Dear IDA Members: In our business, pressure comes in the form of a broadcast deadline, missing a flight for an important shoot or even losing out on a one-time interview. I was recently in Toronto for Hot Docs where I attended the Toronto Documentary Forum (TDF). I was quite impressed with the filmmakers who endured critical review of their work in a public setting. The TDF is an amazing pitching event modeled, in part, after The Forum at International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA). The TDF consists of two days worth of 15-minute pre-selected presentations, held in a large room on
Latest Posts
Dear IDA Members, Just off the plane from Cannes, back from MIPDOC and MIP-TV. These were two successive markets that served up many, many buyers and sellers in one place. This year MIPDOC was different in a couple of ways. There were more than 300 screening booths and more activities for the documentary filmmakers in attendance. These screenings were digitized for the first time. What does that mean? It used to be that distributors or producers sent off six copies of their film on VHS. A library of sorts was installed and the buyers could "check-out" your show at their own private viewing
Dear Readers, Know your rights! The increasingly prohibitive costs of archival footage, music and other key elements to telling a story are impacting documentary filmmaking. As a follow-up to a February-March 2005 piece about the Center for Social Media's Untold Stories project, Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-directors of American University-based Project on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest, discuss the sometimes Byzantine parameters of "fair use" and present the particulars of a proposed Statement of Best Industry Practices for this area. As mentioned last issue, IDA is
Dear Readers, What a month of media madness has been March 2005! Just as CBS News anchor Dan Rather signed off for the final time, Docurama released The Edward R. Murrow Collection, a four-DVD set that commemorates the work of the legendary reporter, and Discovery Times Channel aired one of Murrow's finest reports, the 1960 classic Harvest of Shame. Not to equate Rather with Murrow, but the latter, with his singular style and his impact on nonfiction television programming, helped make possible the emergence of the former. But now, we get faux news reports—not from The Daily Show, but from the
Dear IDA Members, As reported in The New York Times and on National Public Radio, a new media phenomenon has come into being-Video News Releases (VNRs). It's very interesting how these play on national and local channels. Catching up on the day's news, you could watch a 90-second report that passes itself off as a normal in-house story. One problem, though: The reporter's name is fictitious and the entire piece was created by a public relations firm that was hired by the White House-and paid for by the US taxpayers. According to NPR, 30 government agencies are in full swing financing the
Dear IDA Members, In the world of nonfiction filmmaking, January and February brought NATPE, the Sundance Film Festival and the RealScreen Summit, all within three weeks of each other, with IDA representation at all three events. I attended the RealScreen Summit in Washington, DC, which attracted nearly 1,100 people for three days of seminars and discussions about the creativity and business of the nonfiction form. While the seminars went on downstairs, the business of selling went on upstairs in the lobby. I saw a great number of buyers outlining their programming needs in 30-minute sessions
Dear Readers, While the past few years have a yielded a bumper crop of box-office successes, the prospects of a brave new utopia for documentarians may not be quite as bright as previously bruited. There are only so many theaters and channels to go around, and while the combination of cost-effective technology and a more doc-friendly world has encouraged a new wave of storytellers, a troubling number of good documentaries still go homeless. What's needed beyond the artistry and craft is a dose of marketing savvy and chutzpah. We recruited a few seasoned veterans to share their sage counsel
Dear IDA Members, As this organization continues to grow, so does our need for more help. You may not be aware that we accomplish our programs and events with a small staff. The IDA depends on our working board of directors to initiate and direct the many activities you read about in these pages. While most of our board is composed of filmmakers, we also need professionals from law, fundraising, multimedia, accounting, publishing, etc. This year we had 27 talented and experienced applicants vying for seven slots on the board. The seven newly elected board members I am pleased to introduce to
Dear Readers, When we were planning an issue devoted to women in documentary, we were prompted first by an article that appeared in the January 2004 issue—an editors roundtable, courtesy of Editors Guild magazine, that consisted entirely of men. We received our share of calls for a counterpart. Then, filmmaker/educator Nina Gilden Seavey sent us an unsolicited article about her personal experiences regarding motherhood and documentary filmmaking. The seeds were planted. The documentary community is one of the few in the entire media arts spectrum in which women play a prominent role both
Dear Readers, Making documentaries, as we all know, is a difficult profession, one with more psychic, spiritual and artistic rewards than monetary ones. The realities of paying the bills, supporting families and surviving prompt the need to cast one's net wider, expand one's portfolio, cast about for between-documentary, or even during-documentary, opportunities. And some of these opportunities have actually served to enhance one's documentary-making sensibilities. In this issue, we look at a few crossovers and sidelights that have kept documentary makers reasonably solvent, and have inspired