Editor's Note: Ray Zone has reviewed books for International Documentary on and off for about two years. He also writes reviews for American Cinematographer , among other publications. As literature on documentary has proliferated at a more rapid rate, we want to give this field a more consistent profile in these pages. We are pleased to have Ray Zone on board as our regular book reviewer. He can be reached at r3dzone@earthlink.net. In recent years, the number of books published about documentary films and filmmakers has greatly increased. The proliferation of books about documentaries bodes
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You've done it. You've run the funding gauntlet, overcome colossal obstacles in pre-production and tackled the challenges of production. As you rest comfortably in the black leather chair in the editor's suite, trying to enjoy the full measure of your accomplishments, you become dimly aware that you might have forgotten something. Something important. Clearances? All done and filed away. You have the footage you need. Music and narration, check, check. Thinking hard, you close your eyes. The nagging fear swells to a throbbing panic behind your eyes, completely eclipsing your hard-won bliss
Producer, A Memoir By David L. Wolper With David Fisher Introductions by Art Buchwald and Mike Wallace A Lisa Drew/Scribner Book 368 pages, hardbound, $30.00 ISBN 0-7432-3687-4 It seems no accident that David L. Wolper and television were both born in 1928. Wolper matured to become one of the most prolific television producers; he began his career in 1949 by selling motion pictures to start-up TV stations across America. In 1958 Wolper produced his first award-winning television documentary, The Race for Space, and left the distribution business. He subsequently produced thousands of hours of
Offering a full ten-day program of high-quality documentaries, the fifth Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival—"Images of the 21st Century," held in March in Thessaloniki, Greece—has established itself as a major documentary event, in spite of its relatively short existence. In the spirit of this year's festival poster depicting a film reel designed as a razor blade, many of the films had a cutting-edge aspect to them. Though many of the titles were repeats from earlier festivals, there were plenty of new events to experience, including a new Greek competition section. Alongside the five main
"If this piece of film dies, a human thought dies with it. If I can do something to preserve that thought, isn't it worth doing?" That observation was made by Kemp Niver, a former law enforcement officer and head of security for a Hollywood studio. Niver was explaining what motivated him to switch career paths and dedicate himself to the restoration and preservation of some 3,000 black-and-white films produced between 1894 and 1912. He was recognized with an Academy Award for technical achievement in 1954. For most of the history of the motion picture and television industries, the efficacy of
In April 2002, I was videotaping an animal rights protest in Beverly Hills, California, for an independent documentary I am producing titled Chattel. During the demonstration, the Beverly Hills Police showed up. I, along with the protestors and another filmmaker, was detained, put in a line up and photographed. The officers then confiscated my DV camera and videotape. When everything was finally returned to me several days later, the camera and part of the videotape had been damaged. During the time I was detained, the police were intimidating––and convincing––telling me I could not touch my
Dear IDA Members, Writing for the media arts industry can be a noble and ennobling profession, and can be a lucrative one as well. But when writing nonfiction—documentaries, strands, limited series and, yes, reality TV—pay is too often minimal, and benefits are too often even less. On-screen credit for a job well done is something that the Documentary Credits Coalition has successfully fought for over the past 15 months. The top ten nonfiction cable networks made close to $2 billion in profits in 2002 from both advertising and subscriber fees. We want the nonfiction writer to have financial
Dear Readers: Music fuels a documentary—it punctuates and primes the story, it underscores the emotional current, it dramatizes, it manipulates time. In this issue, we look at two of the most vital elements when it comes to music for documentaries: choosing and working with a composer, from veteran documentary composer Miriam Cutler; and clearances and rights, in a primer offered by David Powell, whose company, The Music Bridge, is all about that very subject. We also look at three music documentaries—DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus' Only the Strong Survive and Paul Justman and Allan Slutsky's
There are countless ways to use the camera and the editing room to get at the truth. But I like best the nonfiction movies that open up the possibilities—movies that provoke the audience to find their own feelings on the subject. Take Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line. Possibilities start as soon as the "Blue" in the title card is red. The opening credits name a production designer. You can't have that in a documentary! Then, a few minutes into a sincere interview with accused killer Randall Adams, there's a cut to a staged shot of a look-alike gun. Wait—that's not even the gun! Then there's a
Berga: Soldiers of Another War is an elegy in two senses. The personal "what might have been" aspect of the story haunted and motivated Charles Guggenheim to make the documentary about his US Army unit, the 106th Division in World War II. "I can remember their faces just like yesterday," he says in his narration of the film. "They went overseas and I didn't, and some of them didn't come back. I've been thinking about it for 50 years, wondering why it didn't happen to me. That's why I had to tell this story." Ironically, what was in his system while he was getting something out of his system