Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, the film produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries goes beyond the headlines Walters made during her career as broadcaster to explore her childhood, her drive and the relationships that shaped her life.

“We really wanted to make sure that we understood all angles of her,” director Jackie Jesko says. “It’s not only her record-breaking insane TV career in which she interviewed dictators, celebs and different kinds of people with equal skill and publicity, it’s also who she was, what made her tick, and greater contribution to the industry.

Through footage from ABC News archives where Walters became the highest-paid news anchor at the time in 1976 and ended her career in 2016 after her final act as creator and co-host of The View from 1997 to 2014.

There are interviews with prominent women journalists such as Katie Couric, Oprah Winfrey and Connie Chung.

Jesko and producers Sara Bernstein and Betsy West detail Walters’ climb through the news ranks, sexism, inner feelings of inferiority, as well as her lasting impact in media after her death on December 30, 2022, at age 93.

Many women journalists clamored to tell Walters’ story

The story actually began with Imagine Documentaries. The exec-producer is Betsy West, she directed RBG and Julia, and she and Sara Bernstein and Imagine were talking about doing a Barbara Walters film after she passed away. They approached ABC News which holds the archives of Barbara’s five decades on camera, and they decided to do it together. But they needed director and gave me a call.

Was there overlap between your time at ABC and hers? Did you ever meet?

There was. It’s not like we worked together. I was the lowest possible rung on the ladder. I was an assistant, but I would see her sometimes – catch a little glimpse in the halls. She was kind of winding down at that point, but she was doing The View. It would’ve been a couple of years of overlap. I obviously knew that she had had this tremendous career— although I have to say I wasn’t a perfect student of it, but I did see her on The View all the time, and I was very aware of her presence in the building. I think everybody was.

We started talking about it in late 2023, and then I think production would’ve kicked off about April 2024, so it’s just been about a year. It actually ended up going pretty quickly, but I think a lot of that was just that it is archival-driven so the timeframe for those films can be shorter.

It feels like Barbara is narrating this film

But as far as her own voice, we actually didn’t know how much of her voice we were going to be able to include from the outset. She had done a bunch of interviews surrounding the publication of her autobiography, Audition, in 2008, so we had some raw tapes from that. But really it was our incredible archival producer team that was able to find all these other interviews she did with the Television Academy, NPR, [etcetera]. It was really a patchwork quilt of sources for that audio, and we were really happily surprised that there was a lot of it.

Oprah Winfrey said that Barbara impacted her decision not to have children. 

But the whole topic, that whole section [of the film], it was really important for myself, and for Betsy West and Sara Bernstein, who are working moms, to be careful about what we were saying and to not have the same boring conversation about the balance of work and motherhood. I mean, look, it’s easier now than it was for Barbara and Oprah, but it’s still not easy. We thought it was kind of an interesting, nuanced conversation. And Oprah, I thought that was really interesting that she shared that. And I understand. I understand both choices.

We tried a couple different times, different ways. People who know her told us in advance that it was unlikely she’d want to do anything with the film. She was aware it was being made.

Has she seen the finished film? 

I don’t know.

Bette Miller is the only celebrity talking head

Diane Sawyer one of few women news anchors who doesn’t participate in the docu

Did you ask Diane about participating?

We wanted to find out if she wanted to participate, but I understand that perhaps she didn’t.

None of the men who created the environment of sexism Barbara had to contend with are around to address their behavior

I would’ve liked to talk to her daughter, but that’s kind of it. I think because Barbara was so important, and she had such importance to so many people in the news industry we really did have great luck with talking to the people we wanted to talk to.

What surprised you most in your research?

It was her childhood. I didn’t really know anything about how she grew up. So when I started reading her book and watching other specials that were made about her, and understanding that she grew up in this interesting nightclub environment. Her dad was a showman, maybe a scoundrel, depending on who you ask. And she grew up in the backstage of his nightclub, meeting famous people, hanging out with them, seeing that they were real people. I thought it made a lot of sense for her approach later to famous people and to how she’d never really seemed afraid of anybody.

Oprah says there’s no place in this world now with social media for Barbara Walters interview

It’s true. Television news interviews used to hold such a huge audience power. The number of people who regularly watch TV news was much bigger. There weren’t other sources of information. There was no other way to hear from politicians or from celebrities; they had to use the medium of television news. Obviously, that is over with the dawn of social media and all these different podcasts. There’s so many different ways to get information and there’s pros and cons to that. We have more varied things, you can really get into your niche interests. But I think the hard stuff is [part] of the whole idea of disinformation and lack of trust. There’s a lack of trust in the news media and a lot of debate about which channel can you trust, and it depends on where you are politically. I think that we’ve really swung the other side of the spectrum, and we’ve lost a lot of things in the process.