john maggio: documentary artist
New York native John Maggio is, in case you haven’t heard, a major documentary filmmaker. His work with HBO and PBS includes 13 nominations for national awards–including the Emmy and Writers Guild of America Awards–for documentary film production, direction, and writing. Maggio’s work ranges from The Perfect Weapon, a chilling feature-length film about cyber warfare, to A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, a biographical account of Black documentary photographer Gordon Parks, to The Newspaperman, a revealing, in-depth profile of Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee. Maggio has also been commissioned by Apple TV for a major documentary on international espionage and by the Biden administration to document the first year of the president’s term.
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Maggio’s gift as a writer and director is, in part, his capacity for identifying compelling, unifying narratives for his subject matter–a skill any documentary filmmaker needs but Maggio uniquely possesses. He is presently directing a film on the relocation of the fashion industry from Paris to Milan. As he began the project, Maggio found the epic drama at the center of the story, behind the world-renowned fashion families of Milan who negotiated, married into, fought over, and leveraged their relationships and influence to affect the transfer of the world’s fashion capital to their city. The more Maggio dug into the story and characters, the more he recognized what he identified as an Italian grand opera in real time. To recognize subject matter for a documentary as “Italian grand opera” is one thing, to write and direct the film as an Italian grand opera is something else; it requires a confident, chameleon-like literary sensitivity and versatility as well as a culturally sophisticated mind and imagination.
Maggio is an effective teller of tales employing his own version of Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” finding and organizing themes and metaphors contained, sometimes hiding, in the worlds of his subjects. Identifying a narrative to fill a feature-length documentary requires and is the result of prodigious research–knowledge of details and facts, a certain mastery over the subject matter. During his research phase, once Maggio feels that he has captured and understands the essence of a character or event, he links that insight to the essence or “truth” of other characters and events. He begins to see the stories emerging. This is Maggio “getting out of the way,” listening intently to the unfolding action, “letting the story tell itself,” as he says.
“I’m a storyteller,” Maggio explains. “When I’m into a project, I work incredibly hard learning about and researching the people and subject matter I’m filming.” Then, as if giving away the secret to a signature culinary creation, he adds matter-of-factly, “Eventually, the characters tell you the story.”
My guess is Maggio can freely share that insight because the art of truly listening is a lost art in times of self-promotion, in the “Age of Me.” Few have the capacity while engaged in conversation to eschew their own thoughts long enough to hear the unspoken thoughts and feelings and read between the lines of what the speaker chooses to say. Maggio at work is like a skilled jeweler scrutinizing a gem in the rough, carefully discerning the human story behind the story, querying for hidden treasure–themes, motives. From the painstaking reserach, gathering of information, data, and history, and the interviewing of subjects to the final, critical art of cutting and editing, the magnitute of his work ethic is clear. He has produced over a dozen major documentary films.
The success of this process or method is in the unifying narrative shaped through Maggio’s word processor, camera lens, and musical soundtracks (the cuts for which he takes a personal interest in selecting). He is able to convey emotional texture, color, and nuance for the story he is telling with compelling pace and intellectual depth combined with an accessibility that makes his documentaries both informative and entertaining. Novelist and master of the short story George Saunders once described his writing process as visualizing what he calls a “reader meter,” his way of keeping his fiction engaging and the reader turning pages. Maggio appears to have a similar gift for keeping his audience engaged with every frame.
Maggio graduated from Rutgers University in 1992 with a degree in environmental science and worked as a journalist with the Environmental Protection Agency, aiming to cultivate his skills as a writer. At the same time, he kept alive his preternatural gift for music, playing bass guitar and piano and occasionally performing in the DC area. In 1995, his passion for music led him to Los Angeles, where he focused full-time on developing a career in rock and pop music. In LA, Maggio met and performed with rising rap star Cody Chesnutt, who at the time was transitioning from hip-hop into rock and pop and playing regular gigs at venues like the Viper Room and Troubadour. The partnership led to a contract for an album with Hollywood Records–a division of Disney Productions. Maggio reports that the album, titled Venus Loves a Melody, was an elegant, first-rate production that benefitted from collaboration with sound engineer Robbie Adams and legendary mix artist Bob Clearmountain. But it never saw the light of day. Disney’s pulling the plug on the project was devastating, Maggio says.
The outcome of the stillborn project, however, was to launch Chesnutt into a successful R&B career and Maggio into what would become his widely celebrated career in documentary filmmaking. Maggio began writing “video treatments” for artists in the music and media industries in LA and eventually returned to his native New York, where he met Barak Goodman and Rachel Dretzin, founders of the film production company Ark Media. Maggio joined the firm as a principle partner in 2003. Over the years, Ark Media has gathered a diverse roster of filmmakers and won four prime-time Emmy Awards, an Academy Award nomination, the DuPont Columbia baton, and three George H. Foster Peabody Awards, among other accolades.
As life’s labyrinthine paths often do, by cultivating his skill as a writer and following his love of music, Maggio was led to what appears to be his culminating destination as a non-fiction filmmaker. By following his instincts and intuition, he found the people and opportunities to bring his artistic talent to fruition. In our conversation, Maggio reiterates in detail how his life experiences along the way have been in preparation for the documentary work that remains his passion after nearly two decades.
When asked about his decision to abandon music performance for filmmaking, his reply is that he has not abandoned music but incorporated it into what is a more encompassing passion for choreographing many parts into an artistic whole. His musicianship is essential to his work and allows him, he says, not only to select music that gives depth and direction to his films but also to set the tempo of a story itself, much as a composer creates the dynamics of a musical score with notes reading “alegro” or “andante.” The tempo of a Maggio documentary is one of the things you notice first. It engages and draws you in, allowing the narrative and images to sweep you into a story that feels not unlike the kind of novel you might describe as a “page-turner.”
Watching a Maggio documentary is like peeling back the layers of an onion. He reveals more and more about the subject; the further in you get, the more intriguing the details become, so that one of Maggio’s signature traits is what is often highly complex material, material that might be dry on its own but presented in Maggio’s way develops a plot with intrigue and keeps your attention. His talent for making complicated themes and information accessible to the layperson is widely recognized. In our conversation, he mentions a meeting with a General at the Department of Defense who asked him to consult with their communications staff on the challenges of formatting highly technical topics in understandable terms while keeping the attention of wide audiences.
As my conversation with Maggio draws to a close, curious about who or what has influenced Maggio’s creative identity as an artist, I refer to the thesis of the late, iconic literary critic Harold Bloom that strong writers regard themselves as having precursors whom they “slay” in order to set themselves apart, disguising aesthetic influence. Maggio knows exactly what I’m talking about and cites Bloom’s landmark work The Anxiety of Influence. My questions for Maggio are, does he have precursors? What is it that motivates and drives his work and art? Without missing a beat, he tells me, “Albert Camus said ‘a guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.’” He continues,“I was raised Roman Catholic and have a robust sense of guilt.” I ask him if his work is an effort to make a positive moral impact on the world, to redeem his Catholic guilt. “Yes,” he says, “that’s right.”
This is vintage Maggio, telling you something new about something you thought you already knew. With a twist on Camus, rather than suggesting the paralyzing and toxic effect of religious guilt–not just religious guilt but guilt a la Catholicism, likely the worst case of guilt Camus thought a person could have–Maggio suggests that guilt has perhaps turned out to be positive for this particular Buffalo born and bred artist. Guilt, in Maggio’s art, is redemptive; it is the wellspring of human conscience, the source of the impulse to do the right thing. And I suspect that his existential sense of the guilty conscience also alerts Maggio to the “confessions” his subjects make in interviews that are not self-perceived as confessions and, therefore, reveal more than the interviewee intends or even knows themselves to be revealing. Only a gifted listener and documentary artist of great talent could discern such diamonds in the rough and then extract and reveal their luster.
I am reminded of a line in a Wallace Stevens poem, “We live in an old chaos of the sun,” and, as if in reply to it, Robert Frost’s aphorism, “A work of art is a stay against chaos.” John Maggio has an extraordinary ability to confront the chaos of the often-unsettling world we live in, yet to probe deeply and thoroughly enough into that chaos with the tools of camera, pen, and music to direct and produce documentaries that offer not just entertainment for entertainment’s sake but, at his best, to provide insight if not wisdom in answer to the perennial questions of why we are here and what matters.