October 2010
2 posts
Teenage Papparazzo
You have to thank HBO for giving us two documentaries in a year about photographers who chase celebrities. The first was Smash His Camera, Leon Gast’s striking portrait of Ron Galella who gained fame for stalking Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at her Fifth Avenue apartment, in Central Park or wherever her publicists clued him in to her presence.
The symbiotic relationship between celebrities...
September 2010
7 posts
The Guarantee
Imagine this conversation (or you may have already experienced it):
“Your documentary is going to change something, right?
That’s why we will give you the money to make it. We fund social action films.
To be sure, we want an executive producer credit. You’re going to do outreach?
We’ll fund that, too. This documentary must make a difference. We want a guarantee.
...
Journalism and Documentary
Journalism gives context and perspective to documentary. Documentary gives form and emotional power to journalism. They need each other, but often misunderstand what each can offer. The extended news report is not a documentary but a first draft of history. A successful documentary tells an evocative story akin to the literary journalism of a long non-fiction magazine piece or a book.
Too...
Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today →
These thoughts occurred to me after I was invited to a preview screening of a restoration of the 1948 film Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, a documentary that was shown extensively in post-war Germany but banned in the United States though it was made for the U. S. military by a very young Stuart Schulberg, who later became Executive Producer of NBC-TV’s Today show. Sandra Schulberg, a film...
Special Event at New York Film Festival →
The restored film already shown in Jerusalem and Toronto will be screened on Tuesday September 28, 2010 as a Special Event of the New York Film Festival – followed by a panel discussion that will clearly establish the relevance of this report of Nazi war crimes.
CBC's The National on Nuremberg →
This CBC report on Nuremberg makes explicit the current context for revisiting the searing images of an aggressive Nazi war machine. Watch and wonder whether American television news will do a similarly significant report.
