Before John Sinno wrote his "open letter to the Academy", the whole issue of Oscar rules for docs was inside baseball. Sure, there'd been the occasional blog post or trade article, debates on message boards, even a contentious meeting or two. But why would the rest of the world (or even those with a keen interest in
art house cinema) care? Mostly, they wouldn't. Enter Sinno, who helped distribute James Longley's Iraq in Fragments and was given a producer credit on the film (and subsequently was nominated for the Documentary Feature Oscar this year), and his letter, which had a touch of star power (the basis was a complaint that Oscar presenter Jerry Seinfeld had shown disrespect for the Oscar nominees with his jokes) and which culminated in a charge leveled against newly-discussed Oscar rules:
Seinfeld’s introduction arrived on the heels of an announcement by the Academy that the number of cities where documentary films must screen to qualify for an Academy Award is being increased by 75%. This will make it much more difficult for independent filmmakers’ work to qualify for the Best Documentary Feature Award, while giving an advantage to films distributed by large studios. Fewer controversial films will qualify for Academy consideration, and my film Iraq in Fragments would have been disqualified this year. This announcement came as a great disappointment to me and to other documentary filmmakers. I hope the Academy will reconsider its decision.
[The full text of Sinno's letter and my response can be found here.]
While most of the posts online dealt with Sinno's charge against Seinfeld, a number of the posts started to focus on the new rules - with many claiming that "what I find more interesting" was Sinno's claim that Iraq in Fragments wouldn't have qualified. Nearly all took Sinno's accusations at face value. [See posts from Sasha Stone, Nikki Finke, Erik Moe and Bilge Ebiri.] Further, commenters to various posts weighed in to decry the new rules. In response to Ebiri's post at Nerve.com, Blue23 wrote:
Those qualifications are completely unrealistic for a documentary. Besides "An Inconvenient Truth" which was considered a runaway success for a docu which of this year's films would have met these?
My own response to Sinno's letter was the only example I can find where someone challenged his assertion that Iraq in Fragments would not have qualified under the new, then-pending rules. My post led to an animated phone conversation between Sinno and myself that had no real resolution, other than that I admire his putting money into James' film, which I consider one of the great films of 2006.
[James himself has stayed mostly quiet on the issue, although he did post in the comments at Seattlest:
"For my part, I thought Seinfeld's introduction was pretty funny. But, like David said, what do I know? Anyway, even if Seinfeld wasn't at the top of his form, his comments hardly took anything away from documentary film. It's good to have a sense of humor. So I think you're on your own with this one, John."]
Reading many of the posts, and comments like those of Blue 23 (above), I was irritated that there was a perception, however misguided, that none of this year's documentary nominees - aside from the blockbuster (for an indie doc) Inconvenient Truth - could have qualified under the new rules; that somehow playing 15 cities was this wholly unattainable goal for nonfiction filmmakers. This is not hyperbole, it's an actual argument made both publicly and privately by some doc filmmakers and the occasional small distributor - that it's just too much to ask docmakers to do. Considering that my first film, Gigantic, which made a decent but small sum at the box office, played in more than 40 cities theatrically, and knowing that numerous docs in 2006 played as many or more dates, this "whoa is us" argument is not only patently false but also sets up a notion that we're pretty much illegitimate as a box office entity. Which, considering the current state of documentary distribution (as in, the number of players has collapsed and many are back to their "one doc a year" formulation) is not a notion I'm particularly inclined to promote.
[For context, here's a list of 30 documentaries that played more than 15 cities in 2006 - it is not meant to be a complete tally: 49
Up, 51 Birch Street, Al Franken: God Spoke, American Hardcore, Black
Gold, The Bridge, Cocaine Cowboys, Deliver Us From Evil, The Devil and
Daniel Johnston, The Heart of the Game, Inconvenient Truth, Iraq in
Fragments, Jesus Camp, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple,
Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man, Once in a Lifetime, Our Brand is Crisis,
Shut Up and Sing, Sketches of Frank Gehry, This Film is Not Yet Rated,
Unknown White Male, An Unreasonable Man, The U.S. Vs. John Lennon, The
War Tapes, Why We Fight, Who Killed the Electric Car? and Wordplay.]
Meanwhile, looking around and having the occasional conversation at film festivals, I'd noticed that many were very unclear as to what the new rules were exactly. While people got the gist - you'd have to play more theatres - the details were often lost. So last week, I talked to Academy governors Freida Lee Mock and Michael Apted about the new rules, in an attempt to clarify the swirling rumors and misinformation.
But before I get to the new rules, some important history.
For much of the past two decades, the way the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out its award for Best Documentary Feature has been the subject of some controversy. Much of the criticism has come from outside the Academy, primarily when well-known and critically acclaimed nonfiction films (such as The Thin Blue Line, Roger and Me, Hoop Dreams, Crumb and Startup.com) were passed over, while other, less well-known, often bound-for-television docs were nominated. Those who voted for the documentary prize were often characterized as elitist or clubby, and accused of only voting for their friends or a specific issue or cause, as was characterized by a stretch in which Holocaust-themed films won the award four out of six years.
In a lengthy piece for The Nation in 2001, Carl Bromley investigated the history of recent complaints, starting with a story about the 2000 Oscar ceremony:
A few minutes before the winner in the Best Documentary Feature category was announced at last year's Oscars, Wim Wenders was feeling pretty confident. After all, his film, Buena Vista Social Club, had been a huge commercial and critical success, and it was the odds-on favorite to win. But then, according to Wenders, producer Arthur Cohn--whose picture, One Day in September, a sleek, flashy film about the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, was also in the running--approached him and said, "Whatever happens today, I hope we will remain friends and keep a mutual respect for each other." Says Wenders, "Before I could really say anything, he was gone again. That's when I had a sudden sinking feeling that we had been pretty naïve in thinking we had a good chance. I sat down and realized that [Cohn] didn't have to ask for mutual respect. That is the rule of the game in the Oscars; it goes without saying. You would only ask for it if you had a bad conscience, so to speak."
Wenders' bewitching film was about to go the way of so many other popular documentaries (if they were lucky enough even to be nominated): eclipsed by a virtually unknown film whose total audience barely exceeded the tiny fraction of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members who had seen it. When Cohn collected the Oscar, Wenders applauded, but Cohn's acceptance speech, he says, "left me speechless. Congratulating the academy for being able to distinguish between commercial success and artistic value was a slap in the face of all the other nominees. You just don't do that to your competitors when you get up there to receive an Oscar. Some of the other nominees sitting just behind us were just as appalled." Wenders walked out. "I was disappointed, but not because we lost," he continues. "Only because we had not really had a fair chance to win."
A box-office and critical hit with a strong distributor behind it not given a fair chance? Welcome to the strange world of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Since 1995 three of the winners have been Holocaust documentaries--Anne Frank Remembered, The Long Way Home and The Last Days--and One Day in September had obvious Holocaust undertones. After Spike Lee's documentary Four Little Girls lost to The Long Way Home in 1997, Lee said, "When the film is about the Holocaust and one of the producers is a rabbi and it comes from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there are not many sure things in life, but that was a sure thing when you consider the makeup of the voting body of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I'd have rather been the New York Knicks in the fourth quarter, down ten points, a minute left in the United Center, than have the odds we faced of winning the Oscar against the Holocaust film."
While Bromley's article is a fascinating step back in time and interesting for the perspective of some of the filmmakers he talked to, there are a number of problems with the piece, particularly with the cautionary tale that he wraps around Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club and the film that would "steal" its Oscar, and it's mainly that One Day in September is a revelation, a sign of the stylistic adventurousness that would follow in the next decade and the announcement of a major directorial talent, Kevin McDonald. As much as I like Buena Vista Social Club, there's really no comparison between the two films. (Bromley felt differently and calls September "unoriginal" and "one-sided".)
But Bromley had tapped into a common, and perhaps not too off-the-mark complaint about the Academy's choices:
Over the past decade, the films nominated, with a few honorable exceptions, have been the cinematic equivalent of castor oil. Then-New York Times critic Janet Maslin described them as "films about the Holocaust, the disabled, hard-working artists and inspirational programs in the inner city"--worthy subjects that all too often get mediocre or sentimental treatment.
In other words, the struggle over the documentary Oscar is a cultural struggle over documentary itself: between what some call the academy's "cultural commissars," who dictate the definition of a "good" documentary, and a diverse documentary filmmaking community that has challenged the selection committee's conservative aesthetic values. It has been a fight against what Errol Morris calls the "Mother Teresa school of filmmaking--the idea that if a film is about an exemplary person or subject matter, then it follows that the film is just as good."
It hadn't always been this way. In a conversation last week with Freida Lee Mock, the chair of the Academy's Documentary Branch, she told me that between 1980 and 2000, the state of the theatrical doc was almost at its nadir. "25 years ago, TV started to dominate, cable started to dominate. Before that, when I first started doing it, it wasn't like that," Mock said.
In The Nation article, Bromley tries to make the case that the films that were nominated in the 1970s (including Woodstock, Harlan County, U.S.A. and Hearts and Minds) were a world away from the films of the next two decades, but this is a bit simplistic. Life before 1980 was not perfect (not a single nomination for the Maysles Brothers or D.A. Pennebaker or Robert Drew) nor was everything from 1980-2000 a grim wasteland (winners included The Times of Harvey Milk, When We Were Kings and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie).
But it was the accusations of insider trading that colored much of the complaints raised by critics of the documentary committee. The loudest came when Hoop Dreams failed to clear the Academy's selection procedure and Mock herself won the Oscar that year for Maya Lin: A Clear Strong Vision. Reporters and critics pointed to Mock's role on previous selection committees as an "aha!" moment. They almost always failed to mention how good Maya Lin was and the rave reviews it had received. Mock and her film were a convenient target for the Academy's critics, and for them, Hoop Dreams was the third strike (Thin Blue Line and Roger & Me being the first two) that led many to want to shine a light on the Academy's selection procedures. From Bromley's article:
Committee member Mitchell Block told the Los Angeles Times: "I think [the distributors] set [The Thin Blue Line] up as a shoo-in and...created an expectation among members that the film couldn't meet. But there was no backlash. As a group, we simply thought the five nominated films were better." (ed. note: The five films nominated were Hotel Terminus, Bruce Weber's excellent Let's Get Lost, and the largely forgotten The Cry of Reason - Beyers Naude: An Afrikaner Speaks, Promises to Keep and Who Killed Vincent Chin?)
When Michael Moore was overlooked for Roger & Me the following year, he pointed out in a New York Times Op-Ed: "Mr. Block has a financial interest in who gets nominated; he owns a documentary distribution company and, in the last 10 years, nearly one quarter of all films that have won the Academy Award for best documentary have been Mitchell Block films." In the year of Roger & Me's omission, Block owned the distribution rights to three of the nominees.
Bromley went on to suggest that committee members actually aligned themselves against films that had found success in theatres:
According to (filmmaker Alan) Adelson, during a pre-scoring meeting in which members deliberated over the films submitted, one voter warned that if Hoop Dreams was nominated, its victory would be certain. "He appealed to his fellow members to preserve other films' chances of winning the Oscar by denying Hoop Dreams a nomination altogether," Adelson wrote. When the committee voted, at least two other attendees allied themselves with the anti-Hoop Dreams speaker and denied Hoop Dreams by giving it the lowest possible score, even though other committee members awarded the film top scores.
Why the animosity toward Hoop Dreams? "Many of the committee members at the time considered documentary the real weakling in the cinema litter," Adelson told The Nation. "They had a patronizing, paternalistic attitude toward the form: Documentaries are never seen by anyone until the academy shines their light on it and gives the poor weakling sustenance. There was a sense of mission. They promoted films they thought the public needed. And they felt threatened by an already successful film."
Bromley closes his article with a bit of cloudy forecasting:
(D)espite recent reforms in the selection process, the real proof of the pudding will be the day Errol Morris takes home an Oscar, as Alan Adelson has suggested. But that could be a long time coming. Even if the restrictive voting rules are relaxed, there's no guarantee that the general membership will get things right. Still, applying the academy's usual standards to documentaries would be a big improvement. As it stands, says Morris, "I've got more of a chance winning my first Oscar for a fiction film than a documentary."
Just three years later, Errol Morris had his Oscar, for directing the documentary The Fog Of War. Michael Moore had his for Bowling for Columbine, and the Academy had a new Documentary Branch, with three governors and with new rules that favored theatrically released films. But it's been since 2003, when new rules were first put in place, rules that may have helped Morris win, that these new complaints have arisen, this time from within the documentary community. Filmmakers, particularly those whose films that had not necessarily been made with a theatrical release in mind, argued that the new rules were unfair. Sinno was tapping into a wave of discontent amongst some (but by no means all) documentary filmmakers.
[Before I go on, a bit of full disclosure on my part. In a December 2003 article for the Hollywood Reporter (subscription required) that dealt with changing perceptions of documentaries, I was quoted as saying that I thought the focus on theatrical documentaries was good for filmmakers and correct for the Academy. I have written here often on the topic and have credited the change in Academy rules for some of the popularity documentaries have seen over the past six years. (See here, here, here and here.) My own film will be going through the qualification and submission process this year.]
This year, just the threat of change - particularly the notion that the theatrical requirement would be strengthened - led to a confrontational meeting last December between filmmakers and Academy Governors Mock, Michael Apted and Rob Epstein which I wrote about here. Since then, rumors and, in some cases, misinformation have been swirling about what the new rules would be and what - or should I say who (shades of conspiracy theories) - was behind the latest changes. Recently the Academy posted its new rules on its website and I talked to Mock and Apted (who also serves as DGA President and who directed the well-known, critically acclaimed and not nominated "Up series" of films) to get more information.
The changes: Qualifying for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar is a multi-part process. First, films that wish to qualify for the documentary feature category still must have a 7-day qualifying run in Los Angeles or New York. The films have to play a minimum of two times a day (previously this was one) and must screen between noon and 10 PM (eliminating the popular 11 AM screenings that defined the documentary qualifying run for decades). Films must screen in an approved projected format (either on film or digital) that adheres to the Academy's technical standards. According to Apted, these technical standards are uniform for both narrative (fiction) and nonfiction films.
Second, the film must then roll out to fourteen other cities in at least ten different states. The film must play twice daily for at least three consecutive days. This is the increase, up from 8 last year, that Sinno talked about in his open letter. However, in an important and helpful change, the projection requirements for the fourteen rollout cities have been altered so that films can project in any standard format, including Digibeta or DVD. (Previously, you had to fulfill the same technical specs as were required by your initial qualifying run.) I would argue that despite the increase in the number of theatres, the relaxing of technical standards for the roll out makes the new rules actually easier (and certainly cheaper) for most filmmakers.
Apted described the allowance of additional formats as part of the Academy's desire to "find a balance between keeping the demands of the Academy to have a theatrical release and keeping abreast of the technology."
Some have raised the question of whether enough theatres even exist to meet this demand. My own notion on this is pretty clear (not incidentally formed by my experience with Gigantic) but I asked Apted about alternate theatrical venues, such as Boston's Museum of Fine Arts or Los Angeles' American Cinematheque or Columbia's storefront Ragtag Cinemacafe. Did museums or microcinemas count toward the 14? Apted assured that they did, as long as films were advertised and admissions were paid.
"We're trying not to make filmmakers leap through hurdles or bankrupt them," Apted told me. "But we want to have films that have a theatrical life." Later in the conversation, he added, "I think that if you can't do 14 cities, 3 days in different cities, projecting off of DVD, then something is wrong."
Mock echoed the thought, asking rhetorically, "Is (just having) a 7-day qualifying run a theatrical documentary? I don't think it is."
From my point of view, the most important change in the current
rules is the mandate that the roll out must occur before the Academy
announces the films that have made the semifinals, or as it is commonly
referred to, "the shortlist". Previously, filmmakers could wait to
hear whether they'd gone on to the next round, and then would have to
fulfill the 8 city roll out. Some films, particularly those that were
destined for television (and would only get a theatrical if they were
shortlisted) would stop there theatrical efforts the moment they
discovered they hadn't made the list. With the new rules, films have
to prove that they have had a theatrical life before they can even be
considered for the shortlist.
Says Apted, "The Academy got all these submissions that had no real
attempt at a theatrical plan and these are awards for theatrical
movies."
Another important change is a concession to films funded by
television entities. Both Control Room and Why We Fight had been
disqualified in recent years over television screenings which had been
built into their funding window. Now, films must only wait 60 days
after they have completed their rollout requirement the first day of their qualifying run and must complete their rollout requirements before the film airs. Finally, films can air
on television before nominations are announced or awards are handed
out. [correction made 8-7-07]
Apted called the change in television rules part of the Academy's
"experimentation", and the changes seem, at least in part, designed to
answer criticism regarding these earlier disqualifications, showing
that the Academy is at least more nimble and responsive to change than
they had been a decade ago.
Some filmmakers have complained that if your film is shortlisted,
you must produce a 35mm film print, a costly process that is starting
to seem unnecessary in the midst of the digital revolution. I find
this complaint a bit hard to swallow, considering that just 6 years ago
you couldn't play a film festival without a print, but Apted says that
it's something the Documentary Branch is looking at, and that it's
conceivable that in the near future you wouldn't have to have a print
if you made the semifinals.
[A full list of Academy rules for feature documentaries is available here.]
According to former IDA (International Documentary Association) Executive Director Betsy McLane, the move toward a theatrical requirement began after the Academy had considered whether to do away with the documentary categories. Posting at indieWIRE (scroll down to comments), McLane wrote:
"Only through the very strenuous efforts of IDA and others in the field were the two categories saved. An independent study commissioned by AMPAS as to the theatrical viability of documentaries proved that there was ample reason to keep the categories, and even to create the documentary Branch. Recall that the Branch only has existed for a few years and that a number of dedicated documentarians- Freida Mock, Michael Apted, and Arthur Dong, among others- have advocated within that Branch for the documentary at AMPAS."
Mock said that the changes were not, as some have thought, part of a
mandate handed down by the larger Academy but rather grew from the
experience of becoming an official branch of the Academy. In justifying why documentaries should be a granted their own
branch, filmmakers started to talk about what made them filmmakers,
"people who make movies", what made their films a theatrical entity. She told
me that they looked at the previous year, when many of the
nominated docs had gone straight to television and hadn't had any
theatrical release. The question Mock and others found themselves
deliberating over was a fundamental one, "Are you a theatrical form?"
Both Mock and Apted talked about troubles in the previous decade,
with Mock calling the 90's bumpy and Apted more bluntly calling the
process "scandalous". Apted said that the goal with each adjustment of the rules -
and it sounds simple enough - was that the films nominated would
actually be the best films of that year.
Some in the documentary community seems stuck in the mindset of the 1990s, with the idea that if you make a feature-length nonfiction film you should be able to play a couple mornings at the Laemmle Monica and be in the mix for the Oscar. Some argue that it should be up to a selection committee to determine what is theatrical and what is television.
But, in the current climate, who's going to make that choice? Is Jesus Camp, a movie funded by a feature film arm of a cable television network, bound for theatres or bound for television? What about The Trials of Darryl Hunt, one of the best films of last year, which received some of its funding from HBO? Who should be entrusted with separating one type of film from another? And isn't this how we got into the "scandalous" '90s in the first place?
Ultimately, the more films that play in more venues, the better it is for all of us who make nonfiction films. Even if you're self-distributing and finding houses that will show your digibeta for a Monday - Wednesday run, we are, as a group, better off. Every time that people pay money to see documentaries in a theatrical setting, it helps the next guy.
Just getting into Sundance doesn't mean you should be nominated for an Oscar. Just paying to play a couple mornings in Santa Monica doesn't mean you should be nominated for an Oscar. As Betsy McClane wrote on indieWIRE:
The shifting of AMPAS rules is nothing new. As a private club, not a public or not for profit organization, they are entitled to change any rules about any thing that they choose. AMPAS is under no obligation, other than a moral one, to serve any particular part of the film community or the public.
The sky isn't falling (even if a recent Best Documentary winner suggests it might be sooner than we think) and docmakers have a real opportunity to build a grass roots network of venues across the nation wherein filmmakers can accomplish self-distribution. In future posts, I want to examine this possibility and hope to create a list of theatres, microcinemas and alternative screening venues that are open to self-distributed docs and can help filmmakers fulfill their Academy requirements AND get the theatrical they were hoping for.
Because if you weren't hoping, weren't planning, weren't thinking all along that you'd have a real theatrical, then you shouldn't be thinking Oscar.
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