All these wonderful things

Liz Ogilvie Departs Docurama for Indiepix

Liz Ogilvie, the longtime Head of Programming for leading nonfiction DVD distributor Docurama, has departed to join online distributor Indiepix as their new Head of Marketing.  It's the latest of several high profile moves for Indiepix, which announced the formation of Indiepix Studios this summer with former A&E IndieFilmser Ryan Harrington at the helm.  Harrington later announced a $700K film fund for its productions.  (Full disclosure: Indiepix is a sponsor of the festival coverage on this blog and a partner in the Cinema Eye Honors.)  An email to Ogilvie at Docurama instructed that inquiries should Docurama's Director of Marketing Ellen Capon.

Just last week, an interview with Ogilvie appeared on MovieMaker as she touted Docurama's release of 12 nonfiction films as part of "The Docurama Film Fest" series.  Talking then, Ogilvie addressed her thoughts on the changing nature of festivals and film distribution:

"I believe (film festivals) will change due to the ever-expanding digital realm that will make films more accessible to bigger audiences… However, the interactive film festival experience will remain as part of a community-building experience and the streaming/online component will add another layer to the fun film festival experience."

Ogilvie has been a fixture on the festival circuit and will make her Indiepix debut this month at the Hamptons Film Festival.

DOC BOX: Arthur Russell & Lee Atwater Bio-Docs Lead the Way

A very strong opening for Plexifilm's WILD COMBINATION: A PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR RUSSELL at NYC's IFC Center and a solid debut for Stefan Forbes' BOOGIE MAN: THE LEE ATWATER STORY highlighted theatrical doc debuts this weekend.

COMBINATION, directed by Matt Wolf, grossed $11,580 at the IFC, yet another 10K+ opening for a doc at the theater that is becoming the de facto home of nonfiction in NY.  The film marks another fall-IFC success for distributor Plexifilm, which opened Gary Hustwit's HELVETICA at the IFC last September.

BOOGIE MAN opened in NY and - appropriately for the film's subject - DC, where the film was a critics pick in the Washington Post, and grossed nearly $11K on two screens.

Lots of films are coming to the end of their theatrical run as YOUNG@HEART and AMERICAN TEEN both pull up stakes just shy of the next million dollar milestone ($4M for YOUNG and $1M for TEEN - I owe Laura Poitras dinner).  Meanwhile, TROUBLE THE WATER enters our top 15 for the first time, with a total cume of $285K.

This week, Larry Charles and Bill Maher's RELIGULOUS arrives on the nation's screens, starting with a two-screen run on Wednesday and expanding to more than 500 screens this weekend.  One would have to guess that the film "from the director of BORAT and the distributor of FAHRENHEIT 9/11" may well top $1M its opening weekend, a feet matched this year only by U23D and EXPELLED (which not so coincidently hold the #1 and #2 position on our chart).

The nonfiction box office top 15 of 2008 thus far is after the jump.

The 2008 Nonfiction Feature Honor Roll (First Edition)

Before we move full throttle into end-of-the-year awards considerations and critics lists, it's time to look back at the major awards that have been bestowed upon nonfiction feature films over the past 9 months. 

No surprise that Oscar frontrunners MAN ON WIRE and TROUBLE THE WATER have had significant recognition.  But this list offers an interesting look at some relatively unheralded or unknown titles that have attracted the attention of juries and critics at the top festivals in the US and elsewhere.

The first edition of the 2008 Nonfiction Feature Honor Roll is after the jump:

Acclaimed Animated Doc WALTZ WITH BASHIR Out of Doc Oscar Race

WALTZ WITH BASHIR, the animated documentary that elicited rave reviews at Cannes and Toronto, will not be in the running for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, a victim of the latest Academy rules and deadlines.  Ironically, the film will be eligible for Best Animated Feature and also for Best Foreign Language Film (Isreal chose the film last week as its official selection).

According to a publicist for the film: Sony Pictures Classics, BASHIR's distributor, had initially intended on fulfilling the Academy's latest requirement that films have one-week qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles.  However, the distributor was told by NY Film Festival reps that such a run - even an underground, unpublicized run, prior to the NYFF, would knock it out of the prestigious fall fest.  So, SPC decided to move forward with the NYFF and forgo pursuit of the documentary Oscar.

Writing about the film at Cannes, NY Times' Manohla Dargis described BASHIR as a powerhouse:

"(Director Ari Folman) plunges us right into his nightmare with a harrowing vision of low-down and dark dogs running at the camera, teeth bared and eyes glowing bilious orange-yellow. The dogs run and they run, gathering in number as they cut a swath through everything and everyone — men, women, children — in their path...

Brought to vital, plausible life in a combination of Flash, classic and 3-D animation, the characters look as if they stepped right out of a graphic novel. Their faces and bodies, for instance, are outlined in black, but their faces are so ductile and expressive that I was surprised that they hadn’t been rotoscoped (the animation technique in which live-action movement is traced over). The fluidity of the figures accentuates the air of surreality — one soldier compares war to an acid trip — which deepens as the story reaches its terrible end. That finale, which finds the animation violently giving way to live-action documentary footage, is stunning, at once a furious act of conscience and a lament."

SPC, it should be noted, has not had terrific luck in the Doc Oscar race over the past several years.  They last had a film make the shortlist in 2005 (THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON) and their last nominee in the category was 2003's THE FOG OF WAR.  This despite SPC being consistently one of the top distributors of nonfiction titles (last year's omission of MY KID COULD PAINT THAT was a particular surprise) and despite success in other categories, including an Animated Feature nod for last year's PERSEPOLIS.  (Update: Variety's Anne Thompson has more on BASHIR and SPC's other entries in the foreign language field.)

The absence of WALTZ WITH BASHIR adds to the growing list of this year's high profile, cinematic nonfiction titles that have been, for one reason or another, eliminated from Oscar contention.  Other films not eligible this year include YOUNG@HEART (foreign TV broadcast), UP THE YANGTZE (foreign TV broadcast) and SURFWISE (pay-TV broadcast).  Each of those films is amongst the 20 top box office titles of 2008, thus far.  (It should be noted, however, that each of these films is eligible for the Cinema Eye Honors).

WALTZ WITH BASHIR screens this Wednesday and Thursday at Ziegfeld in NYC. It is scheduled to open in New York and Los Angeles on December 26.

Paul Newman, 1925-2008 - The Nonfiction Films

The great Paul Newman, beloved actor and philanthropist, died Friday at his home in Connecticut after a long battle with cancer.  Newman was 83.  The Oregonian's Shawn Levy, who has been writing Newman's biography, has an excellent overview of his career.   Manohla Dargis has an appreciation.  Sasha Stone broke the news late last night.

  In addition to Newman's legendary screen performances, from Fast Eddie Felson to Cool Hand Luke to Butch Cassidy to Frank Galvin to Sully Sullivan, Newman also was involved in a number of documentary films in his career, nearly all of which involved one of his three loves - auto racing, progressive politics and cinema.

In fact, two of his last film appearances (both 2007) were in the role as narrator - for Bill Haney's Oscar-shortlisted THE PRICE OF SUGAR, about human rights struggles amongst sugar farm workers in the Domincan Republic, and Rory Karpf & Mike Viney's DALE, a biography of driver Dale Earnhardt that waws produced by Nascar.

DALE was but one of several nonfiction films about racing that Newman participated in over the course of several decades.  He hosted David Winters' ONCE UPON A WHEEL in the late 1960s (it aired on ABC in 1971) and was the narrator of the IMAX racing film SUPER SPEEDWAY (1997).

Newman's involvement with politically progressive documentaries began in the late 1960s, when the actorserved as narrator on the 1967 Oscar winning short A YEAR TOWARD TOMORROW (directed by Edmond Levy) detailing the work of the VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program, the "domestic' peace corps.  Three years later he appeared (with wife Joanne Woodward) in the Oscar nominated feature KING: A FILMED RECORD... MONTGOMERY TO MEMPHIS.  That film was directed by Sidney Lumet & Joseph L. Mankiewicz.  And just two years after that, he hosted Emile de Antonio's McCARTHY: DEATH OF A WITCH HUNTER.

In the late 70's, Newman worked with fellow progressive Haskell Wexler on the latter's documentary short WAR WITHOUT WINNERS, which detailed the dangers of nuclear war.  Two and a half decades later, Newman was an interview subject in TELL THEM WHO YOU ARE, Mark Wexler's film about life with his famous father, Haskell.  That film fell in with Newman's appearances in a number of theatrical and television biographies about his cinematic collaborators.

Newman also participated in the requisite behind-the-scenes docus of his many films, particularly those of the past decade-plus.  But one "on-set" appearance by Newman stands out - a fleeting, slow-motion, frame-crossing appearance in the experimental short LUKE, shot during the making of COOL HAND LUKE by the great avant-gardist Bruce Conner.  (Conner died two months ago.)

On a personal note, I had the great pleasure of seeing Newman perform (with Woodward, Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Matt Damon, Tom Hanks, Goldie Hawn, Kevin Kline, Jack Nicholson & Julia Roberts, among others) a version of "The World of Nick Adams" at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles in 2002.  As might be suspected by Newman's involvement, the event was a benefit for one of Newman's Hole-in-the-Wall Gang camps.  As someone whose childhood is filled with memories of summer camp, it's but one of Newman's many philanthropic endeavors that resonates with me today.

DOC BOX: Strong Starts for FLOW & ENLIGHTEN UP

It's been fairly quiet at the theatrical doc box office of late - aside from the collosal bomb that is/was PROUD AMERICAN.  Irene Salina's FLOW, which is being distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures, the new shingle from Beastie Boy Adam Yauch (aka Nathaniel Hornblower) and ex-THINKer David Fenkel, had a strong debut last week and is keeping a decent per-screen average of nearly $2,800 as it expanded this weekend to 10 screens.  Oscilloscope recently announced the acquisition of the Slamdance hit DEAR ZACHARY, which it plans to release late next month.

Meanwhile, Balcony's Boston-release of ENLIGHTEN UP!, a yoga doc directed by Kate Churchill, brought in large crowds at the Kendall Square and was able to make more than $8,500.

Also last weekend, James Marsh's MAN ON WIRE became the 5th nonfiction of 2008 to reach $2 million.  For reference, 7 films reached that milestone during each of 2003, 2004 and 2005.

Otherwise, everything stayed status quo in the doc top 15, with two Paramount Vantage titles trying to inch forward - YOUNG@HEART to $4 million and AMERICAN TEEN to $1m.  Here's the list through this weekend:

1.    U23D (National Geographic)                                             $  9,494,745

2.    EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED (Rocky)    $  7,614,754

3.    SHINE A LIGHT (Paramount Vantage)                             $  5,355,376

4.    YOUNG@HEART (Fox Searchlight)                                 $  3,964,040

5.    MAN ON WIRE (Magnolia)                                                $ 2,232,828

6.    UP THE YANGTZE (Zeitgeist/KinoSmith)                          $ 1,345,047

7.    GONZO (Magnolia)                                                            $ 1,207,278

8.    AMERICAN TEEN (Paramount Vantage)                          $    940,496

9.    ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (THINK) $   900,034

10.  I.O.U.S.A. (Roadside Attractions)                                      $    715,018

11.   VINCE VAUGHN'S WILD WEST... (Picturehouse)           $    603,894

12.  WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OSAMA... (Weinstein)         $    384,955

13.  THE SINGING REVOLUTION (Abramorama)                   $   335,577

14.  BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER* (Magnolia)                   $   308,575

15.  TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE (THINKFilm)                          $    274,661

Update: Kim Voynar Joins Movie City News

Update September 30: Kim Voynar announced today that she was joining David Poland and crew at Movie City News.  Her Film Essent blog will be featured at MCN.

Catching up on a bit of news from a couple days ago...

One of our favorite film writers - Kim Voynar has departed Cinematical and launched a new blog called Film Essent.  She's also returned to her Seattle stomping grounds and it's not unlikely that she will be turning up somewhere soon in still another venue.  As she wrote in a post on her new site:

"This is something I’ve needed to do for a while now, but it was hard to let go of Cinematical, after working so hard and putting my heart and soul into it for so long. We were, as most of my colleagues know, acquired by AOL in late 2005 along with the rest of Weblogs, Inc., and big corporations have different priorities sometimes than niche film sites, no matter how impressive Cinematical’s traffic may be in comparison to peer sites, or how solid a reputation we’ve built in the industry. I don’t have anything bad to say about AOL or Moviefone. Writing for Cinematical afforded me an opportunity to make a name and place for myself in a highly competitive business, and for that I’ll always be grateful. But it’s time to move on."

Jeffrey Wells has a post on the topic and there's a veritable food fight amongst current and former Cinematical staffers in the comments.

On the Film Essent site you'll find her coverage of TIFF and Teluride, as well as a lovely piece pondering why a site like Cinematical should aim for intelligent film discussion (in addition to breathless coverage of the latest Batman villain casting rumors):

"It’s a matter of standing up and saying, you know what? It does matter if someone writes about independent film. It does matter if a little film from Bosnia or Ethiopia has a chance to have its voice be heard, even if a review of that film doesn’t get millions, or even thousands of hits. It does matter if film critics support filmmakers...  – people who are passionate about the value of film as an art form, who are fighting to still get intelligent films made. It matters."

From Toronto: Jamie Jay Johnson's SOUNDS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

Festival coverage sponsored by Indiepix.

When we wrote about the Toronto International Film Festival in our guide to the top festivals for documentary, we said:

"The second biggest stage for documentary filmmaking, but caution, getting the attention of press and buyers is not automatic..."

This week in Toronto, all eyes were on high profile, celebrity-driven docs like IT MIGHT GET LOUD , VALENTINO: THE LAST EMPEROR, EVERY LITTLE STEP and PARIS, NOT FRANCE.  But what of the other docs at Toronto?

I've heard from more than one person that Jamie Jay Johnson's SOUNDS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT was the hit of the festival, but it's Tuesday night premiere and unfamiliar subject (the junior Eurovision Song Contest) kept most major film press away.  But a few bloggers have weighed in, all very favorably:

Katarina at the Toronto-based They Shoot Actors Don't They grabs on tight, comparing SPIRIT to the king of competition docs:

"The kid contestants are all between the ages of 10 and 15, and all have to write their own songs. National finalists are sent to a Europe-wide contest which is televised and very widely watched. These tiny hopefuls are no less weird than their adult Eurovision counterparts, but they’re a less polished, less privileged lot than the North American kids you might see in a doc about child beauty pagents or overly ambitious stage moms....

The music is so-so, but the stories are so heartbreakingly adorable that it’s hard not to be riveted. Sure, there can only be one winner, and hundreds of cute kids will go home disappointed, but that doesn’t really change the fact that this is one of the festival’s ultimate feel-good docs. Think Spellbound but with extroverted performers instead of weird nerds."

Vickie at Moviepie admits right up front that she digs docs about kids:

"My final film of the day is one such doc, and it proudly joins the ranks of personal faves like SPELLBOUND, SUMMERCAMP! and GIRLS ROCK!. It was just as fun, just as touching, just as energetic and just as much of a crowd-pleaser as its predecessors.

It was SOUNDS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT: A POPUMENTARY (7/8), a fantastic British documentary about the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, in which kids from 17 countries compete in a gigantic, one-night extravaganza where they perform original songs (either solo, or in groups or bands) and one kid/country is declared the winner after, like, 20+ million votes are cast. The film tracks a number of contestants from their national finals (oh yes, this is serious business!) through the actual Eurovision process, and it’s wonderfully presented. Each child is talented but, more importantly, real and compelling. Some have heartbreaking stories. Some have wacky outfits. Some will make you laugh. Some will make you cry. But they will all entertain you."

Meanwhile, the Toronto Star's Richard Ouzounian profiles director Johnson and talks of his unusual filmmaking journey:

"This strange confluence of styles eventually led him to create a piece called I Love Breakfast Cereal: A TV Fanzine, which he describes disarmingly as "a 30-minute late-night ode to breakfast cereal."

BBC's Channel 4 was taken with his daffy creation and asked him to pitch them on a idea for a bigger project.

And then he stalled. "I sent them 44 different ideas," he sighs, "and they hated every one. Finally they said, `Don't you have anything else?' and I said `Okay, I've got one that so ridiculous it just might work.'"

Johnson called it Holiday Around My Bedroom, about a young man (Johnson) who was so broke he couldn't afford to go anywhere on vacation, so he took it in his room.

"I put everything into it," he admits. "Shots of me shrunk down to tiny size playing with all the animal and insect life. Some footage of two pigeons making love while Christina Aguilera sang `Beautiful,' that sort of thing."

The resulting project was widely acclaimed and nominated for all sorts of awards, but when people came to Johnson to commission him for assignments, they discovered he knew very little about the formal grammar of filmmaking.

"I finally went to film school to get a masters," he confesses, "but it was a frustrating experience. I always wanted to make films about the underdogs ... the slowest-ever swimmer in the history of the Olympics, or the life-cycle of the short-finned eel."

Channel 4 came to his rescue again and decided that this wildly skilled young man with a penchant for loveable losers would be the perfect person to tell the tale of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest."

OUCH! Conservative Quasi-Doc PROUD AMERICAN Worst Wide Opening of All Time

When Nathan Frankowski's right-leaning nonfiction EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED opened wide on over 1000 screens this spring and subsequently wowed the box office with a 2 million-plus opening weekend, we wondered whether this heralded a new trend for successful conservative docs (which had theretofore struggled to find a box office audience).

Not if this weekend is any indicator.

Fred Ashman's PROUD AMERICAN, self-synopsized as detailing the "(o)pportunity, personal responsibility, and the free enterprise system" that created America's success, had a disastrous opening weekend, according to estimates at Box Office Mojo.

The film opened on 750 screens and averaged just $180 per.  According to BOM, this makes PROUD AMERICAN the worst wide opening in the history of cinema.

Although PROUD AMERICAN is described as a documentary, it should be noted that the film contains a number of acted vignettes, as noted by the NY Times pan from Andy Webster:

"(T)wo sequences recreate the early days of Coke and Wal-Mart (yes, actors play the young Sam and Helen Walton), invoking both corporate behemoths as examples of singular ingenuity...

These accounts, starring fading television faces like James B. Sikking (the SWAT leader on “Hill Street Blues”) and Ken Howard (“The White Shadow”) proceed in their blunt, Hallmark-moment way. Punctuating the relentless bathos are appearances by the comedian Yakov Smirnoff (you remember: “America — what a country!”) and montage barrages of sun-saturated landscapes, national monuments and softball games, accompanied by generic choral singing. Moviegoers are actually expected to pay for this hollow uplift. Don’t even consider it."

Webster notes that Coca-Cola, Mastercard, Wal-Mart and American Airlines are listed as sponsors of the film, with their logos in the opening credits, although apparently the film claims (in its opening) that the sponsors had no influence on the content.  Ashman's bio, it should be noted, describes him as "one of the nations premiere corporate media producer/directors".

The Emmy Goes to AUTISM: THE MUSICAL & I'm Fucking Matt Damon

The Creative Arts Primetime Emmy Ceremony was held Saturday night at the Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles (it will be broadcast next Saturday, September 20 on E!) and a handful of nonfiction awards were bestowed upon eager documentarians and television executives (full list of doc nominees here).

No surprise, HBO and PBS were often on stage, with public television's love affair/patronage of Ken Burns paying off with 3 awards for his miniseries THE WAR.  PBS also took the Outstanding Nonfiction Series trophy for AMERICAN MASTERS.  Surprisingly, Ken Burns himself did not take home a winged angelic award, as the prize for Outstanding Directing went to Chris Wilcha and Adam Beckman for their work on Showtime's THIS AMERICAN LIFE.

Tricia Regan's AUTISM: THE MUSICAL was the big winner of the evening, receiving the award for Outstanding Nonfiction Special and for Outstanding Editing.  HBO also won a prize for Steven Okazaki's WHITE LIGHT/BLACK RAIN in the Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Programming.

But the best news of the night, much like last year's victory for "Dick in a Box" came in the Original Song category, where Sarah Silverman (and her four collaborators) won for "I'm Fucking Matt Damon".

Here are tonight's winners:

OUTSTANDING NONFICTION SPECIAL
AUTISM: THE MUSICAL
Jonathan Murray, Janet Grillo, Krstin Stills, Executive Producers
Nancy Abraham, Senior Producer
Perrin Chiles, Tricia Regan, Sasha Alpert, Producers

OUTSTANDING NONFICTION SERIES
AMERICAN MASTERS
Susan Lacy, Executive Producer
Prudence Glass, Series Producer
Julie Sacks, Supervising Producer
Jim Brown, Producer
Michael Cohl, Producer
William Eigen, Producer

EXCEPTIONAL MERIT IN NONFICTION FILMMAKING
WHITE LIGHT/BLACK RAIN
Sheila Nevins, Executive Producer
Robert Richter, Executive Producer
Steven Okazaki, Producer
Sara Bernstein, Supervising Producer

OUTSTANDING DIRECTION FOR NONFICTION PROGRAMMING
Christopher Wilcha & Adam Beckman, Directors
THIS AMERICAN LIFE - "Escape"

OUTSTANDING WRITING FOR NONFICTION PROGRAMMING
Geoffrey C. Ward, Writer
THE WAR - "Pride of Our Nation"

OUTSTANDING CINEMATOGRAPHY FOR NONFICTION PROGRAMMING
The Cinematography Team
DEADLIEST CATCH - "No Mercy"

OUTSTANDING PICTURE EDITING FOR NONFICTION PROGRAMMING
Kim Roberts, Editor
AUTISM: THE MUSICAL

OUTSTANDING SOUND EDITING FOR NONFICTION PROGRAMMING
Erik Ewers, Ryan Gifford, Mariusz Glabinski, Magdaline Volatis, Ira Spiegel, Marlena Grzaslewicz & Jacob Ribicoff
THE WAR - "When Things Get Tough"

OUTSTANDING SOUND MIXING FOR NONFICTION PROGRAMMING
Jason King, Sound Mixer
AMERICAN MASTERS - "Tony Bennett: The Music Never Ends"

OUTSTANDING SPECIAL CLASS - SHORT-FORMAT NONFICTION PROGRAMS
GREAT MOMENTS FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
Tim Nolan, Executive Producer
Anthony Giacchino, Producer

OUTSTANDING VOICE-OVER PERFORMANCE
Keith David, Narrator
THE WAR: A Necessary War