February 2008

August 3, 2004

Genealogy research has become a popular hobby in the past decade. This interest -- coupled with ever-lower prices for camcorders -- has resulted in a rapid growth in video-based oral history. Getting grandma and grandpa on tape for more than the occasional "home video op" has taken on a whole new meaning. Their stories about growing up, surviving the Depression, fighting World War II, and building a strong post-war U.S. are now being recorded for posterity. The combination of genealogy and oral history give a family a true and personalized appreciation for the past -- one that can help children and grandchildren shape realistic goals for the future. "If grandpa did it, I can too!"

Mattingly Productions (MPL) has been involved with video-based oral history since the early 1970s when MPL started documenting performers and craftsmen at the Smithsonian Institution's annual Folklife Festival on the Mall. Under a 1976 grant from the Bureau of Indian Affairs MPL launched the Native American Videotape Archives project as part of this country's Bicentennial celebration. This archives, which is housed at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, NM, now includes over 8000 tapes featuring Native Americans relating tribal stories and customs, showcasing costumes and ornamentation, and demonstrating art techniques and dancing. Native Americans representing tribes from throughout the U.S shot all source videotapes.

In 1994 Mattingly Productions was tapped by the Federal Judicial Center to help the U.S. Supreme Court launch its video oral history documentation of sitting Justices. MPL taped Harry A. Blackmun, who sat on the bench for 24 years, one week before his retirement. Based on that model, the Media Center of the Federal Judicial Center has continued the videotaping process, with resulting tapes stored at the Library of Congress.

Recently Mattingly Productions received two grants - one from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the other from the Scott Opler Foundation -- to assist the Steamboat Era Museum in Irvington, Virginia in setting up its oral history center. The Steamboat Era on the Chesapeake Bay ended in 1937, but the community still has eyewitnesses to this bygone time. Most are in their 80s and 90s.

Under the grants MPL will, first, develop a system for logging and indexing footage, and then hold workshops to train teachers and interested community members in the techniques of interviewing subjects for archival purposes.

It is vital to train videographers and interviewers to properly produce oral history. "A big problem," says Grayson Mattingly, President of Mattingly Production, "is that people neglect two very important basic ingredients when taping interviews - technical guidelines and project content. Inattention to basic technical guidelines can result in distorted or no audio, plus poor picture quality and composition. Inattention to content is due to lack of control or planning -- the interviewer lets the interviewee wander away from relevant subjects. Sadly enough a lot of good information has been lost this way. So the goal of the workshop is to instill in the participants the skills needed to avoid these pitfalls."

Once the trainees have some good interviews under their belts they will take on the task of training others in the community in to videotape oral history.

More information about the Steamboat Era Museum Video Archives Project and video- based oral history in general can be obtained by contacting Mattingly Productions at 1-804-4385181.

8 March 2004

"This is the Justice Harry A. Blackmun oral history. This is taping session number one, on July 6, 1994. I'm Harold Koh. I'm a professor at Yale Law School, and clerked for Justice Blackmun in October term, 1981."

Thus began the on-camera reminiscences of a Supreme Court Justice who remained on the court for 24 years. One week after Blackmun retired, Grayson Mattingly of Mattingly Productions, now of Irvington, VA, was contracted by the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) to commence the Blackmun video-based oral history project and produce the first 8 hours. FJC staff than continued to record Blackmun and Koh interviews every couple of weeks for the next 17 months.

The Library of Congress made the resulting 38 hours of videotaped oral history, plus 1,500 boxes of Blackmun's court papers, available to the public on March 4, 2004, exactly five years after Blackmun's death and the naming of Koh as the new Dean of Yale Law School. The release of these materials received wide attention from the media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and the PBS News Hour.

Appointed to the Court by President Nixon in 1970, Blackmun believed that being a Justice was "a lonely job despite the fact that we sit as a group of nine." Eight of the current nine Justices served with him. Most of the important social issues of our day - abortion, the death penalty, the right to privacy, federalism, the First Amendment - play out both in the papers and videotapes. A front page article in the March 5th issue of the Washington Post says the Blackmun collection affords "an excellent view into the court's personalities and private arguments, " and "shows the extraordinary labor involved in mustering a majority on some decisions." The day of their release, a "flood of scholars and journalists" began rummaging through the materials.

Grayson Mattingly was tapped to spearhead the video documentation because he wrote, also under the auspices of the Federal Judicial Center, the original guidelines for videotaping depositions for the federal courts. He is founder and president of Mattingly Productions, which was the oldest video and multimedia company in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The company relocated to Irvington, Virginia in 2001.