Dear Readers, September means renewal--returning from a summer vacation or retreat, launching a new season, going back to school. While this issue is not the blockbuster education issue of previous years, we do look at how an educational context is utilized in innovative ways, whether for documentary purposes or as the subject for documentary exploration. We all presumably read Shakespeare in either high school or college, but it may have been unusual for many of us to have read the Bard in elementary school. But at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School in Los Angeles, teacher Rafe Esquith is
Latest Posts
Dear Readers, There's a certain verve and passion among filmmakers who willfully spend months out of the year in unforgiving conditions, observing and documenting the rituals and habits of exotic creatures. There's a fascination--a yearning, even--among humans to locate some symbiosis, some commonality with creatures fundamentally different from us. Perhaps it's the basic needs of food, sex, family, home and community, or perhaps it's the predatory, tribal and territorial instincts. The animal kingdom sustains our gaze, and we wonder if the fourth wall between nature and man serves to protect
Dear Readers, Earlier this month, I attended the INPUT conference-an international convocation of public television executives and filmmakers-in San Francisco. What kicked off and drove the conference was a report in The New York Times that Kenneth Tomlinson, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, had installed "ombudsmen" to ensure "balanced" programming-that is, programs that countervail what the far right perceives to be a left wing bias, as perpetuated by the far right's favorite whipping boy, Bill Moyers. According to The Times, Tomlinson had also paid a consultant $10
Dear IDA Members: In our business, pressure comes in the form of a broadcast deadline, missing a flight for an important shoot or even losing out on a one-time interview. I was recently in Toronto for Hot Docs where I attended the Toronto Documentary Forum (TDF). I was quite impressed with the filmmakers who endured critical review of their work in a public setting. The TDF is an amazing pitching event modeled, in part, after The Forum at International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA). The TDF consists of two days worth of 15-minute pre-selected presentations, held in a large room on
Dear IDA Members, Just off the plane from Cannes, back from MIPDOC and MIP-TV. These were two successive markets that served up many, many buyers and sellers in one place. This year MIPDOC was different in a couple of ways. There were more than 300 screening booths and more activities for the documentary filmmakers in attendance. These screenings were digitized for the first time. What does that mean? It used to be that distributors or producers sent off six copies of their film on VHS. A library of sorts was installed and the buyers could "check-out" your show at their own private viewing
Dear Readers, Know your rights! The increasingly prohibitive costs of archival footage, music and other key elements to telling a story are impacting documentary filmmaking. As a follow-up to a February-March 2005 piece about the Center for Social Media's Untold Stories project, Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-directors of American University-based Project on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest, discuss the sometimes Byzantine parameters of "fair use" and present the particulars of a proposed Statement of Best Industry Practices for this area. As mentioned last issue, IDA is
Dear Readers, What a month of media madness has been March 2005! Just as CBS News anchor Dan Rather signed off for the final time, Docurama released The Edward R. Murrow Collection, a four-DVD set that commemorates the work of the legendary reporter, and Discovery Times Channel aired one of Murrow's finest reports, the 1960 classic Harvest of Shame. Not to equate Rather with Murrow, but the latter, with his singular style and his impact on nonfiction television programming, helped make possible the emergence of the former. But now, we get faux news reports—not from The Daily Show, but from the
Dear IDA Members, As reported in The New York Times and on National Public Radio, a new media phenomenon has come into being-Video News Releases (VNRs). It's very interesting how these play on national and local channels. Catching up on the day's news, you could watch a 90-second report that passes itself off as a normal in-house story. One problem, though: The reporter's name is fictitious and the entire piece was created by a public relations firm that was hired by the White House-and paid for by the US taxpayers. According to NPR, 30 government agencies are in full swing financing the
Dear IDA Members, In the world of nonfiction filmmaking, January and February brought NATPE, the Sundance Film Festival and the RealScreen Summit, all within three weeks of each other, with IDA representation at all three events. I attended the RealScreen Summit in Washington, DC, which attracted nearly 1,100 people for three days of seminars and discussions about the creativity and business of the nonfiction form. While the seminars went on downstairs, the business of selling went on upstairs in the lobby. I saw a great number of buyers outlining their programming needs in 30-minute sessions