All these wonderful things

Sundance 2011: Jeff Deutchman, Ridley Scott and the "History-Making" Doc That Isn't Making History

There's been a bizarre bit of news developing in the past couple of days, as a powerhouse team - the Sundance Institute, YouTube, Ridley Scott and Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Kevin Macdonald - is emploring people to join in what they describe as "the first-ever user-generated film shot in a single day".

The organizers of LIFE IN A DAY are seeking folks from all over the world to shoot footage of their lives on Saturday, July 24.  Then, according to the film's YouTube site:

"The most compelling and distinctive footage will be edited into an experimental documentary film, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.

The film will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 and will be available right hear on YouTube.  If your footage makes it into the finished film, you'll be credited as a co-director and you could be one of 20 contributors brought ot Sundance to celebrate with Kevin Macdonald."

Hey, it sounds groovy and all, and congrats on one of the earliest Sundance selection notices of all time.  But just one problem - it's not "the first-ever user-generated film shot in a single day", as Variety reported yesterday and as an email from the Sundance Institute trumpets today.

Hat tip to Christopher Campbell, who flagged this for us yesterday with his tweet:

"Someone tell Ridley Scott that @jeffdeutchman already made a user-generated documentary feature shot in one day."

Indeed, Jeff Deutchman debuted his user-generated, shot-in-one-day feature documentary, 11/4/08, at SXSW this year and it's gone on to have quite a life on the festival circuit and is now playing select dates around the US.

As Campbell later tweeted:

"Noticed that 11/4/08 is screening in Indianapolis on July 24. @jeffdeutchman should film at the event and then submit it to Life in a Day"

Now, Deutchman may or may not have made "the first-ever user-generated film shot in a single day" - it's the first I've heard of, but who knows what's been out there in the ether" - but LIFE IN A DAY certainly can't claim that title.  It may be historic in other ways (there's that July announcement for a film screening at Sundance again), but Scott & Sundance & YouTube should give credit where credit is due.

Deutchman beat them to the punch.

Update: Numerous folks have weighed in on other "shot-in-one-day" documentaries that feature some variation on a similar theme.  In particular, Movieline's S.T. VanAirsdale notes 140, a film that premiered at the 2010 Newport Beach Film Festival, that seems pretty much directly on the same page as what Scott & Co. are hyping, although it limited its user-generated material to 140 seconds, a reference to the number of characters allowed in a tweet.

Also, on this topic, Christopher Campbell writes further at Cinematical.  And USA Today's Susan Wloszczyna (who comments below, arguing that 11/4/08 doesn't fit her idea of "user-generated" since Deutchman recruited some of his footage) talks to Kevin Macdonald about the film project.

The Monday Brief: A Strong Start for RESTREPO, A Good Move for LAFF and 8 For Oscar

For all intents and purposes, the documentary year - though just half over - has reached a wrap point.  The films of the first half of the year have come to the end (or nearly have) of their festival runs.  Nearly every major American documentary festival showcase has come and gone.

Time now to take our only major break in the year - the two-plus months between the festivals of June and the unveiling of fall titles in Toronto, which then kicks off a busy theatrical season, the lead up to the European fests of late October and November and awards season.

Speaking of, here's a piece of Oscar trivia you might be interested in:

In the past five years, only one film - last year's THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA: DANIEL ELLSBERG AND THE PENTAGON PAPERS - wasn't screened by this point in the year and went on to be nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar.

So, chances are, we've already seen this year's five nominees. 

And while your scanning this year's titles in your head (THE OATH, ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE, LAST TRAIN HOME, A FILM UNFINISHED, GASLAND, INSIDE JOB, THE TILLMAN STORY are just a few that figure to play in the mix) you might wonder which of this year's most popular titles (OCEANS, BABIES, EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK) might be able to crack through the Academy's "serious ceiling".

And you might look at this week's box office returns to see how one film, which may be one of a few frontrunners at this point, happened to do with audiences...

That film is Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's RESTREPO and the answer is, quite well actually.  Buoyed perhaps by Junger's literary star-power (if not its Sundance Grand Jury prize, which has been hit and miss in terms of theatrical payoff for docs recently), RESTREPO opened this weekend to more than $15K on each of its two screens, battling back the notion that folks aren't clamoring for nonfiction (or fiction for that matter) pieces about current US wars.  The film - currently only in NYC and LA - heads to SF, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia in time for the Independence Day weekend.

Sticking with box office for a moment, two of the aforementioned successes - Banksy's EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP and Ricki Stern & Annie Sundberg's JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK - continued to do well at the North American box office, according to estimates at Box Office Mojo.  EXIT picked up nearly another $75K in its 11th weekend, taking its cume to $2.65M.  And JOAN scored another $365K in its 4th weekend, for a total-to-date of $716K.  That film is now in 86 theaters and may hit the $1M mark after this coming holiday weekend.

But perhaps the biggest heat around a documentary film this past week centered on the television debut of one of the year's best and most important films, Josh Fox' GASLAND.  We have a full post up today about the natural gas industry's attempts to smear Fox and his film.

LAFF and Silverdocs have both wrapped (we had the winners yesterday) for 2010.  LAFF has since announced their Audience Awards, with prizes going to both Mark Landsman's THUNDER SOUL (Documentary Audience Award) and Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith's PRESUMED GUILTY (International Audience Award).  We're also pleased to note that OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" music video (which we had a hand in) picked up the LAFF Audience Award for Music Videos.

Interview: Previewing Sundance 2010 with Doc Programmers David Courier and Caroline Libresco

Last week I sat down with David Courier and Caroline Libresco, Sundance's team leaders for the documentary line-up.  We talked at length about this year's amazing slate of films, changes brought about by the departure of Geoffrey Gilmore and the ascension of John Cooper & Trevor Groth, and look back on a breakthrough decade for documentary and Sundance's role in creating an environment for that breakthrough.

Perhaps most interesting to filmmakers (or to me at least) is the discussion of the thin line between getting into Sundance and not getting in to Sundance.  

It was a great conversation with a lot of laughter - I'm going to run it in two parts because it got fairly extensive.

All These Wonderful Things:  First I want to ask, because the list is so amazing on paper – did you know you were going to get submissions from that caliber of A-list directors, did you know they were coming or were you like, “oh my God, here’s another great film from another great filmmaker”?

David Courier:  Yeah, we kind of did.  We’d been tracking them for a while.  In the case of certain ones like (Alex Gibney’s) CASINO JACK, he’s been working on that for years, and we knew he was ready so it was likely, I mean we were hoping it was going to come our way and not go elsewhere.  And sure enough, it’s what he wanted to do.  Laura Poitras’ film, same thing.

Caroline Libresco:  Totally, and Davis Guggenheim and Amir (Bar-Lev), we'd been tracking.  Those I feel were in our consciousness already.

DC:  A couple of those – CASINO JACK and (Bar-Lev’s PAT) TILLMAN film – we were hoping to get last year.

ATWT:  Yeah, I think Amir had said that one point they thought they might have been ready…

CL: Yeah, I remember that.

DC:  Glad they waited.  It’s really exciting.

CL:  But I think that it’s a really tough competition, that’s kind of the underlying question under your question, because there are so many consummate American documentarians.  And if each of them has a film every 3 or 4 years, there’s a lot of great films out there.

ATWT:  We just did the new film festival survey and Sundance is number one, not surprisingly.  But one thing I noticed, I kind of have this theory that Sundance is that its almost like the Cannes of documentary to the extent that the list of people – Oscar winners, Oscar nominees, the crème de la crème of the American documentary scene – that when these people are making films they want to come to Sundance, in the way that if the Coen Brothers make a film or if Soderburgh makes a film, maybe they’re aiming for Cannes as a premiere.  Do you think that’s because Sundance offers a good Oscar platform?  Is it because the distributors are expecting to find the great docs there?  Why has Sundance stepped in to fill that position in a way that it doesn’t really do on the narrative side?

DC:  Well, I think partly because Sundance, years ago, elevated documentaries to be on a par with narrative films which is unlike so many festivals.  In fact, not only “on a par”, they’re first in our catalog.  They get so much attention.  We just have given documentary filmmakers the respect that they’re due and not that many festivals do.  I mean, it’s always like, if you’re at another festival, it’s like "the other".

The Monday Brief: More on THE COVE's Battle With Tokyo, Spike's Latest Doc Hits Big and Cinema Eye Moves to January

Good morning from Des Moines, where last night I scored the last chicken lip of the 2009 Iowa State Fair...

Disney released its latest nonfiction release of 2009, X GAMES 3D THE MOVIE, on 1,399 screens, the largest opening for a doc since Disney released EARTH in May.  This time, however, the results were not EARTH-shattering, as X GAMES managed just $572 per screen and a total gross of $800K.  Since the film was announced as a one-week only theatrical release, the ESPN Films-branded documentary may have difficulty making it to $1M by Friday.

UPDATE: X GAMES ended its one-week run with nearly $1.4 million, making it the 7th nonfiction title of 2009 to reach the million dollar mark and the third this year for Disney.

Fairing better was the release of Spike Lee's PASSING STRANGE: THE MOVIE, a filming of the same-name Tony-award winning Broadway musical written by Stew.  The film was recently announced as the kickoff to IFC's new Sundance Selects series, a Video-on-Demand service which debuts this Wednesday on Comcast, Cox and Cablevision.  It had its theatrical debut on a single screen at NYC's IFC Center and managed to gross more than $18K for the weekend.

In other box office news, IT MIGHT GET LOUD continued on 7 screens, cooling a bit in its second weekend to an average of $7,429.  Its cume is now $198K.  Meanwhile, THE COVE is continuing to defy expectations (although not in the ways that one would hope), slipping 40% from the previous week and now down to 29 theaters and total box office of $537K.

Last week, we wrote about THE COVE's producer Fisher Stevens sending a letter to Nikke Finke protesting THE COVE's exclusion from the Tokyo Film Festival.  We noted that drawing attention to a festival rejection was rarely a good PR move for filmmakers, thinking that Stevens' email was some rogue act.  But we'd missed what had previously been something of a concerted effort by THE COVE's filmmakers to draw attention to what they described as the Japanese government's efforts to stop the film from screening in that country.  It began as early as July, when THE COVE director Louis Psihoyos spoke to the IDA's Sara Vizcarrando:

"There was a major distributor who wanted to distribute this film in Japan, but his excuse not to do it was, "I didn't realize there was so much national pressure from the government not to have this film seen." He also said that he was worried the fishermen there might commit suicide if it was out because they'd lose so much face...

The Tokyo Film Festival called today. They said that, ironically, the theme of this year's fest is the environment. Not the top director but one of the directors of the fest said it would be hypocritical of us not to show that film."

The Monday Brief: Thompson at indieWIRE, THE COVE Debuts and Michael Moore Threatens a Docu-Retirement

We're gonna try a bit of an experiment, a new feature here at the blog called The Monday Brief. 

What is it?  In short, it will be a recap of some of the news of the weekend, some of the items that we missed or couldn't get to from the previous week(s) and a bit of a riff on what we're thinking and talking about.

How long will it last?  Hard to say.  We're gonna try to keep it regular, although our filmmaking job will continue to take top priority, so we can assume that there will also be Commando Mondays (sans Briefs).  But we're hoping this provides an outlet for stories that seem to deserve more than a headline and maybe something less than a full blog post, plus a bit more stream of consciousness (which will likely get us into a spot of bother).

In any case, thanks for coming along for the ride.

Today is the day that Anne Thompson moves her column Thompson on Hollywood over to indieWIRE and, at press time, there's already a significant amount of content, including posts about THE HURT LOCKER's Oscar hopes, a few wrap-up pieces from ComiCon and a look at the disappointing year Universal is having.

As we wrote earlier this year after it was announced that Variety had given her the pink slip:

"Few are able to balance coverage of studios and indies as well as Thompson does.  And, true to her being a real reporter, she has better sources and a more inquisitive mind than nearly anyone who writes about the industry on a regular basis."

I should add that she's one of a handful of folks who pays a good deal of attention to what's happening in the documentary world.  It's great to see Thompson pair up with indieWIRE and it will be interesting to see how the partnership plays out.

Mo' Money for Socially Conscious Docs: Sundance Partners with Cinereach

A bit of hoopla over the past day or so as the Sundance Institute announced a new documentary initiative that will funnel 1.5 million dollars toward documentary filmmakers - at least those "with themes that evoke global cultural exchange and social impact".  News of the 3-year "Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute" comes as many are watching to see where the Sundance Film Festival will trend with new leadership (John Cooper was named festival director earlier this year) - whether it will balance its somewhat competing interests between bleeding heart docs and high profile, salable films or whether it will tilt towards the activist leanings that define the activities of the Institute.

A bright spot for those of us hoping for more than just the usual left-leaning content - Cinereach has made a point of supporting films with an artistic bent, recently giving money to Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri's stunning OCTOBER COUNTRY, a film that examines an under-represented slice of American life without being didactic. 

The film fund will supplement the existing Sundance Documentary Feature Film and Documentary Film Program, which means that only films that have already received the Sundance seal of approval will be eligble for the discretionary fund.

Press release excerpt after the break.

A New Nonfiction Shortlist for a New Award

As part of today's announcement of the upcoming, inaugural Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking, we have revealed a shortlist of 15 films, selected by a blue ribbon committee of film festival programmers.  These 15 films were the top vote getters in the category of Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking.  From this shortlist, five films will be nominated in the top category, with nominations to be announced in two weeks at an event in Park City, Utah.

The shortlisted films are:

BILLY THE KID
DEEP WATER
THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK
GHOSTS OF CITE SOLEIL
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON
INTO GREAT SILENCE
LAKE OF FIRE
MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET)
THE MONASTERY - MR. VIG AND THE NUN
NO END IN SIGHT
SICKO
TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE
THE UNFORESEEN
ZOO

indieWIRE has more here.

2007 Preview: Major Film Festivals Jan-Jun

As we embark on the new year (without even having finished our look back at the old), it's time to preview the major film festivals on tap for the first half of 2007.  While there may be sins of omission in this list (feel free to post others in the comments), it's a good starting point of the most important festivals of the year, particularly for folks interested in nonfiction:

January
Palm Springs    January 4 -15
Sundance        January 18 - 28, 2007
Rotterdam        January 24 - February 4
Santa Barbara    January 25 - February 4

February
Berlin           February 8 - 18
Cinequest        February 28 - March 11

March
True/False        March 1 - 4
Miami            March 2 - 11
SXSW            March 9 - 17
Mar del Plata        March 8 - 18
Cleveland        March 15 - 25
Thessaloniki Documentary        March 16 - 25
New Directors New Films     March 21 - April 1
AFI Dallas        March 22 - April 1
Chicago Docu    March 30 - April 8

April
Philadelphia        April 5 - 18
Full Frame          April 12 - 15
Sarasota        April 13 - 22
Hotdocs        April 19 - 29
Tribeca        April 25 - May 6
IFF Boston        April 25 - 30
San Francisco    April 26 - May 10

May
Emerging Talent    May 12 -15
Cannes        May 16 - 27
Seattle        May 24 - June 17

June
Newport        June 5 - 10
Cinevegas        June 8 - 16
AFI Silverdocs        June 12 - 17
Provincetown    June 13 - 17
Los Angeles        June 21 - July 1