We are pulling this article from the archive to promote our upcoming Doc U: Shooting Overseas: Making Your Doc on Foreign Soil at the AFCI Locations Show at the L.A. Convention Center. On Friday, June 15, we are hosting a panel of doc filmmakers who have traveled the globe and film commissioners whose job it is to make filming in their countries as straightforward as possible. Register for the AFCI Locations Show and RSVP for this free Doc U today! When it comes to documentarians, they go "where no man has gone before" to get their story--South Africa, Brazil, China, Russia, India, Afghanistan
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by George Butler In late 1974, I published a book, with writer Charles Gaines, called Pumping Iron: The Art of Bodybuilding. I thought this could be a subject for a film and that its main character, Arnold Schwarzenegger, could become a big movie star. No one agreed with me. It was impossible to find an experienced director to touch the subject. After being turned down by Frederick Wiseman, DeWitt Sage Jr., Howard Smith, David Wolper and others, I decided I would direct and produce my own movie. I had never directed a film before, so in preparation, I rented a 16mm projector and a dozen top
Terry Zwigoff's Crumb by John Anderson Proof that cranky, banjo-playing misanthropes can be movie heroes, Crumb (1994) is a perfect synthesis of character, access and director Terry Zwigoff's eloquent invisibility. One of the more astute films in any genre to deal with the creative process, Crumb is probably also the first film to posit a counter-cultural icon as the product of post-traumatic stress disorder. A portrait of the artist--underground comix star R. Crumb--as open wound and downbeat prankster, Crumb has to be considered now the Birth of a Nation of nerd chic. Alternately intimate
Jeffrey Blitz's Spellbound Your heart completely goes out to the eight young competitors in Spellbound (2002); it really does. They're so filled with hope and belief--so industrious in wonderfully individual ways in their quest to win the 72nd National Spelling Bee--that wishing that each and every one of them could win becomes inevitable. And maybe, this irresistible documentary suggests, they already have. These eight were part of a group of 249 who came out of some 9,000 school and city bees to qualify for the 1999 finals in Washington, DC. While a contest where the aim is correctly
As part of IDA's 25th Anniversary celebration, film critic Emanuel Levy writes an essay about Errol Morris' 'The Thin Blue Line,' which came in at Number 2 in the Top 25 Poll, as voted for by the IDA Membership.
One overlooked, but quite crucial element in a documentary, is its music. A well-crafted score can make a difference in the shape, mood, pacing, emotional texture and character of a film. And the right chemistry between filmmaker and composer can help achieve that full-bodied, visceral cinematic experience that we all yearn for as audience members. Documentary gathered some top film composers--all of whom have worked in a variety of genres including documentary--to talk about working in nonfiction, the collaborative process, the challenges of working around and against a temp score, the final
In this history-making US Presidential election, in which the politics of division and fear were laid low by a grassroots-and-Internet juggernaut of unity and hope, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story couldn't have been more timely in reconstructing the man who brought us Bush pere, Bush fils and the notorious Karl Rove. Filmmaker Stefan Forbes' second documentary is as much informed by a fascination with the American political system and those who control it as it is by his background in music, his major at Brown University. Documentary talked to this year's Jacqueline Donnet Emerging
It read like a Hollywood script. One day, an unassuming black teenager is picked up off the streets of Winston-Salem, North Carolina by policemen searching for a suspect in the murder of a 25-year-old white woman. Though innocent, he's charged and convicted of the crime by an all-white jury. After all legal channels for appeal are exhausted, and despite exculpatory DNA evidence, the man's lawyer realizes the only way he can free his client is to find the real murderer himself. He does. After nearly two decades of incarceration, the wrongly convicted man is released from jail with nothing but