Submarine Films Co-President Josh Braun, who repped VERSAILLES, SUGAR MAN and ME @THE ZOO at Sundance, on Saturday said he thinks there are several titles being shopped at the festival that could do well at the box office, and that there’s “a strong appetite for high quality theatrical docs.” He added, “Not to be overly simplistic, but if I like the films, I imagine someone else will too.” There’s been a slight lull in acquisitions at Sundance since Friday, so it remains to be seen if distributors are playing a wait-and-see game before shelling out for other docs.

Also making it’s “debut” in Sundance’s New Frontier category was the affecting interactive doc BEAR 71, by artists Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison. The doc, which relies on a trove of data collected on a bear traveling through the Canadian Rockies, can be experienced online at the National Film Board of Canada’s website.

For those filmmakers lacking the means to trek to Sundance for networking purposes, DocumentaryTelevision.com’s Peter Hamilton has provided a useful list of tips for pitching your project.

In awards news, the British Acadamy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) on January 17 released its list of nominations for the Orange British Academy Film Awards. Asif Kapadia’s SENNA made a strong showing, earning nods in four categories: best film, outstanding British film, best documentary and best editing. The two other nominees for best doc were Martin Scorsese’s GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD, and James Marsh’s PROJECT NIM. Wim Wenders’s PINA also picked up a nomination for film not in the English language. The awards ceremony is set to take place on February 12.

Tomorrow will also see the release of the list of Oscar nominations. At the New York Times, John Anderson took a look at the Academy’s history of handing out nominations that seem incongruous with the list of films that have picked up critical plaudits and positive attention on the festival circuit. Anderson concludes that, even under the Academy’s new nomination and voting process for docs, feel-good stories will continue to dominate over more ambiguous works. “Tougher films, complex documentaries about challenging subjects, will be at a disadvantage against films that make voters feel good, or at least ennobled, when they vote for them,” he writes.

Elsewhere, Iranian filmmaker Marjan Safinia on January 17 was elected board president of the International Documentary Association (IDA), replacing outgoing president Eddie Schmidt, who retired from the board. Safinia, who directed the short BUT YOU SPEAK SUCH GOOD ENGLISH (1999), is a constant presence on documentary forum The D-Word, where she is one of the site’s four co-hosts.

Christopher Campbell at the Documentary Channel blog has this week’s roundup of theatrical releases, which includes STF alum THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH by Chad Freidrich, which is getting a run at the IFC Center in New York City.

Those living in New York City can also take advantage of a rare screening of ON THE POLE WITH EDDIE SACHS (1960), which is showing Tuesday, January 24 at 7:30 p.m. at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem. The film, a Drew Associates production, was shot by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles. Both Maysles and Robert Drew will be in attendance at the screening for a Q&A.

Stranger Than Fiction’s Winter Season is set to kick off January 31 with Corrine van der Borch’s GIRL WITH BLACK BALLOONS, which will be preceded by the 11 minute short THE PARTY IN TAYLOR MEAD’S KITCHEN, by Jeffrey Wengrofsky. Both directors, as well as film subjects Bettina and Taylor Mead, will be at the screening. You can get more information and tickets here. STF season passes, which will get you into all eight movies, along with free popcorn and a free DVD, are still available for $100 ($80 for IFC members—cheap!).

Please send tips and recommendations for the Monday Memo to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Stranger Than Fiction: I’d like to ask you about the circumstances making this film, and the legal situation that resulted when you tried to distribute the film.

Frederick Wiseman: I had permission, obviously, to make the film. You don’t parachute into Bridgewater in the middle of the night and leave at dawn. I had permission from the lieutenant governor, who was in charge of the prison system, the commissioner of corrections and the superintendent at Bridgewater. The lieutenant governor who arranged for me to make the film was Elliot Richardson, who went on to greater fame in Watergate and the Nixon Administration. When the film was finished I showed it to all of those people and they liked it. Then the reviews began to appear and the reviews were critical of the state of Massachusetts for allowing Bridgewater to exist. And a social worker who lived in Minnesota who had formerly lived in Massachusetts wrote a letter to the governor of Massachusetts expressing her horror at the fact that there were naked men shown in the film. It was the first the governor had heard of the film. The attorney general at that point was Eliott Richardson, because in the year between the time the film was shot and the time it was released Richardson had become attorney general. Richardson wanted to run for either governor or the Senate, and he thought his political career would be damaged when it became known he had been instrumental in my getting permission. He had the choice of either supporting the film and saying, yeah let Wiseman make the film because Bridgewater was a pretty horrible place and we wanted to have the public aware of it so perhaps the legislature would appropriate more money. But he made the other choice, which was to protect himself, and got an injunction preventing the film from being shown in Massachusetts. He tried to prevent it from being shown in New York and failed, because New York courts wouldn’t accept it. Then there was a legislative hearing to determine how I got permission to make the film, which was really an effort by the Democrats in the Massachusetts legislature to get Richardson. Then there was a trial in Massachusetts, and there were three principle points in the trial. First, that I had breached the privacy of Jim, the man shown naked in his cell. Two, that I had breached an oral contract giving the state editorial control over the film. And three, that the receipts should be held in a trust for the benefit of the inmates. I won on the trust issue, which was what they call a pyrrhic victory since there were no receipts. The court found that the right of privacy existed in Massachusetts. It was the first time the right had been found to exist in the state, because the right either exists as a result of the legislature, or common law tradition. The judge ordered the negative be burnt and described the film as a nightmare of ghoulish obscenities. The case was appealed to the Mass Supreme Court, which said the film had value, but could only be seen by limited audiences consisting of doctors, lawyers, judges, legislators, people interested in custodial care and students in these and related fields, but not the merely curious general public. I could show the film on condition that I give the court and attorney general’s office a week’s notice of any screening, and then file an affidavit after that everybody who saw the film fell into the class of people allowed to see the film. That would require a personal police force, so the film was never shown. Then, around 1973, there was a new attorney general for Massachusetts, and he amended the restraining order and allowed me to rely on someone else’s representations. So if a college wanted to show the film and represented to me that the audience consisted of the allowable class of people, I could then rely on that and file a requisite affidavit. So the film was shown quite a bit on campuses and in public libraries. And then in the mid 80s, the original judge died—there was a headline in the Boston Globe that read, “Titicut Follies Judge Dead.” I wasn’t disappointed to read that. I brought another case asking that a new judge reconsider. The new judge appointed a lawyer to investigate whether the showing of the film would harm the surviving inmates. At that point, there were 31 surviving inmates. He determined that if the film were shown it would not only not hurt them, but benefit them. The judge then said I could show the film if I blanked out the faces of the inmates. I refused to do that and appealed. He finally reconsidered and said the film was protected by the First Amendment, and the film was shown. I barely resisted when the film was shown in a theater in Boston to put on the marquee, “A Nightmare of Ghoulish Obscenities.” That’s sort of the short version of the story.

STF: In 1967, when you were shooting this film, did you have any idea that you would, on and off, spend 24 years fighting for your film to get seen.

Wiseman: No, of course not. Also, I was very naive.

STF: How did going through that experience affect your work in the future as a filmmaker?

Wiseman: It confirmed me in my view that Duck Soup was a documentary.

STF: One of the scenes in this film that I think catches everybody’s attention is the forcefeeding scene. The way that it’s edited, the parallel narrative—you’re cutting back and forth between the forcefeeding and the same inmate’s body being prepared for embalming. It was something that was not common editing.

Wiseman: Well I wouldn’t do it now, I think it was a mistake. It forces the issue too much. At the time, I thought it was terrific. But now it embarrasses me. It forces the issue in the sense that it’s too heavy handed editorially. It would have been better, I think, to show the force feeding, and then a couple of sequences later, show the guy being made up for his funeral. Then you could come to the conclusion yourself that he was treated better in death than in life. The way I edited it, it’s heavy handed.

STF: People refer to your work as observational cinema, or verite or direct cinema, and I understand that you don’t care for any of these terms.

Wiseman: Well, I don’t know what they mean. As far as I’m concerned, I make movies. That’s a good enough designation.

STF: Do you have a philosophy to your filmmaking?

Wiseman: Shoot a lot of film, and find the story in the editing. That’s very deep.

STF: Works for us. Over the course of your career you’ve made films at a lot of different institutions that, taken as a whole, give us a look at our entire society. Is there an important institution of our society that you haven’t been able to hit?

Wiseman: Oh yeah, lots.

STF: Any that you still think about chronicling?

Wiseman: The White House, the CIA, the FBI. You know, I’d never get permission. There’s an inexhaustible list of subjects. I don’t think even in one lifetime you could do all possibilities. Even if I’d started when I was six.

STF: I wish you had started at six.

Wiseman: Me too.

Audience: What happened to Vladimir?

Wiseman: He got out of Bridgewater maybe eight or nine years after the film was made. He then went to work in Brockton, Massachusetts at a supermarket and died a few years later. When he got out of prison I invited him to come and see the film. He liked the film, which pleased me. He was a nice man—the scene with Vladimir is really the key scene of the film as far as I’m concerned. It’s clear that Vladimir is sick, but it’s also quite clear that he’s not getting any treatment at Bridgewater, or any useful treatment, I guess.

Audience: Was the film begun as an advocacy project?

Wiseman: In the mid-70s, long after Richardson had gone to greater glory, there was a new prison built, and a lot of prisoners at Bridgewater who had been there for many years—some for 40 or 50 or 60 years—were discharged. The prison population went down from about 900 to about 350. They had a modern building and the medical and psychiatric services were provided by a consortium of the teaching hospitals in the Boston area. That persisted for a number of years, 15 or 20 years. Then the medical schools lost the contract and it was given to a group of private doctors. And I’ve been told, although I don’t know this from my own experience, that the quality of care has deteriorated. That’s what I heard, I don’t know that for a fact.

Audience: How did your experience with Titicut Follies change the way you approach the different institutions to get permission?

Wiseman: Well, I approached it the same way, in the sense that I asked for permission, and then afterward wrote a letter summarizing what my understanding was. And then I asked whoever I was dealing with, usually the head of the institution, to sign the letter, which became an informal contract which stated how the film was going to be shot, where it might be shown, how it was going to be edited, and that I would have complete control over it. In the Follies, I tried to get written releases from everybody, and I got them from many people. But there were some people that I didn’t get releases for, not because they refused, but because in the press of events I didn’t get them, by negligence really. At the trial, that was made to appear as if they had turned me down. For all subsequent films I never got written releases, but I get tape recorded consents. Sometimes before the sequence is shot, but most often after the sequence is shot. And that, in Massachusetts, is valid. I explain that I’m tape recording, and explain, basically, the same kind of things that are in the letter, and ask them to give their assent. It’s very rare that anyone turns me down.

STF: You studied law before becoming a filmmaker—

Wiseman: Well, my little joke about that is that I was physically present in law school. It’s the word study that I had a problem with.

STF: Do you think an understanding of the law is beneficial to filmmakers?

Wiseman: I think the fact that I went to law school sometimes intimidates people in contractual negotiations, but I don’t think it’s had any effect on the way I make the films or anything else.

Audience: Has your method of making films changed over the years, in regard to production and also in regard to how you carry yourself in the spaces you’re filming in?

Wiseman: Basically, it’s the same system. I’d like to think that over the course of the years I’ve learned something about how to make a film. And I think I’ve learned most about how to make a film because I edit them myself. When you’re editing one film and don’t have the shot you need, you tend to remember to get the shot the next time you’re out and in a similar situation. Basically, it’s pretty much the same system. Small crew, I don’t do any research. The shooting is the research. Shoot a lot of film, anywhere from—the least is 75 hours, the most is 250, and figure it out in the editing. I don’t even begin to think about structure until I’m seven or eight months into the editing, when I’ve edited all of the so-called sequences that I think might make it into the film. When I’ve got all those candidate sequences hanging on the wall, then I work out the first structure in three or four days. Then I have an assembly, and it takes me six or seven weeks to arrive at the final form of the film. At that point, it’s mainly working on the rhythm, the internal rhythm within the sequence, and the relationship between the sequences. Then the last thing I do is look at all of the rushes to see if there’s anything that I’ve forgotten that might solve a problem that I haven’t resolved.

Audience: When you were filming, especially when men were naked, did you ever feel moments of awkwardness, as if you were complicit in their humiliation?

Wiseman: No, I’d seen naked men before. No, I thought the fact that many men were kept naked in their cells at Bridgewater was an important part of the subject. There was no reason, for example, that they couldn’t have paper suits. The rationale for keeping them naked was that they were suicidal. A principle other reason was that they were incontinent, or some of them were incontinent. Some of them may have been incontinent in response to the way they were kept. But even if they were incontinent they could have been given a paper suit, because a paper suit is easy to take off. It was really that the guards objected, it was messier to deal with a fouled paper suit.

Audience: Do you follow the rest of the contemporary documentary scene, and if you do, what you think about other documentaries.

Wiseman: I don’t go to the movies very much, I don’t have time.

Audience: Obviously this was shot on film, was Crazy Horse also shot on film?

Wiseman: No, Crazy Horse was shot on HD. I can’t get the money to shoot on film. It’s hard enough to get the money to shoot on HD. There’s such an enormous difference. Forty-eight minutes of HD is about $40. And 48 minutes of film is about $1,100.

STF: You also previously made the jump to color from black and white for technical reasons, because the color stocks were faster. But do you ever get the itch to shoot in black and white again?

Wiseman: Near Death was shot in black and white, and The Last Letter, which is a fiction film, was also shot in black and white. I wanted to do Ballet in black and white because I thought it would be more stylized, I thought it would look better in black and white. But we looked at the rushes the first day shooting, and they were unusable because the light was so bad. We went back the next day with fast color stock and it was fine.

Audience: What period of time did you spend in Bridgewater?

Wiseman: Twenty-nine days over a period of three months.

Audience: I’m wondering about the follies themselves, and when you came over that. It’s just such an amazing built-in metaphor. Did you know early on that it was going to be the open and close of the film, the title of the film?

Wiseman: When I planned to shoot the film, I knew they were rehearsing and performing Titicut Follies. They did it annually, and they continued to do it after the movie was made, but they changed the name of the show. Titicut is actually an old Indian name and Bridgewater, the prison, was on Titicut Street. There’s nothing prurient about the title.

Audience: What was it like to shoot this movie, because watching this movie makes you feel kind of crazy? What was it like for you going to work to shoot?

Wiseman: It was really interesting. I basically couldn’t stay away. It was certainly a strange experience but it was a fascinating one. But that’s always the experience because all these worlds, which are the subject of the film, most of them, with the exception of High School and Basic Training, are new to me. The fact that you’re working is also a kind of defense against some of the horrible things that you’re seeing. That makes it easier to deal with emotionally.

In other categories, Gian-Piero Ringel and Wim Wenders took home the award for Outstanding Acheivement in Production for PINA (Wenders pulled double duty as the film’s director). The editing award went to Gregers Sall and Chris King for their work on SENNA. Accepting the award on their behalf, SENNA director Asif Kapadia said the film had drawn on an astounding 15,000 hours of raw footage.

Photojournalist Danfung Dennis scored the cinematography award for his debut feature, HELL AND BACK AGAIN. Errol Morris’s TABLOID picked up two awards—one for best original music score, which went to composer John Kusiak, and another to Rob Feng and Jeremy Landman for Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Animation. Clio Bernard’s hybrid doc, THE ARBOR, was named the best debut feature, while Cindy Meehl and her crew took home the audience award for BUCK. The spotlight award, intended to highlight a film that went largely overlooked during the year, went to Tatiana Huezo Sanchez for her film, THE TINIEST PLACE.

After taking the stage to receive the Legacy Award for canon film TITICUT FOLLIES, Frederick Wiseman reflected on his decades-long career. “I’m continuing to slog away on making these documentaries, and it’s very nice indeed to have the recognition of this award for the first film that I did.” Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were joined by an ecstatic Jason Baldwin, a recently freed member of the West Memphis Three, who helped the filmmakers accept the new Hell Yeah Prize for their work on The Paradise Lost Trilogy. Sinofsky, after accepting the award, recalled a moment that occurred the day after Baldwin was freed, when Baldwin asked if he could say grace at breakfast. “That was one of the high moments in my life,” he said.

Sinofsky and Berlinger also joined James in picking up a DGA nomination for outstanding directorial achievement for PARADISE LOST 3: PURGATORY. The other DGA award nominees are Martin Scorsese for GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD; James Marsh for PROJECT NIM; and Richard Press for BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK.

The impending kickoff of the Sundance Film Festival, set to begin January 19, was marred for one documentarian by news that David Siegel, a real estate developer and subject of Sundance-selected doc THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLE, had filed suit against the Sundance Institute and director Laura Greenfield, as well as her husband. Siegel in his suit alleged that Sundance and Greenfield had defamed him by describing his real estate business as collapsed in the film’s promotional materials.

Sundance highlighted three docs screening at the festival that are linked by their examination of the decline of the American dream—DETROPIA, an examination of the decline of the Motor City by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady; FINDING NORTH, by Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson, which looks at the problem of hunger in America; and THE HOUSE I LIVE IN, about the toll taken on society by illicit drugs, by Eugene Jarecki. All three films were among the 16 U.S. documentaries in competition at Sundance that were to premiere at the festival. They are to be complemented by 12 other films in World Cinema Documentary Competition category. The world category also included Fredrik Gertten’s BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS!*, a film documenting Gertten’s own court battles with giant fruit corporation Dole, which took umbrage at their unflattering profile in Gertten’s earlier work, BANANAS!*, and filed suit against the filmmaker.

Across the pond, news broke that British satellite broadcaster BSkyB, which is partially owned by Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media behemoth News Corp., was dropping Current UK from its lineup, potentially spelling an end for the channel in the British Isles. Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt took BSkyB to task for its decision, claiming that “Sky is once again discriminating in favor of the networks it owns and the points of view News Corporation agrees with.”

A little closer to STF’s home, the Tribeca Film Institute named eleven works in progress to its Tribeca All Access program, five of which were documentaries. Among those making the cut was director Rahmin Bahrani, who has previously won plaudits for his narrative feature work, but who will participate in the All Access program for his work on an as-yet untitled doc about gold.

The folks at Creative Capital on January 12 named a slew of filmmakers as recipients of grants dedicated to Film/Video and Visual Arts, doling out funds to a total of 56 artists, among them POV series producer Yance Ford.

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Basil Tsiokos has curated a number of documentaries inspired by the civil rights leader that are screening online at Hulu.com.

Documentary Channel blogger Christopher Campbell breaks down this week’s theatrical releases, led by Frederick Wiseman’s CRAZY HORSE, a portrait of the eponymously named Parisian cabaret, which is opening January 18 at NYC’s Film Forum. STF Artistic Director Thom Powers described the film thusly: “In CRAZY HORSE, Wiseman pulls back the curtain on Le Crazy Horse de Paris, a landmark that has prided itself as “the best nude dancing show in the world” since 1951. Le Crazy Horse sets itself apart from the average strip club by adhering to exacting standards in choreography, lights and physiques. The erotic revue is composed of songs and sequences that blend traits of old-fashioned burlesque, Bob Fosse and Cirque du Soleil — designed not only for the enjoyment of men, but also couples.”

STF is also hosting a pre-season screening of Wiseman’s TITICUT FOLLIES at the IFC on January 17. While the 8 p.m. screening is already sold out, due to overwhelming demand STF has added a second screening that will be introduced by Wiseman. You can get info and tickets here. Also, STF Winter Season passes, which will get you into TITICUT FOLLIES (while seats still last) as well as eight other films, along with free popcorn and a free Docurama DVD, all for $100 ($80 for IFC members). To buy a pass go here.

As always, we welcome your tips and recommendations. They can be sent to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Have a great week!

Stranger Than Fiction: Steve, how did you first come to this subject, and for Ameena and Cobe, what was the first meeting with Steve like. Had you been familiar with his films at all?

Steve James: The film was inspired by my partner on the film, Alex Kotlowitz, a great author who worked as a producer on the film and has been a great friend of mine for many years. He wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine, a cover story on this organization CeaseFire. Alex and I had been looking for something to do together and this seemed like the perfect project to do. In a deeper sense, for both of us, we both had people that we’d come to know quite well from our other work, with me from Hoop Dreams, who had been lost to the streets. For those of you who’ve seen that film, Arthur Agee’s father, Bo, was murdered some years ago, as was William Gates’s older brother Curtis. To see the devastating effect that those losses had on the families—and they were both very senseless situations—sticks with you. It just seemed like it was a good time to refocus a film on this issue of urban violence. We have a sense that everything’s been done that can be done. New York’s been much more successful at this than Chicago, although Chicago has made great strides. The murder rate in Chicago, I think, is four times that in New York per capita.

STF: What was it like to meet Steve for the first time?

James: Do you even remember?

Ameena Matthews: I do remember. I ran from him, I did. In working with the project and dealing with the serious issues we have going on on our streets, and our high-risk youth—but knowing Alex and seeing the piece that he did, that was pretty cool. But then, when they were talking about bringing cameras and following us for hours at a time—me dealing with media prior to the idea that Steve and Alex had, I was like, this is just going to be another sad, fucked up story about inner city youth. Another black kid dead, nothing’s happening behind it. I didn’t want to have any part of that. I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize my effectiveness out in the community, with the cameras and white boys and Alex’s police shoes. I ran from them, because the stigma of camera and white man in Englewood, in our ghettos, is that they’re either the police, the Feds, DCFS [Illinois Department of Children and Family Services]—something is about to happen and it’s not going to be good. It took a little while, maybe a couple of days?

James: A couple of days?

Matthews: He says two months, it didn’t seem that long. After just getting to know Steve and Alex personally and meeting their families—well, we didn’t meet their families until later on, but they talked about their families. If I give you something and you give me something back that is impactful emotionally, spiritually, then we can jam. They would talk about their families, and I would talk about mine, and the things they were talking about were very personal. So I decided to move forward, also with some positive reinforcement from my supervisor down at the program telling me to let them in. I did and I’m very pleased and happy that I did, because looking at the documentary from the standpoint of an audience, not as me being an employee, it’s already been so impactful. People want to get involved, not to be a violence interrupter like Cobe and I, but to get involved. And I’m starting to see that. It’s not as big, but we have to start somewhere so I’m grateful for that.

Cobe Williams: [CeaseFire] Director Tio Hardman keep telling us at our meetings every week that they were doing a documentary on CeaseFire. He keep stressing this every week, so I just kept calling them, and they was Johnny on the spot. We sat down first and talked about it so they had an understanding that if they come out to the community and somebody doesn’t want to get filmed then they got to leave, and we’ll stay and do our job to mediate the conflict. I kept calling them everytime somebody called me with a problem or mediation. I walked into a lot of situations where I said, I want to let you all know that if you call me I got my film crew with me. So I kept telling people that over and over. So once Steve and Alex started hanging with me in the community a lot, I said, man, you don’t know who that is? That’s Steve James, he’s the one who did Hoop Dreams. That’s how it opened up. It started working out, and they kept coming, like I said, always on the spot, they were doing some good filming.

STF: Steve, this film is two hours long, and you have a lot of characters that you’re following. It’s a pretty remarkable feat of editing that you’re able to follow as many narrative arcs as you do. Can you talk about how you crafted the narrative, and were there any subjects that you loved, but couldn’t include in the film?

James: Just to answer that one first, there’s this great story on the DVD with Cobe and this kid named Stephan, who was living down the street from Cobe’s grandma in an abandoned home. Cobe tried to reach out to this kid and help him. At one point in time when we were editing it was strung through the film like the other stories. Eventually, with great reluctance, we took it out to shorten the movie and focus it more. We understand it’s a lot to ask of an audience to track three interrupters plus the stories of the people they’re dealing with. For me, we knew early on that it wasn’t going to be the traditional arc of a narrative. It’s always wonderful when you have that strong narrative to hang your film on, it’s a gift to have that. I’ve been fortunate to have that in the past with films. But I think one of the things that’s exciting about this film, creatively for me as a filmmaker and editor, is not having it. And trying to capture organically and preserve organically the nature of what we witnessed in that year on the streets, and find a way to pull you through the film hopefully, that is compelling and interesting. Even though it’s not that strong narrative, it’s a lot of mini-narratives. As filmmakers, the more films you make, you kind of look forward to situations where you might not have everything that you want, and how can you solve it? The solving of those kinds of things, creatively, makes a film more distinctive, more original. You have to find a way. I didn’t feel it was hard in this case because we had such great subjects, such great people and stories. But it was still a creative challenge and a lot of fun.

Audience: Has the film played in Englewood, and how was it received in the community in the Chicago area if so?

Williams: We don’t have a theater in Englewood, but up the street about ten blocks there’s a theater where it stayed about 11 weeks. It played on the West Side where we’ve got a CeaseFire office for 13 weeks. It played downtown at the Gene Siskel for two weeks straight, then it came back a month later for two more weeks. It’s been playing great in Chicago, it’s been playing in a lot of schools in Englewood—high schools, colleges. A lot of people have been responding to it, they’ve been talking about it a lot. And we’ve got a lot of bootlegs in the community. A lot. Five dollars. But the DVD is coming out February 15, and it’s got a lot of extras.

James: In fact, the version that played at Sundance a year ago was 40 minutes longer than this version. You may count yourself as blessed that you didn’t have to sit through that, but there were some great scenes in that version that went away that are in the DVD.

Audience: There were a few spots where you were able to pull people out of their world, allow them to make a change. Do you think they had something in common?

Williams: First of all, we spend a lot of time with these guys, we spend a lot of time with them. You’ve got to spend time if you want to make them change. With Flamo, he reached out to me and said he had a problem. So any time he called me, that meant I got his attention right there. He called me and said he got a situation, and I told him I got the film crew with me. So when I got over there he flipped—who is these white guys right here? I said, I just told you they’re coming with me. He was on 10 really, so charged. I really was like, I ain’t gonna waste my time with him. Sometimes in this job, you want to give up on somebody, but it reminds me not to give up. Steady working with Flamo, it took about five to six months to visit him, take him out of the neighborhood. To really get him thinking about his sisters, his brothers, his kids. Doing this type of work you need to be thinking on your feet all the time. With Lil Mikey the difference was that he had just came home. He had gotten rejected 12 times trying to find a job, he was determined. But he kept saying all the time he was locked up that he wanted to apologize to the people at the barbershop he robbed. That was something he wanted to do. We went to the barbershop about four times to talk to the people, they refused, they didn’t want nothing to do with him. I was ready to give up on it. But Steve and Alex went in without me and said, we’ll leave the cameras out of here, but this is what this young man wants to do. And once Steve and him talked to them, they let him apologize. A lot of these guys want to make a change in their lives, they just need some guidance and some help to get to that next level. It reminds us over and over not to give up on them. Me and Ameena and the whole CeaseFire staff, we don’t judge nobody. We meet them where they’re at and try to take them to the next level.

Matthews: With each conflict or crisis, there’s always a principle. What a principle is, is maybe one or two is the aggressor, that’s the one that stands out to us. We’re gonna grab them by the back of the shirt and say, come here. You just saw Mikey and Flamo, but it’s 150 of Mikeys, Flamos, Capryshas, Stephans that we deal with on a regular basis. They did get lucky to be followed in the documentary, but at the same time, Steve didn’t want to lose you guys with all of the different people. Before they’re ready to go to the outreach workers we need to work with them to change their minds, to really chill on that crisis or conflict. I’m ready to get back to Chicago because I have so much work to do. We deal with so many high-risk youth and their families. Once we deal with the principles, we have to deal with their moms, aunts, uncles—just different things that are going on. Violence is the result of a whole bunch of symptoms going on in their lives. Sometimes they’re not as open to say, ok, I’m open to listening. They may listen and go back and do some dumb shit. As long as they’re calling and answering the phones, and the police haven’t really gotten in—because once the police get in we have to back out. We deal with a whole bunch of youth in which we get to impact how they think about violence, how they react. CeaseFire is, “Stop the Shootings and Killings.” My parents used to tell me, if someone hits you, you hit them back. That’s a form of defense. Now, I have to tell our young youth, if someone hits you, you don’t have to shoot to kill them. They don’t have to die because they hit you. These guys are starting to shoot because someone looked at them the wrong way, put something on Facebook, put something on YouTube.

Audience: Do you think there’s been an escalation in the type of violence we’re seeing? People are going around shooting people like it’s nothing. Something’s changed.

James: I just want to point out one statistic which may make you feel better, which is, nationwide, murders are down in America, in virtually every American city, from the height of the crack epidemic. Back in the early 90s, when it was at its peak, there were twice as many murders in Chicago as there are now. The violence statistically in poor neighborhoods in Chicago is very located. Something like 90 percent of the murders take place in 10 or 12 percent of the neighborhoods. There’s a lot of reasons that those murders have come down, certainly the interrupters’ work is part of that. For good reasons as well as loss of population in Chicago. The black population in Chicago has declined by 17 percent in the last decade, 20,000 less residents in Englewood alone. There’s other reasons for the decline as well.

Audience: Do you feel threatened while you were filming?

James: We never really felt any real threat, I think that was entirely due to these guys. We were with them, and that made a huge difference. I’ve had the experience of shooting in neighborhoods where I go to film and I’m not with an interrupter. I’ve done it enough where I think I’m sensitive to those situations to know how to get people’s permission to allow you to film. I know for a fact if I walked into Englewood without them and got the camera out and started filming indiscriminately, it would not go over very well. And I would never ever get close to the situations we were able to film. So it’s really them, and the trust people have in them. Both their former reputations and their reputations for what they do now that makes a difference. When we’re with them, they see there’s a connection between us. They’re not showing up in these neighborhoods and acting all different because of us. That makes a huge difference. Having said that, there were a few situations that were a little dicey, and they were always looking out for us. Ameena mediated a situation with Alex that had nothing to do with what was going on in the moment, it had to do with a guy that had seen Alex give a speech months earlier that he didn’t like. He was kind of a threatening guy and then Alex showed up in the neighborhood when we were filming, and he zeroed in on Alex and Ameena had to deal with him. With Eddie, we did some filming in his neighborhood of Lil Village with some gang members. After this one really great scene, which is not in the movie because of this, the word got passed down from the top of that gang that they didn’t want us over there filming any more with gang members, and so we didn’t.

[Q&A edited for length and clarity]

The other rule that got passed that you read about that was about the New York Times reviews, the Academy has reminded us that this is an award for movies that are released theatrically and not tv documentaries. They have an award system, it’s called the Emmys. It’s a fine award, many of you might have one. So somebody proposed that the New York Times has a policy of reviewing every single film that opens in New York. You wouldn’t be able to sneak a film in for a week, it’s their policy. It’s not up to the reviewers, it’s not up to the critics, it’s their policy. Every film, big or small, fiction or non-fiction, gets a review. So they added that as one of the benchmarks to make sure they’re honoring theatrically released films instead of tv films. But the big news, I think, is that this is now a much more open, transparent, inclusive, accessible process. And the old days of this are gone.

Moore’s remarks came just moments before he handed the CEH’s top award for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking to Steve James for his lauded film THE INTERRUPTERS, which was famously ignored for an Oscar nomination this year. James also scored another award for best direction, marking the first time a film had been honored by both awards in the five-year history of CEH. (We’ll have more complete coverage of the awards in the upcoming January 16 edition of the Monday Memo.) James holds the dubious distinction of being the victim of the Academy’s arguably two most famous doc snubs; he was similarly overlooked for his work on the classic HOOP DREAMS (1994).

Much of the initial attention paid to the Oscar doc kerfuffle focused on the new rule requiring that award contenders be reviewed in either the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times. But filmmakers and others over the past few days have also taken a closer look at the changes being made to the nomination and voting rules.

At the Times’ own Carpetbagger blog, Melena Ryzik got fresh reactions to Moore’s speech and the award changes from filmmakers at the CEH afterparty. The blog later noted that the new rules had officially taken effect on January 12, as decreed by the Academy’s Board of Governors.

A few days earlier, the POV blog expressed concerns that the changes would result in a sort of provincialism favoring the opinions held in L.A. and New York City, shutting out films screening in smaller cities and festivals, both in the U.S. and internationally:

There are stunning and meaningful documentaries being produced at an unprecedented rate, which is the most happy outcome of the digital age—amazing work by ‘outsiders’ who lack the speed dial of the L.A. players but who know how to tell a damned good story. They use cheap camcorders and HDSLRs and other DIY tactics to tell sublime and gripping tales. And there have never been so many channels to distribute them, but the Academy has yet to fully support them.

At the Documentary Channel’s Docblog, Christopher Campbell said that opening up voting to the entire Academy could have the effect of allowing populism to run roughshod over the process, and questioned the accepted hegemony of the Academy Awards as the most highly regarded doc award:

Are the new rules bad for truly independent filmmakers in general? Probably, but that’s par with the rest of the Oscars. And regardless of its supposed prestige, which is still only marked by how much attention we all give it, the Academy Awards are not the only nor the most important of film honors for documentary. Those who really enjoy docs should be and for the most part are paying attention to other sources of acclaim and prominence. It’s not the 20th century anymore. We have more media, more outlets, more options.

The International Documentary Association (IDA) on January 10 issued a statement on the changes, seeking to clarify that not all of the films submitted to its DocuWeeks program were guaranteed acceptance to it. The statement also said the changes “will certainly have an impact on IDA’s DocuWeeks program,” and added that they would be “evaluating that impact over the coming weeks and asking for further information and clarification from the Academy as well as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times editorial staffs.”

The Washington Post‘s Ann Hornaday snagged an interview with Academy Chief Operating Officer Ric Robertson, who said the changes were proposed, in part, to cut down on the number of films submitted to the Academy that were not made with the intent of being released theatrically.

What everyone seems to be able to agree on is that debate over the changes shows no sign of abating. We’ll all just have to wait until the conclusion of the nomination and voting processes for the 2013 awards, when the new rules take effect, to see how everything shakes out.

As always, anyone with tips or other ideas can send them to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).