Ellen Gray: Ex-Philly pol Sam Katz creates pilot for history film

PHILADELPHIA: THE GREAT EXPERIMENT. 7:30 p.m. tomorrow, 6ABC.

DOCUMENTARY filmmakers don't often come from the world of politics, but maybe they should.

Because to listen to Sam Katz describe his latest campaign - to film a seven-part, multiplatform series on the history of Philadelphia - is to realize that what the three-time mayoral candidate, longtime businessman and new chairman of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, sees as his third act doesn't sound all that different from his second: trying to stir up interest among his fellow Philadelphians, one community group at a time.

And asking for money.

As founder of History Making Productions, Katz, 61, who's working with a team that includes his son, Phil, 28, said that he began showing excerpts to small groups a couple of years ago and estimates that in the past six months, he's screened the presentation pilot of the project they're calling "Philadelphia: The Great Experiment" about a hundred times, mostly to local audiences of "150 and less."

Last week, there was an invitation-only premiere at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, and tomorrow night, Katz hopes to reach a much larger audience as 6ABC pre-empts "Wheel of Fortune" to air the film in a presentation hosted by news anchor Jim Gardner.

Directed by Mark Moskowitz ("Stone Reader") - who filmed the spot for Mayor Nutter's campaign that featured the candidate's daughter, Olivia - and narrated by Michael Boatman ("The Good Wife"), the 28-minute film makes a lively argument - by documentary standards - for Katz's dream of a series on the scale of those that have been done on New York, Chicago and other cities.

And there's not a tricorn hat in sight.

"Probably no city in America, including Boston, has as much history as Philadelphia," Katz said last week, "and yet the history of Philadelphia is completely forgotten in deference to, you know, one hot month in 1776."

So when he and his team decided to make a pilot for the proposed series, "we were definitively not going to do 1776," he said.

Instead, they jumped ahead to 1865-76, which "turns out to be the period where the foundations of the city that we live in today were largely laid: the construction of City Hall, the emergence of Broad Street as a major thoroughfare, the creation of Fairmount Park, the beginnings of a political machine that happened to be Republican, the bursting out of the civil-rights movement and the relocation of both Irish and African-Americans aspiring for better jobs and housing conflicting with each other," Katz said.

What's airing tomorrow was until fairly recently a work in progress, the original pilot having been thrown out more than a year ago and rewritten and re-edited.

"We made every mistake in the book in the making of this film," some stylistic - "the kind of mistakes that would make you take your thumb and press channel change" - a few historic, Katz said.

For example, "we kind of presented Philadelphia in the earliest part of the film as a Northern city, united in the cause of the Union," he said. "Nothing could have been further from the truth. It fit what we were doing. It just didn't fit the history. And we got taken to the woodshed by some historians on that, which was good because we fixed it."

Philadelphia's is not a dry history, and it's not told drily. "We tended to have a lot of younger experts, much more in the narrative sense than in the pensive, roaming kind of academic style that I think a lot of documentaries tend to do," said Katz.

(MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Fox News Channel's Juan Williams also appear among the talking heads.)

As for the re-creations and the re-enactments, "we still have a way to go, I think, in making those as good as they can be."

So what's a former investment banker doing talking production values, anyway?

You might say it started with director Martin Scorsese.

Several years ago, Katz was watching Scorsese's "Gangs of New York," "where two fire companies end up in front of a burning home, fighting each other for the right to go in to fight the fire. I thought the scene was so ridiculous on the surface that it sent me off to find out something about the truth of that story."

He found his answers in a book, "Gotham: A History of New York to 1898," and in a doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania on the history of volunteer firefighting in Philadelphia.

"I learned that Philadelphia invented the form of firefighting that I saw in 'Gangs of New York,' " he said. (There's an eight-minute webisode about those early volunteers at www.HistoryofPhilly.com.)

And the rest was, well, history.

"Gotham" led Katz to the documentary series "New York," by Ric Burns, which led to his watching documentary histories of Chicago, Las Vegas and New Orleans.

"I'm watching other things, I'm still having a life, but I got into it," he said. "And when I decided I was ready to watch [a history of] Philadelphia, I called around to find out who had it. There wasn't one. There were things that had been done. There was no epic, multi-century treatment."

And there still won't be if Katz can't raise the $750,000 to $900,000 he estimates that each segment of the series will cost, including an hour-long film and about three hours of online components.

"We have a lot of proposals that are right now . . . sitting in front of some very significant foundations," he said. "We've been turned down by a lot of them." Given the "extraordinarily difficult fundraising climate," he's resigned to doing one installment at a time and insists that his connections are no guarantee of success.

"While I do know everybody, I know them in a much different context than as a player on the cultural scene, trying to get people to fund a project for which there are no commercial upsides," he said.

Certainly not for him.

"I think I kind of walked my way, slowly but surely, over 12 or 14 years, out of my business by constantly interrupting it to run for mayor," he said. "I do have investments. I do have things I do."

So he can afford to be a documentary filmmaker?

"No, but I can't afford to spend the rest of my life wishing I did the things I'd like to do in life," he said. "I'm 61. What am I waiting for? I can't afford this. My wife is not happy, entirely. She's happy that I'm happy.

"I know it seems like a completely bizarre segue from someone who's been in business his whole life, and politics. But my passion's always been about Philadelphia. I really did want to be mayor. I really thought I would have made a good mayor. . . . But, you know, this might turn out to be better, in some ways, to be part of a group of people who are making it possible for Philadelphians to know themselves, to know their city. There's an awful lot of pride in the city's history. It's sort of a joke I make - there's a lot of pride. We just don't know what the history is.

"We're going to change that." *

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