This year's Preservation & Scholarship Award honoree, Mark Jonathan Harris, has taught filmmaking at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts since 1983. The award celebrates the impact Harris has made as a teacher and mentor--inspiring students, alumni and colleagues alike to make a difference in the documentary community. Harris, whose career has blended filmmaking, writing and teaching, is the first to maintain that he's more of a practitioner than a scholar. Indeed, when he graduated from Harvard, the last place he expected to land was academia. "I graduated
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Jeff Malmberg, recipient of the 2010 Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award, may have only a single directorial credit, but his cinematic philosophy is far from inchoate. "Most of the documentaries I admire do the same thing," he says. "They take someone you would initially dismiss, and then blow up your preconceptions and make you realize that person is stronger in certain situations than even you would be. The documentaries I respond to are always those kinds. Marjoe is that way. Salesman is that way. Grey Gardens is that way. It's easy to forget that Salesman is a portrait
On the first day of her shoot at the Harlan County (Kentucky) coal miners strike, Barbara Kopple and her crew were met with distrust. The miners were under threat from a company whose recklessness with their safety had gone unchecked for years. On top of that, the company had gotten crafty, hiring scabs and bullies to menace the strikers and placing spies on the picket line. When Kopple and her crew introduced themselves, the strikers gave them fake names. "They said they were Martha Washington or Florence Nightingale, but they left a door open," Kopple recalls. " ‘If you come tomorrow at 4:00
This year, New York City's Film Forum celebrates its 40th anniversary. Throughout the years, it has played an essential role in the city's film world, earning such glowing descriptions as "New York's most nourishing cinema" (Stephen Schiff, Vanity Fair, 1988), "A moviegoer's landmark" (Andrew Sarris, New York Observer, 1989), "Our idea of heaven" ("150 New York Essentials" issue, Time Out, 2008), and "New York's most prestigious, active and venturesome art-film theater" (John Rockwell, The New York Times, 1992). Much of this praise can be traced directly to the long-standing team of
The ever staid and stoic Michael Kaplan, producer/director of Make 'em Laugh. Photo: Joe Sinnott. Courtesy of Thirteen/WNET After producing what many consider the definitive documentary series on the Broadway musical, what topic was there left to tackle for filmmaker Michael Kantor? Something that made him laugh. Series producer/director Kantor and his Emmy Award-winning team from Broadway: The American Musical have just started principal photography on a new six- hour PBS series chronicling more than a century of American comedy, called Make'em Laugh: The Funny Business of America . The multi
As you probably heard, the documentary world lost two award-winning makers last month--Gail Dolgin and George Hickenlooper. Gail Dolgin died October 7 after a decade-long struggle with breast cancer. She was 65. She earned an Academy Award nomination and Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for her and Vicente Franco's 2002 documentary Daughter from Danang. Other films made with Franco included C uba Va and Summer of Love. A fixture in the San Francisco Bay Area documentary community, Dolgin always wanted people working around her to be a little better," said Franco in an obituary in the
The Film Independent Filmmaker Forum, held this past Hallowe'en weekend at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles, offered a weekend's worth of food for thought for doc- and fiction-makers alike. A perennial in-demand panel, Find Money for your Documentary, moderated by Caroline Libresco of the Sundance Institute, went beyond the usual areas of grant-writing and pitching to cover such areas as packaging, as presented by Dina Kuperstock from the agency CAA, and equity financing, a bailiwick of Impact Partners' Dan Cogan. Executive producer Stephen Nemeth ( Climate Refugees; Fuel, Flow)
'Cool It' comes out March 29 on DVD through Lionsgate.
Seven-part series airs on Turner Classic Movies through December 13.