SUNDANCE DOC CREATIVE PRODUCING LAB DIARY #2: RACHEL LIBERT

By Scott Macaulay

Here is part two of Rachel Libert’s diaries from the Sundance Labs. Read part one here.

The busloads of people arriving at the Sundance Resort for the Creative Producing Summit signaled the end of the Creative Producing Lab. Twenty narrative producers, twenty documentary producers and dozens of high-level industry representatives are sequestered in the privacy of the Wasatch Mountains. We’re participating in an information marathon. We are a think tank in which our collective brainpower evaluates the industry and its future. For the Documentary Creative Producing Lab fellows there’s a palpable shift from our tight knit group discussions about the impact of our films to the business of financing and distribution.

Like many documentary producers I am also directing my project along with my co-director Tony Hardmon. When I’m with other documentary filmmakers our conversations gravitate toward subject matter and production anecdotes, not line items and complex financing models. The business focus of the Summit provides a much-needed opportunity to do a check-up on our projects.

Several pieces of advice resonate with me. The first is that we should include outreach as a line item in our documentary budgets in the same way that narrative projects include P&A in their budgets. Earlier in the week filmmaker Jennifer Arnold coined the term “Documentary Famous”. She described jetsetting around the world with her film A Small Act but reminded us that she doesn’t get paid for much of it. It sounds obvious but many of us are so don’t consider the financial strain a festival run places on the filmmaker. You also need to make sure that you budget and fundraise through completion. With dwindling acquisition fees you don’t want the cost of your prints, masters and dubs to come out of this money. Finally, it’s important to negotiate all of your music clearances and archival rights before you finish the film. Several people shared stories of great films whose release was halted or delayed by exorbitant outstanding music clearances. You are in a much better position to negotiate a reasonable rate before your film has premiered at a festival.

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FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: SUMMER, 1994

By Scott Macaulay

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction was our Summer, 1994 cover. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. I didn’t go to Cannes and saw the film with only a few other people a couple of weeks later at the Magno screening room. I completely loved it, wanted it for the cover, but, for reasons I can’t remember, we couldn’t get an interview with Quentin. Nor could we get good original art. So, we commissioned a cover from Mark Zingarelli , interviewed the producers (Lawrence Bender and Stacy Sher), and got the great critic, author and poet Geoffrey O’Brien to write an appreciation of the film that considered its ties to, well, pulp fiction.

From O’Brien:

Cornell Woolrich and Frederic Brown were writers who mined the gray zone between supernatural or (in Brown’s case) extraterrestrial horror on the one hand and criminal violence and madness on the other: Woolrich with the humorless intensity of the true paranoid, Brown with a sort of spaced-out whimsy that might have sprung from the brain of an alcoholic reporter steeped in chess and Lewis Carroll. Both dealt heavily in the realm of improbable coincidences and cruel cosmic jokes, a realm which Pulp Fiction makes its own.

Just how deeply Woolrich’s I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening-to-me vision has permeated noir mythology is evident from a partial list of the films based on his work, including Rear Window, The Leopard Man, The Bride Wore Black, Mississippi Mermaid, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Phantom Lady, I Married a Shadow, and Maxwell Shane’s poetic quickie, Fear in the Night (1947). Brown’s work has not been so fortunate – only Gerd Oswald’s inimitably sleazy Anita Ekberg vehicle, Screaming Mimi, springs to mind – but the diabolically engineered plot twists of his novels The Far Cry (1951), The Wench is Dead (1955), The Murderers (1961), and his masterpiece, Knock Three-One-Two (1951), show a clear affinity with the crisscrossing and recursive narrative lines in Pulp Fiction.

Tarantino does not exactly dabble in the

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