Sex It Up
- Kevin Huffman
- Jun 28
- 4 min read
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received sounded ridiculous.
"You need to sex it up."
It was January 1996. I had a fresh master's degree from Emerson College, two small kids, and an annual income of $13,000. We were broke. Really broke. There was no work in Boston television. I was seriously wondering if I was going to end up on welfare.
Boston had just been buried under two massive blizzards. The city literally had nowhere left to put the snow.
I remember looking out my second-floor apartment window wondering whether I could simply jump into the snowbank instead of facing another day of freelancing—which is to say, unemployment.
Then the phone rang.
It was Fran Mires, the executive producer of a new NBC news magazine called Real Life. During my interview she'd watched my reel and delivered the bluntest critique I'd ever received.
"You need to sex it up."
I wasn't entirely sure what she meant. Fran was from Miami – maybe that was a thing people said there? She did work at a station made famous by the phrase “If It Bleeds, It Leads.”
My work wasn't bad, she said.
It was just…well ...earnest.
In television, "earnest" is another word for "boring." The kiss of death.
Apparently, they were desperate that morning because Fran asked if I could come in. They needed help.
I looked at my wife and said, "You're going to have to shovel."
She still reminds me of that.
An hour after I arrived, someone dropped four Beta tapes and a rough script on my desk. The story slug simply read:
Lipstick
The premise? According to New York City fashion reporter Toni Senecal, you could supposedly tell everything about a woman from the shape of her lipstick. This is not something she made up – this idea still exists today.
I started my career at PBS. This was not PBS. But I was determined to figure this out. If the lipstick was rounded, she was liberal. If it was flat top, she was conservative. Kind of makes sense, I guess.
My instructions were simple. "Make something out of it."
So, I did. I found clips of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Margaret Thatcher. Mixed in the beauty "experts." Made jokes. Found funky music. Cracked up the editor and we gave it a snappy ending. Four minutes. (I wish I had an archive version of this classic, but it may be lost to time).
At eight o'clock that night the executive producers dropped by the edit room to watch it. They laughed and looked at me. They didn’t ask my name or introduce themselves.
Joel Cheatwood, the executive producer (and son of two evangelical ministers) looked up and said, "Move it up in the rundown." I assumed this was a good thing.
I wanted to ask whether I should come back the next day, but the cool kids were already headed to another crisis intervention. So, I just came back. I faked my way through security and strolled in. Nobody officially hired me for weeks. I just kept showing up.
For the next year I lived in edit rooms. Three or four stories every week. Lots of dead baby stories, some profiles, even a human-interest piece about the Tulsa Race Riots in the 1920s. And a polkamentary. Kind of amazing – the idea of an hour long news magazine five days a week. No studio interviews, just stories. It was intense.
Some stories arrived in good shape. Others...well, charitably, did not. Those were the ones they handed to me. My first move was usually to strip out most of the reporter’s narration and completely re-write and re-order it. There was no flow. I watched the footage and I couldn’t believe the amount of time they wasted on useless standups; marveled at the lack of coverage and screamed when they didn't ask the most obvious questions.
We made do and whatever PBS, high falutin attitude I had in my system was washed away for good.
Before long I became one of the producer’s people called when a story wasn't working.
Not because I had shot the footage.
Not because I knew more than everyone else.
Because I could usually figure out why the story wasn't working.
I literally fixed it post.
I loved the people, but hated the hours. A few months later the show was inevitably cancelled (we found out by email -- perhaps the first time in television history). I decided to find work in New York. Goodbye Boston – nice town, not enough dancing, not enough work.
New York felt like home. I produced stories for CBS, NBC, Vh1, CNN; lots of longform documentaries for cable companies like TNT, Nat Geo, A&E, Discovery & History and then premium streaming docs on Showtime and Netflix.
Times changed. Television production changed. The production process was breaking up. Gone were the days when a producer worked on the entire story. Field producers were cheaper. After they finished shooting, they were dropped. I became a story producer (or story editor) because I could take a pile of material, write it, over see the edit and deliver it to the network in record time. I guided the reporting, framed narratives for episodes and shaped the arc of the series.
It was like old times for me.
Now, as a doc film consultant, I tell people many things, but I am really telling them to "sex it up." Maybe not with that exact phrase, but they get the idea. I want my clients to give the audience a reason to lean in. That's literally our job.
Documentaries rarely fail because filmmakers lack talent.
They fail because they've lived with the material so long that they've stopped seeing it through the audience's eyes.
That's understandable. It happens to all of us. After months—or years—of chasing characters, conducting interviews, digging through archives, and living inside a story, it's almost impossible to recognize what's missing. Or what's no longer necessary.
The same storytelling traps appear again and again. They have names now.
The Pedestal Problem.
The Scene That Had to Work.
The Missing Present.
The Flatline Problem.
I'll write about each of them in future essays. But in the meantime, if you're stuck and looking for help, reach out and we'll fix it in post
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