The motion picture world has witnessed many passings of late, as has the documentary world, which lost three individuals who quietly made a difference in making this world better.

Gordon R. Hitchens, a noted international film journalist and founding editor of Film Comment magazine, passed away on Saturday, August 7, at the Carillon Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Huntington Long Island. He was 85 years old.

Gordon Hitchens began his studies at Columbia University, where he received his bachelor's degree in English Literature and two graduate degrees, one in cinematography and the other in journalism. For his master's thesis in cinematography he co-produced and co-directed the film Sunday on the River, which won several awards for its portrayal, in documentary form, of parishioners from a church in Harlem on their Sunday outing on the Hudson River.

Hitchens went on to earn renown as a documentary film journalist and jurist, covering international film festivals in Berlin, Moscow, Nyon and Yamagata, among others, over his 30- year career. As an American organizer and assistant, he helped many aspiring filmmakers submit their documentaries to film festivals abroad, including films by some who were blacklisted in the US. In 1962, he founded Film Comment, a film opinion magazine, of which he was the editor until 1970. Film Comment is currently published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. In addition to his film festival and journalistic work, Hitchens also taught film studies courses at the School of Visual Arts, Hofstra University, NYU, Adelphi University, City University, Pratt Institute, the New School, and he retired as Associate Professor of Film Studies at CW Post College in Long Island in 1990. Over the years, he was a stringer for the weekly edition of Variety Magazine, and wrote articles for the New York Times, Documentary and Film Culture as well.

As editor of Documentary magazine since 2000, I had the pleasure of working with Gordon in the early part of my tenure, until he became ill in the early-to-mid 2000s. He had a longer history with one of my predecessors, Tim Lyons, and Gordon was kind enough to write a tribute to Tim when he succumbed to cancer in 2001.
Gordon had strong relationships with the Berlin and Yamagata Film Festivals, and I was grateful for his dispatches from there. I think that filmmakers and cineastes alike owe him a debt of gratitude for having founded Film Comment, one of the more distinguished periodicals devoted to cinema.
Above all, he lived a rich and rewarding life.

He is survived by his daughter, Janine H. Parker, and son Laurence Hitchens, as well as his four grandchildren, and son-in-law Robert Parker and daughter-in-law Lauri Carluccio Hitchens. His half-brother, Michael Hitchens, is a video-journalist with the United States Air Force in Los Angeles, California.

A Memorial Reception honoring the life and work of Mr. Hitchens is planned for Thursday October 14^th from 8:00 to 10:00 pm at the Freida and Roy Furman Gallery in the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, in Manhattan. Interested colleagues and friends are welcome to attend.

Charitable donations in Mr. Hitchens' memory can be made to PBS, or Human Rights Watch. For more information go to http://www.gordonhitchens.com/.

Arthur E. Holch Jr., an Emmy Award-winning television documentarian whose work at midcentury and afterward tackled charged subjects like race relations, Nazism and Communism, died September 28 in Greenwich, Conn. He was 86.

According to The New York Times, Holch earned an Emmy nomination for writing the 1961 documentary Walk in my Shoes, a study of race in America from the perspective of African-American interviewed for the film. He later won a News & Documentary Emmy in 1992 for Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth, a half-hour documentary he produced and directed.

Holch began his career as a reporter, having graduated from the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism. He worked in radio and television before his own company. Other documentaries he wrote, produced and directed for television include The Beautiful Blue and Red Danube (1967) and Cuba: The Castro Generation (1977).

Holch is survived by his wife, the former Ellen O'Keefe Hare; three sons, Gregory, Christopher and Jeremy; four daughters, Hilary O'Neill, Milissa Laurence, Meredith Holch and Allegra Holch; and seven grandchildren.

Marshall Flaum, whose 55-year career began under the aegis of first Walter Cronkite, then  David L. Wolper, died Oct. 1 in Los Angeles. He was 85.

According to The New York Times, Flaum earned Academy Award nominations for et My People Go: The Story of Israel (1965), which traced the Jewish diaspora from 1917 to 1948, and The Yanks Are Coming (1963), which told the story of America's entry into World War I.

Flaum also earned five Emmys-two for episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau in 1972; and one for Jane Goodall and the World of Animal Behavior: The Wild Dogs of Africa (1973).  Earlier in his career, he won two Emmys for writing for the CBS documentary series The Twentieth Century, hosted by Walter Cronkite. Flaum joined the Wolper Organization in 1962.

He was nominated for other Emmys, and won awards at various film festivals.

Flaum is survived by his wife, the former Gita Miller; his daughter, Erica, and his son, Seth, both film editors; his sister, June Flaum Singer; and two grandchildren.

The early rumbling of Awards Season just revved up a few decibels as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just announced the eight short listers in the Documentary Short Subject category. And those films are as follows:

• Born Sweet, Cynthia Wade Productions
• Killing in the Name, Moxie Firecracker Films
• Living for 32, Cuomo Cole Productions
• One Thousand Pictures: RFK's Last Journey, Lichen Films
• Poster Girl, Portrayal Films
• Strangers No More, Simon & Goodman Picture Company
• Sun Come Up, Sun Come Up, LLC
• The Warriors of Qiugang, Thomas Lennon Films, Inc.

Killing in the Name (Dir./Prod.: Jed Rothstein; Prods.: Liz Garbus, Rory Kennedy) and Sun Come Up (Dir./Prod.: Jennifer Redfearn; Prod.: Tim Metzger) both screened as part of IDA DocuWeeks^TM Theatrical Documentary Showcase this past summer. Thomas Lennon and Ruby Yang return to the Oscars fold with The Warriors of Qiugang; the filmmakers earned an Academy Award in 2008 for their short The Blood of the Yingzhou District, another DocuWeeks alum.

The 83rd Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Tuesday, January 25, 2011, at 5:30 a.m. PT in the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2010 will be presented on Sunday, February 27, 2011, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center®, and televised live by the ABC Television Network. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 200 countries worldwide.

Eliot Spitzer, a member of the pantheon of fallen, libidinally challenged political icons--John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Mark Sanford, John Ensign, Henry Hyde, Strom Thurmond, Wilbur Mills, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson--is the subject of a new documentary that explodes the myths surrounding his case. 

The biggest myth is that he and call girl Ashley Dupre were engaged in non-stop, horizontal bop. In fact, he only slept with her once. Recognizing a good career move when she saw one, Dupre stepped into the limelight when Spitzer's regular escort decided to duck the media storm after his carousing became public. "She [Dupre] was very clever,"  says Alex Gibney, the writer, director and producer of Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. "She did nothing to disabuse anyone of that notion."

It's fitting that so many myths surround this story. Even Spitzer likens himself to Icarus, a mainstay of Greek mythology. For those of you who don't have your copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology nearby, Icarus ignored his father's warnings about the fragility of the wax-covered wings he strapped on in order to escape the confines of the labyrinth in which he and his father were imprisoned.  Icarus flew so high and close to the sun that his wings melted, and down he went, plummeting to his death. The takeaway from his aborted flight has been that arrogance, or hubris, will lead humans to crash and burn. 

Eliot Spitzer's career is a model for this lesson. The "Luv Gov" resigned from office in April 2008 when The New York Times revealed that Governor Spitzer, who was seen as a candidate to be the first Jewish President, had developed a taste for illicit sexual encounters with prostitutes. A few months before his fall, he uttered this prophetic observation to a luncheon crowd at the New York State School Board Association: "Hubris is terminal."

"You can't make that stuff up," says Gibney, whose film lays out how Spitzer's drive to root out corruption on Wall Street and in New York's State Capital created enemies that coalesced to "take him out of Albany."

"I don't condone what he did," Gibney continues. Nor does Spitzer, who appears in the film to explain how his career-ending dalliances provided the ammunition his foes needed to bring him down.

We meet a colorful array of characters who'd been stung by Spitzer's relentless, hard-charging prosecutorial ways. We're reminded that he sued out-of-state coal-fired power plants for causing acid rain in New York and took on General Electric for dumping PCBs into the Hudson River. 

But it's his battles with Wall Street that may have sealed his fate. Spitzer pursued two analysts, Henry Blodget and Hank Grubman, who were accused of misleading the public about the value of investments they knew were, in Blodget's terms, "POS"--or, "pieces of shit."  Both financiers were banned from their profession for life-and were given multi-million-dollar severance packages. 

Spitzer took on the CEO of insurance giant AIG, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, who'd engineered a scheme to artificially pump up the value of his company. Spitzer kicked over a hornets' nest when his gaze landed on one of the richest men in America, investor Ken Langone and his pal, Dick Grasso, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, whom Spitzer sued over a $187 million pay package.

"There were a lot of people who wanted him gone," Gibney explains. "He wanted systemic change." The press dubbed him "The Sheriff of Wall Street," but his declaration of "war" didn't earn him any supporters in Albany on either side of the aisle when he became governor. He took his attack dog approach to public service into the governor's office, where he tangled with the rough-and-tumble entrenched interests in the State house. Gibney interviews Senate leader Joe Bruno, who became Spitzer's main foe.

"I've been threatened by hoods and gangsters my whole life; if you think you're going to bother me, don't," Bruno, a former professional boxer, maintains in the film what he said to the governor. When Spitzer did get under his skin, Bruno met with Greenberg, and later hired political operative Roger Stone, a lobbyist known for his wild sexcapades as a swinger and for his inclination to dress up like James Bond. "Sometimes the stories are just too good," Gibney admits. "The glory of nonfiction is running across characters like this."

Political lobbyist/strategist Roger Stone and friend. From Alex Gibney's Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, a Magnolia Pictures release. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Spitzer came to town with the campaign promise to "Bring some passion back to Albany." His constituents would soon find out exactly what that meant. After the government got wind of Spitzer's encounters, the Department of Justice (DOJ) began to close in and his fear--"If we stumble, they will kick us in the nuts"--came true, according to Gibney.

The twists and turns of why the DOJ was involved, how they traced Spitzer's transactions, the identity of his frequent escort, the names of the cabal that had it in for him and how the Feds manipulated the press to break the story and the fact that he was never charged with any crime, are part of this riveting, feature-length documentary.

Greek mythology wasn't about redemption, but it's clear that Eliot Spitzer is attempting a comeback. He's taught college classes and now has a talk show on CNN. Will he be able to wax up those wings and set flight again? "I disagree with [F. Scott] Fitzgerald, who said there are no second acts in America," Gibney maintains. "This country loves second acts."

I suspect Spitzer has one, but what it is remains to be seen.

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, which is being released by Magnolia Pictures, opens November 5 in New York and November 12 in Los Angeles. The film is also available right now on major cable systems across the country, iTunes, Amazon, Xbox live, hotels, etc.

Michael Rose is a writer, producer and director of nonfiction programs; he also writes for The Huffington Post and other publications.

Editor’s Note: Inside Job, an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, will be screening Saturday, February 26, at 6:10 p.m., as part of DocuDay LA at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills, and at 3:15 p.m. at DocuDays NY at The Paley Center for Media in Manhattan.

Most films geared to young boys bank on them coming back time after time to watch their favorite action heroes take on the forces of evil. Adults are usually good for one viewing. But after seeing a new documentary, Inside Job, which uncovers how a group of "evil doers" tanked the global financial system, I think the post-adolescent crowd finally has a multiple must-see. 

It's a densely packed film that methodically lays out the who, what, when and where of the ultimate bank job. "My first choice for a title was Bank Job, but that was taken," says director Charles Ferguson.

Ferguson's film is not peopled with a group of charming rogues like the Lavender Hill Mob or sexy, populist, anti-heroes like John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde, who held up one bank at a time. His characters are the pillars of Wall Street--the bankers, the analysts, the ratings agents, the regulators and their lackeys in Congress and academia who together tunneled into the banking system and made off with all the loot. The response to this calamity was to engineer a shakedown of tax payers or depositors in order to fill the banks back up so this gang can do it again.

So far, only one industry titan has been charged: Angelo Mozilla, the CEO of Countrywide Financial. But, Ferguson notes, "He's only being charged with civil fraud not criminal fraud." Ferguson believes that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) zeroed in on Mozilla because what he did was "so egregious--and he's not connected." Mozilla spent most of his career independent of the large financial institutions and brokerage houses.

That's not to say others shouldn't be doing the perp walk. "Many people knew [the financial boom] was going to end badly," Ferguson explains. "And their financial behavior suggests that."

At the same time they were touting the shares of their firms, these financiers were not investing their own money in the companies. "They took out hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it in cash," Ferguson says. These actions constitute "potentially both civil and criminal fraud." There's nothing stopping the SEC from going after these guys, but, Ferguson notes, "for anything else to happen would be due to public pressure."

Right now the vocal pressure for reform, however misguided, is coming from the Tea Party, whose members the Republican Party hopes will support its recently announced "Pledge to America." This platform is what a friend used to call "the same old sandwich"--a retread of the same policies that party stalwarts have championed for years: tax cuts, a spending freeze, rolling back health care reform, missile defense and a raid on Social Security as the prescription for what ails the country. There's no mention in the manifesto of any financial regulatory reform, let alone a call to lock up the malefactors who took down the system while lining their own pockets.

The GOP also fails to point out that America's financial system, once the world's gold standard (no pun intended), is no longer trusted. "If you talk to people in Europe, Asia and Latin America, they don't take seriously what America's bankers have to say," says Ferguson.  These countries, all with vibrant, growing economies, are looking for other places to put their money besides Wall Street. "It will reduce the amount of investments and will have an enormous impact on America," Ferguson warns. "America's impact is declining."

This wasn't the first time an economy has melted down. The world has experienced numerous economic disasters over the last several centuries, according to Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, who took the long view in their book This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. What they found was that as far back as the 1300s elements like rapid deregulation and real estate bubbles coupled with arrogance and ignorance were the sparks that set the economy on fire.

Ferguson agrees with the authors who say that these disasters can be avoided if politicians and regulators step in. "If we don't fix this, it's going to happen again," he warns.

It's up to us to apply the pressure. First step: Go see Inside Job. Bring your friends and better yet, bring someone who doesn't agree with you. Then see it again and bring some more people. 

Then let your legislators know that you don't want any silly, faux fixes; you want them to really put some teeth in regulations. Demand someone like Elizabeth Warren be appointed at the SEC and at the Treasury Department, and demand that the ratings agencies be held accountable. And while you're working yourself up into high umbrage, tell Congress to appoint a special prosecutor and put some of the financial system arsonists behind bars.  Nothing like the threat of serious jail time to shake things up in the Hamptons. It's not going happen without you. Ferguson's done his job; now it's up to the rest of us.

Inside Job, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, opened October 8 in New York, and opens October 15 in Los Angeles. The film rolls out to additional cities, starting October 22 with Chicago, Boston and San Francisco.

Michael Rose is a writer, producer and director of nonfiction programs; he also writes for The Huffington Post and other publications.

The Toronto International Film Festival is a place to watch big, shiny films that often are on their way already to a theatrical release. The advent of Thom Powers as programmer of the Real to Reel strand brought documentaries under the big-and-shiny banner; with his excellent connections, he has been able to ensure that big documentary releases are showcased and sometimes debuted at TIFF. This year, mostly under the aegis of Powers, the festival presented the latest work of American documentary luminaries such as Fred Wiseman (Boxing Ring), Errol Morris (Tabloid), Alex Gibney (Client-9) and Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for Superman), as well as international figures such as (the American-based) Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams), UK director Kim Longinotto (Pink Saris) and Chilean Patricio Guzman (Nostalgia for the Light). 

Perhaps the most buzz was generated about Morris' and Herzog's films. In Tabloid, Morris focuses on a brilliant woman who, after winning a beauty pageant in her youth, falls into ever stranger, more obsessive and more isolated ways. Herzog's film, shot in 3-D, takes viewers inside the little-seen French cave that houses the earliest known Paleolithic artwork. The day-long documentary conference, oriented to filmmakers, culminated with a conversation between the two documentary big dogs, who happen to be fast friends. (See sidebar.)

Charles Ferguson's Inside Job drew huge applause from audiences who were properly outraged by his exposé of the financial fecklessness that created the financial crisis. The essay film, which depends on a powerful music track to hold together its sequences of high-profile interviews interlaced with helicopter views of urban landscapes, follows Ferguson's 2007 documentary No End in Sight; Inside Job is even more grim. His gotcha interviews, revealing bankers' cupidity and stupidity, provide laughs, but they don't last.

Another hot ticket was Gibney's Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. In the tradition of Gibney's high-quality, theatrical investigative documentaries, this is a detective story that goes behind the headlines. The film poses two questions: Why did squeaky-clean Spitzer hire prostitutes? Why did his outing result in his resignation, when few other politicians resign after similar embarrassments? Gibney gets a scoop by discovering who the prostitute Spitzer became obsessed with was and getting an interview. But much more than that, he provides a devastating answer to the second question, an answer that intertwines financial and political corruption at a national level. While the film may not revive Spitzer's political career (he appears committed to a political style guaranteed to alienate even his friends), it certainly lays bare the corroded political and economic structures he was trying to reform.

The documentary conference opened with an interview with Gibney, which I conducted. He called himself an "agent provocateur" of better conversations on fundamentally moral issues. "All my films address moral problems, and I want to get people angry about immorality," he said. Unlike many producers of public affairs documentaries, he always structures his films as mystery or detective stories:  "Why did a taxi driver get beaten to death by American soldiers? That was Taxi to the Dark Side. Why did one of the most successful energy companies in America go belly-up almost overnight? That was Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room." Gibney noted that the detective format allows him to address formidably difficult subjects. "You can introduce a great deal of complexity if you tell a simple story," he maintained. In response to a question, he explained his success at gaining access to subjects by persistence. "It can take a long time to get people to talk to you; I'm releasing five films this year because it took so long to get some people to talk." Also, he noted, the good faith representation of figures in earlier films helps to convince people to talk. Explaining his prolific résumé, he said that he depends upon a small but energetic staff, which primarily does journalistic research--all his films are meticulously researched--and on trusted freelancers.  

Along with a couple of business panels that offered no surprises, the documentary conference also featured a spotlight on a forthcoming HBO project, War Torn, a historical look at post-traumatic stress disorder. Veteran indie maker Jon Alpert talked about the devastating cost of war to the soldiers, and a little about the price of chronicling it for journalists.

It is also possible at TIFF to uncover talent, showing work that they desperately hope will attract buyers. Veteran editor Laura Israel's Windfall was one such, and so was veteran cinematographer Risteard Ό Domnhnaill's The Pipe. They both take on the hard challenge of chronicling community conflict. Both films are compelling narratives, beautifully produced, elegantly structured, authoritatively edited, with unforgettable characters. They both present a persuasive and powerful point of view, without slighting hard realities.

Windfall recounts what happened when wind-generating companies in her upstate New York town began to bargain with local farmers to install giant, 400-foot-high windmills. Initial enthusiasm by some in the collection of dairymen, organic farmers and weekend professionals soon led to dissension and then acrimony. Without federal regulation--and indeed against government support for poorly planned projects--the townspeople are left to investigate complex issues on their own. Researchers, including the town planning commission, discovered that the windmills not only make a constant and loud whop-whop sound but also create "shadow flicker," an irritating and unremitting shadow-show from the rotating blades. They found out that no one knows how to put out fires at the top of a windmill, and that companies had no plans for fluid spills or for deconstruction of aged windmills. And then the residents found out that wind energy, always intermittent, lacks a distribution grid to get energy out of local areas, and that the only business model yet found depends on continuous and high-level taxpayer subsidy.

The Pipe tells, partly in Gaelic, the story of what happened when a Shell natural gas project blessed by the Irish government schedules a pipeline to rip through a rural Irish fishing and farming village, where the director lives. The townsfolk, spurned by their own government and rejected by Shell when they offer alternatives, begin civil disobedience, a move that starts to tear the town apart.

In both cases, victory comes with scars to community culture so deep that the principals cannot imagine healing. The cost of exercising democratic rights at the grassroots level, when government and regulators have been bought and corporations respond to nothing but the bottom line, is prohibitively high. Windfall and The Pipe make, separately and together, a powerful case for pro-conservation energy policies and regulations to match. That way, local residents wouldn't be left alone on the front lines.

Neither film featured representatives from government or the offending energy companies. Israel noted that the energy companies largely worked in secret, signing locals to confidential agreements. Ό Domnhnaill, who had filmed the conflicts over the 10 years of struggle as a news cameraman, said, "I made the documentary because I had seen in covering the news that Shell could manipulate the media, burying these people's stories and portraying them as lunatics and anti-development. I wanted their voices to be heard." In any case, neither Shell nor the government would participate, since they had signed an agreement previous to the conflict. Interestingly, the film was funded in part by the Irish Film Board, a government agency. Ό Domnhnaill attributed some of the reason for the support to the Green Party, but noted that once in power, the Green Party did not come to the village's aid. He also praised the IRB's integrity.

From Risteard O Domnhnaill's The Pipe. Courtesy of Toronto International Film Festival.

Fair and balanced? I think so. These are both stories propelled by the conflicts within the community. Both directors reside, some of the time, in these communities, and the effort to deal scrupulously with the different characters and to represent their points of view with respect was palpable. The core balance in the story is maintained, as viewers are able to understand the different perspectives, how passionately they are held, and to see the consequences of conflict.

International documentaries were strikingly diverse at the festival. Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light is an elegiac tribute to the women who continue to search the Atacama desert for remains of their loved ones, disappeared during Chile's brutal dictatorship. The parallels he draws between the searches of astronomers for the secrets of the skies in the desert observatory and the women's searches for secrets in the ground is arch and forced, but the film's production values are as elegant and graceful, as always in a Guzman film. Kim Longinotto's Pink Saris is a vivid but ultimately unsatisfying film about a low-caste Indian vigilante for justice for women. The central character is unbearably grandiose and blustering; her abuse of her higher-caste, common-law husband becomes so painful to watch that not even his confrontation in concluding moments of the film rescues the film. The Danish doc Armadillo, by Janus Metz, echoes other season-with-the troops films: Callow young men go to war hoping for glory; fight with frustrating, invisible enemies; discover that the local population is more afraid of the Taliban than them; go home wounded and confused, without other recourse than to head back for another tour of duty. Tears of Gaza, by Norwegian Vibeke Løkkeberg, is more document than documentary, but it is quite a document--a brutal, graphic, on-the-ground record of the 2008-2009 Israeli siege of Gaza. It features close-ups of body parts, a dusty human torso on a bombed balcony, confused children and dazed women. 

Along with music docs, a lighter doc moment was provided with Australian Mark Hartley's Machete Maidens Unleashed! It is a fascinating film history of 1970s US B movies made in the Philippines, exploitation films in every sense (of Filipinos, the young women who played bimbos, and the audiences who watched the same film again and again in slightly different form). The film reinforces H.L. Mencken's acerbic comment, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

Whether fresh out of the box or on their way to a 20-city launch, the films all stood to benefit from their prestigious platform. One of the beneficiaries of the platform was Davis Guggenheim, who brought billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates to a press conference for the education-reform film Waiting for Superman. Powers never missed a chance to urge people to use their social media tools to spread the word of their enthusiasm for the films they loved.

Pat Aufderheide is director of the Center for Social Media at American University.

Herzog and Morris Explain It All to You

By Pat Aufderheide

An hour-long conversation, moderated by Thom Powers, between the two legendary filmmakers capped the TIFF documentary conference. Here are excerpts, as best real-time transcription could capture the back-and-forth:

Errol Morris: Werner is a neorealist...there is a hybrid world between fiction and nonfiction, perhaps the most interesting place in film to inhabit. From these first films [Morris saw of Herzog's], it gave me a different idea of what is possible in filmmaking. For that I will always be indebted to this man.

Werner Herzog: Errol stuck out like someone who immediately caught my attention, because I had the feeling you had to be taken seriously. There was this wildness of ideas floating around and it just needed to take shape, and needed a certain amount of discipline--which you still do not have in post-production, where you waste too much money. You have to expect films to become profitable fairly early on and when you spend too much money in post-production, it is hard to get into that terrain. But I do not really mind because it is the way you function. You have to wrestle like Laocoön with the snake. The end result is always disciplined, but the way into it, I have my doubts.

EM: I share those doubts.

***

Thom Powers: What do people need to become a filmmaker?

EM: The main ingredients are rage and a desire to get even with others.

WH: A more prosaic answer, [because] you are aiming at the obvious and we are not into the obvious. You have to understand music, and Errol does because he's a cello player, and you have to read, that's what I tell students in the Rogue Film School [that he runs]. Read, read, read, read, read, or you will never become a filmmaker. Errol Morris, he reads everything, like the autobiography of a failed lion tamer, but you can discuss Hölderlin with him. In the application for the Rogue Film School, you have to follow instructions for a mandatory reading list. It starts with Virgil, The Georgics, if possible in Latin. It includes the Icelandic Poetic Edda. A short story by Hemingway, and the Warren Commission Report.

EM:  It is great reading [aside to audience: It's unreadable.].  I've been planning to do a version of Tales from the Crypt, only it's Tales from the Warren Report.

WH: Everyone denounces it, including you, apparently, but it is an incredible, conclusive report. It's a wonderful crime story.

EM: it is one of the great crime stories. I would define my reading as compulsive, unremitting, obsessive, often counter-productive reading. ..Years ago I had this fantasy of creating my own version of Harvard Great Books, 100 great books no one had ever heard of. I found this book by Frank Weatherwax, on training Lassie, which is a masterpiece of its kind. Another book, which at one time I wanted to turn into a movie, Letters to Strongheart. Strongheart was the first of the great dog movie stars, pre- Rin Tin Tin. Legendary because he cried in a close-up on film...This man J. Allen Boone fell in love with Srongheart, and never had a chance to meet him, and after Strongheart died he started writing letters to Strongheart. This is a collection of 80 letters to a dead dog.

***

WH: How do you get people to read?

EM: Maybe it's good they don't. The power of my recent protagonist, of Tabloid, told me a story about how she as a young girl in high school had read a short story by Theodore Dreiser. I compulsively read through Dreiser, and read a short story called "The Second Choice." As a connoisseur of despair, [I find] this is one of the most despairing things ever written. A woman unable to marry the man she loves settles for the second choice. You see her entering into a life of utter barrenness. Joyce [the protagonist in Tabloid] read this and decided that she would not go there.

WH: An admirable and costly decision. How many years did she live in seclusion?

EM: Still, if she had not read this book she would be in such better shape.

WH: No, there are decisions about your life, and she has great dignity, great depth. She is extremely articulate, she is not mad, she made choices, sometimes strange but not indefensible. When you read her favorite books, you see her whole life unfolding in front of you.

***

EM: I often think I am the exact opposite of Werner Herzog. We had dinner in LA recently, and Werner was talking about how he'd gone into a cave where no men had been for tens of thousands of years, and making a film in Siberian wilds, and there was a laundry list of these incredible adventures. I said to Werner, It's interesting you should mention this. My last film was made in one of the most desperate, depraved places on the face of the earth--Van Nuys, California. Both of us--and I hope I'm correct; it's certainly true about Werner--we're both involved in a certain kind of risk-taking. What I took away from [Herzog's documentary] Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices was that art was somehow about risk-taking. I think that's actually more than anything in the movie moved me, because I think it is true. It's doing something that is ill-advised. I remember saying to you once there was nothing more depraved, debased than filmmaking, and you looked at me appalled and said, "You must never talk that way!" But it is doing something that shouldn't be done.

WH: I always come back to the conclusion that there is a certain nobility in it as well.

EM: The fact it has no nobility gives it a certain nobility.

WH: That is too dialectical for me. But it does give meaning. You can wrestle some meaning even from Van Nuys. Even Van Nuys is inhabited by humans.

EM: Don't go too far here. There's another line, I believe it comes from you, 30-plus years ago, that part of art is extending sympathy where it's never been extended before. Part of the job of an artist is to look in places where people would not normally look. To examine people who normally would be passed over or ignored. I agree with that. If anything gives it a kind of nobility, this tawdry enterprise, it could be that.

THIS EVENT IS OVER.

TICKETS FOR 12/6 IN WASHINGTON DC AND 12/8 IN BOSTON WILL BE ON SALE SOON.

IDA proudly presents conversation and clips with Julia Bacha, a key member of the creative teams behind the award-winning documentaries Encounter Point, Control Room and her latest, Budrus.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010 in New York
Doors Open: 7:00pm
Discussion & Audience Q&A: 7:30pm - 9:30pm

Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick Street
New York, NY 10013

FOR MORE INFO AND TO BUY TICKETS, VISIT THE EVENT PAGE

Special Support Provided by the ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES. We appreciate the generous support provided by the foundation.

The event which was sold-out gave audiences the real story about what went wrong when Katrina hit New Orleans, LA; and how both the investigators and the Corps of Engineers whistle-blowers were silenced.

Special thanks to our wonderful and generous sponsors: Los Angeles County Arts Commission, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Pithy Little Wine Company.

VIEW PHOTOS by clicking here.

For more information on the next Doc U at The Cinefamily featuring rising star Lucy Walker, VIEW EVENT PAGE by clicking here.

If filmmaking was a sport, then ESPN would be a contender. Few players in television would commission and produce 30 films in less than two years--and grant creative autonomy to the filmmakers.

In 2007, Bill Simmons, columnist for ESPN.com, e-mailed his bosses a short pitch: With ESPN's 30-year anniversary coming up, the cabler should produce 30 documentaries from that time frame--but not SportsCentury: 30 Years of ESPN. Import a few well-known Hollywood filmmakers and give them complete creative control. Call the series 30 for 30. The top brass at ESPN took the idea further: Filmmakers from outside the ESPN stable would make all 30 documentaries.

 "We made a list of respected filmmakers and celebrities who were sports fans," explains Simmons, executive producer of the series. "We made another list of filmmakers we respected, whether they liked sports or not. We hoped to land a few early for a ‘domino effect,' of sorts, and we only needed two or three names. Something happened that we never anticipated: These people had been waiting for us.

"Al Maysles, who had filmed two months of incredible footage of Muhammad Ali before the Larry Holmes fight in 1980, cut a 30-minute film that nobody wanted to buy, as the fight itself had been so depressing," Simmons continues. "Dominos started falling. Ice Cube is a lifelong Raiders fan. Steve Nash grew up idolizing the late Terry Fox. Barry Levinson never recovered from the Colts leaving Baltimore." Other documentarians who signed up included Alex Gibney, Dan Klores, Brett Morgen, Billy Corben and Barbara Kopple.

As Documentary went to press, ESPN was at the midpoint of its series. Executive producer Connor Schell believes that 30 for 30 is special not just for the sheer number of quality films produced in such a short period. "We have some pretty extensive documentary history in the past with SportsCentury, as well as our 25th year project," he maintains. "However, all were internally produced and more biographically driven and countdown-focused."

Senior director Mark Durand, who oversaw films made by Kopple, Morgen, Maysles and Gibney, was a senior producer on SportsCentury from the beginning. "SportsCentury was ESPN's first real effort to get into sports history--a successful series that was more like documentary than previous Sports Center programming, and it laid the foundation for ESPN Classic''s in-house documentary efforts," he explains. "30 for 30 continues the evolution and takes it to another level."  

"When we sat down and discussed 30 for 30, we agreed on how the independent film genre had advanced, with some incredible storytellers out there that we felt could turn their focus to sports projects and capture them with independent film spirit," Schell adds. "We sought out an eclectic mix of feature film directors, professional documentarians and first-time filmmakers. The common denominator was real passion for the story they wanted to tell. Each piece stood on its own, not dependent on the one that came before or after it. Collectively, they tell a larger story of the era in a mosaic of the last 30 years, diverse points of view and cultural turning points. We tried to support every aspect of production without getting in the way of the filmmakers, so the work of each is their vision."

"These are evergreen stories that ESPN can broadcast on multiple platforms for years to come," Schell says. "We feel we have a great dynamic here, by commissioning great filmmakers to tell stories they have passion about. We're hoping to continue to do that in the coming years."

The only feature-length piece in the series, Jeff and Michael Zimbalist's The Two Escobars, premiered on ESPN in June and in commercial theaters in August, and enjoyed successful runs at the Tribeca, Cannes and Los Angeles Film Festivals. According to the Zimbalists, The Two Escobars was green-lit by ESPN as a result of the series' shortage of both Latin American-oriented titles and soccer stories. "ESPN was looking for works portraying the impact of sports on society," says Jeff. "We thought both Escobars [Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord, and Andres Escobar, the captain of the Colombia national soccer team] were critically involved in issues of major social import, particularly in Latin America. We also felt the stories were so compelling that we needed a feature length to do them justice. Who would have thought ESPN would produce a socially conscious story about drugs and soccer, support our vision and allow us creative control, show a Spanish language film for two hours in prime time, and even set up a theatrical run?"

Another high-profile project in the series, Kopple's The House of Steinbrenner, about the late owner of the New York Yankees and the dynasty that he created, premieres September 21. Kopple was on ESPN's short list, and with two previous sports films under her belt (about boxer Mike Tyson and baseball player Lenny Dykstra), it was an easy decision for her. "I had been talking with ESPN during the 30 for 30 project selection," she says. "I was at the All Star Game two years ago, and was impacted strongly seeing George [Steinbrenner] driven around in a golf cart weeping, and I decided I wanted to do something on the Yankees. I've been a loyal Yankees fan since I was a girl. ESPN gave me great creative latitude. I showed them rough cuts and they'd make suggestions, but I could take them or leave them. The story of the Yankees in this period of transition evolved several times over the two years, including shooting and editing after Steinbrenner's death."

"Steinbrenner and the Yankees were not an easy organization to tackle," Durand contends. "The family doesn't care for publicity. The younger generation does things in a different way than their dad, who would call reporters at 2:00 a.m. if he thought he'd make a score. Part of the deal going in was no filming of George, who was not in good health the past four years. But here you have Barbara Kopple, distinguished filmmaker who has worked with a lot of famous people--often during controversial points in their lives--accustomed to getting intimate access. But that wasn't going to happen with the Yankees. She still got uncommon access, yet from her point of view, she would have liked a lot more. That was a tricky thing, so she took advantage of being able to come out with three cameras at the closing of Yankee Stadium-from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.--to cover a really historic moment and catch the full transition from the old stadium to the new one.

"It's more of a vérité film," Durand continues. "Not entirely, but closer to her style; she wasn't interested in doing a history. She was interested in the heritage and the feeling that goes with the heritage of the Yankees. All these things were happening at once--the old ballpark to the new ballpark, the era of George, the era of the heirs, particularly Hal. At the same time, the Yankees come back and win their 27th championship. George's death brought it full circle."

Kopple characterizes the film as being "about family ties, the passing of things. At the end, George passes away; it was pretty heavy. Major League Baseball and the Yankees are an experience that is both massive and intimate. These were once-in-a-lifetime stories. I looked at it as a total: the Yankees, the family, the players, the fans and the legacy."

H. Scott Bayer is the editor/publisher of Indie Film Reporter and writes about independent film, filmmakers and production technology for several trade publications and broader audience newspapers when not working on his own or other peoples' films.

Editor’s Note: On October 21 at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Los Angeles, IDA will present Davis Guggenheim in conversation with Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz. The two will explore his wide-ranging body of work that includes culturally significant and brilliantly crafted films. Learn more and purchase tickets.

As I drove to the screening of Waiting for Superman, knowing I'd be writing this article, the question on my mind was, "Can Davis Guggenheim do for education in America what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change?" The bar is high--not only did it do well at the box office when movies were having trouble in theaters, it foregrounded the climate-change issue across the country, proving that people were ready to discuss the difficult subject. In hindsight, that film appears to illustrate Malcolm Gladwell's "tipping point," using a politician's PowerPoint to inspire a national discussion that was already brewing.

Waiting for Superman isn't Guggenheim's first stab at the issue of education. In 2001, he wanted to show his young children that teachers are heroes. His first doc, the Peabody Award-winning The First Year, followed five teachers over the course of a year in the Los Angeles public school system. "The film is raw, edgy, spare--so beautiful and inspiring it makes you want to go out and do something for those struggling kids, those impassioned teachers," wrote Phil McCombs for The Washington Post. Guggenheim says that since making that film, "Ten years later, nothing has changed. The dysfunction still exists."

For him, Waiting for Superman is "the uncomfortable truth about why our system is not working." Beginning with Guggenheim's smooth voiceover, the film leads with a first-person account of driving his children past their local public school to get to the private school they attend. "I knew that you couldn't tell this story without someone pulling you along in a specific, chosen direction," Guggenheim says, on his choice to include himself in the narrative. "I needed to take you on the path." He acknowledges his affluence makes private school possible but he wishes he could support public school, and with that, he sets up the point of view for the remainder of the film--public schools are an unfulfilled promise to our children and, by extension, our society.

Anthony, Bianca, Daisy, Francisco and Emily--the protagonists of the film--share their hopes for their future; their parents bite their lips and furrow their brows as they face hard realities about their kids' education without funds for private school. Stacked up against these students' dreams are the facts: Dropout rates are high, test scores are way down and spending is at an all-time high.

Representing a diverse geographic, ethnic and economic cross-section, these children face grim options. Daisy wants to be a veterinarian, but her chances of reaching that goal are slim if she follows the fate of the majority of students in her school, one of thousands of so-called "dropout factories" across the country. Watching these great kids standing at such a dangerous precipice is truly heart-wrenching.

The film moves deftly among individual stories to the wider landscape of facts and figures, using eye-catching animation and a bevy of smart, engaged talking heads. Davis notes that in An Inconvenient Truth, where he faced the challenge of animating the story beyond former US Vice President Al Gore's speech, "It was good to go from information and then yank the audience in the direction of the historical. Zooming in and out had to be done by necessity. It works on this story as well." Taking a full year and a half to cut Waiting for Superman, Guggenheim and his team edited as if the film comprised two different narratives--"Other People's Children" and "The Folly of the Adults." In the last few months, they wove the stories together.

Workforce needs have changed over the past few decades but the school system hasn't. Microsoft founder-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates speaks to the need for qualified engineers in the tech industry. The US education system isn't turning out enough qualified workers, requiring importing of workers from Asia to make up the shortfall. Among developed countries, US education ranks near the bottom.

Why? Education reformers Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Success Academy charter school in New York, and Michelle Rhee, chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools, point to teachers unions forcing bad teachers on schools and strangle-holding change, while Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers attributes the situation to the lack of resources and appreciation for an important yet disrespected profession.

 "I try to attack the logic, the psychological constructs of the issue so the audience can feel the issue anew," Guggenheim explains. "You can't just say, ‘Isn't it terrible?' Now, you have to do more." Producer Lesley Chilcott describes an escalating outreach plan, starting with encouraging website visitors to pledge to see the film. As people make a pledge, there are a series of benchmarks that result in benefits to students and teachers when numbers are hit. At 30,000, those who pledge get a $5 certificate for Donors Choose, a site where anyone can donate to classes in need; at 40,000, Office Max donates supplies to teachers; at 50,000, First Book sends out much-needed books; and so on as the film racks up more supporters.

Gladwell's tipping point isn't a flash in the pan, but rather a groundswell that slowly rises without much notice until an event pushes the trend over into mass appeal, the breaking of a wave. Is now the time for the issue of education reform, as it was in 2006 for global warming? "It's embarrassing to have the same hopes," Guggenheim admits. "It feels a little like I'm tempting fate. I think the issue is just as important. The need and the stakes are so high and people respond to the film. It has a potent effect on people, and I want it to move the needle."

Chilcott has her own hopes for the film, stemming from her experience teaching English in Japan, where she was treated with great respect by the aging executives she taught. "Sensei is the most valued position you can hold," she explains. "We're missing that in America; it's not cool to be a teacher. We need a culture of teaching as a prestigious career." She points to Finland, one of the top education systems among developed countries. "If you teach in Finland for 10 years, you can get an interview for anything else that you want to do," she notes. She points to signs of hope, like a friend getting into Yale Law School, but not AmeriCorps' Teach for America.

Similarly to An Inconvenient Truth, the end credits to Waiting for Superman are interwoven with inspiring messages that direct you to text "POSSIBLE to 77177," or visit www.waitingforsuperman.com--the main portal for how to become active in the issue. "The heartening thing is that the solutions are there; we know what works," says Guggenheim. "People have proven that reform can be done. Even kids whose parents can't give them everything they need... schools can do it."

 "It's not enough to make a movie; you have to create a movement," Chilcott maintains. In the Superman stories, people who need help hope that he will arrive soon to save the day, but hoping for someone to come along and fix the education system, or for one's number to be called in the charter school lotteries, are simply not viable long-term options. "We know what makes a good teacher, we know what makes a good school," says Chilcott. "We just need the political will to make it happen." Waiting for Superman makes a strong case for why everyone, even those without kids, should take an interest in the discussion about schools, but only time will show, as the film rolls out across the country, whether or not it is the right moment for a wave around education reform to break and produce results.

Waiting for Superman opens September 24 through Paramount Vantage and Participant Media.

Agnes Varnum is the communications manager at the Austin Film Society in Austin, Texas.

IDA MIXER and Free Screening of "Catfish" at WESTDOC

WHEN:
Sunday, September 12, 2010
6 p.m. Cash Bar at the IDA Delegate Lounge
6:30 p.m. Free Screening of "Catfish"
8:30 p.m. IDA Member Mixer at the IDA Delegate Lounge

WHERE:
Doubletree Guest Suites in Santa Monica

For additional info and to RSVP visit the dedicated event webpage.

*Attendance to WESTDOC is not required for screening passes*