Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is far from a tell-all on the esteemed journalist, but the film produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries does go beyond the headlines Walters made during her career as a broadcaster to explore her childhood, her drive and the relationships, personal and professional, that shaped her life.
“We really wanted to make sure that we understood all angles of her,” director Jackie Jesko tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s not only her record-breaking insane television career in which she interviewed dictators, celebrities and all these different kinds of people with equal skill and publicity, it’s also who she was, what made her tick, and really her greater contribution to the industry.”
Through footage from ABC News archives where Walters both became the highest-paid news anchor at the time in 1976 and ended her career in 2016 following her final act as creator and co-host of The View from 1997 to 2014, as well as interviews with prominent women journalists such as Katie Couric, Oprah Winfrey and Connie Chung, Jesko and producers Sara Bernstein and Betsy West detail Walters’ climb through the news ranks, the sexism and inner feelings of inferiority she battled, as well as her lasting impact in media following her death on Dec. 30, 2022, at the age of 93.
Below, Jesko talks with THR about piecing together Walters’ career and personal life for the doc, which premiered on Hulu Monday, the figures she wishes she would’ve been able to talk with — as well as those who declined participation — and why there’ll never be another Barbara Walters.
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I imagine a lot of journalists, women journalists especially, were clamoring to tell Barbara Walters’ story. How are you the one to do it?
The story actually began with Imagine Documentaries. The executive producer of the film is Betsy West, she directed films like RBG and Julia, and she and Sara Bernstein and Imagine were talking about doing a Barbara Walters film shortly after she passed away. To do that, they approached ABC News Studios who, of course, holds all the archives of Barbara’s five decades on camera, and they decided to do it together. But they needed a director and they gave me a call.
Of course, I was like, “Please, please, pick me!” because I actually used to work at ABC News. It was my first job. I was a news producer for 10 years, a lot of that at ABC, so I knew how important Barbara was to the news industry, not just to ABC and to women in the industry, and what a tremendously big career that she had. You really can’t tell the story of American Broadcast News without talking about Barbara Walters. So I was lucky to get the opportunity, but it was also a huge responsibility and one I did not take lightly.
Was there any overlap between your time at ABC and hers? Did you ever meet?
There was. I mean, it’s not like we worked together. I was the lowest possible rung on the ladder. I was an assistant, but I would see her sometimes – catch a little glimpse in the halls. She was kind of winding down at that point, but she was doing The View. It would’ve been a couple of years of overlap. I obviously knew that she had had this tremendous career— although I have to say I wasn’t a perfect student of it, but I did see her on The View all the time, and I was very aware of her presence in the building. I think everybody was.
So, when did you officially start working on this?
We started talking about it in late 2023, and then I think production would’ve kicked off about April 2024, so it’s just been about a year. It actually ended up going pretty quickly, but I think a lot of that was just that it is archival-driven so the timeframe for those films can be shorter.
It really feels like Barbara is narrating this film. What was it like for you going through those tapes? Do you have any sense of how much footage you all went through?
It had to be thousands of hours of footage. Our amazing partners at ABC News studios opened up this archive, which I don’t know that anybody had been allowed to look through to this extent prior to this project, and in there were all kinds of different gems. They had this idea from the outset that maybe we’d be able to learn things about Barbara from both the questions she asked other people, and also little moments that we could find in her tapes where she was sort of off-camera — obviously, not literally off-camera, but sort of an unguarded moment where she’s having a normal conversation with a subject or being off the cuff and seeing if we could piece that together to create a more intimate portrait of her.
But as far as her own voice, we actually didn’t know how much of her voice we were going to be able to include from the outset. She had done a bunch of interviews surrounding the publication of her autobiography, Audition, in 2008, so we had some raw tapes from that. But really it was our incredible archival producer team that was able to find all these other interviews she did with the Television Academy, NPR, [etcetera]. It was really a patchwork quilt of sources for that audio, and we were really happily surprised that there was a lot of it.
What sources did you use to fill in the details of Barbara’s childhood, her experience with motherhood and her romantic relationships in the doc?
A lot of it was just different people in her life who felt like they could weigh in on that. It’s interesting for her childhood, we ended up just relying on her own voice, but it’s because she spoke about it so well. We don’t always have the best perspective on ourselves — I mean all of us — so there are other aspects of her life we felt like it was useful to have friends and colleagues speak to.
I was really struck by Oprah Winfrey saying Barbara impacted her decision not to have children. How did you get to that moment with her in the interview?
I didn’t know that she was going to say anything like that. I didn’t know she felt that way — you don’t really get a pre-interview with people like Oprah; you get one swing at that. So, it was an amazing interview. I felt like she really came to talk about Barbara and they had a very real relationship. This wasn’t just like a talking head for a documentary thing. She really wanted to talk about their relationship. And when she said that I was surprised. But it’s really interesting: Barbara and Oprah have careers of a stratosphere that 0.0001% of any people will ever achieve, so far be it for me to doubt their reasoning for their decisions or what it’s like to be on top like that.
But the whole topic, that whole section [of the film], it was really important for myself, and for Betsy West and Sara Bernstein, who are working moms, to be careful about what we were saying and to not have the same boring conversation about the balance of work and motherhood. I mean, look, it’s easier now than it was for Barbara and Oprah, but it’s still not easy. We thought it was kind of an interesting, nuanced conversation. And Oprah, I thought that was really interesting that she shared that. And I understand. I understand both choices.
We don’t see Barbara’s daughter, Jacqueline, in the film. Did you reach out to her about participating?
We did a couple different times, a couple different ways. People who know her told us in advance that it was unlikely that she’d want to do anything with the film. She was aware it was being made.
Has she seen the finished film? Do you know?
I don’t know.
Bette Miller is sort of the outlier in that she’s the only celebrity talking head. Why was she the chosen one?
She and Monica Lewinsky were in the same category, mentally, for me, which was we wanted to hear from people who spent time on the other side of the interview table from Barbara. She interviewed Bette a bunch of times, and they certainly had a really good rapport. So that was part of it. And we wanted one of her celebrity friends that she would interview a lot and moved their relationship past just being subject and interviewee. And then Monica, of course, being probably the biggest get of any news magazine show of all time, [I was] sort of curious — Monica’s a very lovely person by the way— to understand what it was like for her to be on the other side of that kind of campaign and what Barbara did differently that made her choose Barbara, and then what her experience was.
Diane Sawyer is one of few women news anchors who doesn’t participate in the documentary, though you do touch on the perceived feud between her and Barbara which leads into the larger conversation that people assume Barbara didn’t support other women in her field. Was your aim to kind of recontextualize their relationship or that belief?
Barbara would say it wasn’t a feud. But I do think it’s interesting that the way that Diane came into ABC was that Roone Arledge, who was a very famous ABC news president, really helped pioneer the whole news as entertainment philosophy. He was among the first to do that, so he intentionally would set up his anchors to compete with each other. It was no accident. And I think that’s a tough situation to walk into for anybody so that’s, I think, an important part of the context. But a lot of the women in the film, Cynthia McFadden, certainly Katie Couric, Connie Chung, felt like Barbara was really great to them and defended them at different times in their career. I think perhaps it’s not a monolithic answer; relationships are individual.
Did you ask Diane about participating?
We wanted to find out if she wanted to participate, but I understand that perhaps she didn’t.
It’s sort of interesting that none of the men who created the environment of sexism Barbara had to contend with are around to address their behavior. Was there anyone else you wish you would’ve been able to speak to for this that you weren’t able to?
Obviously, I would’ve liked to talk to her daughter, but that’s kind of it. I think because Barbara was so important, and she had such importance to so many people in the news industry we really did have great luck with talking to the people we wanted to talk to.
What surprised you most overall in your research?
I think it was her childhood. I just didn’t know much about it, period. I didn’t really know anything about how she grew up. So when I started reading her book and watching other specials that were made about her, and understanding that she grew up in this interesting nightclub environment. Her dad was a showman, maybe a scoundrel, depending on who you ask. And she grew up in the backstage of his nightclub, meeting famous people, hanging out with them, seeing that they were real people. I thought it made a lot of sense for her approach later to famous people and to how she’d never really seemed afraid of anybody.
Also, the whole riches to rags storyline. Her dad lost it all when she was in her early twenties. And this is an era when a lot of women didn’t work at all. And she felt like she had to save her whole family financially. And she probably did. I mean, her dad had nothing. Her mom wasn’t educated, had no ability to work as most women of that generation, and then her sister had some mental disability of some kind, and it was really up to Barbara. I think that that fear and that experience really propelled her entire life.
In one of the last scenes in the documentary, Oprah says that there’s no place in this world now with social media for a Barbara Walters interview. How does that make you feel as a fellow journalist?
It’s true. Television news interviews used to hold such a huge audience power. The number of people who regularly watch television news was much bigger. There weren’t other sources of information. There was no other way to hear from politicians or from celebrities; they had to use the medium of television news. Obviously, that is over with the dawn of social media and all these different podcasts. There’s so many different ways to get information and there’s pros and cons to that. We have more varied things, you can really get into your niche interests. But I think the hard stuff is [part] of the whole idea of disinformation and lack of trust. There’s a lack of trust in the news media and a lot of debate about which channel can you trust, and it depends on where you are politically. I think that we’ve really swung the other side of the spectrum, and we’ve lost a lot of things in the process.
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Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is now streaming on Hulu.