accomplish.

And you're, um, I think it's really remarkable that there are people coaches who actually do the exact same thing. You actually have to get everybody playing the same game. It's 

[00:54:50] GORDON EARLE: interesting that you should bring up Harry again, because he told me that good coaching is good teaching in a nutshell, that's what it is.

And there certainly is I think an element of teaching in producing 

[00:55:04] FRANK DOELGER: very much so, 

[00:55:05] GORDON EARLE: so Frank, you've talked about your career and your role as executive producer. Now I want to drill it down into some of the productions, but before we do that, whether it's your idea or you're presented with an idea to produce, what makes you decide that you want to do a project?

[00:55:22] FRANK DOELGER: I think what is true for writers, directors and producers across the board is the starting point is often the characters. So that's the bedrock in which any project is built. but I think increasingly, and certainly as my career progressed, I became as interested in the possibility of creating worlds and whether that was creating entirely new worlds as we did in game of Thrones or as recreating reimagining worlds that sometimes had been seen to access, certainly stories about the American revolution.

I think ancient Rome as well, the two movies I did about Winston Churchill, that period. So there are, there are certain stories. You, you like 

[00:56:05] GORDON EARLE: the characters you're drawn to the characters and then you're gonna put them in a setting. And it's that imagery that you also build that ties the character to a scene at a setting that works and excites you.

[00:56:18] FRANK DOELGER: Yes. And I think if I think there's an opportunity to use the characters in the worlds as a springboard for my own imagination, to push myself and challenge myself, to find something new, something on the scene of knew something unseen about it. I would say that's probably the biggest factor in why I've decided to accept the projects that have been offered to me of late and increasingly.

And 

[00:56:40] GORDON EARLE: do you know what the world you're gonna build when you start a project or is that an evolutionary process? 

[00:56:47] FRANK DOELGER: It's a complete evolution. And as I said previously, we were talking about the parts I, my job, I enjoy most. That's one of them. It's the evolution of the idea. It's the discovery. I'll give you, uh, an example on John Adams.

John Adams came to me and it was a very faithful adaptation of David MCs biography, but it was the drafts that I first read were a little bit lifeless. There was nothing on the page that made me feel these, this was at all different from anything I had seen or read about this period. And I knew that it would, would only succeed, um, on HBO if it were in fact different.

And I thought starting off, it was a very difficult period to breathe new life in because at one point you want to be historically accurate. And unlike Rome, I mean, John Adams, his life, his times were still surrounded by the buildings and the furniture and the costumes. I mean, there's, that period is preserved in aspect, you know, throughout the United States.

And we actually, in some ways we had too many references and I had a sense that I knew that I had to start looking maybe at things a bit differently. And I wasn't quite sure how to do that, what the way in. And it all came together for me. When I was looking at images of the various characters, the casting department had put together for reference portraits of all the great men of the time.

Two things were interesting is that every, I discovered that every portrait of John Adams was very different because he kept changing his hair. He kept changing his wigs, which told me a lot about the man, but I saw a portrait of Alexander Hamilton. And what I noticed was that he was dressed in a very dark coat and the flakes, the collar and the neck of his jacket were reflect with white.

It looked like an extremely bad case of dandruff. And then I noticed in another portrait, this same flex of white, and I said to an historian with whom you are working, do you know what this white is on the collars of these men's coat is this fabric that's worn through? Is it some sort of painterly device?

And they said, no, that's powder from the wigs. Men would powder their wigs and the powder would fall off during the course of the day. These are portraits, which actually captured that. And that led to a, the first and the key conversation I had about making John Adams a differently. And it was about wigs.

What I learned very quickly was that at that period, A little bit like the sixties, how you wore your hair, spoke to your politics. So if you were conservative, you shaved your head. You, you cut your hair very short, or you wore a wig. If you were a radical or more liberal, you grew your own hair. You didn't wear a wig.

And that became key to suggesting in a way, the politics of the various players. Well, 

[01:00:14] GORDON EARLE: this may be too granular, but I think that Benjamin Franklin had his own hair for what that's worth. But when you look at the two and Benjamin Franklin doesn't have a wig and John Adams does, and they present themselves very differently.

[01:00:28] FRANK DOELGER: And Thomas Jefferson wore his own hair. Samuel Adams wore his own hair, but was also interesting is that as I started doing research into wigs, I discovered that most men like John Adams would have three or four wigs during his life. Um, they were very expensive and they were almost worn like hats. So you would get a very good wig, which you would wear in all public occasions as that wig became dirtier or greasier or lost its shape, you would buy a new one, but the old wig became like a hat.

Then John would wear that when he was in the fields and along the way you could remodel them. But then I was speaking to the hair and makeup department and I said, all right. We have a couple of challenges here. We want to make a point that some men are wearing wigs and some men aren't. If we have men without wigs and we have men with wigs, how will the audience know that there's just not good wigs and bad wigs?

The wigs that don't look like wigs aren't necessarily good wigs they're men's hair. And that the wigs that men are are wearing are wigs will look like wigs. And so what we decided then to do was in when the first scene John Adams rides across the Boston, common on the Eve of the Boston massacre, he comes in, he goes to the fireplace, he takes off his coat, he takes off his hat.

Then he takes off his wig. He shakes the snow off of it, and then he pops it back on his head. So that became very much, we wanted to see men taking their wigs on and off like hats. It's a small detail, but it suddenly realized that if we kept looking deeper at all the conventions of dress and building, we would undoubtedly find lots of ways to breathe new life into it.

And when I say for me, it was always, the key thing is coming up with a big idea that informs all your choices. That was the start of that examination. Always coming back to this big idea, what was it? And the things that we know so well that if we looked at differently from a different angle, this also became very clear to me when, as I read.

the screenplay and the dialogue sounded quite forced in places. And then I realized, of course, as I became more familiar that the writers were simply quoting from John and Abigail's letters. And then I discovered of course, that in John and Abigail Adams in most instances made an extra copy of the letters.

They knew these letters, or they had a pretty good guess these letters would be read and they wanted to preserve a copy for posterity. And it became very clear to me that people like John Adams and Abigail very well educated, very conscious of words were completely different in writing than they would've been.

So we tried to do is to find scenes that were as far away from the language and the formality and the cordial replies and diction, they use to distinguish them as individuals. But how did you 

[01:03:31] GORDON EARLE: make that leap so that you made a, your best attempt to know what they really sounded like in conversation? How did you decide that?

Because you know what they wrote? Yes. But how did you decide or figure out how they spoke? 

[01:03:45] FRANK DOELGER: Well, technically what we did was I was told that accents in that period, we're very regional, depending on where your ancestors came from in England, you probably picked up that accent. So John Adams had an accent that was very.

Like the accent of the town from which his family came as were most of the people in Boston, Thomas Jefferson had a very different accent because his ancestors and most of the people around him came from a different part. So that gave us away into the accents. But in terms of how they spoke, you know, I 

[01:04:25] GORDON EARLE: maybe you have to take a little creative license cuz no one knows exactly how they spoke, but, and I, you, you figured out, 

[01:04:32] FRANK DOELGER: well, actually I think what I figured out was that I kept trying to imagine scenes where they would be like any couple.

So for example, the evening before John Adams is to present his defense of the British soldiers who fired on, uh, the citizens of Boston in the Boston massacre. He spent days writing the speech and he was reading it to Abigail. And originally it was staged in a drawing room, but I knew that John Adams often worked through the night.

So we decided that would be a scene where Abigail who was raising four children running a farm was probably exhausted. She wanted to go to sleep. Adams was pacing. And so he put that scene in the bedroom and it became a very human scene because also John Adams. Probably would've like nothing better than to climb into bed with Abigail, but he had to work through the night and Abigail kept sending him away.

So that scene had to become about a couple who would love to get into bed together, to sleep, to make love. But in fact, one of them has something to do. One is tired, the other one has work to do so when you have a scene like that, you have to find the language that fits that scene. So I think that the key was to find scenes, that real people experience that we all know, which will give us a way into the dialogue.

And I think their scenes particularly became very much, that was the dialogue of a couple. And that was the same approach we took even when they were in the white house. Yeah. I 

[01:06:11] GORDON EARLE: mean, the one thing that struck me about John Adams brothers is that you take these iconic figures and you make them real, they're real people.

And you know, where that comes out, other than wigs and languages, uh, in the debate at the continental Congress where you depict them and they're taking their wigs on and off, they're yelling, they're sweating, they're arguing, you know, it's a very chaotic kind of scene. It's a very human scene and it's not idealized.

And that's what you presented the humanity that was taking place, as well as the, the great history that was 

[01:06:46] FRANK DOELGER: unfolding. And that was very important. Those scenes, because that was, there were scenes during that. section where men were making great speeches. Adams had one of his greatest speeches of all time.

So for those speeches to really resonate, they had to be separate from the discourse. If, from the moment you started that everybody was speechifying, it would be another speech. But when we switch gears, so radically, you suddenly realized how brilliant that speech was. And Paul Jimma of course performed it brilliantly.

But the other scene that I always remember that I was very pleased with and also speaks to how we found dialogue that suited the characters when they weren't making speeches. There's a scene that's very well known when Thomas Jefferson had done his first draft of the declaration of independence and he's reading it, he's presented it to John Adams and Ben Franklin.

And of course, Ben Franklin and John Adams are giving notes. And I realize I had been in that scene, thousands of times, a writer's room, you were, was a writer room writer's room. Yeah. And I remember the dread when you hand, um, you know, when I would hand in a scene that I had written to the people who had, were sitting in judgment over it, how difficult it was.

And so that became quite a comic scene. And also I think it became a scene which was very real about how do you say something isn't very good while you're trying to not demoralize them. So again, by finding situations, so it wasn't, again, Thomas Jefferson presenting a draft and everybody's folding over with how brilliant it was.

They started really picking the words apart, because again, if you look at the changes that Jefferson made from first draft to second to third draft, you realize that was probably the process going 

[01:08:37] GORDON EARLE: on. And in the details, I remember the scene, cuz I saw it recently. Jefferson's getting his back up a little bit, but he goes along with it.

I remember there's a particular word. I can't remember what it was that and alien bolt. Yeah, exactly. That that Ben Franklin wanted. And then, and he's persistent and uh, and uh, Adams is, I'm sorry, Jefferson's getting his back, but he lets it go. Yes. And then if I remember the scene, another detail, if I got this correct, they end the scene.

And then, um, Ben Franklin comments on the swivel chair at the end of the scene that Jeff, that Jefferson had designed. Yes, it was a really nice little detail, but it's sort of like, let's be friends again and you made a nice chair. Yeah. That I'm sitting in 

[01:09:19] FRANK DOELGER: that scene really became about the men in the room.

It was about Jefferson who did not take criticism lightly. It was about Franklin who was very clear about what he wanted was brilliant at managing people and that's details. Wonderful. He actually ended the scene with a compliment. Yes. Yes. So he, he tried to settle the waters by being complimenting a very VA man and Adams was a little bit as a, of a go between.

You know, he sort of, he was offering his opinions, but again, he, he left the stage to, to Jefferson and Franklin. Adam's also being a writer. I think he was more sympathetic, a little bit to Jefferson because he knows how hard it is to write those sort of documents. And in 

[01:10:06] GORDON EARLE: an earlier scene, again, it's fresh in my mind, you know, he, he makes it very clear because I think Jefferson says, why don't you write it?

And he writes back and says, you're a better writer than I am. Yes. You know? So he understood his own limitations. He understood he could be cantankerous and boisterous. His is John Adams, but he knew someone else else's strength. Yes. And he said, you do this cuz it's so 

[01:10:30] FRANK DOELGER: important. Yes. Um, I was very proud of that line because I've used that line a lot when I've had writers who say, just write it if you know what you want.

And I say, you're a better writer, so leaving it to you. Oh, that 

[01:10:41] GORDON EARLE: makes them feel very good. it always does. They're gonna write a good scene. One thing, um, we're talking about the historical dramas, you know, and now I'll get back to some of the details, but why are you drawn to that subject matter? You don't exclusively do that.

Game of Thrones would be an example, but what is it about history in these great figures that interest you? 

[01:11:03] FRANK DOELGER: Well, again, if we take it as a starting point that they're fascinating characters, but they're fascinating characters in, in all dramas. I think it is the opportunity to reexamine worlds, to. Find of ways to connect the worlds we're creating to the characters, which historical dramas period dramas offer brilliant directors, brilliant costume designers, brilliant set designers would say.

And I agree that if you're doing a drama now and you're going to someone's apartment on the lower east side, every detail in that apartment should say something about the personality, the character, that's a canvas. That's a little bit too small for me. I prefer the, the bigger challenge of creating a bigger world, but I did make a conscious decision after game of Thrones.

When as you can imagine, quite a few other projects, game of Thrones, like projects came my way. I decided that I was going to try to do something very different. So all the projects I'm doing without exception now are all contemporary and some in the near future. Cuz I wanted to see if I could take that same world building creative skill and apply it in a way that I hadn't before mm-hmm 

[01:12:20] GORDON EARLE: so the, the, um, you know, the interest in, in characters, which is also just so important, so you have great characters and then you have to make them particularly interesting and have a fresh look at them.

And I think that's what you've done. We've did some talking about that with John Adams is a fresh presentation of him in his environment, his relationship with Abigail. So you could say this is a fresh look, not an old. It this 

[01:12:44] FRANK DOELGER: great man. Yes. And I think that freshness of approach really was something.

Actually, I kept in mind, uh, with game of Thrones, when I was asked to come down on game of Thrones, it's not a genre I had ever worked in. I hadn't read the novels. I actually don't read fantasy or science fiction, but I did a little bit of a crash course looking at a lot of similar projects out there.

And what really struck me was that there was a visual disconnect and a tonal disconnect in most of these projects between what I would say were the more realistic aspects and the more futuristic fantasy science fish and a aspects. And so I was really intrigued about whether or not we could approach the fantasy elements and the real elements of game of Thrones with this, painting them with the same brush, trying to figure out a way that the worlds were consistent, that they were tonally the same.

And that was quite an interesting challenge because I always felt that that series had to work simultaneously on both levels. You had to be invested in the characters in the real world, in which they inhabited at the same time, that had to feel part of the fantasy world. So 

[01:14:05] GORDON EARLE: that it's almost like historical fiction in a way.

Would you say that right? Or I think you said the fantasy elements were grace notes. That's those are your words because you wanted to inject a sense of realism into this world of fantasy. 

[01:14:21] FRANK DOELGER: Is that yes. Is that accurate? Yes. I think particularly for the first season, as we found our way in, I, I strongly believed and most of the people with whom I'm I was working were the same opinion we had to, we had to get people who don't normally watch this type of material hooked by the characters in the worlds, in which they live.

So again, I felt that the balance between fantasy and reality was something we had to strike very carefully in season one. And I think we did that quite successfully that most people, when you speak about it, yes. They remember the fantastic moments, particularly the end of the, the first season when the three a Deras survives the fire and the three eggs actually have hatched in their dragons.

We have other moments like that, but 80% of that were really following the characters and the dynamics between them and exploring the real worlds in which they live. And then I think, again, as the series progressed, that balance began to change that actually the fantasy elements became more prominent and that was the way the world developed.

But certainly as a starting point, I felt very strongly that we needed to ground it that way. Yeah. Cuz it, 

[01:15:33] GORDON EARLE: it, I mean, when you're watching it at many aspects, it feels very real. Mm-hmm there's not a lot of sorcery. There's not a lot of magic they're dragons. But they're they feel like real characters. 

[01:15:45] FRANK DOELGER: I remember I had this moment when I was looking at the first episode when the Starks are going through the woods and they, they find the dire Wolf, which is a beast that was rumored to exist.

You weren't quite sure it was mythological or they weren't quite sure if it actually existed or it really, or it was just something from tradition. I remember thinking actually I was walking through central park at the time and I had just read the script and I thought, how would I react if I came around the corner?

And there was a dead unicorn. And I imagined myself in that situation, suddenly a character, which was a fantastic, as far as I knew, was a fantastic character, a creature fantastic creature that has been portrayed dozens of times is part of a lot of different mythologies. But as far as I know, never existed.

And what would it be like to have all that information? So again, I, I think partly when I was thinking about that, speaking to the writers was to keep reminding everybody of what would our experience be if we in fact were confronted with some of these things. Wow. 

[01:16:55] GORDON EARLE: I know I would, if it was, uh, this animal you're talking about, I would be scared and I would call the police or nine one, one.

um, let's talk about game of the throne and how you got involved, because I think people would be surprised to know. I think you turned it down three times and you were very reluctant to get involved and then you did. So tell me about your reluctance and tell me why you eventually got involved. 

[01:17:23] FRANK DOELGER: I had a wonderfully successful relationship with HBO.

I was producing for them almost exclusively for most of, uh, my career. And I got a call about a project called game of Thrones, and it was a project that had been in development for quite a while. Two very good writers, a very good pilot script, but I don't think anybody really had a hook, a way into the material.

It was very risky. It was something very much outside of the kind of very expensive, very expensive. But I think again, uh, just so different than the other shows that HBO had done. So I was asked to take a look at it and I was sent a screenplay, the pilot, and I was also sent some images of the fan art. If you go online at that time, and you see all the artists who had created images based on the novels, and I found them appalling, they were cheesy mil dramatic.

They were the kind of things you see on. Terrible romance novel covers. So the writers were good. I, there was, there were wonderful lines and there were some wonderful characters, but again, I couldn't really get a handle on it. So I wasn't particularly interested executive there. I, I really liked to ask me to reconsider.

I went back and I read, I agreed to read the first novel, which I found an interesting read it. Wasn't the type of material that I would normally read. But again, George, a Martin is very talented. There are wonderful moments, wonderful scenes that I was struck by. So I agreed to come out and I met with the two writers and the network executive, um, who had become the producer on the project.

And we had a very, very interesting meeting, which I just said, I explained why I'm I was hesitant about this, because again, I, I said, you know, you're really, this is not in my wheel box. This is not material. I really know what I would do with, but I said that if you are going to do this, the one thing I would advise you is you have to make, I said, reading the material.

And even in the pilot, I was very confused about bouncing between worlds. And I said, the thing you really have to be careful about, and you really have to think about is how you make sure all these worlds are distinct. And I said to them, you should be able to put a character you've never seen. Up against a backdrop, a flat, and based on the color of that, the texture, the way it was lit, what the character was wearing, the colors of the clothes, the patterns, whether he, it was a man, whether he had a beard short hair, what the woman's hair with, and you should know instantly which world you're in.

It sounds somewhat, 

[01:20:12] GORDON EARLE: I'm sorry, I don't wanna cut you off. It sounds a little bit like Rome where you had, you had to create a world that didn't exist when you were introduced to the, to the, um, production and here you had to figure out also what the world was gonna look like in a way that reflected the realism you're talking about.

But again, you had to create a world that made sense in all its details. 

[01:20:39] FRANK DOELGER: Yes. And even though it sounds like a direct connection from Rome to game of Thrones, John Adams figured largely in that, because also in John Adams, I learned that sometimes the big idea can spring from small details. Give, gimme an example.

So in John Adams, the observations about the wigs led to a realization that actually we had to look deeper. So the big idea in Rome was let's make Rome Calcutta. The big idea in John Adams was all right, there's so much information out there. We just have to look at it differently. So that was a different game of Thrones fed on both of those ideas.

What were the small details that would distinguish it? And also what were the bigger ideas that would inform it? The bigger idea was I felt that we had to get the balance between fantasy and reality, right? The smaller details were how specific the worlds had to be, unlike the fan art, which the architecture made no sense, the costumes, no made sense and nothing in the fan.

Art looked real at all. So that was also, we had to make sure all those small details were real. Was that because they were 

[01:21:46] GORDON EARLE: sort of grounded in sci-fi mm-hmm they were grounded in, in a world that, that you didn't wanna represent. 

[01:21:53] FRANK DOELGER: Yes. You know, I looked at it, I felt that the, it should be animated. There was nothing real about the characters.

Um, and these visions I saw, I think that the other thing, a detail, that one of the examples, I think that was most informative for all of us, was the creatures called the others. It really was an examination about what was specific about these creatures. So these were men, these were creatures from the frozen north.

And was there a way to somehow suggest visually. Connect them to all the recent finds about caveman have been found, you know, buried in the ice. It sort of just led us to a path of saying, okay, there may be for all of these Fanta. So you're dealing with a completely made up fantastic character, a man, you know, a group of a group of mythical characters living in some sort of Arctic waste by the fact that we then said, okay, let's look at what these men who've been dug up recently found in glaciers.

What does their flesh look like? What's their bone structure? What were they wearing, not wearing. That was an example 

[01:23:08] GORDON EARLE: of what weapons did they have. They always look at that and yes. And, and they can even find out now what they 

[01:23:14] FRANK DOELGER: ate. Yes. So it was simply saying to everybody, wherever we can find a real reference for.

What's fantastic. Let's look at that. So I think conversations we had, um, about that really just start us on that path of examination or again, so it's a fantasy world. The goal is to make it as real, as possible with the grace notes of fantasy, but how do we make the fantastic creatures real or as have elements of reality that will inform our, our final decision about how to create that world and those characters.

Yeah. 

[01:23:52] GORDON EARLE: Um, I mean, that makes, that makes perfect sense to me. It also the realer, the characters and the drama. The more powerful, the impact is on the viewer as opposed to something that's so out there. And so sci-fi so to speak that you put it in that bucket, but if it becomes real, then the emotional impact on the viewers is, is greater.

I think 

[01:24:20] FRANK DOELGER: I absolutely, I think that's what, that's what I think we all, we all felt and we, we attempted to achieve now let me, 

[01:24:29] GORDON EARLE: uh, step back, cause we've talked a lot about the details and the importance of details, but this is you've, you've said earlier, a massive production. How did you help executive produce this massive production?

What were the major challenges that you were facing? 

[01:24:46] FRANK DOELGER: I think the major challenges are the same on a small film, as on a huge series, which is you have to get everybody on the same page, how, whatever, the, whatever that page is, you have to write it, make sure people read it and make sure they're interpreting it the same.

I think that I was obviously on something like game of Thrones. I was surrounded by incredibly talented people who are very good at their jobs. The fact that I didn't, I was not responsible for huge parts of that production. Made my job easier. There's no way I think one person could possibly have taken that on.

Um, certainly I would, it would've been beyond my ability. 

[01:25:29] GORDON EARLE: So you focus it within your wheelhouse, which was the creative 

[01:25:32] FRANK DOELGER: part very much so. Okay. And I, and again, my, so for me, it was very important that all of the elements that it attributed to, or all of the elements that were key to striking this balance between fantasy reality casting, obviously script the physical world, everything about that.

Those were the, the areas that I, I really concentrated on. I wanted to be the person to make sure that I was looking across all those departments to make sure they were working in tandem. Casting's very important because again, depending on how we cast it, you would, you had to create a world of characters that also seemed to inhabit this world comfortably with one another.

Is there 

[01:26:14] GORDON EARLE: anything you'd wanna say about the casting decisions that were made for game of Thrones was that mostly, you know, done by HPO and, and not directly something you were involved in? 

[01:26:24] FRANK DOELGER: No, I was, um, on any of the shows that people in my position are very involved in casting particularly is a show in which you're every episode, you're introducing new characters, those decisions rested with me and the other executive producers.

Um, the directors will weigh in, but it's not really directorial. I think that we had the luxury of, um, working. Two very, very good casting directors with whom I'd worked on Roman other projects, and they had wonderful taste, wonderful judgment. And particularly after the success, I mean the first season was more difficult because it, a lot of actors founded.

They didn't really understand the show. Um, when they saw it on the page afterwards, we, everybody was lining up to come and do projects. I mean, one thing we decided to do and we stuck to this was to try not to do any stunt casting. There are a few examples where people who are very recognizable snuck in, but by and large, they were not particularly well known.

Sean Bean was. But other than that, I think mostly unknowns. I saw some characters 

[01:27:29] GORDON EARLE: from Rome who by the way, were in, uh, game of throne. And so you, you borrowed some characters. 

[01:27:34] FRANK DOELGER: Yes. And the characters from Rome and game of Thrones, John Adams have shown up in some of my new pro will be showing them some of my new projects as well.

[01:27:42] GORDON EARLE: You sound like Woody Allen with your en ensemble 

[01:27:45] FRANK DOELGER: cast. Yes. But I think probably the, the characters that showed up, it was probably, I don't know, the, the thousands of parts we cast, there were very few, but they were memorable. Well, let me, let me 

[01:27:55] GORDON EARLE: touch on this. You've talked about the visuals in creating a world.

You've talked about the characters. I just wanna focus a little bit on the writing cuz everyone will talk and have an opinion on the writing of a show. So tell me about how you interfaced with the writers and what your role was in the writing of the show of any show, game of Thrones or another. 

[01:28:13] FRANK DOELGER: Game of Thrones.

I did not write a single word game of Thrones. I, my input was completely editorial. Uh, David and Dan, and the other writers that came along the way they was, they were a fantastic group. They had a wonderful handle of the material. So I would simply give notes as I, as I read the material, either production based or character based.

And they were very receptive to that. So that one of the things that I didn't have to do at all on game of Thrones was any writing. My other projects, I, and other projects, I was in a situation where writers get a bit burnt out and directors come on producers get frustrated. They think that the writers have hit, um, a dead end.

And the temptation is to bring in new riders. I've always worked very hard in my career to make sure that doesn't happen. I think that all the heavy lifting that rider do to get a project, to be green lit. If they're gonna run into issues, you just have to work with them. So what I would do is always, um, work very closely with the writers to make sure, instead of bringing someone new and I would help them get to where you needed to go.

And when that worked well, it was terrific. And I would find that occasionally they would ask me to write scenes, which I would present to them. They would write scenes and present to me. So it became very much. I was co-writing in a way to help them get to where I knew the directors or the actors wanted to be, and they hadn't quite got there.

And that was very time. That can be very time consuming on projects. And I think fortunately, I didn't have to do any of that heavy lifting on game of Thrones at all, but you did it for 

[01:29:56] GORDON EARLE: the John Adams. I remember 

[01:29:58] FRANK DOELGER: I did it with John Adams with the, you know, working very closely with the writer. And I also, because I was spending a lot of time on the set.

I got a very good handle on how the actors were playing the parts and how the director conceived scenes. And I, I think one of the skills I had, or maybe I developed is I'm somewhat chameleonlike. I do seem to have an ability to write in the way other people write or the way actors speak. So I think what made it a little bit easier for me, sometimes the original writers, when you depart too much from their vision or things go in a different way.

Can't quite recalibrate. I could come in and a little bit shift a bit. So I was able to, to help the writers get there sometimes just giving them very concrete examples of what I think sound scenes might sound like or could be. But I always tried to do it a little bit like Ben Franklin did with Thomas and Jeff with, uh, Thomas Jefferson to make sure I was respectful of their work and just acknowledging and helping where they needed it.

[01:31:06] GORDON EARLE: Yeah. And I also noticed, or we talked earlier, you made a decided effort to be discredited yes. As a writer. And that was, I guess, not to threaten the writer or make the writer feel at ease. 

[01:31:19] FRANK DOELGER: First of all, I didn't think it'd be fair. Um, you know, if writers spend years working on a project and they get it to be green lit, if I were to come in and no matter how extensive the work I was doing, it never actually measured up to the work they had done.

So I thought that was unfair. I also knew from dealing with people in the creative community, that credits are incredibly important. And for them to know that I was going in not asking for a credit, they didn't have to worry, which were my lines, which were my scenes. No one was going to know. Yeah. You know, I would have conversations on the set and when the writers weren't there and I could speak about lines that I had contributed, but they never had to worry about who was going to be credited.

And as an executive producer, when you see your own credit being diluted, by the way, suddenly everybody's given these types of credits, they don't do the jobs, but there are lots of reasons for that. And I was very sensitive to what it feels like to. Having your own credit diluted by other people sharing it.

So I did it out of respect for the writers. It was self-serving I knew I would get better work out of them if I wasn't seeking a credit. And also I just thought I knew what it felt like to actually, you know, have your credits diminish for and given to people who didn't really deserve them. Yeah. 

[01:32:53] GORDON EARLE: Um, let's talk about pressure, uh, just for a little bit, and it can be meeting deadlines, a former journalist I'm aware you have to meet those deadlines and you would have 11 episodes in a season.

There's tremendous pressure, right on the writers on the production to get it done. How did you deal with that pressure either on the writing or the, um, something that was gonna fit your vision within the context of a show that might have 11 episodes, those pressure all the time, how do you deal 

[01:33:28] FRANK DOELGER: with that pressure?

You know, it's funny that you're asking me that question. I have a brother who's a surgeon and has four children and he's, I'm always amazed when he says to me, your job must be so stressful, such high pressure. And I always say to him, you know, if I don't do my job properly, one day, a sea may not be quite as good.

A performance may not be good. You know, people live or die. So I always wanna put this in context. Yes, there are pressures, but they're not, they're never life threatening. I'm very committed to my work. I want it to be good. You have a lot of chance to go back and do things. I'm always going back and re-editing rewriting.

I go past deadlines all the time because I know what deadlines are true and which ones aren't. So it's a little bit of just, you know, I'm very aware. I'm very conscientious. I'm very committed to doing the best job possible. But as I say, um, my deadlines, my stresses are very easily delayed deflated born by other people.

So I think for me, I was just lucky to work with people who seem to manage things well, and I just try to manage them as best I can. You know, it's, it's, I'm 

[01:34:47] GORDON EARLE: gonna turn it around based on your answer is it's. It's not maybe. Tremendous pressure that you feel because no one died. On the other hand, giving the example of working with writers, it seemed that you wanted to relieve some of the pressure on them.

You didn't want to feel threat them to be a threatened by you taking your credit so they could work perhaps in a more relaxed manner with you. So it's a pressure reliever as opposed to someone who's gonna come up, come in and beat them up. 

[01:35:14] FRANK DOELGER: Yes. Yeah, no, I was, I think that's also very much part of my job is to find the creative space, the people with whom I'm working need to do their jobs properly.

Um, so I think because there are so many people who are under stress or put themselves under stress, partly what I try to do is diffuse that and I think in diffusing their stress, I'm defacto diffusing my own as well. 

[01:35:39] GORDON EARLE: Yeah. And, and, and get a better product as a result. Um, let me, I put a, a spin on the pressure thing a little bit and talk about critics and criticism.

Um, you've been blessed by doing many productions that well, well received, uh, won many, uh, Emmys and, and very respected, but, but there have been some criticism and we were talking about game of Thrones, um, and some of the criticism that came about the high level of violence, uh, in, in the series, either it could be rape torture or execution, battle scenes, whatever it happened to be, which was also very real in a very real part of life.

Is, uh, is as you wanted it depict, what were the discussions that went on behind the scenes, where you received some criticism in that area? How did you deal with it? What do you, what were you talking about with your fellow producers, writers, and directors about those, those elements? 

[01:36:35] FRANK DOELGER: We discussed this in great detail, and these were conversations that not only involved the producers, the writers, the directors, it also involved the creative executives at HBO, and it also involved other executives at HBO.

And it was always a question of what we felt or the consensus felt was appropriate for the show. There were a lot of people who would say, um, and I would say on occasion, I felt we aired. There were some scenes that I had argued against that I felt were too violent. I felt that even though that it was a show in which female characters were depicted as very strong characters, there was quite a lot of violence against women, sexual nature as well.

There were some scenes that people would argue were gratuitous and almost pornographic. And it really was. I think again, on balance, the group felt they were right for the show. It was a violent world. It was a violent world. And I also think what the. Critics and audience members aren't aware of, of how many, how many things we didn't do.

There were several scenes that were written that we never shot because of sensitivities on these issues and other issues. So it wasn't as if anything we wanted to do, we simply did. We really did give it very serious consideration, but having said that it really was. Yes. I mean, yes, we, it was a violent world.

And I'll tell you a very funny story about Rome, the first episode of Rome, which was also very violent, is sexually graphic. And there was, I recently 

[01:38:23] GORDON EARLE: saw that too. So I know 

[01:38:24] FRANK DOELGER: what you're talking about. Yes. And there was a screening, a premier, uh, to which I had invited my parents. I was very hesitant about, um, inviting them.

It was a very dairy, I had not really done anything quite like this before. And we screened the first episode and there was reception afterwards and I was hovering on the edge of a conversation. My mother was having with a friend and a friend of hers. Um, who had been invited was expressing shock that I had involved myself in anything that was quite so sexually graphic and violent.

And as I joined the conversation, I heard my mother said, it's historically accurate. she rescued you. She rescued me. And so I often think about the fact that historical accuracy, uh, you can justify a lot, but ultimately it's a matter of taste and judgment. And I think, again, these conversations were taken very seriously and I think there were dif there were differences, but I, I can say that I don't feel anybody was doing anything just because I, I don't think any of it was really gratuitous.

Other people would argue trying 

[01:39:39] GORDON EARLE: to titillate or something. They thought it fit the, the setting, the character in the time. 

[01:39:45] FRANK DOELGER: Mostly. Yes. Mostly. Yes. Yes. Well, let 

[01:39:48] GORDON EARLE: me ask you that. I mean, I was talking to my son recently who, um, I, I asked him what I should ask you. And, and, uh, he said there was a dichotomy here.

You mentioned, you know, strong female characters, and then there was sexual violence. So it's like, whether you call it a dichotomy life, isn't simple. And presentations of men or women is gonna be complicated and not simple. So you can have both things in the same production and that's life. You know, it is not a simple women are all one way.

Men are all one, one way. Um, and so he was talk pointing out that dichotomy to me, which I now present to you. 

[01:40:29] FRANK DOELGER: I think what you always have to be aware of is how powerful scenes are on the screen. I also think you have to be aware of that. Sometimes you seem to be giving license to certain types of behavior in a very popular show with characters that you even evil characters that people enjoy and follow.

So I think partly, yes, you're trying to create a nuanced balance view, realistic view of these worlds, and that will include some pretty unsavory elements. But I do think you have to weigh that against you have to weigh that and be very conscious of what you think the audience might be, might be taking from it in terms of what the intention of those scenes are.

And I think, again, I, it's a conversation that I think filmmakers have all the time on these types of projects. I think probably I know it's also a conversation people have in documentaries as well. Um, What you show and what you don't show and what you put forward and all the editorial choices you make.

Right? 

[01:41:38] GORDON EARLE: You told me a very interesting story. This is on criticism. That's not specific, but you told me earlier in your career, a critic had lauded your work and led later the same critic, criticized your work. Tell me about that story and how you relate to it today. 

[01:41:56] FRANK DOELGER: One of the first projects I did, um, got a rave review, um, particularly in the New York times and other and other papers.

And I was very pleased and I decided that this critic was genius. He understood everything that we were trying to do in this little film. He noticed all the production details, the casting, and I was thrilled by this. And the next film I did this same critic destroyed, uh, you know, everything that he had lauded in the previous one.

He absolutely attacked. And I went in to see my boss at the time, Linda Gottlieb, to whom I've referred before. And I said to her, I'm going to write a letter. This critic has completely misunderstood. He's got a deaf ear. He's doesn't understand what we were trying to accomplish. And I just really wanna let him know how disappointed I am and how much I had that.

I basically had reevaluated him as a critic. And she said, well, you know, you could do that or you could also ask yourself if he's right. And I said, why are you asking me that you told me that this is a difficult project, but you told me it was getting better and better. She said, yes. I told you it was getting better.

I never told you it was good. so I learned from that lesson, two things, one of which is that better is not necessarily good. And then she also said to me, my advice for the future, if you're going to read reviews, you have to believe the good ones and the bad ones. And , and I very rarely read them. going forward at this point.

And I try to, um, but I will tell you one very, um, one other story that reminded me of this, that I had, um, moving back and forth between Europe and various projects. I was homeless for about three months. I was staying in the, the barn of some friends and. They had, let me, they were said that I could come into the house whenever I wanted to, and I could use their laundry room and I didn't wanna disturb them.

So I decided that on the course of the three months, there was a, I would go down to the local laundromat. So I would go down in a Sunday morning to this local laundromat, with my piles of quarters and my box of detergent. And I was standing there at the machines and behind me, there were two women who had time magazine opened in front of them and were reading.

And it was the issue in which game of Thrones was on the cover. And the cover said you inside the most successful series of all time. And the thing funny was about it was I had, I had known this magazine was out this. I decided not to read it. And I thought I'm standing in a laundromat putting quarters in the machine, doing my laundry by two women behind me are reading about the most successful series of all time.

And it was, first of all, I thought it was, I was very amused by the irony. Yeah. But I also thought it's really, it sort of keeps your feet on the ground a bit. Um, and I just remember that because I still to date, haven't read that article. 

[01:45:07] GORDON EARLE: oh, , let's talk a little bit about, um, your next projects and the big one that's up now is, is the swarm.

So can you tell me a little bit about that and how it came about and you're producing it with your new company outta Berlin? 

[01:45:22] FRANK DOELGER: Yes. So to give you a bit of background, following game of Thrones, I was approached to start a new company and. what's happened in the last few years is most people know is that the market has changed radically.

So there are a lot of broadcasters throughout the world who have relied on acquisitions, uh, American UK projects. They buy them and they become a very important part of their schedule. They're audiences that really like what's coming out of the us. But increasingly with the advent of all the streaming services, those projects are not coming on the market.

Uh, if they are coming in the market, they're very expensive. One example. I don't have the exact numbers, but I know that game of Thrones was sold to hundreds of broadcasters throughout the world. My understanding is that for the prequel, which is now in post production, HBO will be keeping that largely for HBO max.

So that's happening across the board. So a lot of broadcasters find found themselves with a big hole in their schedules. And I was approached by one of the leading figures in Europe, in terms of distribution production sales, named Jan Moto. And he had been speaking to some of the people at these public broadcasters, um, ZF in Germany, rye, Italy, France, some Scandinavian stations and they all had this idea that.

We, they had all this air time. They had the money, which they used to spend for acquisitions. Could they start a new company that would produce for them the type of projects they used to acquire? So I was approached about starting this company, which was to do high quality, high level English language programming that would be tailored for their markets.

So it was a new challenge, something I had never done before. So I accepted it, but I accepted it with two caveats. One of which is I would not in any circumstances consider any projects that it all were like game of Thrones. I didn't wanna be in a situation where being asked to do the next game of Thrones.

And also you don't wanna repeat yourself. I don't wanna repeat myself. And also you can't repeat yourself. Sometimes. I also told them what my definition of international was. And I told them the story about when Michael Fuchs called me before going to HBO, I said, I need, if this is going to work, these stories have to get off the entertainment pages and what's gonna get them off.

The entertainment pages is a subject matter. It's not about location. It's not about casting. It has to be subject matter that we truly define it's international. And that of course led me to believe that everything should be contemporary. So they said, yes. And that's the com that's one of the companies that I'm now, uh, I'm now heading up and.

The first project is called the swarm. It's an adaptation of a novel written by Frank Shet sing. I believe it was first published in 2004. It's been translated and published throughout the world. And it's a very simple story about a group of scientists, mostly Marine biologist, uh, around the world who begin to observe in the, along the shores in the, where they work or live a series of very odd things going on in the oceans of the world.

And there's something about these events, which at first seemed explicable, but as they continue, they realize that there's something more going on here. They begin to suspect there's they may be there's some strategy, some plan. They can't quite figure out what it is. And as they begin to compare notes, they realize that these attacks aren't coincidental, they're strategic, and they go through all the likely causes and they come up with an idea, which is quite preposterous, is that there's an alien light force living in the ocean that has basically decided that it's time given the damage that we're doing to the oceans.

It's only chance of survival is if it takes us out before we take it out. And, uh, that's, that's the, that's the swarm. Yeah. And 

[01:49:46] GORDON EARLE: getting it off the entertainment pages. So it's a story, very contemporary to, to say society, which is climate change and the danger posed. And the fact that, uh, mankind is sort of screwing up the planet.

Yes. And now it's gonna get its payback. 

[01:50:00] FRANK DOELGER: And the thing that we did, which I think will really get it off the entertainment pages, I'm not sure if you know this, but this year there are hundreds of license out there for the rights to do undersea mining. And if these licenses are approved and if it goes forward, it will do reputable damage to the, to the bottom of the ocean.

So we have incorporated this applaud involving undersea mining, um, into the story because we wanted to give, make it very topical, something that's being discussed. And right now, green peace, a lot of other organizations are really mounting this fight to see if they can stop this. And it's very difficult because a lot of the things that come from undersea minings are the things that make our phones and our lives possible right now.

But most people don't know about this. I didn't know about this till I happened to see an article and the Atlantic about it, but we decided to include this, um, as a plot point, a very significant one. So we're going to be part, we're hoping to be part of this effort to bring attention to this. So that was, again, example of just finding something out there to.

Make it not only relevant, but particularly current. 

[01:51:10] GORDON EARLE: Are we not gonna be seeing John Adams and Rome anymore from you and your production company? Is it all gonna be modern 

[01:51:17] FRANK DOELGER: times? Probably not. There are two projects out there that, uh, I'm very intrigued by. One has to do with the history of Islamic, Spain and a period in Spain in which Muslims, Christians and Jews all lived in harmony.

What made that possible. And I'm very intrigued by that because it's a, it's a period I knew nothing about. And the more I read about it, um, I find it pretty fascinating. And the other project I can't reveal right now 

[01:51:44] GORDON EARLE: oh, come on Frank. It's just, just us and some Williams and alums listening in. 

[01:51:49] FRANK DOELGER: We're just in no, we're just in the middle of a ferocious rights negotiation.

Okay. So, um, I can't, but sorry. Well, 

[01:51:56] GORDON EARLE: we'll, we'll respect that we won't press you. Um, let's uh, come full circle back to Williams and Williamstown cuz you just completed a winter study project. Yes. And tell me about the central focus of the course and what you were trying to teach Williams students 

[01:52:15] FRANK DOELGER: looking back at my own progress as a producer, I realized that early on, I was relying on instinct that instinct my taste, my judgment in terms of what projects to take on and how to oversee them.

And I became increasingly aware. Um, particularly after I did a film conspiracy, which we can talk about a bit later then going into Rome, John Adams and game of Thrones, that one of the key elements to the success of any project, in my opinion, is the definition articulation of the central idea. If you have a strong central idea that will be the springboard for other sort of creative ideas, it will also give you the solution to problems that you have.

So I became very much aware that that for me, that was the key building block for the projects I was working on. And I think for most creative endeavors, people have that experience. You have to find articulate, find that idea. So the course was called getting to the big idea, and it was really, um, examination of how you find a piece of material, how you reduce it to what the big idea is by reducing it to the big idea.

You're actually opening it up in a way that you may not expect. So that's what we talked in the, over the course of the four weeks. We, I assigned a book of short stories. We gave it to the students. I asked them to choose two, to present to me, which they thought might be good for film or television. I also decided to.

I had 16 students and I put them in groups of four because I wanted them to understand that most creative enterprises, unless you're sitting at home writing, but even then, you're gonna get to a point when you're producing are collaborative. So I wanted them to collaborate together. I asked them to pitch them back to me from their two pitches.

I chose one and said, it's a film or television. Now you have to go and develop it. I then asked them to distill it down to what the big idea was to get it down to a five minute pitch, then get it down to four paragraphs. And then I asked them that's the written part. And I asked them to go out and find images, clips of other films, still images, reference photographs, pieces of music, uh, that would indicate to a reader, to the audience.

They were trying to interest or a buyer at a network, um, or a studio, what their vision of the project was. And it was very interesting how they, at first, they were very thrown by this. It's curious. I think there were a lot of students at Williams and I was probably one of those who got into a school like that because I knew exactly what my teachers wanted and how to give it back to them.

So when I kept explaining to them, there's no right and wrong. They were thrown by that. Um, and I think some of the, some of the first submissions I got. Uh, they really had missed the mark. And when I spoke to them, they kept saying, we couldn't figure out what you wanted. And I kept saying, well, that's because I don't know what I want.

I'm simply telling you there's no right and wrong. Also getting them to collaborate was interesting. But at the end, they really, they got it. And I was really pleased that, um, we ended up with a project that was, I think they did a very good job on the material. I ended the class with a screening of conspiracy, which is a film I did in 2000, 2000, 2001 for HBO.

And it was, it was a film about the VSE conference, which was a conference that was held in January, 1942, uh, almost exactly 80 years ago, uh, in which the Nazis planned the final solution, they talked about the details, the instrumentation of it, and the, the ambition of the piece, the big idea was to create a 90 minute film that completely retold a 90 minute meeting.

And it was a very simple idea, a very strict idea, and we developed it and we shot it and very good cast with Kenneth Branna and Stanley Tuchi and Colin Furth. And I was invited to look at the director's cut. And when I saw director's cut, I was horrified because. the director had intercut in the midst of this meeting, these men talking at the table about what they were going to do, uh, the most terrifying footage from the Holocaust.

So when they were talking about we're going to put Jews on trains, they had images of Jews being put on trains. They talked about the camps, all of this was unveiled language. The whole point of this meeting was they were being very careful to use phrases and speak around and all the way through. He had intercut this meeting with these images and it was terrible.

I mean, it was offensive. It was completely not what we had wanted and it was nothing. It was not a documentary. It wasn't a drama. And I asked him, I was surprised that he had lost his nerve. He's a very accomplished filmmaker. So I asked him to strip out all of this footage. And when he did, I realized that he was right, there was something missing.

It seemed a little bit flat, it seemed dull. But I also realized that I knew instinctively that the solution to this problem couldn't be bringing in something from the outside. So I went back and I kept trying to figure out what was missing. We were so clear about what we thought the big idea was, but the truth was we had a concept.

We hadn't really thought it out. And as I was going back and thinking about, and looking at my notes, I realized that one of the things that really struck me about it was that. This conference was not held in an army barracks, an office. This was held in a beautiful Villa on the shore of lake Vasay outside of Berlin in a house that had been taken from a Jewish family in which Hydrick, who was the head of this meeting, hoped to live afterwards.

It was a house hung with beautiful paintings, wonderful furniture, and the irony of these, this meeting, where these men are talking about the most horrific crimes possible in the setting, we hadn't really explored enough. I also realized that there was something very, we had missed another trick, which was there was an agenda kept at this meeting.

And at the end of the meeting, there were 30 copies made 29 of which disappeared. One copy of this agenda was found in the files of the German foreign ministry. And it talked about the bullet points of this meeting. The Nazis made sure to try to get rid of all copies of this. And even the notes that were taking, taking at the meeting, they were burning it.

They were told not to talk about it and they really wanted a curtain drawn over it. So then it occurred to me also, it's a little bit, this whole idea of a curtain being drawn over it. I thought it's a little bit like a play 15 men arrive at a meeting. You see them on stage in this dining room for 90 minutes.

they leave and the curtain is drawn and they hope history will draw a curtain over this as well. So I went back to HBO. I got permission to do some, uh, reshooting, and we went back and we shot an opening sequence where you see China being pulled out of cabinets. You see crystal being polished, silver being polished, you see name cards, being written.

You see a beautiful table being laid. You see food being prepared and you see this house being opened up in the morning and the stage is set. And it was all of the things that speak to civilization. The things that we've accomplished, you know, the refinements we are capable of in terms of our lives. And that became the setting for these men sitting at this table, um, having this barbaric conversation, and then we shot an end sequence where basically once they leave, the house is put back and the final images, the doors close again.

So you've had a house open, like the curtain going up. We also went back and, uh, we shot some other footage of Eichman listening to a Schubert quintet. And we did that because we wanted to make sure that we have a crawl at the end, talking about what happened to all of the men that were present. And the contrast of this heartbreaking, beautiful music by sheer over this crawl gave it power.

So when we changed the beginning, we shot all this. I realized that actually what we had done, the director was going to look outside for the solutions. I realized that by looking hard at the original idea, all the solutions that we needed were there. And curiously enough, when, you know, I know that reviews and awards aren't necessarily speak to a project success, but I would say that at every reward ceremony, in every review, everybody commented on these two factors, the way the doors opened down this meeting and closed at the end, the way that we really emphasized how we find and civilized the veneer that was applied over this meeting, um, and how that it was odd.

So I came away from that, thinking that there is, this is the way to solve problems. If you can find the idea, but you have to articulate it, think about it, apply it to all aspects of the projects. It's not just enough to say this is the concept. So that's why I wanted to end the class with that because I realized from that point forward, I was looking.

I learned a very valuable lesson. I was looking much harder at this idea that I had articulated, but I hadn't really thought through. And I think if I hadn't done that, I think my career after that and the work I had done would probably not have been at least in my own mind as successful. You 

[02:02:32] GORDON EARLE: know, I saw, uh, the, uh, the film the other day, cuz I knew we were gonna sit down and talk and it reminded me of 12 angry men, um, where you have in that case, 12 jurors in a room deciding a case in the, the, the energy and the drama that's just created by what happened in that room.

It didn't have to be embellished was very gripping and it seems that you've done a very similar thing here. You didn't SIFY it with a lot of, you know, inner cutting. You said, this is what happened. This was dramatic and we're gonna show it. Is it 

[02:03:09] FRANK DOELGER: unfold? Very much so. And I think the writer of the project loing Mendel, who was the writer that I had spoke about earlier, who came in to write one of the first projects I was producing.

And Linda Gotlieb said, read the book and throw it out twice. He was the one who wrote it. And 12 angry men was very much, uh, the model he had in mind and how powerful it is when you just get people in a room talking, you know, 

[02:03:31] GORDON EARLE: one of the things that struck me is we've, we've listened to some horrific conversations from certain groups in contemporary America, very ugly conversations.

This conversation took place when they went around the room and introduced themselves with highly educated men. I think there were nine lawyers or something like that. There were a lot of lawyers and that was the other juxtaposition that these well educated people could Conco something that was so 

[02:04:00] FRANK DOELGER: horrible.

Yes. And we thought very much, particularly in the casting of Hydrick who was the mastermind and that's what Kenneth bra did. So brilliantly, this wonderfully, you know, Ken, Branna just his, his intelligence shines forth. He is, has this air being very worldly, very erudite. And to see him mastermind this meeting and manipulate this man so easy and so effortlessly, it's really shocking.

And I think the casting of how there's a sort of 

[02:04:34] GORDON EARLE: brutal intelligence 

[02:04:35] FRANK DOELGER: very much so. And I think also. , he was very different from the other actors we cast, some of whom are quite B, some of whom are quite intellectual, but no one had that, that charismatic quality, uh, that just shown for, and that's steeliness yes, very much 

[02:04:54] GORDON EARLE: so.

Yeah. I would recommend anyone who's listening to go, um, watch that movie as it's very powerful. I wanna ask you finally about sort of where you're going next, but did any students in the class come up to you and say, I want to be a television producer. And if they did say that, what did you tell them?

[02:05:15] FRANK DOELGER: It's interesting that you asked that because when I looked at the majors of the students who had signed up for the course, there were some freshmen who hadn't declared yet, but there was only one that actually was at all. There was one who was majoring in English, who was thinking about film intelligence.

I had economists, I had, uh, mathematicians, people studying physics, one woman who was studying mechanical engineering, an historian, one musician, and they all said they wanted to do something out of their comfort zone. And a lot of them said that it sound intriguing. And I was very pleased about that, cuz I thought, yes, this is what the Williams winter study should be.

And it was very clear to me from day one, that there was one student who was in a completely different field. there was a spark there. She instinctively understood what I was going for. And every step along the way, she kept surprising me. She evidenced a great talent first, all for title. She kept coming up for titles for her, the various projects.

And I just, I noticed this, I didn't say anything about it. And we screened conspiracy as the final class. And the next day she sent me an email saying she found the film very moving and could she have a conversation with me? And I called her and she said, you know, I I'm very, I came to Williams thinking that I really wanted to do something in the sciences, but I think actually this might be a better choice for me.

So it was interesting that I think she must have had this. She was obviously perceiving the same thing that I was perceiving that there was some sort of connection there. So she asked me about advice and we spent quite a bit of time talking about it. I, I had told her about the path I took and I said to her that, you know what, you've got three more years, three and a half more years to go, you know, as we've talked about, you know, just make sure you take full advantage of the education.

You educate yourself visually. You try to spend as much time with characters and stories in addition to what else you're doing. And then. You know, when you get further along, let's talk again. And she was really interesting that the, the, what really impressed me is I told a story when I was talking about how important it is to have different frames of reference.

Visually, I was showing one of the last episodes of game of Thrones when the NAS comes home and there's the castle dragon stone perched on a cliff. And I admitted that I never really liked that every time I see that it was something that was done very early on, it looks like every medieval castle, every castle on the cliff you've seen from the wizard of Oz on.

And I've always felt that it's all of its inspiration comes from other castles that you've seen and the throne room, which was seen for the first time when I saw the drawings for it. I was really stunned because I had never seen anything like it. And I said to the production designer, where did the ideas come from?

And she showed me images of the Saul Institute, Louis K built in California. And it's the central courtyard arcade with these segmented walls that seemed to be falling somehow it's miraculous that they're not falling on top of each other. And she had taken that and she had transformed it into the, the throne room.

And this student had said to me, I was so fascinated that someone would take something like the, so Institute a courtyard and have the imagination to create something completely different. And I, I, it led to a conversation about a quote that I love from Picasso. He's being very provocative about how good artists copied great artists steal.

And I said, again, I think what you, what this is to me, evidence of someone who's stealing something and making it completely their own, rather than just copying it. The exterior to me is a copy. This interior is actually a stolen idea, that's reimagined, but the fact that she was a single student who really commented on and that really stayed with her, I thought, yes, she does have an instinct maybe for, for this business.

[02:09:42] GORDON EARLE: Well, maybe you've changed someone's 

[02:09:44] FRANK DOELGER: life. Well, it'd be nice to think I did if it works out well, , if it doesn't work out well, I take no responsibility whatsoever. 

[02:09:52] GORDON EARLE: Well, um, on that note, I'm just gonna ask a few final questions as you reflect on your life and your professional career. So you said at the beginning of this talk that you wanted to lead an interesting life from my perspective you have, how would you say you've led an interesting life?

[02:10:12] FRANK DOELGER: If an interesting life is defined by the people you meet, what you learn, what you see, what you experience. Yes. Undoubtedly, it's been very interesting. I also think that, and this is probably true of a lot of professions, but I have found that as a, that I try not to repeat myself. It means that everything's a new challenge.

So I do think it has been, I've been very fortunate that I've had a career that's evolved in a way that let me keep upping my game. Taking on new challenges was supportive. A lot of the people with whom I work and not repeating 

[02:10:49] GORDON EARLE: yourself, as you said, yes. Um, any 

[02:10:52] FRANK DOELGER: regrets? No. I had a very, I very rarely look back.

In fact, it's interesting. I realized at this screening of conspiracy, I had not seen that film for 20 years. I, unless I'm showing something in a class, I never looked back at what I have done before. And, but I had this. And so I'm not nostalgia. I'm not nostalgic by nature. Um, but I had this very interesting experience when I was back at Williams.

I had been back fleetingly on occasion. And I was my first year I was living in Morgan hall and I remember one fall day walking up the staircase. I think it's called the Stetson staircase. Mm-hmm that goes up to O's college. And I was, and I realized I was walking up that staircase almost 50 years later.

Yeah. To the day. And I had this incredible sense of contentment. I, I suddenly realized that somehow some way I had ended up 50 years later back at Williams feeling incredibly content. And it's a rare, it's rare to feel contentment certainly in my experience, but that's what I felt. And somehow it had all worked out.

I don't know how, I'm not sure why, but I do think there's the only thing I would say finally, is that the other very valuable lesson I had, and I think I mentioned to you that there was a period in my career where when you have a sudden burst of success, people throw a lot of projects at you. And I had taken on much more than I could handle.

And I was really burnt out and I was in a really bad place. And again, it was one of those moments when I thought I was going to just move away from it all. And so, um, I decided to take six months off and I traveled a lot and I ended up at India and I had the most fantastic guide there as a woman in who, in her seventies, she was one of the first women who had actually.

Started a travel agency and tour guide. And she, her particular interests were in Indian crafts. And I met her early on and I traveled with her a lot. And at the end of our three months together, I had said to her, I just have one question for you in the course of this trip, you told me that, and I've seen that the hinges believe in one God, and they're 3 million, 800,000 incarnations.

And I said, in your opinion, what is the central tenant of Hinduism? I think most religions, if you ask people, although come with one or two ideas. And she said for her, what she took from Hinduism was that ego led to sorrow. And I think that really stayed with me. And I think that having that experience of always asking myself in any situation, how much my ego is there, how much my decisions are being informed like that, how much of my emotions, and if you can really strip that away.

I think that for me, certainly in my work and I think probably my personal life, it was a very valuable lesson. It doesn't always work. Sometimes you can never strip away your ego and probably I don't completely, but it makes me take a step back a little bit. So I think looking back over the course of my career, um, that's partly also what I instinctively felt.

And I think enabled me to work well with people in the creative community and ultimately did well. It was also very self-serving. I needed them. To do a good job. And I think I told you that this new company I have, you know, I want, I want the shows to be successful, but, uh, I'm working now with two generation of filmmakers younger than I am.

And while I want things to be good, they need them to be good. So I, yeah, so they really it's an unforgiving business. It is. So if so, I really I've shifted the burden to them. They're not gonna succeed unless they really work hard. And so I'm at a point now where I'm taking a little bit of a step back, 

[02:14:57] GORDON EARLE: well, only a, a couple poor questions, but I'm curious, you have kept an amazingly low profile throughout your career.

Um, that's why I was particularly happy that you decided to sit down and have this conversation. Why did you choose to keep such a low profile when you were working with shows that were so high profile? 

[02:15:20] FRANK DOELGER: Two reasons. I gave an interview very early on in my career in which I was asked a question and I repeated what I had been told by executives.

It had to do with the scheduling of a project, and I won't go into details. But when asked to give interview, I quoted what I had been told, and I was almost fired because of it. I had not realized what I had been told it actually had to do. It was a, it was very clear. The decision was made with the political agenda, which was.

So I realized at that point it's treacherous territory. I did not want to be always walking mind fields. I just also know people are quoted out of context. So I thought there's no gain in this. I also just instinctively knew when you're dealing with people with very big egos. You can take a back step.

You're not vying for attention. And I think that's helpful. I also think that I've seen so many people consumed by this business that I always felt for me. I wanted to keep a separation between my public and my personal life. So for me, I just thought the only way, once you start giving interviews, once you start talking about your personal life, it becomes a public life.

And I didn't want that for myself. So it was both practical, staying out of the way of all the big egos who are going to be fighting for the attention. You know, every time you show up in award ceremonies, you know, it's like a feeding frenzy, you know, which of the people on that stage, they all go running to speak to the journalists, you know, trying to grab as many photos and as many sound bites as they can.

So I've always wanted to remove myself from that. But as I said, I also like a division between my life and my work, 

[02:17:08] GORDON EARLE: you know, I think because of that prank, I felt particularly privileged to be part of this conversation. And I really thank you for it. Um, it spent a lot to me. Um, I've learned a lot from this conversation.

I have really appreciated it and, uh, I think the listeners will get a lot out of it too. So I want to thank you very much. It's been a total joy on my 

[02:17:31] FRANK DOELGER: part. Well, thank you for the opportunity. It's unusual for me to sit back and reflect it all, and I'm very glad to do it in this context. And, um, as I said, you, I was very, very impressed with what Harry she had to say.

I think that was wonderful. And I knew him a little bit and it was wonderful seeing what he had accomplished over these years. So I'm hoping that other people in our class will find this interesting and other people listening will, will find something of interest in this well, but thank you for making it so 

[02:17:59] GORDON EARLE: enjoyable.

Well, thank you for being here. Really appreciate it, Frank. My pleasure.