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HERE COME THE ADVENTURE DIVAS
Emmy-winning PBS documentarian Holly Morris talks about fear, failure, and finding the courage to make her dreams come true. Dan Eldridge witnesses the transformation.
The sun is still hours from rising, but Holly Morris and the rest of her Seattle-based camera crew have just landed in Havana, and they're way too keyed up to stay inside the hotel. As they drive through the streets of the city, we hear Morris's voice booming out of the television, trying to explain the sensation of being an American on enemy soil.
"The forbidden is seductive from afar," she says, her voice filled with enthusiasm and wonder. On the TV screen, a clunky, antique sedan winds its way through the darkened streets of Old Havana. "I feel like I just drank a whole pot of coffee!" Morris says. "I can't believe I'm in Cuba!"
It's a fairly typical scene on Adventure Divas, a PBS documentary series in which Morris, a former book editor, wanders the globe in search of inspirational women. Before Morris and her crew leave Cuba, for instance, they will have tracked down and interviewed an all-girl hip-hop group, a manager of a female-run organic farm, a documentary filmmaker, and even a Santeria priestess.
Throughout it all, Morris will rattle off her own running commentary about the strange idiosyncrasies of Cuban culture with an unscripted and spontaneous attitude not often seen on public television. In the space of 30 minutes, she will schizophrenically transfrom from being the host of a TV show into a giddy young girl on a field trip, and you just can't help wondering, who is this person? And how, exactly, did she get here?
 "I was feeling this rigor mortis of the soul," Morris says, when asked about her former life as an editor with a nine-to-five schedule. She's wearing blue jeans, black Converse hi-tops and a ruffled blue blouse, and is sitting in front of her computer station at Adventure Diva headquarters, which is located in an old storefront on Seattle's Capitol Hill. Her dog, Boo, a gigantic black German Sheppard, is snoozing on the tiled floor next to a stack of mail. There are beat-up metal desks against every wall. A half-dozen filing cabinets are scattered throughout the room, and a stack of jerry-rigged wooden shelves is piled high to the ceiling with books and cardboard boxes. The space feels productive, but also a little chaotic and overwhelming, which is probably a perfect description of what was going on inside Morris's mind when, about eight years ago, she decided to put her editing job on hold and to spend a month-long sabbatical in Sumatra, thinking about her life and where it was headed.
"That trip was really pivotal," she says. "For seven years, I hadn't spent a month away from a desk, and that's when I started to actually envision what would be next. It wasn't a fast process, and I've found that actually being able to articulate for yourself what your dream is, is harder sometimes than achieving it."
Back then, Morris's dream was a bit vague. She knew she wanted to somehow document powerful and independent women, and she knew she wanted to get out of publishing and into a medium with a stronger punch.
"I feel television has this great potential," she says, spinning back and forth in her chair and taking small sips from a cup of coffee. "I have great respect for its power, but not so much for its content."
It's no wonder that Morris would recognize the power of television. Her mother, who now works as a producer with Adventure Divas, was once a sports commentator for CBS. (She also wrote a book, "Brian Piccolo: A Short Season," that was later adapted into what is probably the most famous made-for-TV movie of all time, Brian's Song.)
"We fumbled a lot along the way," Morris admits, when asked about the show's salad days. "Taking on television was a challenge." But before she could meet that challenge, there were other small matters to attend to: the day job she still had to quit, the money she still had to raise, and the business she still had to start.
"That's the big hell period which I try not to remember," she says, laughing. "I try to block it out, like childbirth. But what I did was I cut my job back to half time. I started freelance writing, and I started working on Divas with the other half of my time. I basically just created a more flexible life, and eventually we did the pilot program in Cuba. After we came back we sold it to PBS."
 To hear Morris tell it, her whole transformation from desk-jockey to world-wandering television personality sounds simple. Fun, even. But after a bit of prodding, more truths come out. "We had to make a three-minute trailer, which was interesting," she says. "We had to make it look as if we'd been around the world, so we went to Utah and went to the mountains and the desert. We found some monk in Tacoma and shot him doing a Buddhist prayer. In retrospect, it was a really funny exercise."
Up next was the financing stage. Morris says she got a bit of money from PBS and some from private investors who'd seen Adventure Divas.com and were duly impressed with the concept. The rest came from Morris's own credit cards and savings account, and over the past five years she's written, directed, produced and starred in programs filmed in Cuba, New Zealand, India and Iran. Surprisingly, though, money turned out to be the least of her worries.
"I thought one of the most integral parts of the process was articulating the dream," she says. "Also, I had never been in front of a camera, so I had lots of self-doubt, and I still do. But whatever! What's the alternative? Not doing it? That doesn't seem like an option."
Who can say what the future holds in store for Holly Morris? But as I get up to leave the office, making my way past the mannequin wearing the Adventure Divas T-shirt, and taking care not to step on Boo, who's still snoring in the corner, I notice that she's already back at her computer, typing furiously. As I open the door to leave, I realize there's still one question I haven't asked: Just how many hours a week does it take to run this empire, anyway?
Morris swivels around in her chair, stopping for just a second to ponder the question. "I don't know," she says, looking up at the ceiling and touching her hand to her chin, as if trying to contemplate the past seven years of her life all at once. "You stop counting when your work is fun."
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ISSUE 01 / SPRING 04
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