On the Road, Seeking Heroines

Auburn-haired fireball. Blond-haired tomboy wanderer.

That’s the combination.

Holly Morris, daughter, is a former editorial director of a small alternative press.

Jeannie Morris, mother, is a former CBS sportscaster who won 11 Emmys and wrote a biography that later became the film “Brian’s Song.”

Now, after years on a shoestring budget, roaming the world searching for stories and clinging to a feminist vision for a travel show, this mother-daughter team and a posse of devoted freelancers have pulled it off: Eight half-hour episodes of “Adventure Divas” began airing on PBS on Oct. 26. Two episodes a week will air every other Friday at 10 p.m. through November on KCET.

The show follows host Holly Morris, 36, to Cuba, India, New Zealand and Iran, as she hitches rides on trains, taxis and a beat-up ’67 Valiant, tracking down divas.

Divas, Holly Morris says, are “modern-day heroines.”

The show mixes the genres of biography and travel in a style Holly describes as a cross between Bill Moyers and Pippi Longstocking. Holly uses the first-person and injects herself into the narrative in a way that can make more traditional journalists flinch. But for a lot of women--armchair travelers and adventurers--the show and its accompanying Web site have struck a chord.

This is the story of how a tenacious, Seattle-based mother-daughter team managed to get their series on prime time--supporting each other, influencing each other, and occasionally driving each other crazy--while remaining true to their vision.

“We come from two different worlds and two different generations,” said Jeannie, 66. “But we came with the same view about women’s images and how that needed to be changed.”

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The year was 1996.

The younger Morris was an editor at Seal Press, where she oversaw “Adventura,” a series of sports and outdoor books written by women. She loved the topic but was sick of office life. She wanted to reach a wider audience. She went to her mother and told her she wanted to do television.

The duo patched the pilot together from a nine-day trip to Cuba in 1998. A typhoon struck Havana during their stay, shutting the city down and wasting precious days. Living on credit cards and passion, they created the pilot. Then they shopped it around.

Reactions were mixed. They got confusion. They got interest. And they got, “Loved it, but where are the men?”

PBS got it right away.

“We never said, ‘Why don’t you make it the Adventure Dudes?”’ said John Wilson, co-chief program executive for the Public Broadcasting Service. “Never once did [Holly] have on one of those vests with all the little pockets. It was a refreshing change from the more traditional presenter-led travelogues.”

The pilot, “Cuba: Paradox Found,” aired on PBS in March 2000. It re-aired last week. The three new episodes begin tonight with “India: Holy Cow.” In Cuba, Holly hung out with a girl rap group called Instinto, a Santeria priestess, a poet and an exiled Black Panther.

In India, she tracks down a filmmaker-activist who works in Bombay’s brothels, a humanitarian who tackles poverty, a Delhi police chief, and the head of a micro-lending bank for women.

In New Zealand, she interviews a Maori pop singer and Prime Minister Helen Clark. Then she hunts down Keri Hulme, the elusive author of the Booker Prize-winning “Bone People.”

Iran, the final segment, is still being edited. In the wake of terrorist attacks, Holly is reviewing it with special attention. In Iran, she and the crew hunt down the politically unpopular publisher of a feminist magazine, a taxi magnate, and a filmmaker who was jailed by the Islamic Military Court for her movie “Hidden Half.”(Tahmineh Milani is now out of jail and is promoting her movie about the plight of women in Iran at screenings in Los Angeles.)

“I think we really wanted to put together a new breed of icon,” Holly said. “The reality is, if you see a woman cop running the Delhi police force, that does a lot for a 13-year-old kid.”

Holly is the fourth and youngest child of Jeannie and Johnny Morris, who spent a decade playing for the Chicago Bears before becoming a sportscaster, also for CBS.

When Holly was 8, the Morrises quit their jobs, pulled the kids out of school and took off on a trip across Europe and through Russia in a Ford Econoline camper. Johnny tutored the kids. Holly says she still can’t do fractions or write in cursive, and Jeannie says the older children ended up staying back a year in school.

Jeannie wrote a book about the experience--called “Adventures in the Big Blue Beast”--to finance the trip. The book was later turned into a half-hour Emmy Award-winning documentary. The four children narrated.

Holly distances herself from the influence of the family trip. She calls the documentary “cheesy.” But it is impossible to ignore the parallels between that odyssey and the spontaneous “on-the-road” flavor of “Adventure Divas.” And Jeannie believes it was then that the seeds for the show were planted.

“What I did for all four of my kids was make them comfortable in the world,” she said. “Travel was exciting, not fearful. A lot of people are afraid to travel.”

That attitude comes out in the show’s philosophy.

“Travel empowers women,” said Holly. “What the best of travel does is turn fear on its head and uses that energy as potential.” Jeannie’s career took off in a new direction, much of which she says is due to Holly and her philosophy of empowerment for women. She quit sports and left CBS. She helped form a Chicago group called the Women’s Issues Network. She did a show for TBS on RU486 and the politics of abortion. She had just finished a movie, “Expedition Inspiration,” the story of 17 breast cancer survivors who climbed Argentina’s 23,000-foot Mt. Aconcagua for PBS when Holly brought her the diva idea.

“She came to me and she said ... ‘I think there is an appetite for this.’ It fits all the women I know, but it isn’t reflected in the media.”

Today, the Morrises and a staff of four work in a storefront office in Seattle.

On the walls are clothes salvaged from a hotel fire they escaped in New Zealand, and discarded maps of the world from a local school that have outdated nation names like Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In the corner is an altar to Skydancer, a whirling air toy that goes on all the trips.

Both say the ethos of the show is more Holly, while the messages are both. Jeannie tends to do business work, while Holly focuses on writing and editing. But they work together on everything. “We just laugh when people say you must love working together all the time,” said Holly. “Sometimes we just roll our eyes at each other.”

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“Adventure Divas” airs tonight at 10 on KCET with back to back episodes of the India segment. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).