NEWS VOICES: 'The Secrets Beneath Hazleton' explores city's underground

Hello and welcome to News Voices, your weekly look behind the scenes at WBIA News. I'm Sarah Sinto. Thanks for joining us. What secrets live beneath Hazleton? That's a question WVIA producer, director, and editor Tim Novotny has been digging into for more than a year. His documentary, The Secrets Beneath Hazleton, debuts on WVIA TV next month, but Tim is here now to talk about it. Hi, Tim. Hey, how's it going? Great. Thank you so much for being here. So we're very excited for the broadcast debut of The Secrets Beneath-Hasleton. So let's go behind the scenes a little bit. How did you become interested in this topic? I became interested in the topic when I was a kid. I had a friend who moved in the Hazleton. I didn't really know much about the history of Hazleton, and he said, you got to come over and check out this new apartment that we got. Long story short, we went into the apartment. He took me down into the basement of the apartment building. There was a door that led to these underground tunnels. We didn't know what they wore. We attempted to go in them, but we couldn't find flashlights, so we brought candles. The air in the tunnel blew out the candles, and then we realized we probably shouldn't be exploring this without flashlights. Yeah. He only moved out a few months later, and I never got to explore the tunnels. And so when I moved out of the area and then eventually back into the area, and I started working here at WVA, they said, is there any short documentaries you want to work on? And I said, yes. And they said, well, what is your topic? And I said, I want to do about the underground city below Hazleton, because that moment was always ingrained in my brain. And I always wanted to see what was under there. Yeah, hard to forget something like that, right? So this did start, like you said, as a 10-minute short take, as we call them here. Now, how were you able to expand this into a full documentary now? First and foremost, the short take blew up. A lot of people loved it. They shared it, and a lot of the comments said we want it to be longer. Ten minutes isn't long enough to touch on this topic. And to do so, obviously, we're public media. We needed to see if they wanted to help fund the... undergoing of a longer form film. And so we started Kickstarter and we raised over the amount that we needed to make the film and that's how we got into doing the 30 minute. It was the response from the people who's seeing the first one and then the people who said, look, we want to support you guys to do a longer one. Here's the money to do so. And this was the first time that WBIA has kind of made a foray into Kickstarter. So how did that support kind of make you feel like the city and the region was embracing this history in this project? When people started putting up the money to make the project, it makes you realize that people still do care about the history of the area and that they want to see it preserved. And I think that's one of the themes in the film is if we don't preserve it, what is going to happen to it? So it made me feel great that people still take pride in the areas that maybe their ancestors came from. They may not live there now, but they still take pride when positive stuff is covered in the areas that they used to live. And the film hasn't debuted to broadcast audience yet, but... there's already been some positive impact from it. Isn't that right? Yes, there's been positive impact from the film itself. During the filming of it, one of the ongoing themes in it is like, if we don't preserve the history, what happens to it? And you will see in the film that the history gets erased. And one of the themes that I started asking people about, what can we do with this? And because of the film, it sparked interest in doing a mine tour in Hazleton, and the city is fully behind it, and they're working to make it a reality in the city.

And that was just announced last night, I believe. Yeah, it was announced that the very first screening, the mayor came up with Justin Emershaw, who's a mine engineer and the underground miners. They all work together collectively to try to make it a reality. And it seems like they're a go on it. They're working on securing the land. They're working on securing the underground. Because if you can get the land on top, but you also have to get permission to go land underneath. But yeah, they want to make one of the best mine tours in the... region now because of it. Now we only have a little bit of time left but as a director how did that make you feel to already see some impact from your work? It's one thing to make a film then you're really anxious to see and hope people will watch it and when people watch it the second thing you want is for them to enjoy it. The last thing is to change people's view on how they view things and want to do something about it. So it's a really surreal experience. Well, you can catch the broadcast premiere of The Secrets Beneathleton on September 21st at 7 p.m. Tim, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, and you better watch it.