James D. Stern delivered the keynote address at the Financing Conference at this year's Los Angeles Film Festival. After last year's "“Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling"  speech by Mark Gill, expectations were high. Here are his remarks in their entirety, as published on the LAFF website.  Of note is the fact that Stern is an accomplished documentary director/producer (Every Little Step, Year of the Yao, ...So Goes the Nation), and therefore includes non-fiction when laying out his survival plan for independent film.

The 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival continues through June 28th. 

I know some of you were expecting Mark Gill to be back today and deliver a follow-up to last year’s speech, but unfortunately, on the way over, Mark was struck by a piece of falling sky.  He was rushed to a Cineplex, where doctors have strapped him in a chair and ordered him to watch ‘UP’ in 3D for the duration of the festival.

So I was asked to fill in and address the question, what does it take to be a filmmaker or financier in these difficult times? 

Well, that’s easy.  You need to be as sly as a fox, as slippery as an eel, as thick-skinned as a hippo… and as rich as Sidney Kimmel.

But if you don’t meet those qualifications, don’t worry – it works just as well to be crazy as a loon. 

Remember the end of Annie Hall?  Alvie Singer turns to the camera and tells the joke about a guy who goes to a psychiatrist.  He says, Doc, my brother’s crazy.  He thinks he’s a chicken.  Doctor says, why don’t you turn him in?  The guy says, I would, but I need the eggs.

That sums up why I’m in this business.  Same for most of my friends.  The way we feel about making movies is irrational, crazy, absurd… but we get by because we need the eggs. 

The Lumière brothers were the first to suggest that cinema is an invention without any future.  They should know.  They invented it – and then wisely moved on to more sensible things, like inventing medical forceps. 

Some of us aren’t so smart.  When I left school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.  I immediately started working in theater in New York City.  I lived on a steady diet of MSG-laced Chinese food in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side about the size of this lectern.  Then I kicked around in the real world, eventually went to a fancy business school, and after graduating promptly refused to take any job that would have me – because all I could think about was producing and directing.

In other words, I needed the eggs. 

Last year up here, Mark Gill delivered a pretty sobering argument that the sky is falling.  And a year later he looks pretty smart. 

That wave of more than $15 billion dollars of slate capital from Wall Street from 2005 to 2008 left us with a torrent of movies. Thousands of films got made last year in a world that had room for just hundreds.

A friend describes this problem as a simple equation: Access to capital + low barriers to entry = glut of subprime movies. 

Subprime?  Excess inventory?   Sounds like we’re upside-down on the mortgage and it’s time to mail in the keys. 

An astonishing 9,293 films were submitted to Sundance last year.  Of those nearly 10,000, only 218 were screened.  Of the lucky handful to get bought, so far only three have been released theatrically.

It’s pretty obvious:  Indies are in a world of hurt.  When the financial crisis hit, any awards that independent films were winning suddenly were not enough to appease corporate paymasters, who in turn severely damaged labels like New Line, Warner Independent, Paramount Vantage, PictureHouse and so on.

With fewer U.S. distributors, financiers were badly burned when the financial crisis turned global, and foreign markets no longer could be relied on to mitigate the risk of not having U.S. distribution.  Those markets used to be the backstop of smaller films.  But they started choosing to run their own affordable domestic movies instead of independent American films.  And since those markets need big studio titles to drive ratings and ad revenues, what suffers is… the indie.

On top of that, a stronger dollar cuts foreign buying power, restricting the group of banks still willing to lend to independent producers.  This makes pre-sale financing, and gap financing, almost impossible to get. 

So, in technical terms, the market for independent films really, really sucks!

This is all such depressing stuff.  But wait a minute!  Box office is up!  Isn’t it? 

Not really.  Those statistics are obscured by the fact that there are two movie industries in this town that we tend to lump together.  The first one – studios – is by and large a vertically integrated business mostly concerned with film as part of a merchandising industry.  And the second – the focus of this conference – generally makes single-purpose films that we call independents. 

Let’s compare apples to apples between the two sectors over the past two years.

From January through May 2008, four studio films grossed more than $100 million dollars.   This year, that number is eleven.  Almost triple.

Meanwhile, in the same period, the number of indies that grossed over $1 million dollars went from 16 to six.  Less than half.

OK, great.  Now I’ve basically one-upped Mark on pessimism.  But I still need the eggs… and now my head hurts.  Really hurts.  Like sitting-through-Land-of-the-Lost hurts!

But guess what?  Despite it all, I absolutely believe there’s not just hope, but huge opportunity out there.

That’s not to say I have the best track record as an Oracle.  Several years ago, I tried to hire a wonderful person I’d worked with before.  She was appreciative but said she had an offer to help start a company that would rent DVDs through the mail.  I said, “Are you insane?  That will never work!”  I couldn’t imagine people waiting two or three days to see a movie.

Uh… the next dinner’s on her.  The insane idea she described, called Netflix, has shipped not one but two billion disks, and raked in an $83 million dollar profit on $1.4 billion dollars in revenue last year.  They’ve got a gigantic database of what people like, and almost scary tools to predict what they’re going to want.

My original problem with the idea was that no one would wait for a movie in the mail.  Now they won’t have to:  The next big revenue source, I believe, will be streaming video.  It’ll give ADD types like me what we’re looking for: Impulse purchases!

With streaming, we’ll all have the biggest video store imaginable, crammed into our little TV remotes, enticing us every time we turn on the set to make an impulse buy. 

As these services create real revenue – and according to a pretty thick 2009 Morgan Stanley report, it’s not far off – innovative, forward-looking companies like Netflix will be in the thick of it.  Not just with the content – but with the knowledge to connect it to the appropriate audience.  They won’t be alone.  VUDU, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, Time Warner, Comcast and others will join in.

Provided they actually pay us for our content in appropriate ways, these are the once and future friends of independent film.

All well and good.  But while we wait for this new revenue stream to lift our boats, it’s our job – in the words of William Faulkner – not just to survive, but prevail.

To survive, we need to pay careful attention to the fundamentals of business. 

To prevail, we need to experiment to see what’s new that works. 

A couple of weeks ago Variety ran an article about one of those experiments.  Summer Hours from IFC and The Girlfriend Experience from Magnolia were released simultaneously in theaters and on VOD.  The numbers were solid for both - no evidence that either release cannibalized the other.

That doesn’t surprise me.  The truth is, people will always want to go to the movies, because normal folks, not just teenagers, need to get out of the house.  Nothing at home can match the communal experience of bon-bons and popcorn and the fat guy next to you hissing at the terrorists when they take Miley Cyrus hostage.  Hey, the other night I went to the ArcLight, and when the usher came out to start his spiel, the audience started chanting his name: “Dave, Dave, Dave!”  No way you’re getting that at home.  Unless of course you invite Dave over.

And then there’s IMAX and 3D to give local theaters two more distinct advantages.

Meanwhile, the home theater experience is getting better and cheaper.  This is good news.  Maybe once in a while, instead of loading the minivan, driving and parking, buying popcorn and tickets, a family might rather stay home one weekend, invite the kids’ friends over and pay, say, fifty bucks for a new release on opening night – in high def and 7.1. 

Let’s say they make this decision for premium video on demand maybe six times a year.  At fifty bucks a pop – those are big numbers.

The point is, people will go to the theater.  People will watch at home.  And both are good for our business.

So yes, there’s hope.  Morgan Stanley says a new world of streaming content-on-demand will reach some level of critical mass – in two or three years.   My good friend Michael Barker at Sony Classics almost agrees.  Here’s what he says about a conversation shift he noticed in acquisition meetings at Cannes this year: 

“In the past, the meetings have been completely about the films.  This year, most of the conversations were about new technologies, and where’s the new revenue that’s going to replace DVD?  It’s really about where we are three to four years from now.”

Morgan Stanley says two to three. Barker says three to four.  Either way, by then Mitt Romney will be running against Sarah Palin for the Republican nomination!

What do we do now?  Here’s a suggestion. 

Remember Herschel Walker?  He wasn’t just any football player.  He won the Heisman Trophy.  One time, a team traded eleven players to get him.  He did 1,000 pushups and 3,000 situps every day.  And boy, you could tell just by looking at him.  No one messed with Herschel.

One year with the Dallas Cowboys he got this crazy idea for off-season training.  He asked the Ft. Worth Ballet Company if he could dance with them.

The mental image of this massive guy decked out in ballet gear made some people snicker.  (Out of earshot, of course.)  After all, this was 20 years before Dwayne Johnson did The Gameplan.  But Herschel stuck with it, worked hard and got pretty good.  Even The New York Times was impressed. 

But that’s not why he did it.  He did it for football.  This chiseled Greek statue of a man told his coach he did it because, “I have to use a completely different set of muscles when I dance.”

We’ve got to be willing to build a different set of muscles in this business.  The way we operate is being dissected and reassembled in front of our eyes. The other day, my friend Glen Basner told me that everything we’ve learned about financing films over the last 15 years we have to forget.  Which of course is uncomfortable, but it’s a window of opportunity to develop the muscles we’re going to need to dance this new dance in the coming years.

To accomplish that, I believe there are three hard rules that we, as independent filmmakers, need to obey.

Rule One:  Make Smarter Movies!

That’s not the same as making better movies.  Everyone says make better movies, and everyone wants to.  But that’s like a director telling an actor to act better.   Sounds good, but what does it mean?

I do know what it means to make smarter movies, though.  And that’s what we should be doing.

I don’t mean run out and make The Seventh Seal Part Two: Revenge of the Reaper!  (Although I might actually pay to see that.)

What I mean is crafting a disciplined process that results in a smarter product.  Smarter process means designing movie projects with really clear target audiences in mind from the very beginning.  Doing that takes coordination among all parties involved, from finance to creative to production to marketing to distribution.  Having a clear target in mind determines the process and the range of budget that needs to be financed.  

(By the way, it’s no accident we named our company Endgame – because it’s something every smart movie needs.  We don’t always get it right, but the intention is always there in our films.)

So that’s a smarter process.

Smarter product means films with a distinctive appeal that’s built right into the movie.  This doesn’t mean you need to pander to your audience. 

Why did Shakespeare write Macbeth?  Well, let’s see.  What was going on in 1603?  Queen Elizabeth dies.  A Scottish King succeeds her and unites the crowns. The Black Death breaks out – again. 

So Scots and death were hot topics.  Shakespeare wasn’t just a pretty face.  The Bard wrote the greatest plays ever, and he made them smart.

Patrick Goldstein of The LA Times describes the difference between “making better movies” and “making smarter movies” this way:

“The real problem with the indie business isn’t quality, but discipline.  We have a generation of filmmakers who feel entitled to make personal films… and a generation of executives who’ve been willing to essentially use specialty films as a loss-leader to launch their division or win awards.  If people in the indie world want to start making money again, they have to start treating their investment like a truly precious natural resource, not like Monopoly money.  Discipline is not antithetical to art.”

Patrick is absolutely right.  We need discipline, starting with costs.  Without it, our resources will dry up.  We need to trim away anything that doesn’t strengthen the content.  From the days of Homer, that’s what people have paid for. 

That’s why I’ve never been a big believer in spending heavily on the technical aspect of movies.  I know that’s counterpoint to what a lot of people say, but I think movies can look terrible and get an audience, and movies can look terrific and not. 

On Broadway we had a saying, if you’re talking about the sets after the show, you’re dead.  Well, if people walk out of a movie saying, “I didn’t really buy that relationship between Julia Roberts and Clive Owen – but wasn’t that tracking shot fantastic?”… you’re gonna be dead anywhere in America except maybe at Hollywood ArcLight.

When I started Endgame I told everyone I wanted to make movies I would pay to see twice.  Give me Slumdog over Transformers any day.  Give me movies with stories and ideas that people care about. 

You say, yeah, but kids today expect SFX.  Well, my kids are 9 and 13.  My daughter has watched Twilight seven times.  It has the worst special effects in the world.  The ridiculous way that guy runs looks like the track star with blurry legs in that Verizon commercial.  But does she really care that the special effects in the next Twilight movie will be any better?

As if. 

What she cares about is how Robert Pattinson fights off the werewolf guy for Kristin Stewart. 

For studio films, I’ll concede that 3-D could well be a happy exception, and that’s a different discussion.  But I can’t see anyone making a 3-D version of Rachel Getting Married.

The rule is, don’t compete where you can’t.  Don’t worry about SFX in small movies.  You’re not going to blow holes in Avatar.  Don’t try.   The Coen Brothers used shopping carts as dollies in Blood Simple.  Guess what?  That’s a movie I remember.

Rule Two:  Respect the money! 

Not just the talent. 

There’s some good to be said for the auteur culture in filmmaking.  But like it or not, making a film is not just a collaborative art.  It’s also a business – a matter of finance, logistics, planning and execution.  What Orson Welles said is truer than ever – a painter needs a brush, a writer a pen, but a filmmaker an army. 

For a long time in Hollywood it’s been hip to disrespect the money. 

A director told a friend of mine, “You know, when they decided they had to make money, they screwed the whole thing up.”  This attitude plays out every day. 

Here’s a recent scenario I observed. 

The director describes one type of film to the financier and goes off to make another film altogether.  The cut comes in and the financier says, “This isn’t what I signed on for!”  Whereupon the director informs him it’s the movie he wants.  Heavy hitters on the management side of course stand by their client. 

A movie becomes a war.  Disaster ensues.

The point is, talent and money have to be on the same page.  If you as a producer buy a giraffe and the director brings you a giraffe, it’s your fault if you decide you now want a zebra because market conditions have changed and zebras are in.

But if you’re a director, don’t sell a giraffe, deliver a zebra – and think that’s okay.

Another example.  A really good movie went way, I mean way, over budget not too long ago.  And when the financier said he could no longer fund it, the director – quite famous – said, no worries, I quit.  Now try finishing and promoting it without me.  The financier caved, the film was finished; it was great – and guess who lost a boatload of money. 

And that – a good movie losing money – is the one unpardonable sin in our business.  Everyone’s going to make mistakes and occasionally make bad films.  But if a movie really works – but then people don’t get their money back – financiers don’t understand.  We have to make sure that, especially when we get it right, everybody gets paid.

Here’s an absolute truth – any financier who tells you he cares only about your vision, your story, your movie; that he doesn’t care about the money…

Is lying. 

Here’s the dirty little secret.  Money doesn’t need the eggs.  Money has options.  Lose someone’s money on a movie deal and they’ll take the option of never coming back.  To them, it will never be, “That was a bad deal.”  To them, it will forever and always be, “That’s a bad business.”

On the other hand, in Vegas, no one leaves a table when they’re winning.  If a project is structured and financed so everyone wins, they’ll all come back again.

Mistrust has been built up over the money for decades in this town, with legitimate concerns on both sides.  We could use a little of that Obama-in-Cairo spirit around here.  And we’d all better get on the same page right now, because for the next couple of years, all of us – talent side, money side – are going to need success where we find it.  Things are gonna be tight.  Which leads us to…

Rule Three:  Before Rolling Cameras… think ‘Market.’

Most businesses have a complete plan from the start of a project, which includes the whole chain from manufacturing through distribution. 

Ours typically does not.  It should.  And it should include marketing. 

Years ago, Francis Ford Coppola predicted a day when anyone could make films because technology would lower the barrier of entry to practically nothing.  He was right.  And he could say the same thing today about marketing.  Technically, there’s nothing standing in the way of my nine-year-old son making and marketing a movie today.

I was blown away when I found out that the # 32 film on the all-time documentary box-office list is a little 2005 film I’d never heard of, called The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.  (It’s about wild parrots living on Telegraph Hill, by the way.)  Can you imagine how tiny the market sliver is of people willing to take a night out to go see this peculiar-sounding film?

Well, the filmmaker did imagine them.  Rather thoughtfully, in fact.  And then proceeded to use viral marketing to rally those people into the theater, by making the film an event for every bird-lover on God’s green Earth. 

Audubon Society members.  Bird-watching clubs.  Breeders.  Veterinarians.  Humane Societies.  Feather-fancier magazine subscribers.  There are a lot of people out there who really love birds.  And I think every last one of them went to this movie.

And, I’m happy to say, number 72 is a movie called Every Little Step, which I directed and produced, still in release so we hope it’ll climb higher.  Maybe even past the parrots.

In that film, we juxtapose the original construction of A Chorus Line, the musical, with the 3,000 dancers who auditioned for the revival on Broadway.  Now, 16 million people have paid to see that play on Broadway.  No telling how many more have seen – or been in – productions at community theaters and schools.  Not just here.  Japan has a community obsessed with that musical.  UK, Germany, same thing.  So we had a desirable, targeted brand for that movie before we started shooting. 

Our job was to first make a movie, and then drive people to see it – social-networking sites, building word-of-mouth with targeted email blasts. 

You can go on Facebook and see how many people love A Chorus Line.  And we did that.  But why stop there?  We also saw who listed Chicago in their top fifty films and targeted them, too.  And so on.

I remember not too long ago on Broadway, we used to send out volleys of expensive fliers that mostly ended up in the trash.  On the flip side, sending an email is practically free. 

And it works.  Facebook and e-mail just got a dark-skinned guy with the middle name of Hussein elected U.S. President.  I don’t know about you, but I was getting about four emails a day from the gentleman.  Also his wife, his daughters, his friends and, if I recall correctly, a Portuguese water dog looking to be adopted.

You can target market segments as long as you’ve created something appealing to them.  Bob Berney has been brilliant at this, honing in on audiences of all kinds, from The Passion of the Christ to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which he made a destination for Greeks everywhere.  Both were targeted destination movies.

At the other end of the scale, Laika Studios made Coraline, and with the intricate details of her button eyes, and stitched nose, it was first marketed to sewing and knitting clubs!  It’s going to be Focus Features’ second all-time top performer behind Brokeback Mountain.

You can also consolidate these slivered segments, by the way.  Ira Deutchman at Emerging Pictures says his network of theaters does well with Jewish, gay-themed and French films, plus those that are spiritual and have “Wedding” in the title.  That’s why I have great hope for our upcoming film, The Holy Unsanctified Parisian Wedding of Yitzhak & Muttle.

Point is, when industry produces a firehose of content, we have to be smart in other ways to get the word out so our little droplet gets noticed.  For those of us who can’t afford to blast TV ads like a blunderbuss, it takes a bit more thought, but with new media comes new ways for a small film to connect. 

One thing my 13-year-old actually might care about is a short form of the next Twilight movie.  She might care to watch that scene each time a particular ringtone hits her iPhone, for instance.  Or use some bitstream subscription to watch her favorite scene over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Already today, our kids spend a third of their time interacting with electronic devices, mostly online.  Filmmakers need to recognize and in the future be able to take advantage of it, looking for what David Pogue of The New York Times calls the “AppStore effect.”

When programmers write iPhone applications, Apple encourages them to set a low price – like one dollar.  So the huge majority of programs in the online AppStore are impulse buys.  As Pogue says, nobody blinks at a buck.

In the past nine months, iPhone and iPod fans have downloaded more than one billion apps.  These huge numbers revealed the App Store Effect, which says:  If you cut the price of a software program by half, you sell a lot more than twice as much.  If you cut it to one-tenth, you sell a lot more than ten times as many. 

And so on.  It’s counter-intuitive, but this principle has paid off beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.  Some iPhone programmers have become millionaires within months, one buck at a time, because of this powerful math. 

In the case of films, the AppStore Effect will have you buying a title at home, or even on your iPhone, for, say, four bucks a pop.  Four dollars.  Four dollars.  Four dollars.  It adds up. 

No one knows where this will lead, but it doesn’t sound bad to me.  In fact, it reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s observation that the greatest concentration of wealth in history occurred in the 1860s and ’70s – when the American economy went through its greatest transformation yet.

The railroad was built – the Internet of its day.  Wall Street emerged – better access to capital.  Industrial manufacturing started in earnest – plenty of jobs all around.  In those twenty narrow years the rules that governed how the economy functioned were broken and completely rewritten. 

Here’s something amazing.  Of the 75 richest people in world history, 14 were born within nine years of each other during this span. 

Rockefeller.  Carnegie.  Morgan. Eleven others.  They built fortunes and empires almost beyond comprehension, in some cases in fields that didn’t exist when they were born.

Gladwell says that if they’d been born in 1840, they would’ve lost out by being too young; they couldn’t make anything happen.  If they were born in 1820, they would’ve been too old; they wouldn’t be open to big new ideas.  So those 14 folks were lucky to be born at just the right time.

I think we’re that lucky.  Are we going to be the next robber barons?  Probably not.  But the economy is going through a huge upheaval because of technologies that didn’t exist when we were born – or even when my 9-year-old son was born. 

The opportunities are – to use a word that’s almost never used right – awesome.  I don’t see anyone in this room too young to take advantage of them.  And because in this business we tend to be unafraid of new technology – in fact, we like it – we’re not too old, either. 

In the meantime, we need to cut costs.  Mitigate risks.  Target our audience.  Watch where the deals are taking the industry.  Experiment intelligently.  Basically, learn to use new muscles.  And we’ve got to do this together, not at cross-purposes.

We also need to keep our perspective.  Things are rarely as bad or as good as they seem.  When he was head coach of the Chicago Bulls, Phil Jackson told me he’s made it a principle not to get too high in victory or too low in defeat.  He says that’s the way to get through a season.

In the 1990s, The New York Times declared Broadway dead.  It’s doing pretty well for a corpse – the past nine years have been some of the best in its history. 

Making films is no different.  We’re cycling through a tough period.

But it’s a point of creative destruction, which almost always ends up improving things, sometimes dramatically, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out.

So:

            -If we stick to the basics – good business, smart movies…

            -If we learn from the past and welcome the future…

            -If we gather the eggs we need where we find them…

What do you get when you combine a network focused on green issues and a former Sundance Channel EVP/GM? A new, weekly block of documentary programming focused on the environment. Under the stewardship of president and general manager Laura Michalchyshyn, Discovery Communication's Planet Green is launching "Reel Impact," a two-hour chunk of non-fiction programming that will feature a combo of new and classic titles. "Reel Impact" kicks off on September 12th with the television debut of The Last Beekeeper by director Jeremy Simmons. Additonal titles to air include No Impact Man ( Laura Gabbert and Eden Wurmfeld), The 11th Hour, An Inconvenient Truth and Barbara Ettinger’s film A Sea Change. In the coming weeks and months, Planet Green plans to acquire twenty or more additional films to fill the "Reel Impact" slate. 

When the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television class of 2009 celebrated their commencement on June 12th, they were treated to an appearance by Haskell Wexler. The legendary cinematographer recieved the UCLA Medal, the university's highest honor, at the ceremony. UCLA Chancellor Gene D. Block stated in his citation to Wexler, “You are a bold and courageous artist whose legendary contributions to cinematography span six decades. Through acclaimed motion pictures and grippingly honest documentary films, you have advanced the artistry of filmmaking, illuminated social truths and championed human rights in your industry and beyond." Wexler was the recipient of the 2006 International Documentary Association Career Achievement Award.

Turns out that for the 25th anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival, the state of Utah got a present, too! The 2009 Sundance Film Festival generated an overall economic impact of a record $92.1 million for the state, as determined by the University of Utah’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the David Eccles School of Business (BEBR). According to the study, 40,291 festival attendees spent $34,579,698 on accommodations, $14,976,306 on meals, $4,693,682 on transportation, and $4,015,870 on discretionary items, among other expenditures. Those figures don't include spending on airfare; private dinners, parties and receptions held by the film industry, Festival sponsors or other entities without affiliation to Sundance Institute. Hmmm, so where do the swag gifting suites fit into the picture? 

In other festival news, the American Film Institute and the Dallas Film Society are parting ways, which means the end of the 3-year old AFI Dallas International Film Festival. The 2010 fest will be re-branded as the Dallas International Film Festival. (via indieWIRE)

Bananas!* covers the case of Nicaraguan banana laborers, represented by L.A. attorney Juan Dominguez, against the companies that they claim poisoned them with pesticides. However recent fraud charges against Dominguez called rulings seen in the film into question.

The film was accepted by the film festival for screening prior to the recent developments. LAFF has since taken it out of the competition and turned it into a "case study."

There are two screening and discussions of the film, Sat., June 20 and Mon., June 22. Bananas!* director Fredrik Gertten has also been added to the Filmmaker Lunch Talks special event on Mon. June 22 at 12:30 pm. Get the latest info at http://www.lafilmfest.com/2009.

The festival's director Rebecca Yeldham explained her reasoning for the film's inclusion in the LAT piece:

"We feel that, responsibly, we need to be able to present that movie to our audiences," Yeldham said. The filmmaker, she said, had acted in "good faith" in making the movie.

"This is the filmmaker's point of view. It's not ours," Yeldham said. "We do not program only movies that reflect our subjectivity."

Dole lawyer Scott Edelmam is quoted as countering: "It's a phony, fraudulent story that was made up in one of the worst frauds that I've ever seen in a court in 25 years of practice. Our position is, even if the filmmaker didn't know this at the outset, he knows it now and the film should not be screened. It needs to be entirely rewritten to reflect the facts."

The article points out that "Edelman said he had not yet seen the film because neither Gertten nor the festival had agreed to show it to him. The filmmaker and festival organizers said they had invited Dole representatives to attend Saturday night's screening."

Sounds like a good time. In the meantime, check out the trailer below and get updates on the Bananas!* website.

Allan King, whose pioneering work in cinema vérité and direct cinema spanned some 50 years, passed away Monday in Toronto. He was 79.

His most celebrated work included Warrendale (1967), about emotionally disturbed children in a Toronto institution, which earned the Prix d'art et d'essai at Cannes, as well as the BAFTA's Best Foreign Film Award and the New York Critics Circle Award. His 1969 film A Married Couple, which documented ten weeks of what King called "a marriage in crisis," inspired filmmaker Craig Gilbert to make a film about a contemporary American family; that film became the classic nonfiction series from 1973, An American Family.

"In addition to his epic talent, Allan was a great friend and mentor," said Chris McDonald, executive director of Hot Docs, on a statement on the festival website. "He was unfailingly generous with his time, and thoughtful with his advice and support. We will all miss him dearly."

Toronto International Film Festival Director Piers Handling told CBC News, "There are few filmmakers whose impact has been central to the medium, but Allan King is unquestionably one of them,"

For a comprehensive roundup of quotes from the Canadian press, check out David Hudson's.The Daily.

And for a clip from King's first documentary, Skid Row (1957), check out the CBC Digital Archives.

Finally, here's an interview from TV Ontario of King discussing his 2003 documentary Dying at Grace:

A trailer for Michael Moore's yet-to-be-titled documentary about Wall Street greed and the economic crisis, played in theaters across the country this past weekend (and, yes, in some theaters ushers did walk down the aisles to collect cash). The film, distributed by Paramount Vantage and Overture Films is scheduled to be released October 2.

Here are some comments--and suggested titles for the film--from Christopher Campbell's blog on SpoutBlog

And here are some more title suggestions, from me:

Greed Is Good
Bowling for Dollars
Exile on Wall Street
Trickle Down
Filthy Lucre

Updated June 18: See an audience reaction to the trailer:

Filmmaker James Longley, whose much-lauded work includes the Oscar-nominated docs Iraq in Fragments and Sari's Mother, has been filming his next documentary in Iran on and off over the past two years--including the ongoing turmoil in the wake of the hotly contested Presidential election.

Here's an account of his translator's recent detainment by Iranian authorities, which he posted to Doug Block's blog, Around the Block. Longley's translator has since been released.

And here's a more recent series of updates, assembled by AJ Schnack.

Before you read one more thing, check out our latest exclusive online articles:
Change: It's What's for Dinner: Food, Inc. Takes on Agribusiness
DOC SHOT catches up with Sky Sitney, Artistic Director, SILVERDOCS
How to Film a Cannibal and Other Lessons From This Year's LA Asian Pacific Film Fest
Microbes, Medicine and Money: Under Our Skin Investigates Lyme Disease

Denver Film Festival and Society update: After last week's mass exodus, the Board of Directors at the Denver Film Society voted to oust Bo Smith as executive director of the organization (Britta Erickson has been named interim executive director) and three people came back. (via indieWIRE)

Every Little Step--the doc about roadway revival of A Chorus Line--danced its way past the $1 million mark. It's the fourth doc to surpass that cherished barrier in 2009. Other docs to make the mad money this year are: Earth $31.4 million, (IDA Documentary Awards 2008 winner) Waltz with Bashir $2.3 million and Valentino: The Last Emperor $1.3 million. Disney Nature also announced an Earth follow-up, acquiring North American and Mexican distribution rights to OceanWorld 3D, a 3D underwater adventure in which viewers are guided by a sea turtle from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia to Mexico's Roca Partida Island.

Independent web TV service Babelgum and The Fish Film Company have announced a deal for the worldwide mobile and online release of Rupert Murray's The End of The Line - The Series. It's timed to coincide with the traditional release of the feature documentary. (via indieWIRE)

Oscilloscope Laboratories has acquired domestic distribution rights to No Impact Man a feature doc about one man's attempt to eliminate his downtown Manhattan family's environmental impact. (via Variety)

This developing story was updated on June 13, 2009.

The tale of Bananas!* has just gone, well, bananas. The truthfulness of the doc, which follows crusading lawyer Juan Dominguez as he represents Nicaraguan banana plantation workers who say they were poisoned by pesticides used by Dole Food Co. Inc. on its farms, has come into question, spurring a debate and reactions from the filmmakers.

The controversy has turned the June 20 and June 23 screenings of Bananas!* at the Los Angeles Film Festival into a case study examining what happens when a story continues to evolve after filming.

The issue ignited on June 8, when the Los Angeles Business Journal reported the following accusation of Fredrik Gertten's film:

A judge found that the supposedly heroic lawyer actually took part in a massive fraud against Dole, the Westlake Village food giant. The judge said the supposed victims weren't sterile and had never even worked on Dole's banana farms.

The filmmakers of Bananas!* are standing by their product. Bananas!* co-producer Bart Simpson contacted the IDA saying that the above statement is false and that Judge Chaney's actual statement can be found in court documents posted on the movie's website. Check page 172 of the document for this:

"I don't have any opinion as to whether or not there was any wrongdoing by any of the defendants. We'll never know….

…We'll never know if anybody in Nicaragua was actually injured or harmed by the alleged wrongful conduct of the defendants, and people will never have the opportunity to learn, since this fraud is so pervasive and extensive that it has forever contaminated even our own ability to ever know the truth."

Furthermore, on a letter posted on the movie's website entitled "BANANAS!* under fire - an update," they go on to state that "no one from Dole, Dole’s lawyers--Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP--or the Los Angeles Business Journal have actually seen the film. Their comments are based on pure speculation."

In a letter to the documentary filmmaking community, the filmmakers are working to clarify the issue and point out the increasingly harsh actions by Dole against the film (the letter is printed below this article in its entirety).

The film follows a landmark court case--Tellez et. al. v. Dole Food Company Inc. et. al.--where a group of Nicaraguan banana workers, with the help of attorney Juan Dominguez, sues Dole Food for using a banned pesticide in their Nicaraguan plantations….

… In January, 2008, a full jury found Dole Food guilty of causing harms to the workers, and of acting with malicious intent. They awarded damages to the workers, and Dole is now appealing the verdict. Despite this appeal, during the trial the CEO of Dole Food admitted on the stand that he continued to use the aforementioned pesticide in his Nicaraguan plantations, after it was banned in the US.

Dominguez had many other, similar cases in line following the Tellez case. Dole accused Dominguez of fraud, and the presiding Judge, Victoria Chaney, sided with Dole and threw out all remaining cases, finding plaintiff and plaintiff attorney misconduct and fraud. At this point the Tellez decision stands, and case is still under appeal by Dole. However according to Judge Chaney, these recent developments have called the validity of certain aspects of the Tellez case into question. As those of you who have done courtroom documentaries can attest, court cases can keep developing years after the verdict. Regardless of the final outcome, the film is an accurate representation of the case over a period of time, and our broadcasters and all our other partners support the film 100%.

Dominguez is currently fighting all charges of fraud against him and the L.A. Business Journal reports that a hearing is scheduled for June 17, when Chaney will decide whether Dominguez's alleged involvement in the fraud calls for monetary sanctions. However this shakes out, one winner in all of this is LAFF. We're sure the screenings will be quite the ticket. An update from their site says:

In his most recent film, Fredrik Gertten chronicles the case of Nicaraguan banana laborers, represented by L.A. attorney Juan Dominguez, against the companies that they claim poisoned them with pesticides. Between the film's completion and its screening at this year's Festival, critical new elements of the case have come to light.

What happens when a story continues to evolve after the shooting stops? This case study and screening will explore the relationship between documentary filmmaking, objective and subjective point of view, as well as the rights and responsibilities of activist filmmaking.

Get more info about LAFF and the Bananas!* screenings the Los Angeles Film Festival website.
Get info and news about Bananas!* and updates on this story at the movie's website.
Follow Fredrik Gertten on Twitter here.
Check out the Bananas!* Facebook page here.

Dear colleagues, We have been working on the feature documentary BANANAS!* since 2006, and we are slated to launch the film at the Los Angeles Film Festival, held June 18-28 this year.

The film follows a landmark court case--Tellez et. al. v. Dole Food Company Inc. et. al.--where a group of Nicaraguan banana workers, with the help of attorney Juan Dominguez, sues Dole Food for using a banned pesticide in their Nicaraguan plantations. Prolonged exposure to this pesticide was known to cause sterility in human males. It was the first time that agricultural workers from the developing world gave testimony against a US-based multinational in a US court.

In January, 2008, a full jury found Dole Food guilty of causing harms to the workers, and of acting with malicious intent. They awarded damages to the workers, and Dole is now appealing the verdict. Despite this appeal, during the trial the CEO of Dole Food admitted on the stand that he continued to use the aforementioned pesticide in his Nicaraguan plantations, after it was banned in the US.

Dominguez had many other, similar cases in line following the Tellez case. Dole accused Dominguez of fraud, and the presiding Judge, Victoria Chaney, sided with Dole and threw out all remaining cases, finding plaintiff and plaintiff attorney misconduct and fraud. At this point the Tellez decision stands, and case is still under appeal by Dole. However according to Judge Chaney, these recent developments have called the validity of certain aspects of the Tellez case into question. As those of you who have done courtroom documentaries can attest, court cases can keep developing years after the verdict. Regardless of the final outcome, the film is an accurate representation of the case over a period of time, and our broadcasters and all our other partners support the film 100%.

To date, neither Dole or Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP have actually seen our film. They are basing their comments on a three-minute trailer and information posted on our website.

On May 8, the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, who represented Dole in court, attempted to get Judge Chaney to stop the film from being screened at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. The Judge stated to those present: “Just so we are clear, I am not in any way going to make, and I will not consider, any request for prior restraint on free speech. Okay? So, don't ask me to go try and contact the film company. I don't have jurisdiction over them. But even if I did, don’t ask me for it.”

As they were unsuccessful with Judge Chaney, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP sent us a letter demanding we "cease and desist" from plans to screen the film at the Festival. The first such letter sent to us, on May 8 of this year, was copied to all the corporate sponsors of the LA Film Festival, but was not copied to the LA Film Festival itself. A copy of this letter and related letters are on our website under the "Resources"section.

Dole's team is now moving on to yet another strategy and have contacted the Swedish Consulate in LA and the Swedish Ambassador to the US in Washington, asking them to help stop the film. To date they have only succeeded in getting the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA) to pull out of "co-hosting" the film's opening night at the Festival. However, a lawyer from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher serves on the board of directors of the LAFLA. Again, all this is without Dole or Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher having actually seen the film.

Out of respect to the LA Film Festival, we did not publicize any of these actions until now. However with days to go before our premiere, we are spreading the word.

We are considering all our options given Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher's actions.

As we move forward, we hope you as our allies in the international documentary community will throw your support behind us. Dole and their counsel's interference with us, ITVS, the Festival, and their sponsors represent a serious threat to independent documentary production.

Please join our mailing list for breaking news and join our facebook group by the “F” link on that same page.

Things will begin to move rapidly, and we will keep you updated as they come.

In thanks and solidarity,
Fredrik Gertten
Margarete Jangård
Lise-Lens Moller
Bart Simpson
BANANAS!*

In a wide-ranging conversation between filmmaker Ross Kauffman and IDA Board member Marjan Safinia, attendees at the IDA's second 2009 Doc U session at the Eastman Kodak screening room in Hollywood Thursday night were treated to a cook’s tour of a filmmaking career, from the artistic side to the business side.

Kauffman, who won an Academy Award with co-director Zana Briski for the 2004 film Born into Brothels, fell into filmmaking via the written word—namely, The Elements of Screenwriting by Irwin R. Blacker, which he read as a diversion from his marketing major at University of Rhode Island—a diversion that led to more and more books, and by the time he graduated he had an idea of where he wanted to start looking, and he eventually landed jobs in the editing room. “I love the process of editing, and I learned from some really great people,” he recalled.” I learned how to put a story together.”

But after nine years of editing, and some attempts at cinematography, however, Kauffman admitted that he had been ready to quit filmmaking altogether. Then one day, photographer Zana Briski, who had been shooting in Calcutta, India, asked him to make a film about her efforts to teach impoverished children who had been born into brothels. He was reluctant at first—even after she gave him a camera for his birthday. He agreed to check out her footage. “I put the tape in my Sony PD100, and within 20 minutes I was—it sounds dramatic, but the truth is, when you know you’re going to do a film, you know you’re going to do a film. About a month later I was in Calcutta shooting.”

After a total of four years of filming and editing, as well as pitching and developing the film at the IFP Market and the Sundance Producers and Composers Lab, he and Briski had secured a deal with HBO. “I had edited a couple of films at HBO, so I knew the structure of it,” Kauffman reflected. “I had had a relationship with Lisa Heller based on our time at the Sundance Composers Lab and the Producers Conference.” About two years before the film came out, he showed some footage at the IFP Market to another HBO rep. “Get to these people early,” he advised the Doc U audience. “Show them a trailer, show them a couple of scenes, get them to know about the project. It’s almost like you’re having them become part of the process. If you have a three-minute trailer, they’ll invest that time. Once I had an hour-and-45-minute rough cut, [HBO] had known about it for a long time.”

But, he advised “You can’t just show anyone a rough cut; they have to know what they’re watching.” He admitted that he had refrained from showing Heller his two-and-a-half hour rough cut, despite her wanting to see it. “The materials has to speak for itself,” he explained, “and you have to be intelligent about how to present that material. I wasn’t going to show her a two-and-a-half hour rough cut, but I did show her an hour and 45 minute cut. I think it’s really smart to position yourself in terms of trailers and scenes that you’re going to show people. You need to know your buyers.”

But Kauffman also stressed the importance of timing and luck. He related the fact that a project that he’s working now, about war photographers, that he’s had difficulty selling. “People have war fatigue right now,” he admitted, “and it’s really difficult to sell a project like that.”

With Born into Brothels, he had the fortune of securing HBO’s support prior to getting into Sundance—and convincing HBO to let them take the film to festivals and, through THINK Film, to theaters. Starting with Sundance, he and Brinski also produced a travelling exhibit of the photos of the children in the film, with the proceeds from the sale going to Kids with Cameras, the nonprofit they had set up. “We didn’t know that that was going to be a great marketing tool that was going to get people into the theater, but we did know this was a two-way street-- not only was the audience able to do something after the movie, but the kids got something out of it and the film got something out of it. The film kept on growing because of the photo exhibition.”

“What documentary filmmakers can do is come at it from really wanting to help, or really wanting to do it for the right reasons,” Kauffman advised. “I’m not saying that you have to be altruistic, but the best way to serve your film and serve the people in your film is really concentrate on how to actually achieve those goals in terms of helping people other than the film.”

Born into Brothels, like Senain Kheshgi and Geeta Patel’s Project Kashmir, which Kauffman shot, was co-directing effort—which has advantages and disadvantages. “This is an overwhelming task for just one person,” Kauffman pointed out. “It’s a conscious thing of dividing up the responsibilities, then it switches and goes back and forth in a semi-seamless and not too destructive way.”

But, he admitted, “Having a co-director is a bitch.” Both Kauffman and Marjan Safinia advised to know one another’s different skill sets and figure out how you complement one another. Also, have a strong editor and producer who can function as a mediator whom you can trust, leave your egos outside the working room, and keep your eyes focused on what’s best for the film.”

Kauffman relishes the collaborative process in all his work—including his role as executive producer on Jeremiah Zagar’s In a Dream, and as co-producer and co-director with Zagar, Kheshgi, Geralyn Dreyfous and others on a three-minute piece called Wait for Me.

And although his early work as an editor served as a springboard for branching out into directing and cinematography, he tries to keep those sensibilities separate. “As a cinematographer, one of the most important things is to just be in the moment and point your camera towards what you feel is interesting,” he explained. “As an editor it’s always about choices. With cinematography, I learned this by listening to Al Maysles in his commentary for Gimme Shelter: He said he didn’t edit because he has ADD, and the only time he didn’t have that sense of craziness was when he looked behind the camera; all he had to do was reveal. When I’m behind the camera, I’m really in deep; when I’m in the editing room, my brain is flying around. I try not to let my editing inform my camerawork.”

Kauffman has a plethora of projects on his plate that has taken him to everywhere from Africa to Northern Calfornia. And he’ll return to India to shoot a film for Kheshgi on surrogate mothers. And Born into Brothels remains a persistent part of his life, as Kids with Cameras, the aforementioned nonprofit, is looking to raise $400,000 to build a house for children from Calcutta’s Red Light District.For more information, click here: http://kids-with-cameras.org/home/.

See a video of our May 14 Doc U Seminar: An Evening With Robert Greenwal here. 

Basil Tsiokos is Programming Associate, Documentary Features for the Sundance Film Festival just posted an entertaining piece on indieWIRE about dishing doc advice via Twitter (as 1basil1). (He also screens for POV, has been a guest curator for the Jacob Burns Film Center, and regularly watches hundreds a film a year through programming or at film festivals. He was previously the Artistic Director for NewFest for 12 years. So he knows what he's talking about.)

While screening documentary submissions, he types out Tweets under the heading "Dear Documentary Filmmakers:" with 140-character or less nuggets of info--offering funny, curmudgeonly and also instructive tidbits.

The article put some of his avorites under categories such as Talking Heads, Narration and Subtitles vs Dubbing. A sampling:

Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Please use subtitles instead of dubbing foreign languages with fake accents and emphatic "acting." Please…

Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Having ponderous voiceover narration = bad idea. Having it delivered by inarticulate children = worse idea.

Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Picking the right subjects to follow is so important. The ones in the film I’m watching are the right ones.

He makes sure to point out that the opinions "are not presented with malice, and are, of course, entirely subjective." Think Tsiokos knows what he's talking about? Then get following…