It’s been two full decades since Hoop Dreams, but any basketball documentary is still bound to be compared to that iconic film. Still, technological changes over those 20 years beg the question of how Steve James and Kartemquin Film would handle distributing the film today. When director Robert Herrera was faced with the same challenge for his new film The Gray Seasons, about the women’s basketball team at St. Louis University, he struck upon a series of festival screenings, simultaneous cable PPV and VOD (via Vimeo on Demand) availability, and finally a DVD release and iOS app that encapsulates much of […]
by Randy Astle on Mar 24, 2014I sat down today with my old friend Nelson George to ask about his recent and past projects. We discussed his newly finished film The Announcement, about Magic Johnson 20 years after he made the announcement that he has the HIV virus. And then we worked backwards and discussed Good Hair, Life Support, and George’s path from journalist to filmmaker. The Announcement premiered on ESPN this month and continues to air; for upcoming screenings, including one this afternoon, visit the website. George’s documentary Brooklyn Boheme is now available on iTunes. Filmmaker: Tell me about The Announcement and how you came […]
by Alix Lambert on Mar 18, 2012Few documentary filmmakers’ careers are as fascinating to follow as that of Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and that’s not just because of the consistent quality of his films, but because of the astonishing rate at which he produces them. In the midst of three other projects — an untitled Wikileaks documentary in pre-production; The Road Back, about Lance Armstrong, in post-production; and the newly completed Magic Bus, about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters — Gibney was at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival with his sports documentary Catching Hell, which […]
by Daniel James Scott on May 2, 2011