William Greaves is one of the most respected independents in the film and television production field. In addition, he is considered the dean of independent African-American filmmakers and through the years has helped to launch the careers of many young Black filmmakers. He has produced more than 200 documentary films, eight of which have won more than 70 international film festival awards, an Emmy Award and four Emmy nominations. Greaves was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1980; he won an Emmy for his work as executive producer of the classic public affairs TV series Black
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The quest for freedom and the restraints of race are opposing themes that resonate in almost all of Ken Burns' films, from The Civil War to Baseball to Jazz. But in his newest work, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, a two-part documentary about the first African-American Heavyweight Champion of the World, these forces define a man who not only challenged the status quo, but was ahead of his time in demanding to live his life without any limitations, racial or otherwise. "Jack Johnson wished to live his life nothing short of a free man," says Burns. "And that was a
Henry Darger's life was made for the movies, which is why it is important that esteemed documentary filmmaker Jessica Yu is the first to explore it in her documentary In the Realms of the Unreal (Susan West, prod.); the film is being released theatrically in December through Wellspring Media. Darger, who was considered to be a mentally ill man throughout his 80 odd years, was at once Dickensian, Zolaesque and Proustian. After his death in 1973, and his burial by the Little Sisters of the Poor in a pauper's grave, it was discovered that he had his James M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll aspects as
Deliverables. Boilerplate. Milestones. E&O. Those are the words that follow "You've got a deal" or "We want you to make your film for our channel." And they tend to get lost in the fuzzy elation of having closed a sale. Let's face it: there's nothing easy about getting a cable network to decide that your idea is worth making. And often the specifics of the contract seem like a series of annoying details with which someone else should deal. Increasingly, the expansion of original production at major cable networks has created a production-line environment in which flexibility has been replaced
Dear IDA Members, What will 2005 bring for the documentary world? I make no predictions, but it does look good. The year 2004 was impressive, no question. With a volatile election campaign and an increasingly partisan mainstream media, documentaries, as the new news, enjoyed an unprecedented success at the box office. Clearly, nonfiction films have provided something provocative and challenging for an eager public. Here in the United States we have many network and cable news channels. But a unique television program on CNN called Crossfire is known as one of the better "screaming heads" news
Dear Readers, Twenty years ago, the IDA hosted a group of prestigious filmmakers and members of the documentary community, honoring them with the first IDA Awards. Pare Lorentz, whose lyrical, cinematic examinations of social conditions across America would inspire generations of filmmakers to come, received the first Career Achievement Award, while Erik Barnouw, the great scholar whose book Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film continues to be essential reading, earned the Preservation and Scholarship Award. The award-winning films included 28-Up (Michael Apted), America and Lewis
On the US presidential election...
Dear IDA Members: For the past three years, I've heard, "This is the Year of the Documentary." In a line of great documentaries including The Corporation, Riding Giants and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster , Fahrenheit 9/11 is the biggest documentary of the year, perhaps of this decade. Estimates indicate it could surpass the $100 million mark in worldwide sales. But what does this mean for us, the filmmaking community? After the box office receipts are counted, the DVD has hit the stores and a potential Oscar nod is anticipated, what happens to the rest of the documentary world? I believe this
On the mandated broadcast hour...