All these wonderful things

IDA Turns Over a New Leaf, Nominates a Quintet of Noteworthy Titles

The International Documentary Association announced its 2008 nominations on Tuesday and, following last year's controversial awards, has changed course in several notable ways, not least with its nominating of five notable (and known) titles from the past year for its top award.

In selecting box office favorites MAN ON WIRE and YOUNG@HEART to join acclaimed festival titles WALTZ WITH BASHIR, STRANDED: I'VE COME FROM A PLANE THAT CRASHED ON THE MOUNTAINS and KASSIM THE DREAM for its top prize, the IDA takes a huge step forward in recognizing a variety of styles, subject matters and countries of origin (only KASSIM hails from the US).  They also up-end the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose arcane eligibility rules have eliminated YOUNG@HEART, STRANDED and BASHIR from contention for this year's documentary Oscar.

Following in the footsteps of the inaugural Cinema Eye Honors earlier this year, the IDA announced that it is instituting an Audience Award.  Members of the organization can select a favorite film from more than 130 titles on the IDA's website.

The IDA also took the opportunity to announce documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock as the host of this year's awards, which previously has often been a comedian or public radio host. 

In addition to this year's changes, the IDA today revealed the winners of what it is calling its "career awards".  In addition to the previously announced Werner Herzog, who will receieve the Career Achievement Award, honors will go to Rob Epstein (Pioneer Award), Marina Goldovskaya (Preservation and Scholarship Award) as well as the institution of the first Excellence in Editing Award, which will be presented to Sam Pollard.  Stefan Forbes will receive the Emerging Filmmaker Award for his work on BOOGIE MAN.

Awards will be announced at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles on December 5.

Full nominees are after the jump.

RELIGULOUS Soars Past $9M and a Seaworthy Debut for MORNING LIGHT

There's now no doubt that Larry Charles RELIGULOUS will pass U23D this week to become the top nonfiction release of 2008.  The film just had its third million dollar-plus weekend (which no other film has accomplished this year) and had a relatively small fall-off from the previous weekend (just 35.2%).  The film will look to become the first $10M title of the year (and first since last year's SICKO) sometime this week.

Four new films debuted in theatres this weekend.  The Walt Disney-released sailing film MORNING LIGHT opened in 55 theatres for a stable, if not exceptional, $2,351 average.  Total box office $129K makes the opening one of the better for nonfiction titles this year.  The film was produced by Roy Disney and directed by Mark Monroe, previously a writer on two recent docs - AMAZING JOURNEY: THE STORY OF THE WHO and ONCE IN A LIFETIME: THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THE NEW YORK COSMOS.

In limited release, Caroline Suh's FRONTRUNNERS had one of the better Film Forum openings this year, grossing just over $10K since Wednesday.  The film expands to five more cities this weekend, including LA's Nuart and Boston's Brattle.  John Henning and Mike Roth's timely SAVING MARRIAGE, which opened last week in San Francisco, expanded to Los Angeles and Boston, with an average of just over $4K per.   It opens at NYC's Quad this weekend.

The new top 15 rankings of the nonfiction box office top is after the jump.

Participant's Courtney Sexton Fights California's Anti-Gay Marriage Prop 8

Our pal Courtney Sexton from Participant is one of those leading the fight against Proposition 8 in California, which would strip existing marriage rights from same sex couples.  Courtney joined friends in producing a series of ads that resemble the Apple v. Mac campaign and which feature folks like Molly Ringwald and Margaret Cho.  My favorite is after the break:

Esther B. Robinson Bemoans Time Out NY's List of 40 (Mostly-White) Icons

Esther B. Robinson, longtime fixture of the independent film scene in New York and the Cinema Eye nominated director of A WALK INTO THE SEA: DANNY WILLIAMS AND THE WARHOL FACTORY, recently sent a letter to friends to call attention to Time Out NY's recent listing of 40 favorite folks from the last 13 years in New York.  I'm reprinting her email here, with her permission:

Dear Friends,

Two weeks ago Time Out NY  featured the Top 40 list of New Yorkers who have made a "lasting, positive impact" on NYC in the last 13 years. The cover featured a group of prominent individuals who have in fact made a positive impact on this city, but only three people of color made the list - Jay-Z, Derek Jeter and Junot Diaz.  

To make matters worse..... the editor's response as to why there were so few people of color mentioned, was New York is "a city whose cultural elite have been mainly white." The entire response gets much worse (see link below).

I am writing because I think it is essential that people write Time Out (especially if you have a personal connection to any of their writers and/or editors), send a response to Editor Michael Freidson, post a response at the link below and forward your response widely to people that will care and respond.

What is revealed in the Freidson's letter (linked to above) is the closed cultural world of Time Out.

VIEWFINDER: Mike Roth, Co-Director of SAVING MARRIAGE on California's Prop 8

As part of our new VIEWFINDER series, we are inviting nonfiction directors to write about aspects of the upcoming elections as they relate to their films.  Earlier this week, THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND's co-director, Sam Green, wrote about his reaction to the fact that one of his subjects, William Ayers, had become a central issue for the McCain campaign.  Today, Mike Roth, the co-director of SAVING MARRIAGE - which examined what happened in Massachusetts when gay marriage was legalized - writes about California's Prop 8, which would take away the right to gay marriage in California:

I’m terrified of Proposition 8.  That’s the California ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution and take the right to marry away from gay and lesbian couples.  Right now, it’s ahead in the polls by five points.  Prop 8 = bad.  Gay marriage = good.

You might think that me being a gay man would automatically engage me in this battle for equal marriage rights, but what it really took was to make a film about it.  The film is SAVING MARRIAGE, about the fight to keep gay marriage legal in Massachusetts, and it wasn’t just the people in front of the camera that had changed by the end of the movie. 

When I took on the project in 2003 with my producing partner John Henning, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had just legalized gay marriage and there was a major political storm brewing over the decision.  A huge battle was about to take place, and I knew I was going to be watching civil rights history unfold in front of my camera lens.

RELIGULOUS Passes EXPELLED, Becomes #2 Nonfiction of 2008

On Thursday, Larry Charles & Bill Maher's RELIGULOUS surpassed Nathan Frankowski & Ben Stein's EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED to become the second highest grossing nonfiction title of 2008.  Going into its third weekend, RELIGULOUS has collected $7.62M (to EXPELLED's $7.61M).  U23D remains first (for the time being) with just over $9.5M.  If RELIGULOUS remains on its current trajectory, it should take the year's box office crown by next weekend and could become the first $10M doc of the year (and the first since last year's SICKO).

iW's Docsider has a preview of this weekend's 4 nonfiction releases, including two from budding doc distributor Oscilloscope - Caroline Suh's FRONTRUNNERS and Jay Delaney's NOT YOUR TYPICAL BIGFOOT MOVIE.  Both titles were SXSW '08 world premieres.  FRONTRUNNERS opens exclusively at the Film Forum in NYC, while BIGFOOT is having its bow at NYC's Pioneer Theatre.

DOC BOX: RELIGULOUS Storms to #3 Nonfiction of 2008

Another huge weekend for Larry Charles' RELIGULOUS as that film quickly moves to third on this year's box office chart, showing every sign that it will soon hold the title of top documentary grosser of 2008.  The film averaged nearly $4K on each of its 66 screens. 

Perhaps overly learning their lesson after last October's disastrous clusterbomb of indie doc releases, not a single major or minor nonfiction enter theatres this weekend, leaving the Bill Maher anti-religion title to have the room to itself.

Looking slightly beyond our doc-colored glasses, indie film watchers might be interested to note the low returns for the latest mumblecore title, Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig's NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS, which made big news this spring as the first title acquired at/during the SXSW Film Festival.  Premiering this weekend at the IFC in NYC, and without the blaze of publicity that accompanied last summer's mumblecore sampler, the film managed only $2,902 for the weekend.

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

VIEWFINDER: Sam Green, Co-Director of THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, on the New Notoriety of William Ayers

As the American presidential contest enters the homestretch, some bloggers on the right and elements of the McCain/Palin campaign remain convinced that the key to their last-minute comeback lies in pushing the tenuous relationship between Barack Obama and former Weather Underground founder William Ayers. 

One truism of being a documentary filmmaker is that your subjects often continue to make news long after your film has wrapped and is widely seen.  Kicking off a new feature here at the blog, Sam Green, the co-director of the Oscar-nominated THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, writes about Ayers' return to prominence and the mixed feelings it provokes for the director:

I, like most Obama supporters, have watched with a mixture of apprehension and revulsion as McCain and his VP-pick have ratcheted up their efforts to smear Obama with his tenuous link to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground. Me and my pal Bill Siegel made a documentary about the Weather Underground a couple of years ago, and we filmed a number of interviews with Bill Ayers. Since that time, he's become a good friend of ours. We took him and Bernardine Dohrn, his wife, with us to the Academy Awards in 2004 when our film was nominated for an Oscar.

So it's hard to see this brouhaha and not feel terrible for the person at the center of it. After his long-ago association with the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers has gone to become a widely known and respected education expert. He's a Distinguished Professor (really, that's his title!) at the University of Illinois and has written more than 10 books. To have all of his work, and what he's about, so publicly misrepresented must be extremely painful. Not to mention the fact that he's received such a torrent of death threats that the University has had to provide him with a bodyguard.

All of this is compounded by the fact that Bill Ayers has had to remain silent. He's made the intelligent decision that there's no way to engage with the media in a case like this and win. Anything he might say publicly will only add fuel to the fire, and give the "issue" more of a life. There really is nothing, or at least nothing significant, at the heart of the Ayers-Obama connection, so it's gotta run out of steam at some point. There's nothing more to be said about it.

Bill Siegel and I have taken the same approach. Starting when this "issue" first surfaced in the MSM during one of the Democratic debates, we have been bombarded by media requests (no pun intended), but have felt that for strategic and political reasons, it's been best to stay silent.  (It's not been an easy decision -- any filmmaker wants their work out there, and this in some ways would be a great opportunity to promote the movie).

As depressing as this whole Bill Ayers thing has been, I am hopeful about one thing, and that is that I don't think that it will work. It was pathetic enough when Hillary trotted this shit out, but today, with the financial meltdown and all the other REAL issues that we're facing, I just can't see how this desperate, bankrupt ploy by McCain and his VP-pick will turn things around.

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND is available for download at iTunes and DVDs can be ordered directly from Green's website.  If you order a DVD from the website before the election, Green will include a free 8x10 Bill Ayers mugshot.

A 2 Million Dollar Weekend for RELIGULOUS

Larry Charles' RELIGULOUS became the first documentary in over a year to score back-to-back multi-million dollar weekends.  The last film to do this was Michael Moore's SICKO.  Averaging nearly $4K per screen, the film is likely to become the highest grossing nonfiction of 2008.

Total cume for RELIGULOUS is now around $6.7M.  More box office figures later in the week.

It's Sunday Afternoon in Moscow...

...and the rain is picking up after some brief cameos by sunshine earlier today.  It's our last full day in Russia after arriving here earlier this week for AmFest, the American Film Festival in Moscow.  I am here as part of a contingent of filmmakers, invited by the US Embassy in Moscow to screen our films as part of an interesting cultural program that seeks to present different views of and from America to Russian audiences.  Joining me are my fellow documentary filmmakers Amir Bar-Lev (screening MY KID COULD PAINT THAT), Edet Belzberg (THE RECRUITER), Irene Taylor Brodsky (HEAR AND NOW), Margaret Brown (THE ORDER OF MYTHS) and the great Ross McElwee, who is in town screening a retrospective of his work.

This has all been coordinated by the filmmaker Robin Hessman, who, in addition to being our guide, translator and the curator/programmer of the documentary films at this festival, is finishing work on her own feature about those who came of age in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

I was last in Moscow in 1986 and I expected that there would be a great number of differences.  I had read, prior to coming, that Moscow is now considered the most expensive city in the world and there was much reporting of a survey earlier this year that found it had the most expensive cup of coffee - $10.  As a non-wealthy nonfiction filmmaker and caffiene addict, this was troubling on more than one level.

Suffice to say that yes, things can be pricey here, particularly if you want to live any kind of glamourous lifestyle.  The prices at the large luxury mall GUM on Red Square - which, during my last visit, was a state department store filled with lines and stalls and a general sense of chaos - were so outrageous ($85 for a pair of boxers, $400 for a baseball cap) that one wonders who could possibly afford such extravagence, particularly as news breaks of the worldwide economic crisis.  But you can get a double expresso for $4, which is more in line of London prices than the threat of ten dollar jolts of joe.  I digress, however...

One of three long interior promenades within GUM.

View of Lenin's Tomb in Red Square from GUM.

The nice thing about a festival experience like this (and I should stipulate that this is less like most festival experiences and more like a week-long cultural exchange) is two-fold.  One is the opportunity to spend time with a small number of filmmakers on an extended field trip, the other is to screen your film (in this case, mine was KURT COBAIN ABOUT A SON) for audiences who rarely if ever have the opportunity to watch American documentaries. 

Before I screened my film this week, I wondered if the unusual construction of ABOUT A SON would be challenging to Russian audiences.  But after screening twice (with one more this evening), I realized that these audiences have no set ideas of what a rock movie is supposed to be, so they have no preconceptions to skirt around.  So, the audiences have been passionate and inquisitve and kind enough to stick around for over an hour last night after we lost our translator mid-film (he ran off with no explanation and the film was stopped until a translator finished performing his duties on McElwee's BRIGHT LEAVES).