thank you for being here, Steve.

Steve Weiss, documentarian, veteran journalist.

Just wrapping up a beautiful film about Chuck Morris.

Somebody that goes way, way back here in Colorado.

So thank you for being here.

Thank you.

Alan, is a pleasure to be here.

Great.

Tell us a little bit about how this story came to you, because as just as a music fan and being a lifelong, Colorado resident, I know exactly who Chuck Morris is, but really didn't know a lot about him.

You know, I did, too.

I grew up in that same, time frame to where Chuck was having a huge influence.

So I knew about him.

I knew about the Barry phase of the world.

And, I mean, I remember going to Red rocks and, standing, waiting all day to get the best seats in the third or fourth row back then you could do that if you came down and invested the time at 8:00 in the morning.

So I was very familiar with his name and what he had done, but I hadn't been following him recently.

And then my career was, took me out of state for quite a while, ended up back in the state for the last few years, and then started teaching at CSU about 15 years ago, full time.

I'd been an adjunct there, so I went there full time for a while.

And honestly, where it came from, the quick version of it is we established a relationship with the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media, which is the state's film commission.

Here in Colorado.

And, they have, reached out to us to solicit our students and faculty to work on some projects that were kind of small in terms of funding, but things that were semi state related.

But it was a chance for students to be involved in projects.

So we had established about seven years ago, a relationship with them where we were doing a number of about one a year, documentaries for various topics, really aimed at a local audience here in Colorado and, PBS, audiences.

And they reached out to us on this and said, hey, we know that Chuck Morris has started this unique Colorado, State University, you know, music business program.

It started out just as a few classes.

Then it grew into a minor, and it was kind of growing.

And they said, we just think it's something that's interesting to do.

And Chuck himself is interesting to do.

And he had he's been in the Colorado Music Hall of Fame.

And in 2026, he was elected to the Colorado Business Hall of Fame.

So we kind of tracked him, for the last three years or so, in the program, as he was developing and growing it, he and an associate, who also was working with the program.

So that's how we kind of came in, in contact with him.

And it was in our backyard, myself and Jesse Grace, the co-producer on this, both our faculty members in the journalism and media communication department at at CSU in Fort Collins.

So this was something that was in that was really in our backyard.

So a lot of the things we attended were things that were right there on campus.

We knew some of the students we had some of the students from our program who were also participating in this minor, in this business minor.

And, it was fun to watch in many respects.

We got to know Chuck, and he's a very colorful guy.

He's a great storyteller.

He's a great name dropper because he's got some serious names he can drop.

And so it was fun just to watch the pathway of it all the way through.

your team did a really good job.

You and your team did a really good job of showing how his his life as a concert promoter is almost like.

It seamlessly blends with founding a music business program.

I thought that was really interesting.

Talk a little bit about like maybe where in his journey did he get this idea of like maybe passing on what he's learned to to a younger generation?

Yeah.

He mentions early in the documentary and he mentioned to it's several times as we were working with him throughout this process, that his parents were both teachers and that he'd always had that in the back of his mind that if he hadn't gone into the music business, he might have ended up being a teacher.

And he always had a lot of respect for that.

And I guess he'd been thinking of, for a number of years prior to starting the program, which started about 2021, I think, in, in, Fort Collins, he was looking at doing it at a number of different schools, both in-state and out of state.

He had that much pizzazz that he could kind of say, where do I want to do it?

And I think he came into contact with some of the administration folks at CSU and liked the mix, and they were very encouraging about it.

So he'd always had the idea, he claimed, and then it was just a chance to kind of find a place to do it.

And I think because CSU was very receptive to it and said, we want it to be in our college of business.

We have a very aggressive program there.

They saw it as a unique opportunity.

Really surprise me.

Alan.

I had no idea that it that the music business programs like this were that unique.

There's a few of them out there, but very few of them out there.

And as we would talk with musicians and people behind the scenes in the business, which is a lot of what the documentary about, it's the people.

It's not the stars, it's the people who were in the business of creating music on all aspects.

It was surprising to see how they reacted to the fact, like, wow, this is really different.

This is a very unique program which made us feel good.

As we were producing the documentary, it's like, you know what?

Because you're always looking as you know, for topics that are interesting and unique.

And we begin to understand how unique it was.

At first, we looked at it as well.

Just one more program at CSU, but then people started saying they don't have this elsewhere.

And when we started traveling around the country and talking to students who had graduated from the program and specifically talking to people who hired those students, they were the ones to say, you know what?

We hired students because this is unique, that they know how this business works.

They know the language.

They know the back story.

That's why we think it's a good mix.

So it be it grew on us.

The idea that this was a successful program because it was unique.

And you hear a lot of the people who were involved in it saying, this has always been the kind of business where it's just networking and you don't really know what you're doing, but there's a chance there's a pathway for students to, to look at, to find a way to get into that business and pick your job sort of thing.

Talking about Chuck Morris as a person, because I know when whenever I get ideas about people or places, sometimes in Chuck Morse's case, I would have been very intimidated.

But at the same time, it would have been a lot of fun getting to know about his particular journey just in the music business.

And then, you know, he has this other journey that he's he's begun in the educational field.

What what might have surprised you as you were learning a little bit about Mr.

Morris?

One of the things that probably surprised me the most is how relaxed he is, and I don't know if it's because he's been doing it for so long and he's kind of towards the end of his career sort of thing.

So he or he's always been that way.

I kind of suspect he's always been that way, is you would hear comments from some of the stars who've worked with him.

They've always liked his genuineness.

He's always had great enthusiasm.

But he was very relaxed with us the very first day.

He was very comfortable.

As I said, he's a great name dropper because he's got any great names to drop, but he would, he would, you know, start to talk about somebody.

And here's a funny side note.

Two of your music fan like I am, and I'm closer to his age category than you are by a few years.

But the point is, is that we were talking about music.

He had a radio show, at one of the radio stations in Fort Collins, and it was uncle Uncle Chuck's, music box is what it's called.

And he was talking about music.

And as we were shooting that day, we were filming it, he mentioned Dan Fogelberg, who is a famous artist who, lived here in Colorado for a while, and I was a big Dan Fogelberg fan.

And I said, oh, yeah.

And we started talking about one of the albums.

He looks at me like, how do you know that sort of stuff?

Because he's used to now being around younger people who don't have that appreciation for the history of music sort of thing.

So anyway, it was easy to warm up to him in that respect because he he loved to tell stories.

And if you, you know, it was easy to draw those stories out because he's proud of what he's done and he's had quite an impact.

And he also seems like he's very natural connecting to a younger audience that may not know necessarily all of the artists that he's worked with, but at the same time, it seems like he's he's he can develop those relationships actually quite easily.

Well, partially for two reasons.

One, he's still connected to that music business.

He's still actively working in it.

So he knows the people of today, the stars of today.

But he's also good at, you know, pointing out that, you know, when you start dropping names like the Eagles, you know, U2, Linda Ronstadt, I mean, people that he was directly involved with Lyle Lovett, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

I mean, a lot of these names are familiar to students, that are on campus right now.

They if they love music, they probably look back in history and they've heard of.

And certainly when you talk about people like the impact of the Eagles and Joe Walsh, who's a personal friend of his, Lyle Lovett, who's a personal friend of his, some of these people he's managed, he's become friends with them.

So that has some impact that that raises their attention.

And I think it it makes it easier for him to, I remember filming in his classroom where he would say something about, yeah, I had this singer, she, you know, her name was Linda Ronstadt.

It turned out she was really good, you know?

And so he has that ability to kind of weave that in to keep your attention.

Let's talk a little bit about your personal process and how you go about making, a piece like this.

Part of the fun of nonfiction filmmaking, I think, is that no two projects are ever alike.

And you, you know, you get into one thinking, okay, I'm going to do what I did on this previous one.

And you realize very quickly and it's like, you know, they each have their own ecosystem and each they, they, they breathe a life of their own.

Yeah.

Talk a little bit about the process on this one.

Where did you start?

Did you start researching, Chuck Morris, did you start with interviews with talk a little bit about?

Yeah, we met with Chuck early on, to talk about what we were going to do.

So we knew we had access to what was going on.

And then we also needed a list of people who'd been impacted by him.

And so during those early meetings, he and Eric, the person who was the associate director there at the program, supplied us with some of their success stories.

And there were a number of them.

So it made it easy to.

And because the program had been going for a few years, they had several graduates.

And we went to Nashville, Tennessee, to talk with somebody who was working in the music business there.

We went to San Diego at a club there, a young person who was working with the younger Berg, and so they had a number of people that were, and that's what we really wanted to do as a filmmaker.

You want to we want to talk with Chuck, but we want to see people impacted by it and both locally and nationally, if we could find.

So it was worth the effort to go talk to these people and they all, of course, had good things to say.

But most of them, you know, came back to the same message.

I didn't know this pathway was possible.

And then I found it and it allowed me to get into the business.

And so it made them feel good that way.

So that's part of the process.

And the other thing as a filmmaker that, you know, is you got to kind of pick your style.

And the co-producer, I work with Jesse Grace, and I kind of believe in the same style.

We're big believers in scripting because you can do a documentary with just talking heads, and a lot of filmmakers do that.

I've done some of that in the past, but I really like writing and I really like writing to the story.

I really like linking those sound bites together.

So that was a conscious decision we made was not only are we going to identify the 15 to 20 people, we're probably going to interview and be a part of this, but we're also going to script this as we go along and try to tie those pieces together.

And then we're also big proponents, as many filmmakers are, of letting it develop in front of you, getting the B-roll, lots of natural sound, you know, listening foreign music.

Of course, there's a natural, there's a natural sound and there's music.

So we would try to go to events that they would that their program, they had something called the Music Business Collective there, which is a group of students who were interested in this, who are kind of an outgrowth of the program at CSU.

And they were putting on their own events, and they had a little, information thing at Red rocks, and they would have events on campus where they would be a show, and they would go around and talk to other students.

So we would follow them around in other words, looking for the visuals that are going to support the story.

We didn't want to get caught in a story like this of just doing talking heads, just doing sound bites.

There was a lot of interesting stuff there, but it was it was more fun to try to seek it out and see how people reacted to it.

Awesome.

Yeah, I could definitely tell that that process when I was viewing it.

And one thing that I really appreciated is just the fact that you highlighted a lot of students, you mentioned the the music business collective.

Yes.

And, and just so you can see, like in real time, how that's influencing students lives.

And they're pretty savvy, even though they're, you know, they're young college age students.

They have a real sense of, of, of the, of this business in this ecosystem.

And it was cool to see those juxtaposed with Chuck Morris, who's been doing this, you know, for 50 years.

Right.

So, yeah, talk a little bit about just the young people.

What, what what, what kinds of influence has have you already seen that Chuck Morris has had on their lives?

Well, from an educator standpoint, and because I've been blessed with with doing that the last 15 years of my career, it's been our goal is always to see students succeed.

I mean, you want to see them learn along the way, and you're working with some of our students.

So you get that thrill of seeing them get better as they're working on projects.

But the ultimate goal is for them to find a job or an opportunity and something they're passionate about that they're going to be successful in and happy and get to do what we've done for all these years to continue to do it.

And they look at the at how long we that we're still happy doing it sort of thing.

So you want that pathway for them.

And so we saw that in the students from this music business program.

They were finding those early pathways.

And for them to realize, wow, this is a job I didn't even know existed or I didn't know how to get there or, to see them reveal that or have it revealed for them.

That was the exciting part, to watch how they would gravitate towards this.

And they started that music business collective.

I mean, they didn't nobody pushed them.

They were just like, what can we do to get more involved sort of thing?

And you'd love to see that sort of enthusiasm.

And, you know, when that happens on campus, that's that's something that you admire and you want to feed that fire and you want those students to network, and you can just see that their appreciation for it as they're at these different events, they're just excited to be there, much like I was when I was their age.

Looking for my opportunity.

Exactly.

And one thing about the music business over the, you know, over the course of of Mr.

Morris's career, it seems like the only constant thing is that there's nothing that's constant about it.

It's constantly evolving, it's constantly changing.

There's new ways of appreciating music.

There's, you know, the streaming, the streaming phenomenon I think is, is a is completely different from the way that I used to listen to music and to see him kind of living that out and imparting that knowledge.

I notice it doesn't dampen the students enthusiasm.

And I think that's a really that's a real testament to, to the type of person he is.

And he just and talk a little bit about the way that you notice that he interacts with that with the younger generation.

We're talking about that earlier, but it just seems to cultivate that one on one feel.

Here's an example of it.

And Colorado State is known for its sustainability record.

They're always one of the top five in the country in terms of being a green university and doing things.

And so that was already there before Chuck Morris brought his program in.

When Chuck and Eric started developing program, the program, they thought that was one way they could.

And we talk about it in the documentary, that they could adapt their program to that idea because sustainability is becoming a bigger deal at, concerts and doing things the right way and recycling and things like that.

And so they saw the opportunity to be a university of not only was doing a unique program about the music business, but also a unique program about the green aspect of the music business, and that would be something their students could be leaders in.

So that was Chuck and Eric adapting their knowledge.

It wasn't something they'd do that much before, but they started bringing in guest speakers to talk about the sustainability of the music business.

What can we do to be more vigilant about the way we use energy, about, you know, the way we impact things?

How do we fix concert areas that we come into and have a big concert in an in an area?

And if it damages it, how do we those sorts of things, which were brand new topics and things I'd never stop to think about.

I mean, we see recycle bins at a, at a concert, but that's an actual strategy that people are starting to grow into.

So that's an example of that.

He knew he and Eric knew that the students would be interested in that because of just that's a generational thing that students are interested in.

That and the idea of green, application and different things.

And they also knew it was an opportunity.

So they pivoted to that and included that as part of their program ended up being an interesting part of it that is very unique.

And in fact, the dean of the college business says in the film, you know, I don't think anybody else in the country is doing this.

And it was a natural thing for us.

So I think that's an example of how they recognize the potential to excite students.

And then they just made it an exciting pillar.

I think they they even did some went to some concerts and did some research and took students on field trips, things like that.

Sure.

Yeah.

Well, great.

I really appreciate your time today, Steve.

Thanks for coming and talking about your film.

Yeah, really enlightening about again, somebody that I always knew about but didn't know that that, that much in depth.

So I really appreciate the time that, that you took to, to make the film and giving us all Coloradans something to, to chew on.

Well, we're thrilled that that you got.

You folks are airing it.

It's a great platform for it.

We're excited to get it out there.

I mean, really, my co-producer, Jesse Grace, and I and the university and the film commission.

It's been a collaborative thing.

Certainly the business program up there.

And we're just glad it's a story that will have a chance to leak out there and maybe, maybe inform a few students whether they end up going to any school.

But they're it's more about finding a field or a major that or minor that you didn't even know existed.

You know, how do I find that way?

So hopefully somebody will sit at home and watch it and say, some young person and we'll say, you know, that's something I might want to look into.

So if that happens, then we've made our goal.

Absolutely.

Thanks again.

Thank you so much, Steve.

Appreciate your time.

You bet.

Take care.

Thank you.