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In the mix
LABORS OF LOVE
history on location
The last time Lou
Reda worked in Hollywood, he was a big band singer at the Hollywood USO
waiting to ship out to the Pacific. Now the
seventy-nine-year-old ex-Navy Seabee is making history.
And working in it too.
In 250 year-old Easton,
Pennsylvania, seventy-five miles west of Manhattan, Reda
has carved out a niche producing documentaries for cable,
like the 2003 Emmy nominee The Day the Towers
Fell. He and his staff of eleven, including son
Scott, shoot, edit and archive their work, along with 100
million feet of historical film, in renovated 19th
century silk mills.
"We have a lot of warehousing
we can turn into anything we want to turn it into," Reda
says of the 400,000 square foot complex which, he says,
contains the country's largest private archive of
historical film.
The onetime musician and
big-band booking agent got the TV bug after landing a
syndicated series for a client, the mentalist known as
the Amazing Kreskin. He followed that with the 1982 CBS
miniseries The Blue and the Gray, based on
material by civil war historian Bruce Catton. Reda liked
reenacting history; he didn't like spending seven years
putting the deal together. "I vowed never again (to go
the broadcast network route)," he says. "I said, 'Let's
go into doing documentaries, biographies, things like
that'".
Thanks to a contact in the 8th
Air Force, Reda got the film footage he needed to produce
the syndicated series War Chronicles. That
experience positioned his company perfectly for the
growing non-fiction cable market. "We indirectly helped
launch the History Channel," he says, "because we had a
lot of material they (were) looking for." Covering
subjects as diverse as chocolatier Milton Hershey,
B-Westerns and the military, Reda has produced almost 400
documentaries. Currently he has several projects at the
History Channel - and no intention of leaving
Easton.
"I probably do more," he says,
"by not being in Hollywood."
- Sandy Siegel
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