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We are pulling this article from the archive to promote our upcoming Doc U: Shooting Overseas: Making Your Doc on Foreign Soil at the AFCI Locations Show at the L.A. Convention Center. On Friday, June 15, we are hosting a panel of doc filmmakers who have traveled the globe and film commissioners whose job it is to make filming in their countries as straightforward as possible. Register for the AFCI Locations Show and RSVP for this free Doc U today! When it comes to documentarians, they go "where no man has gone before" to get their story--South Africa, Brazil, China, Russia, India, Afghanistan
A review of 'The Documentary Film Makers Handbook'
Famed Cinematographers and Hungarian Emigres Subject of New Documentary
by George Butler In late 1974, I published a book, with writer Charles Gaines, called Pumping Iron: The Art of Bodybuilding. I thought this could be a subject for a film and that its main character, Arnold Schwarzenegger, could become a big movie star. No one agreed with me. It was impossible to find an experienced director to touch the subject. After being turned down by Frederick Wiseman, DeWitt Sage Jr., Howard Smith, David Wolper and others, I decided I would direct and produce my own movie. I had never directed a film before, so in preparation, I rented a 16mm projector and a dozen top
Terry Zwigoff's Crumb by John Anderson Proof that cranky, banjo-playing misanthropes can be movie heroes, Crumb (1994) is a perfect synthesis of character, access and director Terry Zwigoff's eloquent invisibility. One of the more astute films in any genre to deal with the creative process, Crumb is probably also the first film to posit a counter-cultural icon as the product of post-traumatic stress disorder. A portrait of the artist--underground comix star R. Crumb--as open wound and downbeat prankster, Crumb has to be considered now the Birth of a Nation of nerd chic. Alternately intimate
Jeffrey Blitz's Spellbound Your heart completely goes out to the eight young competitors in Spellbound (2002); it really does. They're so filled with hope and belief--so industrious in wonderfully individual ways in their quest to win the 72nd National Spelling Bee--that wishing that each and every one of them could win becomes inevitable. And maybe, this irresistible documentary suggests, they already have. These eight were part of a group of 249 who came out of some 9,000 school and city bees to qualify for the 1999 finals in Washington, DC. While a contest where the aim is correctly