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Tavis: Glad to have you here. "All on a Mardi Gras Day" was a documentary that aired here on PBS, in fact.

Osborn: Yes. It aired nationally on PBS stations. It's a documentary about the black Carnival traditions in New Orleans, the Mardi Gras Indians, the Zulu, the Skeletons, the Baby Dolls. This is an image of my Big Chief Tootie Montana who, unfortunately, died in July. He died on the floor of the City Council fighting for the rights of Mardi Gras Indians to march on St. Joseph Night because they had run into problems with the police running the Indians off the streets. St. Joseph Night is one of their traditional days to parade.

Tootie Montana went down to the City Council to fight for their right to parade and he had a heart attack and died right on the Council floor. In some ways, you know, I'm glad Tootie wasn't around to see our city like this. He loved the city just like I do, just like everybody in New Orleans loves New Orleans.

Tavis: New Orleans has a lot of traditions, as you well know, having done this documentary and being a native of the city. When I revisited your documentary, "All on a Mardi Gras Day", I thought to ask you, as I will now, whether or not Mardi Gras will ever be the same in the city of New Orleans.

Osborn: I think it will because, you know, the culture is within the people. It's in their heart. It's in their soul. We may lose a lot of property. We may lose buildings. We may, you know, lose structures, but we're never going to lose the culture. This is a culture that's survived hundreds of years of slavery, of Jim Crow, of segregation, of Haitian revolution, of living in a city with no economy, with no jobs, very few opportunities, and those people have managed to survive and keep their culture going this long. I think you can be sure that Mardi Gras will survive and the spirit of the people will survive.

Tavis: Take me back days ago to what I can only imagine was a harrowing experience for you and your wife and Babette?

Osborn: Babette.

Tavis: The super cat.

Osborn: The super cat.

Tavis: The super cat who made it to Los Angeles. But take me back to where you were a few days ago and what happened.

Osborn: Well, I'd been working at the Fairmont Hotel. I took a job as a doorman at the Fairmont. Everybody in one way or another works in the service industry in New Orleans, even filmmakers.

Tavis: Absolutely, um-hum.

Osborn: And the Fairmont assured us that our family would be fine. Probably a thousand employees and their families were living in the Fairmont Hotel as well as maybe a hundred guests.

Tavis: You sound like Hotel Rwanda.

Osborn: It became a cross between Hotel Rwanda and The Poseidon Adventure.

Tavis: Right.

Osborn: It was, you know, people, literally refugees, coming in from the storm, you know, to find some refuge.

Tavis: Forgive this, but that sounds like a pitch now to a studio (laughter). It sounds like a cross between Hotel Rwanda and The Poseidon Adventure, but anyway, go ahead.

Osborn: Being a media person, you start thinking in those terms (laughter).

Tavis: It sounds like a pitch, exactly, yeah.

Osborn: And for four days after the storm, we did relatively well. We had, you know, plenty of food. The hotel took care of us. You know, there was no electricity or water. We were carrying buckets of water up to the seventh floor to try to flush our toilets, but the conditions were relatively good. But we couldn't get any information on what was going on outside of the city. Everything was shut down.

So on Thursday, the hotel said they were going to provide buses to get everybody out and they sent us out of the hotel to go and catch the buses and we walked out into the water. Walking into that water was something we never ever wanted to do. It just looked like a toxic soup that you did not want to step in. You know, on the ground was glass and metal and boards with nails sticking out of them. You know, you just couldn't see what you were stepping in. Even a curb, you know, if you caught the curb the wrong way, you could, you know, we just thought that even a broken ankle could be fatal.

But we got out. We took a cat carrier. My wife held the cat carrier on her head and I had a big old duffel bag and my video camera around my neck and we started walking. We got to Canal Street and walked down Canal to Camp Street and headed up Camp Street where we were seeing police cars and military vehicles passing, but nobody would stop or give us any information. At one point, an officer -- a guardsman, I think -- jumped out of a vehicle and pointed a gun right in my face and said, "Move it, move it." You know, that's all we were trying to do was move it out of the area, but, you know, I didn't try to explain. I had a video camera around my neck and I didn't want him to mistake that for anything threatening.

So we just kept moving and finally got to the spot where the buses were supposed to be and waited with about a hundred other people and no buses came. We just kept hearing rumors that you have to go here, you have to go there. We decided to just make our way to one area where we heard there would be buses and we got there and there were about another couple hundred people waiting there, high and dry under the overpass of the I-10. It had started raining that day and, you know, everybody was out of the water finally.

National Guardsmen came and they said, "Look, the only way you people are going to get out of New Orleans is to go through the Superdome" and that was not something we wanted to hear either. I hadn't seen any pictures of the Superdome, but I knew that it was the last refuge in town and the only way to go, you know, for people who had no other means. Nobody wanted to do that, but they made us go back into the water, through the water, by this time, up to the waist in some places.

There were people with small children, people in wheelchairs trying to push their way through the water to do this. And every time we'd stop, we'd try to talk to the kids, to small children, because their parents were so frazzled and nervous that they couldn't even speak to them anymore. We'd show them the cat, we'd show them Babette, and say, "Look, look how brave she's being. We're going to make it. We're going to be okay."

So we got to the Superdome and that's where we really saw the magnitude of the situation. We saw 15,000 to 20,000 people who were just at the end of their rope, who were just dazed and hungry and tired and thirsty and crazy and drunk and crying and dying, and we just knew we couldn't spend a night there. We couldn't stay in this crowd because it was just too volatile and too crazy.

There were Guardsmen kind of around the perimeter of the Dome, but not inside the Dome. There was never any sense of we're here to help you and we're going to take care of you and you're going to get out okay. It was like we're here to guard you in this pen and keep you in this pen. We just couldn't stay there. In fact, one of the Guardsmen, when he saw us -- by then, there were nine of us from the hotel with three cats all in cat carriers -- the Guardsman said, "You're not going to be able to take those animals with you" and we just said, "Well, that's not an option. We're taking our cats. We've protected them this long."

I saw so many sad people out there with dogs and cats and it can seem trivial to people now that, you know, to worry about the life of an animal, but a lot of these people had lost everything they had and all they had was their best friend with them.

Tavis: So how did you get out of the Superdome?

Osborn: We left. We said this is not an option. We left the Superdome and were headed back to the hotel. We thought, if we can't get in the hotel, we'll spend the night in our cars in the parking garage and, you know, hope the marauding gangs don't come in there because we were hearing about drive-by shootings and rapes and other things going on in the city and we didn't know what to expect.

So we headed back to the hotel, back into the water. Just as we got to a corner, an SUV came up and inside was a bellman from the hotel riding with a National Guardsman. He stop, "Stop. These are my people." He told the Guardsman, "Look, you have to get them on a bus." There were buses then streaming into the city going to the Superdome. The Guardsman said, "Go toward that street and stop the last bus that comes through." I said, "Why stop the last bus (laughter)? Let's stop the first one."

Tavis: (Laughter) This sounds like a setup. Why stop the last bus, yes.

Osborn: Let's go first, yeah. He said, "I'm going to radio the last bus stop" and, you know, we got in the middle of the street and stopped the bus. The driver said, "I can't pick up people here. You have to go to the Dome." This officer drove around and said, "Look, I'm in charge. Get these people on the bus." The driver, a sweet man named Earl from Texas, just let us in, looked the other way when we brought on the cat carriers, and we got in that bus and sat on the back of the bus and was so grateful to be on it. We didn't move. The bus went around to the Superdome then to pick up people and we were afraid that somebody would get on and say, "Hey, you people aren't supposed to be here. You have to get in the back of the line." An officer looked in and he said, "How many you got?" He said, "Nine." He said, "Okay, load on 36 more and a bunch of women and children got on the bus and we went to --

Tavis: And you went to Texas?

Osborn: We went to Houston.

Tavis: To the Astrodome.

Osborn: We got to the Astrodome and our group was -- you know, we were lucky, we were resourceful, we had cash, we had credit cards. We were not going to stay in the shelter. It was just not something we wanted to do. We told the driver, "Look, we want to just get out here and we'll try to get to a motel." As we were leaving the Dome going toward the gates, these wonderful girls came up to us and said, "We have cars and we'll take you anywhere you want to go." You know, it was finally seeing somebody who was there to help us. They said, "If you have no place to go, we'll take you to our house. We'll take care of you." They took us to a motel and we took very long showers and contacted our folks. We sat in the motel for about an hour before we realized we could turn on the TV. We'd been sitting in the hotel with no electricity--

Tavis: With no electricity, you forgot the thing worked.

Osborn: But once we turned it on and started seeing the images of our city and what it was going through, that's when we really started shaking and realized we'd come through.

Tavis: Your mom lives here in the greater Los Angeles area?

Osborn: She does.

Tavis: So I assume she's happy to see her baby.

Osborn: She's very happy to see us, yeah. And my wife's family lives on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi and we finally got word that they're all okay. In fact, one of her uncles was in a tree for three days, but they're surviving.

Tavis: Did you -- with that video camera hanging around your neck, did you get any of this on tape?

Osborn: Yeah, I did. You know, it's just the instinct. You have to shoot, you know, what's going on and I shot about twenty minutes of tape inside the hotel and out on the streets. There were a lot of beautiful, courageous, wonderful people that were, you know, doing what they could to survive and keep their dignity and their spirits alive and intact. Remembering in the hotel, there was a piano and nobody was playing this piano for days and we thought when is somebody going to play that piano? New Orleans is a music city.

Tavis: Absolutely.

Osborn: Finally on Wednesday night, there was a little Latino kid in there and he started playing "When the Saints Go Marching In", just picking it out. We thought --

Tavis: What a New Orleans song.

Osborn: Yeah.

Tavis: Well, to be a filmmaker, you didn't land in the worst place (laughter).

Osborn: No, I guess (laughter) --

Tavis: You could be in Pocatello, Idaho being a filmmaker, but somehow you wound up in Los Angeles. We are glad to have you here. What happens next? Do you know?

Osborn: Well, we're waiting to find out what kind of condition our house is in. We just bought the house this year. Haven't yet made the first payment. We did a lot of renovation on the house and now we don't know if it's going to be livable again, but we're waiting to find out.

Tavis: But you'd like to go back if you could at some point?

Osborn: Absolutely. I think everybody who lives in New Orleans just wants to go home and get our city back together and get our people alive and moving and thriving again.

Tavis: That's why I love the Big Easy. It's a great place to hang out and people there are so spiritual and so soulful and so resilient, to your earlier point.

Osborn: We've got -- you know, I think there's a lot of respect. There's a general respect because you never know who that person is you're talking to. If you meet somebody on a bus who's, you know, you don't know what they are. They might be an Indian chief; they might be a Zulu king; they might be a Second Liner, somebody that's an important person.

Tavis: Everybody in New Orleans is important, as are you. I'm glad you're here.

Osborn: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: My pleasure, man. Up next, how New Orleans could have avoided this disaster and what needs to be done now to ensure that it never happens again. Stay with us.