Prohibition-Era History of Saratoga Springs Inspires MDOCS Alum

After graduating in May 2017, Skidmore College alumnus Harry Sultan has been pursuing a career that strays quite far from his Psychology major. He has been pursuing a career as an audio documentarian. Harry loved listening to podcasts growing up, but it wasn’t until he discovered the MDOCS program at Skidmore that he began to think of documentary as a viable career path. While MDOCS offers classes in different areas of documentary work, Harry focused on audio due to his belief that “there’s something inherently more personal with audio.” Although he didn’t discover MDOCS until the end of his junior year, he made the most of the program with the little time he had, taking “Intro to Audio Documentary” the summer before his senior year with oral historian Eileen McAdam (Sound and Story of the Hudson Valle) and continuing to take documentary classes throughout his senior year. Since graduating, he doubled down on this interest.  Over the summer, he participated in the MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute at Skidmore and in fall joined the class of students at SALT Institute for Documentary Studies (founded 1974) during its inaugural fall semester program as part of the Maine College of Art.  The sound and storytelling skills have jumpstarted a career in audio documentary, with freelance work that keeps him busy from a base in the Kingston, NY, area.

Harry has deepened his enthusiasm for and skills in audio documentary largely through his work on one specific long-term project. Before participating in the Storytellers’ Institute, Harry began researching rumors he had heard of tunnels running beneath bars in downtown Saratoga Springs  dating to the prohibition era of the 1920s. What began as an inspiration has expanded to a larger project on the influence of the mob in Saratoga, the “gambling and the bootlegging and the murders” that they brought to the Spa City, and the ways in which Saratoga’s gambling scene influenced other places, such as Las Vegas.  From its inception as a Storytellers' Institute project, the story has expanded from a local to a national, and arguably even international, level. Although he doesn’t really want the project to end, Harry anticipates wrapping it up in the form of a series of four 10-15 minute audio documentary episodes sometime in the next year.

Despite the freedom and opportunity Harry has been afforded through working as a freelance documentarian in the past year, his ultimate goal is to work for an established podcast company. He credits MDOCS for showing him that making podcasts and other forms of audio documentary can be a professional career and the Storytellers’ Institute for allowing him to meet working, professional documentarians and make connections. When asked to give some advice to aspiring documentarians at Skidmore, Harry advised that when developing interest in a story and conducting interviews, “you need to know exactly what you want to get” and “be assertive” with interviewees. Additionally, he has learned since leaving Skidmore and further developing his skills that “it’s not the story that makes a great piece” but it is actually “knowing how to work with the story.”

After returning to Skidmore to visit and dropping in on Principles of Documentary and Public History classes, Harry is very excited to see more students taking advantage of the program and getting involved in documentary work.  In addition to fielding questions about SALT's post-graduate one semester program, he prepared a 45-second interview clip gleaned from a 4-minute interview segment.  Inviting students to listen for the edits, he stumped everyone while demonstrating that the compelling sound story was found in the editing.

-- Lauren Goldfarb (Political Science, '20)

Listen here for Harry's story, told in an interview with Lauren Goldfarb, '20.