- by Rahul Chadha, March 19, 2012
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Jay Bulger’s BEWARE OF MR. BAKER won the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at SXSW.
First-time director Jay Bulger’s BEWARE OF MR. BAKER on March 13 was named winner of South by Southwest’s Grand Jury Documentary Prize for his portrait of 70s drummer Ginger Baker, who played in the Eric Clapton-fronted Cream, as well as with Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti’s band. Bulger—a Washington, D.C., native—later told the Washington Post that he was so certain his film would not win any awards that he had arrived at the ceremony late. John DeFore at the Hollywood Reporter says the film “reveals a man (filmed mostly at home in South Africa) who is now ravaged by hard living and arthritis.”
Annie Eastman snagged SXSW’s Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature for BAY OF ALL SAINTS, a look at three single mothers living in poverty in Brazil. Eastman shared with the Wall Street Journal her motivations for making the film, telling the paper she became a filmmaker to tell the stories of impoverished families living on a polluted bay. Also, the Audience Documentary Spotlight award went to Katie Dellamaggiore for BROOKLYN CASTLE, a look at the effect of chess on I.S. 318 in Brooklyn. Sony Pictures and Scott Rudin Productions, in an unusual move, snapped up remake rights for the film before it secured a distribution deal for North America. Meanwhile, Joe Berlinger won the Audience 24 Beats Per Second Award for UNDER AFRICAN SKIES, which chronicles the classic Paul Simon album “Graceland.”
In other SXSW doc coverage, Mekado Murphy at the New York Times took a look at three films that caught his attention, among them TCHOUPITOULAS, by brothers Bill and Turner Ross. Basil Tsiokos of the What (Not) to Doc blog broke his coverage up into two posts, which you can find here and here. DeFore at The Hollywood Reporter also reviewed Jeffrey Kimball’s THE CENTRAL PARK EFFECT, a profile of several New York City amateur ornithologists.
Current.org stirred up a virtual hornet’s nest this week, after reporting March 12 that public television doc series Independent Lens had seen a 42% drop in its ratings after PBS moved its air date from Tuesdays to Thursdays in October 2011, the start of the current season. POV will see a similar scheduling change when its season starts on June 21. Current reported that some of the drop in ratings had resulted from the loss of Frontline as an Independent Lens lead-in, as well as the fact that Thursdays were generally reserved for local and syndicated programming on public television stations. ITVS on its Beyond the Box website March 14 said that it was currently participating in a joint task force with PBS leaders and POV to develop a strategy to address the ratings decline.
Venerated doc production company Kartemquin Films also took up the Independent Lens cause, publishing on March 15 an open letter protesting the scheduling changes. “PBS’s programming decision has, effectively, moved these two award-winning series off the main schedule, by leaving it up to stations to program them on their own, on perhaps the most competitive night of the TV week. Both series have carved out a trusted relationship with audiences on Tuesday nights,” the letter read. The International Documentary Association March 16 also announced its support of Kartemquin’s campaign.
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on March 13 announced its lineup of 57 films. Among those films named to the festival were Alison Klayman’s AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY; DETROPIA by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady; Bart Layton’s THE IMPOSTER and HERMAN’S HOUSE by Angad Bhalla. The festival is set to run April 12-15 in Durham, North Carolina.
The Marché du Film on March 12 announced the creation of its DOC CORNER, which will establish a digital video library of all docs submitted that year for buyers and festival programmers attending Cannes.
News broke on March 14 that Errol Morris’ next project would focus on former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. New York Magazine’s Vulture blog reported that Morris had already gotten Rumsfeld to sit for a series of interviews, immediately recalling Morris’s investigation of Robert McNamara in THE FOG OF WAR (2002). The news also lead doc journo Tom Roston to wonder if Morris’s filmmaking skill was great enough to humanize Satan.
The campaign to get Lee Hirsch doc BULLY’s R-rating overturned gained new allies this week in actors Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep, among others. Distributor The Weinstein Company is reportedly moving forward with a March 30 release date for the film, even if it doesn’t get the rating reduced to PG-13.
President Barack Obama also joined the anti-bullying crusade, loaning his bully pulpit to an upcoming Cartoon Network doc encouraging the victims of bullying to speak out. Obama’s campaign on March 15 also released its Davis Guggenheim-directed documentary (or ad, depending on your perspective) THE ROAD WE’VE TRAVELED. POV used the opportunity to put together a nice history of presidential documentaries released in an election year.
Non-profit Mozilla (the force behind the Firefox web browser), The Tribeca Film Institute, The Center for Social Media at American University, ITVS, and BAVC on March 13 announced the launch of the Living Docs Project, an attempt to foster “collaborative, interactive web films.” The program plans to pair filmmakers with developers to help establish best practices for interactive docs. Mozilla is also responsible for Popcorn, a project intended to explore how browsers can be used to make online video more interactive.
Daniel Eagan of Smithsonian Magazine’s Reel Culture blog posted a great history of the funding of documentaries, taking readers all the way from Robert Flaherty to Kickstarter.
Amanda Lin Costa took a more recent view of docs, surveying figures for new filmmaking trends in the digital age for the Tribeca Film Festival’s website.
Back at What (Not) To Doc, Basil Tsiokos presented a useful overview of documentaries getting screened at New Directors/New Films, which starts March 21 and runs until April 1.
Christopher Cambpell at the Documentary Channel doesn’t have any new theatrical releases for us this week, but still took the time to draw up a list of docs still in cinemas.
We at Stranger Than Fiction are still in search of your favorite Twitter users to follow for anything doc related. You can direct suggestions to @GuerrillaFace, or e-mail them .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
This Tuesday, March 20 at 8 pm, Stranger Than Fiction is hosting GIRL MODEL, a portrait of two young women navigating the modeling world by directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon. Both Sabin and Redmon will be in attendance following the screening for a Q&A. You can get more information and tickets here.
As always, we encourage you to send tips and suggestions for the memo .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Have a great week!
- by Rahul Chadha, March 17, 2012
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From left, STF Artistic Director Thom Powers and director Carl Colby. Photo by Tony Voisin.
Former CIA Director William Colby is perhaps best known for the role he played in the hearings held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the 1970s, which were chaired by the late Senator Frank Church. Clearly a polarizing figure in many regards, Colby during the hearings personified strife within the CIA over how much deference the U.S. intelligence needed to show to Congress during America’s post-Watergate years. The fact that there were elements within the CIA angered by Colby’s embrace of transparency in the hearings even today feeds conspiracy theories that his 1996 death was not an accident, as was concluded in a coroner’s report. In his film THE MAN NOBODY KNEW: IN SEARCH OF MY FATHER, CIA SPYMASTER WILLIAM COLBY, director (and William Colby’s son) Carl Colby posits the theory that Colby’s death was deliberate, but came at his own hands. Clearly a complicated figure, Carl Colby’s film further complicates history’s take on his father, a man it seems no one really knew. Following the screening, Stranger Than Fiction Artistic Director Thom Powers spoke with Carl Colby. Click “Read more” below for the Q&A.
Stranger Than Fiction: The thing that you might have had in making this film is, perhaps, greater sympathy in getting access to the incredible interview subjects you had. Can you talk about your ability to gain access?
Carl Colby: I interviewed over 85 people. Being the son of William Colby gets you maybe two interviews with a couple of the old OSS buddies. Someone like Bob Woodward or Seymour Hersh, Secretary Gates, Donald Rumsfeld or Brent Scrowcroft—you got to do your homework. So I would probably spend about two days writing that e-mail. I haven’t been divorced from this subject my whole life, I’ve kind of been immersed in this area. I wrote to them telling them what I’d like to talk about. And it’s almost like if you were in, let’s say London. And you meet somebody like Thom, and you know Thom has been in Africa. So you say, Thom, how’s Africa? What’s going on in Ethiopia? Well, what are you talking about? Whereas you could say, Thom, I’ve heard that Sheik Ahmad in Mogadishu has organized a troop of 400 guys, and they’re getting armament from Syria and it’s being transferred through this other group in Somalia, etc. So you know something. Then they will tell you something back. The agency is like that. It’s a little bit like the Hollywood studios. Hey, how’s the movie business? Well, what does that mean? Whereas if you say, I heard that so-and-so’s deal went south, and I have something that’s in that vein, then you’re in the business of it. It’s a little bit of asking them things in which they will respect you for the question, and they know there will be a dialogue.
Audience: In reference to that privileged information, do you still have access to documents laying around your house?
Colby: Well, there are documents in the house, but they’re more OSS records, and his diaries and things. Which I’ve kind of wondered about. Maybe they do have sensitive information in them. But we’re going to donate them to probably Georgetown University’s library so everyone will have access to them. I didn’t ask for anything special from the CIA. I know people there obviously. I just went out to visit with them and said, this is what I’d like to do. And if there’s any information you can give me that might help. They gave me some documents, but there’s nothing secret or top secret. My vision was not to delve in and tell stories. There are people that I could have talked about or made notions about. It almost reminds me of when I was 15 years old and went to Indonesia for the summer. I had a terrific time staying with one of my friends, his father was the ambassador to Indonesia. We went to Sumatra and it was fantastic. I remember I came back and told my dad, oh I met Mr. X. He’s a really terrific guy, really admiring of you. Do you ever see him? He goes, huh, very interesting. Don’t ever mention his name again. So I realized this guy I had gone hunting with was a deep cover and my helping the mission is not to reveal his name. That kind of thing would occur here and there my whole life. You come home, there’d be somebody in the house. One time I walked down the stairs in Saigon and there was a woman all in black, with funereal garb on. My mother was consoling her, so I realized that something had happened. I see that pictures of her husband had been found on the river the day before, chopsticks jammed through his ears. He was tortured and left for dead. So how does my mother know him? How does my mother know her? Why is this reporter over here tonight? Who does he work for? I never really confronted my father directly about, who’s this guy? You wouldn’t say that. In fact, I never even talked to my brothers and sisters about what he did, it just kind of dawns on you. It would be like if your father was a senior detective in the NYPD, lives out in Rockland County. He disappears maybe for the weekend and tells you he’ll be back, and he’s doing American gangster kind of work. You take it as a given that that’s what he does. And you support the mission up to a point that you then start asking more pertinent questions later. That’s when it became more interested.
Audience: How much that your mother revealed to you was new to you?
Colby: I started the project thinking that it would be a profile of my father as a Cold Warrior and an operative. And almost as an afterthought I interviewed my mother, I thought she might have something interesting to say. Then everything changed. It really became my mother and my odyssey to uncover who my father was. She was very courageous and has been through a lot. It’s her forthrightness and guile, really. The woman you’re seeing doesn’t know she’s talking to you. She’s just talking to me. That’s why she says, oh Carl. I realized that midway through and I thought, my God, she’s talking to me. I thought that was something to share with everybody else. My editor said, there’s something interesting in here. I started out making the film about my dad, and it ends up a kind of valentine to my mother.
Audience: Were there people that you wanted to interview that you didn’t get a chance to?
Colby: I talked to Henry Kissenger’s office, and he was interested up to a point. And then it never really gelled. Dick Cheney was interested in doing it because he was also writing his book at the time. But then he wasn’t feeling well so that fell off. Bush 41, it never really gelled but a couple of months ago he asked me to send a video. So I sent him a DVD and thought I’d never hear from him. I was going through my mail and there was a letter from Houston and he thought the film was quite extraordinary and very powerful. The one thing about these people, they’re like crocodiles. You can’t hurt them. They’ve heard your voice. They understand that they are criticized. They look at things from, I think, a slightly different perspective. Some took pity on my father. Some changed their mind. Kissenger said later about my father’s testimony, you’re right. I was wrong. If you had revealed those secrets it would have destroyed the agency.
Audience: Are you having distribution problems with the film?
Colby: I thought we did pretty well. I talked to my distributor First Run Features today. And Thom, a great champion, he really liked the film and wanted to show it at Toronto but they had such a busy schedule with a lot of American films that it didn’t go to that. Then we quickly got distribution from First Run, but also got a booking at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. We ran two months there, and also at the Quad Cinema. I’m really happy to see this audience too, because most of my audience is sort of the NPR audience. A little older.
STF: This audience is more the Rush Limbaugh audience [laughter].
Colby: It’s a very tough world, independent filmmaking. You make something, and you want it seen. My big worry is, I’d walk down the street thinking, I’m not passing anybody in the street who wants to see this film. I’m walking by hundreds of people on 7th Avenue, and not a person who’s going to see this film. Maybe we ought to open in Washington. And they were like, no, open in New York. And in the end I realized that this was the greatest audience. You’re all really inquisitive.
Audience: Was General David Petraeus influenced in counter insurgency practice by your father?
Colby: Absolutely. General McMaster wrote a book, actually, called “Dereliction of Duty” about how wrongfully prosecuted the war in Vietnam was. And he was vilified for that and remained a Colonel for a long time. Now he’s head of intelligence in Afghanistan. General John Allen, Marine Corps, is the head of all operations in Afghanistan. We sent him the film a few weeks ago. They studied this. Petraeus is very savvy. They’re not engaging in these giant battles. They’re trying to really engage in counter-insurgency. The problem with that is that it’s a really thankless job. It’s extremely difficult. It’s really policing, it’s not war. And the Marine Corps is not meant to go out and distribute bandages and build villages. They’re in business to kill people. And they kill our enemies, that’s what they’re there for. I don’t think the American public has much of a stomach for it. They certainly don’t have the patience. It’s a real problem.
Audience: If your father could see the film, what do you think he would say to you?
Colby: He’d probably feel I was pretty fair. During the hearings, and when he’d come back from Vietnam we’d argue about the war. I’d tell him, you’re just brutalizing these people. And he would try to be reasonable and make me think it through. He was very colored by his France and Norway experience. He thought he was liberating oppressed people. As a young 24-year-old he blew up Nazi troop trains, and villages suffered reprisals. He watched as villages were decimated. So he knows the price. I think he would think I was being fair. He might think I wasn’t describing the Phoenix program as fully as he would like. The biggest revelation would be my mother, because I think he would see who he left behind. I have a feeling in his last week or two he was reminiscing, asking himself, who are you? It doesn’t matter if you’re a general or ambassador, it all fades. In Rome, near the Coliseum was the Arch of Constantine. And he would tell me that there would always be a little slave boy on the chariot with Constantine, whispering sic transit gloria—all glory passes. This is your moment. I think he understood that. It’s a very treacherous, almost chilling view of the world. He had a fatalistic air about him. Something that none of us would really say. You would be devastated if one of your friends or children was killed. I think he absorbed that. He had a capacity to absorb and inflict pain that is not in your vocabulary.
Related Film/Screening:
THE MAN NOBODY KNEW: IN SEARCH OF MY FATHER, CIA SPYMASTER WILLIAM COLBY by Carl Colby
- by Rahul Chadha, March 12, 2012
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Bart Layton’s THE IMPOSTER won the documentary competition at this year’s Miami International Film Festival.
The 29th annual Miami International Film Festival on Saturday announced its award winners. The Knight Documentary Competition winner was THE IMPOSTER, directed by Bart Layton and funded by A&E IndieFilms and Film 4. The film is being released theatrically by distributor Indomina. The jury also recognized two films with Honorable Mentions: UNFINISHED SPACES, directed by by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray; and Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s THE STRAWBERRY TREE, which made its US premiere at the festival. Serving on the documentary jury were Nelson George (director of THE ANNOUNCEMENT and BROOKLYN BOHEME); Carmen Guarini (director of the DocBUENOSAIRES film festival); and Alfred Spellman (producer of COCAINE COWBOYS and BROKE). Also, Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger shared his take on MIFF film YOU’VE BEEN TRUMPED, Anthony Baxter’s look at the efforts by Donald Trump to build a golf course in Scotland, over the objection of nearby residents.
The Tribeca Film Festival, set to take place April 18-29, this week released its lineup of films over the past week. Nisha Pahuja’s THE WORLD BEFORE HER, about two girls’ efforts to win the Miss India contest, is set to open the world documentary competition. Also set to screen are the prolific Morgan Spurlock’s MANSOME and SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN, Malik Bendjelloul’s Sundance Film Fest crowd favorite. This year’s festival is the first to be programmed by new artistic director Frederic Boyer.
Also this week, the short advocacy doc KONY 2012 dominated talk on the web after going viral and racking up some 66 million views on YouTube. The film, about Ugandan warlord and alleged war criminal Joseph Kony, was produced by the nongovernmental group Invisible Children in an attempt to draw attention to Kony’s alleged crimes. However, a backlash against Invisible Children by those who criticized the group’s approach to helping Ugandans soon followed. People also took issue the film for presenting an oversimplification of a complex political situation. Heather McIntosh analyzed the Kony film phenomenon for the POV blog, weighing it in the context of advocacy and propagandistic docs, such as those made by Frank Capra during World War II. Randy Astle at Filmmaker Magazine also wrote a pretty detailed analysis of the situation.
Director Davis Guggenheim of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH and WAITING FOR SUPERMAN fame was also in the news this week for his own advocacy doc, THE ROAD WE’VE TRAVELED, about the first term of the Obama presidency. The 17-minute film was commissioned by the Obama campaign, and has been described by some as treading the line between documentary and extended campaign commercial. The film is set to be released by the campaign this week.
The New York Times drew fire this week for its failure to review Jared Alterman’s well-regarded 54-minute doc CONVENTO, ostensibly because it fell short of the feature-length standard that the Times uses to decide whether to review a film. Alterman reportedly shot more footage that could have been used to pad the film’s length, but had declined to do so, instead leaving CONVENTO in that programming purgatory between short and feature length. Hammer to Nail got Alterman’s take on the mini-kerfuffle in an interview with the filmmaker. If you live in New York City, you can check out CONVENTO in a week-long run at the reRun Gastropub Theater in DUMBO, Brooklyn.
The Motion Picture Association of America on Friday said it would host a screening of Lee Hirsch’s film BULLY, followed by a panel discussion about the film. The MPAA has continued to feel heat for its R-rating for the film, which is part of a effort to end the bullying of young students. The 17-year-old bullying victim Katy Butler on Wednesday delivered a petition signed by 200,000 people to the MPAA, asking it to revise the film’s rating to PG-13 so it could be more easily shown to middle and high school students. Hirsch also spoke with Tom Roston at POV’s doc soup blog about the MPAA’s decision and the ongoing effort to get it overturned.
Sundance Now put together a great little series of video interviews with directors showing work at the True/False Film Fest. You can check out the interviews, which include Victor Kossakovsky (VIVAN LAS ANTIPODAS!), Racheal Leah Jones (GYPSY DAVY) and Anghad Bhalla (HERMAN’S HOUSE), among others, at the Sundance Now YouTube channel. Sundance Now has also just launched its new Doc Club with a monthly selection of docs curated by our own Thom Powers. For March, Doc Club is featuring a Spotlight on Errol Morris, including several episodes of his TV series First Person that are hard to find elsewhere. You can watch them all for only a $3.99 monthly charge here. In other T/F news, Tom Roston also drew up a list of his favorite films from the festival for the POV blog.
Tech junkies were no doubt excited by the release this week of news about Canon’s new EOS 5D Mark III HDSLR. High Definition SLR’s have clearly had an impact on doc filmmaking since Canon first gave them the ability to shoot video several years ago. But the cameras, intended first and foremost for still pictures, have also frustrated filmmakers at times with a lack of functionality. Edward J. Delaney took a look at some of the changes and updates that come with the Mark III for POV’s blog, ultimately imploring prospective buyers to ask themselves if the new camera was four times better than the one it would be replacing. Michael Murie at Filmmaker Magazine also shared a detailed take on the new camera.
Programmer Basil Tsiokos has a comprehensive overview of the docs at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in Athens, Greece. The festival runs March 9-18, and features an incredible 185 films. Look for Tsiokos’ coverage of the festival on Indiewire.
Tribeca’s Future of Film blog provided a useful investigation of the YouTube analytics available to filmmakers to help them gather information on data about videos hosted on the site. One of the new features available to users is access to a breakdown of audience retention rates.
Director David Gelb had a nice chat with The Hollywood Reporter about his doc JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI, a portrait of 85-year-old sushi master Sukiyabashi Jiro, who operates his 10-seat restaurant out of a Tokyo subway station.
The Asia Society’s Japanese doc program, Extreme Private Ethos, started on Saturday, but will last until March 31. The series features “films made from the 1970s to the present, focuses on the most intimate acts by filmmakers and documentary subjects as they probe into extremely private experiences concerning family, birth, death, loss, and heartbreak.” You can check out the schedule at the Asia Society website.
The Karen Schmeer editing fellowship recipient was named this week, with honors going to BULLY editor Lindsay Utz. The fellowship was established to honor the memory of Schmeer, an editor who was killed in a hit-and-run accident in 2010.
Christopher Campbell of the Documentary Channel has this week’s theatrical releases, which includes Marie Loser’s fascinating flick THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE, about industrial music pioneer Genesis P-Orridge and his partner, Lady Jaye, and the pair’s efforts to turn their lives into an ongoing art project.
We at Stranger Than Fiction are still hard at work on our list of favorite doc Twitter accounts to follow, so please tweet your suggestions to @GuerrillaFace or email them .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
This week, Stranger Than Fiction is hosting THE MAN NOBODY KNEW: IN SEARCH OF MY FATHER, CIA SPYMASTER WILLIAM COLBY, Carl Coby’s personal doc about his father. Colby will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening. You can find more information and tickets here.
Anyone with tips or recommendations for the Memo is encouraged to send them .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). And as always, have a great week!
- by Rahul Chadha, March 08, 2012
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From left, producers Adam Schlesinger and Linda Saffire, director Leon Gast and Basil Tsiokos. Photo by Simon Luethi.
Photographer Ron Galella in Leon Gast’s SMASH HIS CAMERA already seems like a paparazzo out of his era. By today’s standards, Galella’s approach to stalking the bushes around the homes of public figures for the purpose of putting them on film (actual film!) seems pretty tame. The guy is old school. And he seems to have a clear sense that the paparazzi world—which today ascribes high value to grainy textured cell phone videos and saturating its subjects with an insane number of camera flashes—has already passed him by. Though Galella’s photographs are derided by some as falling short of the aesthetic standard for high art, they are certainly more artful than the images that populate TMZ.com. As former Metropolitian Museum of Art Director Thomas Hoving notes in the film, history will ultimately be the final arbiter of Galella’s work. His role in helping to foster the now ubiquitous media coverage of so-called celebrities is already cemented. Following the screening film programmer and friend of Stranger Than Fiction Basil Tsiokos spoke with Gast and producers Linda Saffire and Adam Schlesinger. Click “Read more” below for the Q&A.
Stranger Than Fiction: How did this project come about?
Leon Gast: I got a telephone call from Linda and Adam. They both asked me if I was interested in working on a film about a paparazzi named Ron Galella, have you ever heard of him? I grew up around these parts, and for years and years, every single day in the newspaper, in a magazine on the local news, there was some kind of story about Ron Galella. I remembered him very well. They offered to bring me out to his estate in Montclair, New Jersey. We went, sat in his great room. I saw his gardens. I live in the country, and I mentioned that I had some property and we had planted trees and bushes. He said, you see that row of evergreens over there? Every other one is artificial. I said, what? He said, exactly as he says in the film, you go after Christmas and you get them on sale, they’re $20 and they come with lights on them. We drove back, and I said, I would love to be involved in any way. Just about anybody I was interested in interviewing, they were able to get. Adam had a relationship with Chuck Close, it just worked out perfectly. Ron was so much fun, accommodating. We just followed him, and he let us into his life. I wonder, looking at this, after spending a couple of years on a film, an audience is going to see it. And they’re going to spend 90 minutes of their life watching something that you’ve worked on. And is it worth it? Not for me, I got paid. But is it worth it for you guys to spend 90 minutes looking at something you might think is self-indulgent?
STF: What did everybody think?
[Audience applauds]
Gast: He took, probably by now, three and a half million pictures. He’s the price tag of the First Amendment. But do the means justify the ends? If somebody 50 years from now wants to do a paper on Tony Danza, he’s probably got 400-500 pictures of Tony Danza. He took almost 5,000 pictures of Jacqueline Onassis.
STF: With that kind of an archive, how much of it did he show you? How much of it were you looking at when trying to put together a film? There must have been an insane amount of footage that you could have used.
Linda Saffire: Every time we went back to his house, it was like a treasure. We’d find more and more. It was amazing. He shot everybody and was everywhere. There are all the pictures of Jackie, but he has everybody.
Adam Schlesinger: There’s a scene that didn’t make it into the film, called the Italian Scene. He was honored in his father’s town in Italy. And the people from the town came to pick photos, they were going to do an exhibit of Italians. Every person they asked him about, he had. It was an archivists nightmare, because they were flying through all of the photos in his archive and drinking wine and just having a great time. But he had everybody.
Saffire: Italian directors, Italian actors, models, everybody.
STF: Who, primarily, was taking the photos of him taking the photos of celebrities?
Gast: The pictures of him in the football helmet when he found out about Brando, he brought a photographer along. He paid him $200 to turn over the film when the shoot was over.
Saffire: It was Paul Schmalbach.
Schlesinger: Galella was really a dream because he saved everything. He had all the old footage. He always had somebody around, because he really wants to be famous himself.
STF: Did you approach him, or did he approach you? How did you decided he was going to be the subject of this film?
Schlesinger: I actually had read an article in the New York Times about a retrospective of his work somewhere, and they talked about all the celebrities that came to that. I thought it was really interesting that the same guy that all the celebrities were running away from were now going and celebrating him. I thought it was an interesting way of looking at paparazzi, then versus now. Of course, he exceeded our expectations as a character or subject. I went to him, and approached him. He was like, oh sure, sure.
STF: For somebody who is so obviously a storyteller and has been in the presence of pretty much everyone famous for the last 50 years, how did you edit that back. How did you focus him and get what you were trying to get? It seems like he could tell stories for days if you just let him go.
Gast: We did a rough cut. Linda I think you may have put together a group up by Columbia University. We had a bunch of screenings and got feedback. There were students who said, I have no idea who any of those people were, it made me laugh. We just kept refining it. They were ideal producers to work with.
Schlesinger: We also had a great editor on the project, Doug Abel.
Gast: He got it immediately.
Audience: I’m curious about how your following him around affected his access as a paparazzi.
Gast: He was aware of the camera, but he almost acted as if he wasn’t aware of the camera. With most people there’s a camera consciousness, and they react in a certain way. Ron seemed to react to everything the same way all the time. He never tried to look at the camera. A lot of people do when they know they’re being photographed. He was an ideal subject.
STF: But did it affect his ability to access the things he was trying to get pictures of?
Schlesinger: No, because at this stage in his life, as Bobby Kennedy said, he wasn’t hiding in the bushes anymore. He’s so well known amongst the paparazzi now, and primarily he’s going to events at this point.
Saffire: It was fun when we were shooting Ron and there were all of these celebrities, and we didn’t really care about the celebrities. The camera was on Ron.
Audience: I know that Princess Diana was not one of his big subjects. Did you get into the subject of her death and the paparazzi?
Gast: We did in one cut. We put together the funeral, her brother doing that beautiful eulogy. We decided that—
Saffire: It was too big. You can’t tell it in two minutes or five minutes. Was the driver drunk? Was it the paparazzi? She loved the paparazzi. She waited for certain cameramen to take a picture.
Gast: We got the pictures from the hotel. We had shots of her in the elevator looking up at the mirror, smiling. When I first saw them I thought, oh my God, look at these pictures of her. In a few minutes, she’s going to be dead. It had a profound effect on me. I wanted that scene in the film.
Schlesinger: We debated it, but as he says in the film, he had very few shots of her and none of Marilyn Monroe. The feeling was that it took you out of the film.
Saffire: It was like a little news piece in the middle of the film.
Audience: Could you speak about your relationship with the cinematographer Don Lenzer?
Gast: I’ve known Don for a long time. I believe I met Don when I was working with Barbara Kopple. We had a real good relationship. I think Linda had worked with Don on a couple of projects.
Saffire: We were just talking about the shot in the darkroom. He stays on that photograph when it develops, and he zooms in at the right time. The patience—that scene is just Don.
Gast: He was shooting with a Varicam, a big, heavy camera. I can’t remember him ever putting the camera on a tripod. He’s rock steady, always in focus and he never said no. He was just a great person to work with.
STF: Were there any stories that you really wanted to include but weren’t able to?
Gast: He spoke about Marilyn Monroe. He was out in LA, and he knew that she was doing a picture at Fox. And he waited and he waited and became impatient, got in his car and drove away. He found out the next day that he showed up about five minutes after he left.
Schlesinger: There’s also another story where he was in Mexico photographing Richard Burton and hiding in a hotel in a pool room where they keep the generator for the pool heater. I guess the sound person working on the film noticed a humming noise. It was the generator for the pool, and they went back there and turned that off. And it turned out Ron was hiding back there. So he was arrested and thrown in prison. Then, years later, Richard Burton hired him to take photographs at his wedding.
Related Film/Screening:
SMASH HIS CAMERA by Leon Gast
- by Rahul Chadha, March 05, 2012
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A Q&A session following a screening at the True/False Film Festival. Photo by Maureen Scarpelli, courtesy of True/False.
The True/False Film Fest, Columbia, Missouri’s most famous documentary festival, concluded yesterday after four days of screenings (and at least one parade). The festival launched with a screening of UNDEFEATED that honored the recent Oscar win of co-director Dan Lindsay, an alumnus of the University of Missouri. Christine Benedict at Indiewire’s Press Play blog also had highlights from days one and two of the festival. The transportation-conscious minds behind the festival this year also debuted a new bike-sharing system to facilitate the flow of doc heads around Columbia’s streets.
Efforts to combat the Motion Picture Association of America’s R rating for Lee Hirsch’s doc BULLY hit the grassroots this week, after self-professed bullying victim Kay Butler, 17, started a petition at Change.org asking the MPAA to change the rating to PG-13. As of March 4, the petition had drawn more than 198,400 signatures, and was drawing ever-closer to its goal of 200,000 signatures. The MPAA’s decision had drawn criticism from those who said it would limit the ability of teachers and administrators at high schools and middle schools to share the film’s anti-bullying message with students. The Weinstein Company (TWC) Co-President Harvey Weinstein, who is distributing the film, had previously threatened to withdraw its films from the MPAA rating process.
The seemingly omnipresent Basil Tsiokos has a great overview of docs that will soon be showing up at South by Southwest, which runs March 9-17. If you’re in Austin for the festival, you can catch Tsiokos in person at the Beginners Guide to SXSW Film panel on Friday, March 9 at 2 pm.
HBO this week announced that it had picked up “Witness,” a documentary series following photojournalists working amid violent conflicts around the world. Directors Michael Mann (HEAT, THE INSIDER) and David Frankham will reportedly produce the series for the cable channel.
For those in New York City, the New Directors/New Films program, hosted by Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), on February 23 announced its full lineup. Among the docs showing during the series, to be held March 21 - April 1, are Mads Brugger’s THE AMBASSADOR, which has been gaining attention following screenings at both Sundance and True/False. Also in the lineup are Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 5 BROKEN CAMERAS, which won the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award at Sundance, and David France’s HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE, which traces the history of the AIDS activism movement.
The International Documentary Association (IDA) posted a recap of its DocuDay LA event, during which all of the documentary features and shorts that had been nominated for an Oscar were screened. Directors in attendance for Q&As included Marshall Curry and Wim Wenders.
Following the Oscars, POV took an opportunity to rejigger it’s formula-derived best docs of 2011 chart to account for Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s Academy Award win for UNDEFEATED. Despite the new hardware, UNDEFEATED finished at 18th on the list. Top honors remained with Steve James’ THE INTERRUPTERS, which did not receive an Oscar nomination.
This week Polish-born documentary filmmaker Mira Hamermish passed away at the age of 88. Hamermish fled German-occupied Poland as a teenager, eventually landing in Britain. There she made several films for the BBC, among them MAIDS AND MADAMS (1985), an investigation of race and class among black housemaids and their white employers in South Africa.
The folks at DocGeeks this week highlighted i-Docs, described as the first symposium in the United Kingdom dedicated to interactive documentaries. The i-Docs event is scheduled to take place March 22-23 in Bristol, England.
Sony Pictures Classics picked up distribution rights for Amy Berg’s WEST OF MEMPHIS, about the recently freed West Memphis Three. The film gained attention in December after the New York Times reported that Berg’s project had signed agreements with some subjects that prevented them from talking with Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, whose PARADISE LOST trilogy is widely credited for drawing attention to the miscarriage of justice at the heart of the case.
Over at the Documentary Channel Blog, Christopher Campbell spoke with Philadelphia-based filmmakers Don Argott and Demian Fenton about LAST DAYS HERE, their portrait of doom metal pioneer Bobby Liebling. Fenton and Argot, both admitted metal heads, said they believe the film transcends the limited confines of the “rock doc” subgenre.
While at the Documentary Channel blog, be sure to also check out Campbell’s list of this week’s theatrical releases.
We here at Stranger Than Fiction are working on a list of the doc world’s favorite/best Twitterers. We’re looking for people who live, breathe and die docs, as well as others who have an interest in nonfiction film, but tweet about other things as well. Have suggestions? Please feel free to list them in the comments section, or e-mail them .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Stranger Than Fiction this week is hosting Leon Gast’s SMASH HIS CAMERA, a look at old school papparazo Ron Galella, famous for his run-ins with everyone from Jackie Onassis to Marlon Brando. You can find more info about the film and get tickets here.
Got tips or recommendations for the Memo? Please e-mail them .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). As always, have a great week!
by Albert Maysles and David Maysles
by Andrew Berends
