The ever staid and stoic Michael Kaplan, producer/director of Make 'em Laugh. Photo: Joe Sinnott. Courtesy of Thirteen/WNET After producing what many consider the definitive documentary series on the Broadway musical, what topic was there left to tackle for filmmaker Michael Kantor? Something that made him laugh. Series producer/director Kantor and his Emmy Award-winning team from Broadway: The American Musical have just started principal photography on a new six- hour PBS series chronicling more than a century of American comedy, called Make'em Laugh: The Funny Business of America . The multi
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As you probably heard, the documentary world lost two award-winning makers last month--Gail Dolgin and George Hickenlooper. Gail Dolgin died October 7 after a decade-long struggle with breast cancer. She was 65. She earned an Academy Award nomination and Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for her and Vicente Franco's 2002 documentary Daughter from Danang. Other films made with Franco included C uba Va and Summer of Love. A fixture in the San Francisco Bay Area documentary community, Dolgin always wanted people working around her to be a little better," said Franco in an obituary in the
The Film Independent Filmmaker Forum, held this past Hallowe'en weekend at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles, offered a weekend's worth of food for thought for doc- and fiction-makers alike. A perennial in-demand panel, Find Money for your Documentary, moderated by Caroline Libresco of the Sundance Institute, went beyond the usual areas of grant-writing and pitching to cover such areas as packaging, as presented by Dina Kuperstock from the agency CAA, and equity financing, a bailiwick of Impact Partners' Dan Cogan. Executive producer Stephen Nemeth ( Climate Refugees; Fuel, Flow)
'Cool It' comes out March 29 on DVD through Lionsgate.
Seven-part series airs on Turner Classic Movies through December 13.
In the year since winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival for Daughter from Danang, producer/director Gail Dolgin and director Vicente Franco have taken their film to over 60 domestic festivals. The documentary has been seen on five continents, has enjoyed a 20-city theatrical release in the US, and on April 7, will air on the PBS series American Experience. The film is a co-presentation with the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in association with the National Asian American Communication Association (NAATA). Daughter from Danang, which took seven years to make
Injunction to 'Bouchat v. Baltimore Ravens' prevents use of footage that includes Baltimore Ravens.
A review of Marina Goldavskaya's 'Woman with a Movie Camera'
David Wolper, whose Wolper Organization was a pioneering force in documentary production during the first three decades of American television, passed away August 10 at his home in Beverly Hills. With almost all of the news and documentary work being produced in New York in the 1950s, Wolper set up shop in Los Angeles and lured filmmakers like Mel Stuart and Jack Haley Jr. to work with him. Over the next decades, the Wolper team produced such works as The Race for Space , D-Day , The Making of the President series, the Jacques Cousteau television specials and hundreds more. He and his team