“ALL IN – THE POKER MOVIE” DIRECTOR DOUG TIROLA ON DOCUMENTARY RELEVANCE, HIS MARKETING DILEMMA AND FIGHTING IMDB

By Nick Dawson

Last week, I wrote on the Filmmaker blog about the dilemma faced by director Doug Tirola in the marketing of his new film, All In – The Poker Movie. As promised, Tirola has written an expansive first-person piece describing in more detail the situation he faced.

All In – The Poker Movie opened at the Cinema Village on Friday March 23rd 2012 and is now rolling out to over 40 markets including Los Angeles and Chicago. The film was originally shown at a festival in 2009, but over the past three years has undergone some distinct and important changes. However, included in the marketing materials for the film’s release is the fact that the film won a Grand Jury Best Documentary award in 2009 from its festival appearance. I hope the following explains our decision to include that fact in our press notes and trailer. To be clear, it was a decision that as producers we discussed, thought about and eventually believed we had a reason for making. The story begins THREE YEARS EARLIER.

In the summer of 2009, our film All In – The Poker Movie screened at the 2009 CineVegas Film Festival. That night and the days after that we had some casual conversations with distributors around the casino and at various parties about the film. We also had our picture taken twice with Dennis Hopper outside a McDonalds in the food court, danced at some club with Jon Voight and an attractive dark-haired former showgirl who had a one line role in a movie he starred in called Lookin’ to Get Out that was shot in Vegas and directed by Hal Ashby, had our picture taken with Harry Knowles and a Playmate, went to eat with poker player Amarillo Slim, and to Rao’s as the guest of the manager, a gentleman known as “Bubbles” who can be seen in the credit sequence of The Hangover. I mention all of this not because I think our experience was unique but because I believe every filmmaker that ever had a film at CineVegas could tell an almost identical story.

On the last day … Read the rest

MUSIC, “PARALLAX SOUNDS” AND THE CITY

By Alix Lambert

This past week I had the pleasure of working again with my long time friends and collaborators Damon Locks and Wayne Montana on a play that I am developing. Damon is a Chicago-based musician who is featured in a documentary currently in development, Parallax Sounds, which “explores the intimate connection between music and urban landscape in Chicago.” Directed by Augusto Contento, the film also features Steve Albini, Ken Vandermark, and Ian Williams, among others.

Locks and Montana created original music for the soundtrack of my own film The Mark of Cain. Their ability to think cinematically and incorporate the sounds of the world around them into their own original creations make them extraordinary collaborators as well as stand alone musicians.

The Eternals, Damon Locks and Wayne Montana’s band, have long incorporated the “noise” of urban life into their music. More about The Eternals.

Here Locks talks about how Chicago has influenced his sound: “We felt the music wasn’t complete sometimes, until we had incorporated the sound of the city.” 

Damon Locks on how Chicago influences his music from Parallax Loop on Vimeo.

Here is a glimpse of the film to come.

I cannot wait to see this film in its entirety. … Read the rest

AN INTERVIEW WITH “THE ANNOUNCEMENT” DIRECTOR NELSON GEORGE

I sat down today with my old friend Nelson George to ask about his recent and past projects. We discussed his newly finished film The Announcement, about Magic Johnson 20 years after he made the announcement that he has the HIV virus. And then we worked backwards and discussed Good Hair, Life Support, and George’s path from journalist to filmmaker.

The Announcement premiered on ESPN this month and continues to air; for upcoming screenings, including one this afternoon, visit the website. George’s documentary Brooklyn Boheme is now available on iTunes.

Filmmaker: Tell me about The Announcement and how you came to direct it?

George: I owe it to a guy named Keith Clinkscales, who I’ve known for 20 years. He helped found Vibe back in the day, and he was vice president at ESPN. I think they approached Spike Lee first but he was unavailable. I had done a film on HIV for HBO: Life Support in 2007, and obviously I was a basketball fan, so he reached out to me at the end of August. At that time they hadn’t totally confirmed it. Magic had been approached by many people about doing a 20th anniversary doc tied into his announcement, and he just hadn’t felt comfortable with anyone. I had to go to L.A. on some business so I had a meeting with Lon Rosen, Magic’s partner. He had worked with Magic back when he was with the Lakers. So I got vetted by him, and I assume Magic liked me or liked my reputation. The key thing for the whole thing was to get Magic to agree to an interview. He’d talked about HIV a lot in speeches but he had never sat down and really been questioned about it. More importantly his wife had never done a serious sit-down about the infection. We interviewed Magic Johnson at the L.A. Forum. We shot him literally on the floor, and then we walked around to the locker room, and we also went up to the Forum Club, which was important. The Forum Club was the centerpiece … Read the rest

CORINNA BELZ, “GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING”

By Damon Smith

Capturing the moment a work of art is born, or rather the arduous process through which a particular masterwork begins to reveal itself to a painter or sculptor, is an old subject for cinema. Hollywood in the classical and postwar era loved biopics, bringing to the screen highly romanticized, larger-than-life portrayals of everyone from Rembrandt to Van Gogh, Michelangelo to Toulouse-Lautrec. There are fewer great films that focus single-mindedly on the creative process, however. Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse is one, a masterful film about a fictional artist whose laborious, continually frustrated efforts to paint his beautiful young muse are rendered in minute documentary detail and large swaths of real-time concentration. On the documentary side, Victor Erice’s Quince Tree of the Sun (aka Dream of Light) is an enthralling depiction of Spanish artist Antonio López’s perennial efforts to faithfully depict the way light hits a tree in his garden every autumn, slyly combined with one or two fictional techniques, as if the impurities in the artist’s work had become the director’s own.

Corinna Belz’s Gerhard Richter Painting delivers precisely what the title of the film promises: for most of the film, we witness one of the world’s most celebrated and prolific artists at work in his studio, creating a series of large paintings, and the effect is mesmerizing. Richter applies layer after layer of paint to his canvases, first with brushes and then with his redoubtable giant squeegee, continually altering the surface and expression of his spontaneous abstracts, which become richer and more mysterious with each pass. Richter, a laconic, gentle artist who has never allowed anyone to film or observe him while he is at work, is openly discomfited by the camera, telling the director at one point, “We have to talk about the film.” Occasionally, Belz inserts brief cut-outs of interviews with the Dresden-born painter from the late ’60s and early ’70s, after his defection from East Germany, impressing upon us the continuity of his thinking about art as well as his reluctance to expound upon its most secretive inner qualities. Glimpses of Richter navigating the klieg … Read the rest

KONY 2012, VIRAL VIDEOS, AND DOCUMENTARY ETHICS

By Randy Astle

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s Kony 2012, the half-hour documentary by the organization Invisible Children that’s swept the Internet this week. It’s about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has been terrorizing the region around northern Uganda for a quarter century; a particular emphasis is on Kony’s notorious practice of kidnapping children and forcing them into military service.

The film was posted on YouTube last Monday, and as of this writing it’s chalked up 62,172,848 views. Those kinds of numbers are impressive, and the people at Invisible Children, including director Jason Russell and two other American filmmakers who helped shoot in Africa, must be pleased at the film’s level of response. I first heard about it Wednesday in an email from a friend, a mother of young children, urging everyone in her contact list to watch the film and carefully think about how we could best get involved in Invisible Children’s mission. Her message started by saying she had never emailed everyone in her contact list before, but she was so moved by the film’s message she felt she had to let everyone know about it, and right away.

When that kind of response happens 62 million times it is, of course, the very definition of a video going viral. Obviously no one can completely control whether a film will go viral or not, but filmmakers desiring that kind of response can take a look at what Invisible Children did to help push Kony 2012 toward it. Most obviously, it’s built into the film itself. Quite a bit of the running time explains explicitly what viewers should do to help spread the film’s message, not just with all their friends and contact lists but with influential celebrities who have the ability to reach thousands of fans and Twitter followers. Apparently celebs like Rihanna, Alec Baldwin, and Taylor Swift have obliged in helping spread the word through their own social networks. A second tier of response urges viewers to then contact politicians and make Kony’s capture a national policy (success at this stage might prove more difficult, particularly … Read the rest

DAVID GELB, “JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI”

By Brandon Harris

Jiro Ono, the world’s most acclaimed sushi chef, is not one to rest. As hard working an octogenarian as you’re ever likely to encounter on screen, Jiro is a celebrity in Japan, but little known here in the States. That is likely to change thanks to director David Gelb’s portrait of the man, his two sons and the philosophy of diligence, hard work and perfectionism they demonstrate in Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

A hit at last year’s Berlinale and Tribeca Film Festival, it depicts the rigorous work ethic that Jiro, who began making sushi professionally shortly after World War II, insists upon from himself and his staff of apprentices. Captaining an incredibly small restaurant that seats less than a dozen, only serves sushi and requires reservations up to a year in advance, Jiro has passed on his passion for sushi to his two sons, both of whom are budding sushi chefs themselves.

Gelb, who studied film at USC, first became obsessed by sushi as a youngster when his father Peter, the manager of the Metropolitan Opera, would take him on business trips to Japan. The now 28-year-old director co-directed the short Lethargy, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Edward Burns, with Daddy Longlegs co-director Josh Safdie when they were both just 18 years old.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which is being distributed by Magnolia Pictures, opens this Friday in Manhattan.

Filmmaker: You’ve said elsewhere that you initially set out to make a documentary about sushi culture. How did you end up focusing solely on Jiro?

Gelb: I started out shooting little test segments, feeling out the style of the film and also hoping I might be able to raise some money with them. I shot a short on my favorite L.A. sushi chef Nozawa. He actually just retired last week. That was kind of a big deal — I don’t know if you saw the huge piece in the Times about Nozawa?

Filmmaker: I didn’t.

Gelb: He’s one of the most interesting sushi chefs in the United States as well … Read the rest

RUARIDH ARROW, “HOW TO START A REVOLUTION”

By Brandon Harris

Although you’ve probably never heard of him, writer and professor Gene Sharp is one of the foremost scholars on grassroots, non-violent protest movements. The son of an itinerant preacher, the Ohio-born octogenarian, whose writings have informed the tactics of protest movement leaders from Serbia to Iran and the Ukraine to Syria, teaches at UMass Dartmouth. He lives a life of relative quiet and solitude, at least when revolutionaries from around the globe aren’t clamoring for his advice. In Ruaridh Arrow’s documentary How to Start a Revolution we get up close and personal with Sharp, who has drawn the direct ire of dictators and plutocrats on the far left and far right, from Hugo Chavez to the late Slobodan Milosevic.

Arrow’s film takes us from the quaint Boston offices that Sharp maintains with his assistant, Jamila Raqib, to various conflict points across the globe, where Arrow profiles the very people who put Sharp’s formula of unrelenting non-violent civil disobedience into action. In so doing, he links a broad cross-section of social and political movements together under the rubric of Sharp’s techniques. At the same time, he reveals to us a man of seemingly impeccable moral rigor, who, from the time he was jailed for protesting Korean War conscription (long before the anti-war movement in the States gained steam over a decade later), has been committed to non-violent political struggle.

Trained as a newspaper journalist, Arrow got his start in broadcasting producing news segments for the U.K.’s SkyNews, before he moved on to Channel 4′s Frontline-esque Dispatches series. He has produced documentary programs for the The Financial Times and the BBC. During the Egyptian Revolution, he reported regularly from Tahrir Square. His feature debut, How to Start a Revolution premiered at last fall’s Boston Film Festival, where it won a prize for best documentary. It opens at the ReRun Gastropub Theater on Friday.

Filmmaker: How did you first learn about Gene Sharp’s work and how did your interest in his work evolve into the desire to make this film?

Arrow: I’m originally a newspaper journalist. … Read the rest

“RACING DREAMS”: AN INTERVIEW WITH MARSHALL CURRY

Ask a filmmaker how to go about making your first film, and 99% of them will impart the easier-said-than-done advice, “Just go and make it.” The technology is there, filming and editing equipment have never been more affordable, and the internet has broken down the barriers between filmmakers and distributors. Few of those filmmakers, however, can give that advice as genuinely as Marshall Curry, who did just that with remarkable results.

While working at a New York multimedia design firm, Curry decided to pursue a latent desire to make documentary films. With no prior experience in filmmaking, he bought a Sony PD150 and started filming Newark’s 2002 mayoral race between Corey Booker and then-four-time incumbent Sharpe James. That film became Street Fight, and was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. Fast forward to today, where Curry has received his second Oscar nomination for his latest film, If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, and you could do a lot worse for a self-taught filmmaker with just three films under his belt.

Between Curry’s first and his latest film falls Racing Dreams, which has its television premiere on PBS on February 23rd at 9PM. Just because it lacks an Oscar nomination doesn’t mean it’s a film to be slighted. Like its oft-cited comparison Hoop Dreams, Racing Dreams locates a multi-character, coming of age story within a sport where the players literally grow up before your eyes. The film was crafted from around 500 hours of footage, and, different from Hoop Dreams, unfolds over a brisk hour and a half.

Racing Dreams explores the so-called “Little League” of NASCAR racing, the World Karting Association, where pre-teens from around the country race go karts at speeds of up to 70 mph. Curry zeroes in on three young drivers — Annabeth (11 years old), Josh (12), and Brandon (13) — and watches them compete for the league’s National Championship. Bearing in mind an urban viewer’s possible ignorance to the sport, he sidesteps the generic, competition film approach and treats racing more as an entry … Read the rest

AN INTERVIEW WITH “CHARLOTTE” DIRECTOR JEFF KUSAMA-HINTE

We are filmmakers. We are artisans.

Or so we forget.

With filmmaking so often abstracted from the actual work of making a film, so enmeshed in conversations about new models and plans and strategies, we sometimes lose touch with what should be the main reason we make movies in the first place: to take pride in works of art made beautifully and with love.

It is precisely the love of artisanal creation that is celebrated in Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte’s Charlotte: A Wooden Boat Story, a verite doc chronicling the making of a 50-foot gaff rigged schooner, “Charlotte,” by a team of craftsmen working in a Martha’s Vineyard Boatyard. Focusing particularly on boat builder Nat Benjamin, Kusama-Hinte observes the painstaking and quiet work involved in building such an elegant craft over the several years required. In doing so, he eschews many of today’s accepted documentary strategies — pinning narrative on conflict, or allowing a character-based story to assume center stage. Instead, Kusama-Hinte focuses on the work, and he pushes us, the audience, to concentrate on its pleasures as well as its vexations, on the focus required to sustain it and the quiet satisfaction achieved by its final completion. With a lovely, Satie-like score by Paul Brill, Charlotte has a gentle, meditative power.

Charlotte is the second feature by Kusama-Hinte, whose Soul Power documentary was half glorious concert film and half exhilarating behind-the-scenes chronicle of the famed concert accompanying the “Rumble in the Jumble” boxing match. The two films are quite different, but they share a respect for their subject matters and a resolve to find the cinematic styles most suited to them. Kusama-Hinte is also a well known producer, whose credits include The Kids are All Right, Thirteen and Mysterious Skin, as well as — full disclosure — the Board Chair of IFP, the publisher of Filmmaker.

I spoke to Kusama-Hinte about making Charlotte, the work required to place it before audiences, and the DIY techniques he’s using to promote and distribute it.

Filmmaker: So, tell me about how you began this documentary, Charlotte.

Kusama-Hinte: I … Read the rest

CALL ME BERLINALE: A KUCHU CHRONICLE

By Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katy Fairfax Wright

Our run at the Berlinale marks the culmination of two years documenting the work of Uganda’s first openly gay man and activist, David Kato, who was brutally murdered midway through our shoot and just weeks after winning a landmark lawsuit in Uganda’s High Court. The film closely follows Kampala’s LGBT activist community, so we felt it was crucial to have someone present at the screenings to speak for the kuchus. After weeks of nerve-wracking uncertainty trying to wrangle visas and travel permission, we were able to do just that – Naome Ruzindana, an LGBT activist, a key player in the film and a good friend, joined us in Berlin just in the nick of time before the premiere.

Walking into the theater, Naome’s eyes widened with ours as we passed a line of Berliners hoping for eleventh hour entry to the sold-out screening. We settled into our seats, and gave each other a quick hand-squeeze as the lights went down.

When the lights came back up, we were invited down to the front of the theater with our composer Jon Mandabach and Naome, who followed a few steps behind. As she stepped in front of the audience the applause swelled significantly and she gave an outstretched wave with a sheepish grin.

After eons of friends-and-family-only screenings (the only dedicated souls willing to sit through a three-hour cut) the eager responses from the crowd of strangers was a welcome kick-off to the dialogue we hope this film will launch. As we discussed how the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which David fought tooth and nail, was … Read the rest