It’s opening night at the Laemmle Theatre in Los Angeles, the world premiere of your new film. You’ve done everything you can to ensure a successful launch, and there’s no reason there shouldn’t be one. You’ve booked yourself into a high-profile venue, your film’s topic is timely, the reviews have been good, and you’ve blanketed the local talk radio circuit. But there are problems. The L.A. Weekly printed the wrong starting time, FedEx is still trying to track down the third reel, and on top of that, the caterer you hired for your post-screening party whispers to you that the ladyfingers have
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Over the past decade, film festivals have grown into a year-round festival industry, one that seems to have spread to every medium-sized US and foreign city. By the year 2000, when my film Good Kurds, Bad Kurds was released, there were hundreds of festivals with paid staffs and budgets underwritten by chambers of commerce, public and corporate grants and, as every indie producer knows, spiraling submission fees. Good Kurds, Bad Kurds didn't play at Cannes, Berlin, Sundance or Toronto, but the film's hearty reception at fine festivals like Vancouver, Sydney, Santa Barbara, Copenhagen, South
A review of 'John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence' by Jack C. Ellis
This report comes happily from the Cannes International Film Festival. Nothing I have ever seen explains the place of the documentary in film history—and why we all are so involved in the art form—than Martin Scorsese’s marvelous, four-hour documentary, Il Mio Viaggio in Italia (My Voyage in Italy), a two-part history of Italian cinema. This report focuses on Part I, which provides the most detailed explanation of the nexus between documentaries and fictional features. Scorsese narrates the film himself. His set-up for the film explains the overall concept better than I ever could: “This is
Dear Readers, In concert with IDA’s much-anticipated summertime event, we look back on the making of one of the great rock’n’roll docs, D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, and how it has figured in Pennebaker’s illustrious career. We also go back in time, well before the 1960s, to the Roman Empire, the latest subject in Devillier Donegan Enterprises’ well-conceived strand series, Empires. Stephanie Mardesich profiles this and other episodes in this novel way of presenting and interpreting history. Once you’ve made your documentary, how do you get it seen? Well, we look into two areas—festivals
There is no question that Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, her 1936 masterpiece of the Berlin Olympic Games, is the main reason I became a documentary filmmaker. She was the original storyteller, introducing innovative techniques that we all try to emulate today. Even with modern technology, which brings intimate beauty and drama to today’s filming of sporting events, what producers claim to be innovative only have to view Olympia to realize that it all began almost 70 years ago with Riefenstahl’s Olympic epic. One would think that, with Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels as her bosses, Riefenstahl
A long line of impatient movie-goers stretches around the corner and down a residential street in the heart of Toronto’s Little Italy on a warm spring evening. The fact people in this hockey town are lining up on a weeknight to see documentaries during the NHL playoffs is not only surprising to the neighborhood locals. Of the many things the Hot Docs festival achieved this year, perhaps the greatest has been its affirmation that documentaries are a film genre audiences will line up to see. Hot Docs was created eight years ago by the Canadian Independent Film Caucus to address an increasing
Bud Greenspan, whose award-winning documentaries on the Winter and Summer Olympic Games made him synonymous with that quadrennial event, passed away December 25 at his home in New York City. He was 84 and had been struggling with Parkinson's Disease. According to an obituary in The New York Times, Greenspan sold his first documentary, a short about a Gold Medal-winning African-American weightlifter entitled The Strongest Man in the World, to the United States Information Agency. While making commercials for an advertising agency in the 1950s and '60s, he worked on a 22-hour series called The
When Bob Dylan met DA Pennebaker in 1965, the singer/songwriter had earned acclaim as the forerunner of the folk genre, with four groundbreaking albums to his credit and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of songs in his head. To his contemporaries he was both the heir apparent to Woody Guthrie and the wise and mischievous little brother of the Beat Generation. Pennebaker had been making films for over ten years, working first with such pioneers as Shirley Clarke and Willard van Dyke, then as part of the legendary Drew Associates team that included Robert Drew, Albert and David Maysles and
Dear Readers, It is never an easy task to salute the passings, in each issue of ID, of so many dignified members of the documentary community. But when we lose members of our own IDA family, as we did one weekend in April, the task is onerous, indeed. In this issue, former IDA President Mel Stuart reflects on Jack Haley, Jr., and Gordon Hitchens, a longtime contributor to these pages, recalls his 20-year association with Timothy Lyons. Jack Haley, Jr., was an IDA Trustee for many years, and was very generous and gracious with his time, emceeing many of the Oscars® receptions, IDA Galas and