Documentary

HEARTS OF DARKNESS REDUX

I walked into the Filmmaker office yesterday and Ben Crossley-Marra and Jason Guerrasio were bent over a computer monitor, excited to come across the news that Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper and Eleanor Coppola’s documentary Hearts of Darkness is set for a DVD release from Paramount Home Entertainment. As our post didn’t include the studio and director Hickenlooper is a friend of Jeff Wells and a regular poster at Hollywood Elsewhere, Wells posted a skeptical post about the release, wondering why he hadn’t heard it about from George first. Hickenlooper posts in the comments thread below Wells’s piece the news that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 19, 2007
Feeding Frency

From commercial crab fishing in Alaska, to learning how to become a filmmaker in Peru, Aaron Woolf’s worldly experience makes him an ideal documentarian for PBS. His previous films — Dying to Leave: The Human Face of Global Trafficking, Greener Grass Cuba and Baseball and the United States — all aired on public television, but Woolf is proud to have his latest film, King Corn, get theatrical distribution. “I never wanted to be anything,” Woolf says. “I only knew things I wanted to accomplish in my life. I wanted to build a house, drive cross-country, run for office, shoot a […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Oct 15, 2007
A DOCUMENTARY CHORUS

Josh Welsh over at Film Independent forwarded me this info about a cool new documentary project that’s unfolding on YouTube. Two filmmakers, Eric Byler and Annabel Park, are making a film about the politics of immigration in Northern Virginia. They are posting short clips of their film on a channel they have set up on the site and are soliciting viewer feedback about the future direction of the project. “We will respond to viewer feedback, including requests for more coverage on certain storylines, contextual clarifications, and even perhaps on-site production excursions,” the filmmakers write on their YouTube page. Here’s a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 13, 2007
THE PEN IS MIGHTY

In the upcoming Fall issue of Filmmaker (which is literally at the printers as I type this), Anthony Kaufman investigates the constant struggles documentary filmmakers are going through to qualify for the Oscars. Well, unbeknownst to Anthony, and us, the Academy was in the process of revising the guidelines, remedying the filmmakers’ criticisms. Read Anthony’s thoughts on his blog about the newest development in this ongoing saga.
by Jason Guerrasio on Oct 9, 2007
MORE ON REDACTED AND THE NYFF

Jurgen Fauth posted in the comment section of the post below about the dust-up at the NYFF press conference over Brian DePalma’s Redacted and the black bars that now appear over the film’s final images. He links to his own blog, which has both a video clip of DePalma at the conference as well as a detailed description of what happened, which I’ll quote here: When selection committee member J. Hoberman asked about the black bars that now cover some of the photographs at the conclusion of the film, Palma didn’t pull any punches, either: Redacted is now itself redacted,” […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 9, 2007
Bill Haney, The Price Of Sugar

FATHER CHRISTOPHER HARTLEY (CENTER) IN BILL HANEY’S THE PRICE OF SUGAR. COURTESY MITROPOULOS FILMS. William M. Haney III — or Bill Haney to you and me — is one of those people who one suspects would be successful at almost anything he chose to turn his hand to. He started his first business while still an undergrad at Harvard, and made $15m when he sold his stock in the company, aged just 26. He then moved on to invest in two environmental companies and then a software company, continuing his success with all three. He first became interested in film […]
by Nick Dawson on Sep 28, 2007
GAYLOR GOES TO THE SOURCE

Here’s a Google link to a conversation that Scott Kirsner from CinemaTech had during the IFP Filmmaker Confernece with Brett Gaylor, a Montreal-based filmmaker who is exploring new modes of collaboration for documentary filmmaking. I’m also embedding below, but if you go to the Google page you can download the 12-minute piece in a format suitable for playing on your iPod or PSP.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 22, 2007
FREE FAIR USE DISCUSSION

Tomorrow, Friday, is the final day of the IFP Filmmaker Conference, and it’s both free and open to the general public. From 9:00AM until 10:30AM panelists will discuss issues surrounding fair use in documentary film, the limits of, benefits from, and restrictions around E&O insurance, and specific issues that have arisen in various docs having to do with fair use. It’s at the Puck Building in New York at Houston and Lafayette. Anybody working in documentary film today has to know about these issues. Here’s the schedule: FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 21st – FAIR USE IN DOCUMENTARY FILM FAIR USE 101 9:00 […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 20, 2007
Winter Chill

In 2005 indie director Larry Fessenden was troubled by the state of the world—specifically, by our leaders’ callow response to the threat of global warming. So he did what he does best: He made a horror movie. The Last Winter, about a skeleton crew of oil-dredge workers afflicted by madness and other disturbing phenomena in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, revisits some of the tropes in Fessenden’s spooky 2001 feature Wendigo, including a fearsome, shape-shifting deer-spirit. The film was overlooked when it premiered at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, later acquired by IFC First Take (releases September 19), and recently […]
by Damon Smith on Sep 18, 2007
THINGS TO DO IN DENVER

One of my favorite websites, Boing Boing, has just undertaken a re-design. The site is a lot cleaner and easier on the eyes now, all the better to scope out eccentric pieces like this article in the Denver Westword News about the historical end date of the Mayan calendar, Freemason conspiracy theory, the New World Order… and the Denver airport? It’s all knitted together by a filmmaker — producer Nick Weidner, who, with his partner Sharron Rose, made 2012: The Odyssey. Westword’s Jared Jacang Maher, who writes about Weidner’s appearance on KHOW’s Coast to Coast, explains: Weidner, a filmmaker and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007

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