mediajock

Dennis Potter, you are missed...

2011-07-15T20:15:00.001-07:00

Dennis Potter, dying of cancer, talks about his last wish: To be able to murder Rupert Murdoch.

What it is like to bomb...

2011-06-21T10:01:00.001-07:00

Allan Havey, from Marc Maron's essential podcast...(only 1.5 minutes)

Memorial Day

2011-05-28T19:07:00.001-07:00

My first paid job in the film industry was as a P.A. on a Larry Cohen horror movie: "Return to Salem's Lot", that just happened to star one of my heroes, the director Sam Fuller. Part of my job was to drive him to and from the set. Boy, could he tell a story. My first film job, and probably my best film job.

Mad Max 2 / Road Warrior dialogue word cloud

2011-03-20T08:24:00.001-07:00

Ratf*cking in Madison

2011-02-21T08:04:00.001-08:00

Communication is war by other means. Clearly, there is a war going on in Madison, WI. A right-wing radio talk show named Mark WIlliams is being quite open about his willingness to engage in what are called "false flag" techniques to de-legitimize the anti-Gov Walker protests. (The term "ratf*cking" was coined by Donald Segretti, a lawyer who worked for Richard Nixon) Williams wrote, in a message to his audience:

… (1) I signed up as an organizer (2) with any luck they will contact me and I will have an "in" (3) in or not I will be there and am asking as many other people as can get there to come with, all of us in SEIU shirts (those who don't have them we can possibly buy some from vendors likely to be there) (4) we are going to target the many TV cameras and reporters looking for comments from the members there (5) we will approach the cameras to make good pictures… signs under our shirts that say things like "screw the taxpayer!" and "you OWE me!" to be pulled out for the camera (timing is important because the signs will be taken away from us) (6) we will echo those slogans in angry sounding tones to the cameras and the reporters. (7) if I do get the 'in' I am going to do my darnedest to get podium access and take the mic to do that rant from there…with any luck and if I can manage the moments to build up to it, I can probably get a cheer out of the crowd for something extreme.

WARNING: When around these union events do NOT instigate ANY physical confrontation, walk away from anyone who tries to start one with you. These people WILL have a mob mentality and ARE dangerous. [...]

Chances are that because I am publishing this they'll catch wind, but it is worth the chance if you take it upon yourself to act…there's only one of me but there are millions of you and I know that you CAN do this!

Our goal is to make the gathering look as greedy and goonish as we know that it is, ding their credibility with the media and exploit the lazy reporters who just want dramatic shots and outrageous quotes for headlines. Even if it becomes known that we are plants the quotes and pictures will linger as defacto truth.

Williams is also notorious for making racist blog posts, which seems to be okay with CNN, where he continues to be invited to speak.

Editing

2010-11-14T15:38:00.001-08:00

A great blog post, about a course we all need to take. Who could teach it?

"It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.

I don't care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.

Along the way you'd trade detail for brevity. Hopefully adding clarity at each point. This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. The future belongs to the best editors."

The Leviathan

2010-09-16T18:53:00.000-07:00

The white whale of Melville's imagination symbolized many things, but above all it symbolized the American propensity to extend itself far beyond the point of diminishing returns to the point of absurdity and collapse and mass-destruction.

Ahab pursues the Moby Dick across the world, beyond the point of no return, risking money, sanity and the lives of his crew in his obsessive quest. His multi-cultural crew nevertheless accepts the situation and throws their lot in with him, mesmerized by the unfolding disaster.

The reason why Melville succeeded in writing the Great American Novel is because he found a perfect metaphor to describe an essential aspect of the American character. The white whale can serve as a proxy for the American military, who "destroy a village in order to save it", the financial system, which seems to be built on a foundation of vapor, which can implode inexplicably, the art or literary worlds, which on their upper margins manufacture artifacts with no intrinsic beauty, but nevertheless "comment" on themselves. The Leviathan of America's celebrity culture is also a subject that fulfills, again and again, Melville's prophecy, ending on a stainless steel gurney in a morgue in Hollywood. This was the final stop for performers like Marlyn Monroe, River Phoenix, and Jayne Mansfield.

The revelation that Joaquin Phoenix's last two years of public meltdown may have all been a hoax is a facinating development that could be an important event - a piece of satire and performance art that played out across a stage that spanned geography and the internet - far from the rarefied world of PS122 and The Kitchen. If it is a masterpiece of public theater that I think it is, it has interesting antecedents in the work of Andy Kaufman, whose work, best seen in the documentary "I'm From Hollywood", depicts a true misanthrope and satirist running amok in the absurd world of pro-wrestling.

Note to those in Hollywood who are pissed off: Artists are supposed to hold a mirror up to life.

Iterations

2010-08-29T19:04:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of talking to Ken Schneider, the editor of Speaking in Tongues, when I attended a screening of the film at the Docyard. The film is an exploration of bilingual education, and weaves together several stories of young people in bilingual programs, and how those programs enrich their lives. It also tackles the politically charged issue of bilingual education, and explores some of the pushback from nativists who want to declare English to be America's "official" language.

The film accomplishes so many complicated goals that it is a bit of a miracle. It is an almost academic study of the effects of bilingual education. It is a human story of struggle and triumph. It has a tone of journalistic objectivity that is fair and inclusive of different viewpoints.

At the film after-party, I spoke to Ken and bemoaned my current, never-ending editing project, which, like "Tongues", is unscripted, attempts to be objective, and requires the weaving together of several characters and their storylines.

Editing is the only aspect of filmmaking that has no similarity to earlier art forms. Writing a screenplay is similar to writing a play. Directing on a set is comparable to directing for the stage. Editing a film, and in this case, editing a documentary, isn't like anything else that ever came before in human history. In a sense you are writing, or creating a narrative, a story, but from images and sounds of real events. You can cut a scene many different ways, and get a completely different effect. But the individual scenes serve a larger narrative that must have coherence. It needs to be more than the sum of its parts. It is also a temporal experience, like music, but with images, like a mosaic that you view one tile at a time. When it is over, you stand back, and see the entire picture as a thing, in your memory.

I asked Ken about the editing process of his complicated narrative. He talked somewhat ruefully about the sheer, hard slog of the edit. He talked of the process of refining the scene, arranging the shots until its central idea emerges in a distilled form. This requires re-ordering the shots, re-ordering scenes, trying different combinations. But he used an odd word - "iterations". It isn't a word you use every day. Wikipedia defines it as:

"the act of repeating a process usually with the aim of approaching a desired goal or target or result. Each repetition of the process is also called an "iteration", and the results of one iteration are used as the starting point for the next iteration."

It is interesting that the word "iteration" is associated with mathematics and computing, and not artistic pursuits, which might use a word like "revisions", "versions" or "variations". Warhol's "100 Soup Cans" and Bach's "Goldberg Variations" come to mind. An iterative approach to editing allows one to re-order scenes and experiment with different openings and various endings. Luck comes into play, serendipity, when you try butting two shots together that vields an unexpectedly exciting result. The word also connotes the possibility that sheer chance plays a role. Sometimes whole scenes can be re-ordered easily, more often than not a new order requires multiple small tweeks - like when a variable change in a spreadsheet has an unforeseen cascading effect that completely alters the filmmaker's perception of the material.

I am reminded of a story told by Bob Geldoff in "Is that it?", his account of producing the "We are the World" concerts. A news editor, whose name has been lost to history, had the idea of putting footage from Ethiopian famine on top of the song "Drive" by the new wave band "The Cars". While the song played ("who's going to pick you up, when you fall?...We can't go on, thinking nothing's wrong."), there was an excruciating shot of a starving child crawling in the African dust. The biggest spike in contributions during the multiple-hour concert occurred when this altered music video aired. Neither the news cameraman or Rick Ocasek ever imagined combining these two completely incongruous parts, and certainly never anticipated the heart-breaking sum. But these kinds of moments happen all the time in the editing room, and it is why editing is so exciting. Non-linear editing systems allow for this kind of play, and these moments of serendipity.

On the other hand, Spielberg reportedly still edits on a Moviola. "I need the time it takes to make a cut to think". In other words, he makes every cut consciously, and rarely goes back to tweek. Old-school editors, who used non-linear Steenbecks and Moviolas can often be heard to dismiss youngsters brought up on Avid and Final Cut Pro as "Have a look" editors. Try it one way, have a look. Try it another way, have a look. Old school will tell you that art isn't about trying stuff out, it is about making choices. And no doubt non-linear editing systems can enable indecision.

The trap of iterative editing is that you never stop pushing the paint around. The trap of old-school is that you become an machine, immune from inspiration.

Whatever your personality as an editor, success will probably come down to what it has always come down to - what carpenters call "time on tools". Skill and mastery in anything - editing, sports, writing, playing the piano, comes down to those three things that Arthur Rubinstein said might get you to Carnegie Hall - practice, practice, and practice - which, in addition to developing technical skill, leaves you open to serendipity - happy accidents.

Does your language shape how you think?

2010-08-28T06:07:00.000-07:00

A fascinating article in the NYTIMES magazine by Guy Deutscher on language and how it can influence your ability to understand certain concepts.

It is particularly interesting in discussing languages that use egocentric coordinates (left, right, straight, behind) vs. languages that use cardinal directions - north, south east west. Anyone who has lived in Bali and has tried to ask directions has experienced this - the Balinese never say "take a left at the light and then take your 2nd right." - they would say "Go north, and at the light, east, and then after two blocks, go north again."

But Deutscher errs when he leaves the impression that the Balinese have a purely cardinal approach to orientation.

For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.

This is interesting, but actually, the Balinese system does not use cardinal directions. In Bali, Cardinal directions exist, but they via with the kaja-kelod concept - an orientation system that considers the central mountain, Gunung Agung, to be "north" and the sea to be "south". When a Balinese tells you to go north, he might be telling you to go "toward Agung Mountain", even if it is situated to the south, east or west of where you are!

Some of Fred Eismen's writing on the subject has found its way online:

ORIENTATION IN BALI begins with the sacred mountain, Gunung Agung, which stands 3,142 meters high in the eastern central part of the island. Gunung (Mount) Agung is the dwelling place of the Hindu gods. Toward the mountain is called kaja. Because Gunung Agung is in a fairly central location, kaja is a variable direction. It is north for inhabitants of South Bali and south for those who live in North Bali.Whether north or south, it is always "up," the sacred direction toward God. Antipodal to kaja is kelod, seaward, toward th e lower elevations and away from the holy mountain. Kelod is "down," less sacred than kaja, even impure. The second-most sacred direction, after kaja, is kangin, "east," the direction from which the sun, an important manifestation of God, rises. Kangin's opposite to the west, kauh, is correspondingly less sacred.

I am not sure that there is even a word for this way of thinking - it isn't egocentric, it isn't cardinal. "Agung-centric"?

In any case, it is one of the many mind-blowing concepts you learn in Bali.

Fredrick Wiseman at Docyard: Luck, Judgement and Patience.

2010-07-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

I got some insight into what kind of temperament one needs to sustain a 60 year career in documentary when I asked Fredrick Wiseman what I imagined to be a fair question: What recent trends in documentary film do you find heartening or perhaps disheartening?

"I don't go to films. I mostly read."
I pressed him: "You don't watch films? When you go to film festivals or these kinds of events?"
"I still read. There are hundred of years of literature to choose from. I prefer that."

I plopped down. Was that a dumb question? Was that an arrogant answer? Should I take this personally and title this blog article "Wiseman to Aspiring Documentary Filmmakers: Drop Dead"?

I wasn't the only questioner at The Doc Yard's screening of "Hospital" (1969) who didn't get far with documentary director Fredrick Wiseman. The host, an academic in film studies, had his first question brushed aside as well, and he was forced to regroup and find another angle.

But I was personalizing it. There was a lesson here from documentary zen master Wiseman. (who, in fact, looked more than a bit like Yoda) Wiseman embodied the essential quality one needs in order to sustain a long career in documentary: the executive ability to say "No" and move on quickly . One needs a ruthless internal compass to guide you through the brambles of distraction, which are intent on taking you down blind alleys. That ability to make quick calls, to dismiss the distracting or extraneous - either in interviews or while slogging through millions of feet of footage - is essential. Because you need to stay on track - have a sense of the scope and form of the work - or you get lost quickly.

It may be inaccurate to call these decisions "judgement calls", because it is not like Wiseman was passing moral or intellectual judgement, calling a question stupid. He just didn't want to go there. That's the Zen part. A piece of marble that a sculptor chips from the block isn't "bad", it just doesn't belong in the piece. In fact, it might have been a great question, but if you've ever edited a film, you know that there are always going to be great scenes that you remove simply because they didn't fit in the larger piece. The scene might have taken all day to shoot. It might have cost a lot of money. It might be hilarious. Faulkner called these bits "darlings", and said "Kill your darlings" - when they don't serve the whole. Pirsig wrote that there is a third way to answer a yes or no question: the Chinese character "Mu", which means "Unask the Question".

Apart from the ability to stay on point, Wiseman also exemplified the kind of self-reliance needed to survive. He had a distributor for his first two films, but when he found out they were ripping him off, he sued them. (And got some money back). Since then, he has self-distributed his work: "If it fails, I know that it is my fault that it failed."

Along these lines, the experience of "Titicut Follies" may have been a defining moment. It was Wiseman's second film, and it was immediately censored and not allowed to be shown in public. For 24 years, Wiseman soldiered on, step by step, in his legal battle for the film's release. From being initially banned, the film was allowed to be shown to credentialed medical professionals. Wiseman then argued that he could not be responsible to check the ID's of people at screenings. He won that motion, and the film was allowed screenings in University settings without viewers being required to sign a form. (That's how I first saw it, at Wesleyan University back in the 80's). Eventually, all censorship was dropped. But how many filmmakers would have thrown in the towel rather than fight for the film (and the First Amendment, for that matter. Titicut Follies still has the distinction of being "The only American film banned from release for reasons other than obscenity or national security".

Wiseman told the audience that the essential qualities documentary filmmakers needed was luck, judgment, and patience. I'd add courage and character - and not shutting off the camera when the going gets gross. Hospital has perhaps the longest scene of projectile vomiting in motion picture history. A lesser cameraman and director might have fled the scene, or cut the material for the sake of "good taste" (even today, people leave the theater) But if Wiseman had punked out, audiences would have been denied one of the most outrageous moments in film history, and the funniest line about Art Majors, ever.

An earnest young woman asked about the ending of the film, which showed doctors, nurses and patience in the hospital chapel, praying, offering tithe. She said "I have two reactions to that - the first is that you are being cynical. The other is that you are saying that religion gives these people hope for the future, and helps them get through their problems."

Wiseman's response: "Can't I be saying both things?"

Om.

Kickstarter Success - "The Great Intervention"

2010-07-15T20:22:00.000-07:00

A strange thing happened to me in the early 90's. I was invited to Los Angeles to work on a documentary. While there, I dove into a swimming pool. When I got out of the pool, somehow over a year had passed. I have some vague memories of living in a house with some over-stimulated neo-beat poets, writing a screenplay, having a few meetings, buying a cassette tape of songs from a kid named Beck for $2, and getting very drunk when aforementioned documentary won the 1992 Academy Award for best feature documentary. It may have all been a dream, except I still have that cassette tape, and some of those poets I still count as friends.

A friend from my LA years, Steve Moramarco, just succeeded in raising over $5000 via Kickstarter.

To paraphrase from Wikipedia, Kickstarter is an online platform for funding creative projects, often indie films. The concept is called "Crowdfunding" - using ones social marketing skills, you raise money from the general public. Kickstarter claims no ownership over the projects and turns a profit by claiming 5% of the funds raised. Project owners choose a deadline and a target minimum of funds to raise. If the chosen target is not gathered by the deadline, no funds are collected (this is known as a provision point mechanism). Money pledged by donors is collected using the Amazon Payments system, and projects require a U.S. bank account.

Steve is a wildly creative guy - I knew him in 1990 when he was in a band called "Hill of Beans", though I had the pleasure of playing music with him once. I moved to NYC and years later he moved in across the street from me in Williamsburg. He popped into my life a year or so ago when I heard a Hill of Beans song "Satan, Lend Me a Dollar" close out an episode of "Weeds".

So I found him on Facebook, where I became one of his 827 friends. This was where he began his campaign to raise the money for his film, "The Great Intervention". His posts - and there were several daily - begged, cajoled, and implored his friends to cross his palm with silver. But, and this is a big but, he was charming, funny, and witty all the while. Each facebook post linked to a youtube video that made the point well: The Beatles: "Don't Let Me Down", The Jam: "I Need You", Europe: "The Final Countdown", and, when the target was met, Louis Prima: "Pennies from Heaven", Big Star: "Thank You Friends"... Of course, I kicked in.

The film critic Andre Bazin wrote about genre directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks and called them "genius of the system". Crowdfunding is part of the new system. Ted Hope has offered that directors seeking funding from private sources will need to demonstrate social media skills, and Morrie Warshawski speaks of filmmakers not trying to build an audience, but build a community.

Steve Moramarco is clearly ahead of the curve. I wish him well.

Console Wars

2010-07-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

Neil Cicierega had the idea of a film about the 1980's gaming console format wars between Sega, Sony, Nintendo and Atari, which make the VHS / Beta war seem like a spitball fight. I suggested a puppet show version, and went to youtube and came upon this.
I'm too old to have ever had a dog in the gaming console fight, but I did buy (to my regret) an Atari ST as my first computer.
This is a hilarious, naive example of "Object Theater" - an academic term that encompasses everything from the work of Italian Futurists to the muppets, bunraku, and Nascar. There will be a summit on the subject of Object Theater in April 2011.

Haul Videos

2010-07-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

Haul Videos are a popular genre on youtube. Teen-age girls talk to the camera about what they just bought at the mall. Many, like this young woman, have been recruited by business for marketing purposes. It is tempting do parody this kind of thing, but perhaps too easy. Besides, with 700k views on this video alone, she'll have the last laugh...
My wife wanted to know how I heard about this. The truth is - it was mentioned on NPR's Marketwatch.

Writing shines despite wooden performances

2010-06-28T13:52:00.001-07:00

Pretty damn funny. Xtranormal is a wonderful service that promises only to improve over time. Write a script, choose your avatars, and a simple animation is created for you.

Curious to see how features evolve. I want to control the camera, have more choices as far as characters, voices and movements are concerned.

Who will be the first to make a feature-length film using xtranormal?

The Storyteller Part 2 The Oral Tradition

2010-06-27T12:07:00.001-07:00

Listening to the audio book of "The Killer Angels", I couldn't help but feel certain resonances with the storytelling tradition that has obsessed me for 25 years, the Javanese wayang kulit (shadow puppet theater). Both have similar thematic concerns - heroism, war, fate, destiny, character, the military, power, terrain, ethics, duty, you know, the small stuff.

But what got me a 'thinkin' is the simple act of a solitary man or woman telling a story. A story weaving several storylines, multiple characters, switching from one point-of-view to another, using different vocal characterizations along with a neutral narrator's God-like dispassion.

It is a tradition as old as mankind. It may be in eclipse as we reorient - on a neurological level - to more visual forms of storytelling, but it still exists, both in traditional societies, and in unlikely forms here in the developed world - stand-up comedy, for instance. The wayang is an example of the traditional model - its unrivaled continuity over generations makes it a rarity. It uses music and visual aids, however. Simpler ancient examples - relics from bygone days, are the bhopa of Northwest India - which are discussed in a fascinating New Yorker article. Their ability to memorize the equivalent of thousands of pages of text is a freakish skill that puts them as outliers in the realm of human capacity - like Kenyan long-distance runners, Sherpa mountaineers, and Keith Richard's tolerance for controlled substances. There are also the bissu of Sulawesi - a very odd transvestite/shaman/storyteller who memorize what is thought to be the longest text in the literary history, La Galiago. (BTW, This was the subject of a Robert Wilson piece. )

Homer, is the obvious Western touchstone, legend has it that the Iliad and Odyssey were originally spoken from memory. Homer used epithets:

"a combination of a descriptive phrase and a noun. An epithet presents a miniature portrait that identifies a person or thing by highlighting a prominent characteristic of that person or thing... fleet-footed Achilles, rosy-fingered dawn, wine-dark sea, earth-shaking Poseidon, and gray-eyed Athena. The Homeric epithet is an ancient relative of such later epithets as Richard the Lion-Hearted, Ivan the Terrible, and America the Beautiful. Homer repeated his epithets often, presumably so the listeners of his recited tales could easily remember and picture the person or thing each time it was mentioned."

I suspect that epithets may be common to all the above-mentioned traditions - they certainly exist in the wayang kulit. Epithets have a mnemonic purpose for the storyteller and audience - they help you keep the character's straight. Others have analogized them to musical leitmotiv - or what a comedian calls a "call-back", or screenwriters call a "catch-phrase" - they identify a character but also provide connective tissue in a wide-ranging narrative.

These kinds of epic stories were (are) open-source. Anyone is allowed to tell the stories, personalize them, make them relevant. The stories evolved over time, certain episodes dropped, others given greater emphasis. They were work-shopped over generations and centuries. As oral traditions, the narratives evolved in an organic way. Without a codified, official, written version, there could be great regional variation- farm team versions that beta-tested themes, plot twists, and characters. The best ideas - what Malcom Gladwell would call the "sticky" ideas, would get incorporated into the corpus. These would be passed down generation to generation. The bad ideas - the ones that didn't meet with popular approval (see "Jar-Jar Binks") would wither away - pruned from the narrative tree.

As narratives morphed from open-source to intellectual property, and from oral narratives to visual narratives, cognition changes came about in the human mind.

More to come...

The Storyteller

2010-06-15T18:04:00.001-07:00

I recently had the great pleasure to listen to the audiobook of Michael Shara's The Killer Angels, a historical novel that tells the story of the battle of Gettysburg. The masterful reading was performed by Stephen Hoye, and American actor with extensive training in Shakespeare - he even worked the Old Vic for many years.

The Killer Angels is an extraordinary book - and extremely influential. It inspired my former classmate Joss Whedon to write "Serenity", and it was the single reason why Ken Burns became fixated on the war between the states.

My eyesight has been deteriorating as I slide into middle-age, and I am discovering the joy of audiobooks, which make long car drives quite pleasurable. I haven't found any non-fiction books that play as well on audio as fiction - and there is an entire range of quality in the fiction audio book genre. Jim Dale's has won a great deal of renown for his readings of the Harry Potter books - material fitting for a scenery chewing stage actor with a lot of range.

But historical novels are a different animal. The drama and anguish of real history is not suited to Broadway theatrics that actors like Jim Dale and Patrick Stewart traffic in. Hoye's reading of The Killer Angels offers subtle characterizations - just enough to distinguish the characters - but not straying too far from the actor's own voice and pitch. While Hoye demonstrates a remarkable facility with accents - Virginian southern, Irish, British, Down-east Mainer - they never overwhelm the novelistic narrative - or attempt to turn the novel into a "drama". He doesn't play the characters broadly, but rather maintains a consistent voice - perhaps he consciously decided to defer to the author's voice and intent, and empty out his quiver of actorly tricks.

I've always steered clear of the Civil War - no sympathy for Southern Honor, and the lack of visual reference points (except of course, Mathew Brady's photos) never gave the material a foothold in my visually-oriented brain. And fat-assed civil-war re-enactors are up there with tea-baggers and Sarah Palin fans as people most worthy of ridicule. I never even bothered to check out the Ken Burns documentary. I think that may change now. Perhaps you need to be middle-aged to appreciate the resonances of the Civil War - and have had personal experience with disaster, folly, ego, loss, love, death and idealism. Which is not to say there is any danger of me donning a uniform and participating in a re-enactment of Pickett's charge, but nevertheless I can see the attraction.

Complexity vs Simplicity

2010-06-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

Ted Hope turned me on to Clay Shirky's remarkable essay. It seems to clarify many ideas that have been floating the ether recently, and has some far-reaching ramifications.

Actually, Shirky's piece is deeply indebted to the work of Joseph Tainter, who in 1988 wrote a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Haven't read it yet. It's on the way. (Isn't it nice to be turned on to a new major thinker?)

Shirky takes Tainter's ideas, which apply to the collapse of complex societies, and lays them on top of his own ideas on the demise of the old media forms - TV and movies in particular. Some network TV types want to know how to save the old business model of sitcoms and commercials. Shirky not only tells them what they don't want to hear, but what they cannot hear, to wit: their paradigm is doomed. Moreover, that is a good thing. Just as many of the citizens of the Roman Empire actually saw their nutrition actually improve after the collapse of the Empire, (and the demise of parasitic elites) so too will new forms spring forth from the ash heap of the three networks.

Shirky paraphrases:

"Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond."

The phrase "those societies" can refer to any number of entrenched elites - pick your favorite: the newspaper business, the Senate, either political party, the American Empire, Europe, the American labor movement, the conservative movement, the progressive movement, feminism, the oil industry, advertising, academia, your PC's operating system, your marriage, the stock market.

If you are a doom and gloom pessimist, it is a far-reaching paradigm. Almost one-size fits all. Things fall apart because they become too complex. The complexity distracts from the central imperative of survival.

Youtube at 5 years

2010-06-03T06:56:00.001-07:00

Youtube is 5 years old, and a retrospective is now up. Conan O'Brien offers some curatorial input. There are also some well shot (looks like a Canon 7D) videos - interviews with youtube celebrities. Strangely, local phenomenon Neil Cicierega isn't represented.

Taking inventory. The new landscape.

2010-05-22T06:14:00.001-07:00

Dennis Cass, author of Headcase, makes a little youtube video that pretty much encapsulates the plight of the artist in the day of social media and social marketing, which coincides with the collapse of the indie film and the book publishing models. This is the world we live in. Time was artists would plug away, dreaming of the day a media conglomerate would discover and adopt you, take you into their fold, and you'd get paid happily ever after. You'd have your little place in media Valhalla, dine with Oprah, Leno and Larry King, and your fifteen minutes of fame would translate into a long tail of backend residuals that would allow you to live in comfort as you practiced your craft.

That fantasy doesn't exist any more, though there will always be the perennial crop of aspiring screenwriters and actresses who flock to LA every year, like lemmings.

Did it ever exist? Ted Hope has spoken of periods of time when market conditions were wonderful for indies - when the VHS market exploded and anyone could get financing for a little drama or horror film, provided there was a recognizable star's name to put on the sleeve. Technological innovations, like the introduction of the VX-1000 and Final Cut Pro, completely altered the economics of producing a video. Artists, being interviewed, could ponder the question: "Do you make films for yourself or for an audience?", as if they were mutually exclusive. But in fact, it was never easy. It was always a slog, which doesn't mean it was the Bataan Death March, but it was always a slog.

What happens when you choose a vocation that provides you with only a marginal income? You find out if it is worth it.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

2010-05-13T06:38:00.001-07:00

Raising the money isn't fun, but at least the process is finite: You know when you are done.

Directing the movie is the fun part.

Getting people to see the film is the long slog. And it never ends, you just eventually reach the point of diminishing returns and call it quits.

With so many books coming out on viral marketing, social media marketing, alternative distribution platforms, and the collapse of the indie film market, one might get the impression that there was a time in history when it was easy to foist a film on the world.

It never was.

Viewing this trailer, one suspects that Orson Welles would have done just about anything to get his films out there - and he did. And even after making Citizen Kane, he couldn't get funding and distribution.

What would Orson Welles have done with Social Media?

He would have been a tweeking, facebooking, myspacing motherf*cker.

What bad filmmaking looks like

2010-05-11T07:10:00.001-07:00

Digital cameras allow just about anyone to make a documentary, and, sadly, they are. This trailer is wrong on just about every level. Badly edited. Badly shot. Cliched choice of music. The sound is even bad. First image has us looking up a character's nose as he struggles to articulate a point. Absolutely no sense of rhythm in the cutting. At 00:36 we get a shot of Hitchen's nose as he speaks, with blank, generic crowd reaction shots that for some reason have been distressed and de-saturated. There is no dramatic structure here. There are any number of ways by which an editor can, using the formal elements of film - screen direction, cross-cutting, etc... - create dramatic tension that anticipates a confrontation - or a collision, if you will. This filmmaker seems completely unaware of what it is that an editor does.

The Powerpoint Problem

2010-04-27T08:14:00.001-07:00

This NYTIMES article articulates several important problems with powerpoint as a communication medium. In the hands of a genius communicator - like Thomas P.M. Barnett, Powerpoint can be entertaining and informative. It certainly helps if the speaker knows his material and feels passionate about it. But in almost all cases it has reductive effects on communication - a clear case of diminishing returns.

Powerpoint is a medium with its own rules, and it proscribes ideas accordingly. Concepts are factored down into Icons. Thoughts become bullet points. When one listens to a public speaker, a fairly high level of engagement is in needed - we search the speakers face for micro-expressions, we tune into the voice to hear inflections and nuances. Powerpoint turns the live theater of a public speaker into a visually dull movie that reduces our engagement - the human face is constantly changing - the powerpoint slide does not. And when the slides are turned on, we know that a script is being followed - there is less room for improvisation, and surprises become less likely.

Barnett's use of powerpoint is far more engaging - he's really a master of the medium, which means that he understands when it serves his material and when it does not. First of all, he is lit, so we can see his face as well as the projected screen. When the audience is bored with what is on the screen, they can see his face. He conducts the animated material with his hands - the "who gets the children sequence" . He uses body language to illustrate the plight of the submarine commander without an enemy. He surprises the audience with a "Law and Order" music cue. He brings jokes. My only critique of his TED talk is that he needs to hire a graphic designer - who could also go to town on his website.

But the key is that he doesn't let the medium dictate the message. Most people let the Powerpoint tail wag the information dog. Five bullet points make a nice composition on the screen - so if you only have three, think up two more. Let's try several fonts and colors. Let's force the audience to watch this animation that I spent so much time on - even if it interrupts the flow of the presentation.

Since the cave paintings at Lascaux homo sapian has been trying to get its ideas across using visual aids. Its never been about the slides or the pigment you smear on the walls of the cave - if you don't have anything to say, bells, whistles, and powerpoint will only make it worse.

Strong Short Documentary

2010-04-18T17:45:00.001-07:00

Great photography, editing. Heavy story. Shot with canon 7D - a camera that, in its own way, may be as important as the Sony VX-1000 - the first 3 chip minidv camera. I want one, dammit.

How much do Musicians make?

2010-04-16T06:35:00.001-07:00

Facinating. Sad. Infuriating. Now we need the same information for Indie Filmmakers.

Fathom for Indies

2010-03-05T13:42:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to Boston to see a Fathom event for CARE. The event's listing can be seen here. It brought together the authors of "Half the Sky" - by NYT reporter Nicholas Kristof. It included a number of musical artists as well as Maria Bello and Marisa Tomei, who made a short film that also aired as part of the event. The even's purpose was to raise money for CARE and raise awareness for women's health and education in the 3rd world. This event wasn't live, the original event took place at NYU in early February. But FATHOM can do live events.

I immediately thought of Ted Hope, the legendary Indie producer and twitter/facebook phenomenon. (Hey, I knew him when he lived in Carrol Gardens with a stuffed dog. Really.) The first person to put together a Fathom event for an Indie film will probably unloose the floodgates.

Here's the idea: You've got an Indie film and you didn't get distribution, even though you garnered some attention at a major festival and got good critical notices. You've got at least one well known actor or and actor who is a monster with social networking. You've got a cool band to do your soundtrack. The director is an up-and-comer. So rather than go straight to DVD you organize a one night only Fathom event in 10 cities. You pull out all the social networking stops - everyone on the crew tells their friends and family. The event begins like a screening at a film festival - the director comes on stage and introduces the film. The film is shown. Then the crew, stars, director, producer, and musical guests open the floor up to questions (via tweet and facebook and email and text) The musicians play a number or two.

If the film is a documentary, and tackles a social issue, the event can be a co-fundraiser with an NGO, and utilize their email and social network assets. In the event I saw, the audience was asked to text a code that would link them to the CARE social network, and, I assume, give CARE a donation above and beyond the ticket price.

A Fathom event could also be an exclusive screening - only invited guests - say, friends and families of the crew, or people on the band's "1000 True Fans" list.

The possibilities for political organization are also immense. Sad to say, but Glenn Beck has already figured that out, and had a Fathom event of his own. More on this subject as I brainstorm some more. Comments appreciated!

Note: Ted Hope also wrote about FATHOM today, at the same time I was writing. Clearly, the 100th Monkey Effect was operating here...

Review: Rip! A Remix Manifesto

2010-02-21T12:39:00.000-08:00

It is a very impressive film, one that tackles a timely issue, targets the youth demograph, and delivers, more or less. It is strongest when it explains the issues (using some excellent AE animation) and builds its argument, but weak when it spends an inordinate amount of time watching kids dancing to Girl Talk. The filmmaker makes a number of appearances, but doesn't come through as a particularly strong presence on camera. In for a penny, in for a pound - if you are going to appear in your own doc, you need to be an actual character in the story.

But when was the last time you watched a film and learned something you didn't know?

This is a clip from RIP! A REMIX MANIFESTO.

In it Bruce Lehman, formerly of the Clinton Administration, voices his second thoughts on the trade policies he shepherded through Congress in 1997. Since those policies came into play, the trade gap between the US and China has tripled.

When the history is written on where America went wrong and lost its way, perhaps the bargain we struck with the world in 1997 will be seen as a turning point.

The bargain - Faustian or not - was this: We'll let the rest of the world have our manufacturing jobs, but in exchange they have to honor our laws on intellectual property. China, you get to build toaster ovens, toys, and eventually, cars. But you have to pay us licensing fees and royalties on our inventions, art and ideas.

One problem: Can any nation survive without a broad-based economy that includes a manufacturing base? Are we going to go to war against China if they violate our IP laws? With what Army? - the one that is built from components made in China?

The interlocking dependencies of world powers - our Treasury Bills, our IP, our wheat and corn, our military vs their manufacturing ability, their economic might, their connectivity, their aging population etc... it all becomes a blur of variables and, at least for me, impossible to determine who will have the upper hand in the future.

But individuals can hedge their bets. Which is why I am glad I have Irish citizenship (access to the EU) and why I am glad my wife has Indonesian citizenship. Our children will have options. Assuming they study their Mandarin.

Newsonomics

2010-02-12T10:28:00.000-08:00

I just heard an interesting interview with the author of "Newsonomics" that revealed that one of the main reasons big companies are not buying newspaper ads (or internet ads) is that they are bypassing them and marketing directly to their B2B clients and the general population. I wonder if they are bypassing, more and more, television and cable for same reason - the internet is its own portal.

A contrast to the story in the NYTIMES has this story on how Medical companies are making a major putsch to reach out to the general public - not at all a coincidence that they are under fire as the health care debate goes forward.

Marketing to Faith community

2010-02-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

This article in the Times talks about how "the Blind Side" marketed to church communities - even providing video clips to be used in sermons. I think this might be a good approach for many documentaries.

Key graf:

"But once the movie was made — on a modest $35 million budget, about $5.5 million of which was recouped from Georgia tax incentives — churchgoing women and their families were also attracted with help from Grace Hill Media. This marketing company has been used by studios for years to bring such audiences to films like “Walk the Line,” “Elf” and “The Pursuit of Happyness.”

In this case Grace Hill took the unusual step of offering online sermon outlines based on “The Blind Side,” with clips that could be used in churches equipped with video screens. According to Mr. Johnson and Mr. Kosove, about 23,000 churches downloaded the sermons, laying an exceptionally strong base for the film."

Getting Meta

2010-01-31T12:28:00.000-08:00

This video is brilliant, but I suppose it is a unlikely that it will have any effect on the general hackery that rules the day in TV News.

Here is a blogging equivalent, Which was inspired by this and this, apparently.

The problem with Paywalls...

2010-01-27T07:37:00.000-08:00

Is that people are accustomed to free. Newsday tried it, and only 35 people signed up...

King Corn, Continued

2010-01-26T07:23:00.000-08:00

MediaJock appears to have at least one reader. Curt Ellis, maker of "King Corn", liked my analysis....
___________

Hey Daniel,

Thanks for the nice note and the thoughtful review! Sorry to take so long getting back to you.

We didn't know about the Corn King myth in the edit room, but I'm glad you pointed it out (you're the first!) and I'm sure we were influenced by its derivatives at least. Aaron (my cousin and the director behind the camera) talked about the Butz scene as being a moment where we see the man behind the curtain and realize that he isn't a wizard after all; just some guy's grandfather. That wasn't something we thought about before it happened, though -- Ian and I are who we are (reasonably meek guys not capable of pulling off a Moore-Heston confrontation if we wanted to), and the revelation we had in that moment was genuine: our system for food production sucks, but it's not the fault of evil -- it's just a function of another generation's government policy that we've all been too lazy to fix.

The other idea we talked about some was the notion of Whiteheadian tragedy. For a while we were pursuing this question of "what are we going to do with our corn?" as a central organizing idea for the film. Then we realized that farmers don't have any choice of what to do with their harvest, so we didn't deserve to, either. As Whitehead sees it, what makes Oedipus tragic isn't that the guy kills his father and marries his mother, but that he was fated to do that terrible thing all along. It's inevitability that's the essence of dramatic tragedy. So that informed us to, I think, with the idea that Ian and I (or any farmer in our position) really didn't have a choice other than to play out the scenario as we did: with that acre of land, we were basically predestined to grow corn, sell it to the elevator, and watch it march off to the corn syrup factory. We were characters who were necessarily along for the ride, not heroes charting our own destiny.

I'm sure the smartest filmmakers see the ways their stories are could riff on myth and history well before it happens, but I think a lot of us (and I'd put us in this category) just make the story that feels right in the moment we're working on it. Surprisingly often, we match up with the tropes anyway, because those things just feel so right. It doesn't make the comparison any less valid, just more magical. These models work on us in ways we don't even know.

Best to you,
Curt

Bing - A game-changer for newpapers?

2010-01-25T19:42:00.000-08:00

A smattering of stories have surfaced in recent weeks that revolve around the thorny topic of newspapers seeking higher internet revenue. The News Corp's (market cap 70b) omnipresent cartoon villain Rupert Murdock is threatening Google (market cap 171b) with removing the WSJ's articles from Google's search function. He shakes his impotent little fists of rage in the opener of this episode of NPR's Planet Money.

The gist of the NPR piece is that BING is trying to muscle in on Google's action by offering news outlets a source of revenue other than advertising. By opting out of listing on Google and only being accessible via Bing, Microsoft promises newspapers another, hopefully more consistent revenue stream.

So far, two media outlets have signed on. A.H. Belo and Media News Group. (Since these linked articles have aired, Belo's stock has achieve a major stock pump, and Media News Group has gone into Chapter 11 restructuring).

Microsoft has pockets deep enough to overpay newspapers who sign on initially, and hopefully do some damage to Google's growth. Any newspaper signing on with Bing and opting out of Google would do well to lock in a high compensation rate for as long as possible. If Google brushes off the threat and isn't damaged 2-3 year out, (my guess) Bing will quickly try and renegotiate down their payments to news organizations.

Your Documentary's Community

2010-01-15T12:40:00.001-08:00

Excellent podcast from Morrie Warshawski on the hard work of funding and distributing your film. He points out that making the film is about 20% of the work - with fundraising and distribution taking up the other 80% of your time. It is a sobering thought, and one that should inform your decision on whether or not to take on a project. He suggests that you really need to choose projects based on your personal mission in life if you want to survive the long slog with anything to show for it.

Another interesting idea is to not think so much about your film's audience, but rather the film's community. Consider your film's community from the beginning - they are the people who will help you raise money, inform the production, and get it out to the world.

"The Panama Deception"'s success in distribution stemmed from a community distribution model that was built up with the previous film, "Cover-up". We had sponsored like the Quakers, American Friends, and other crunchy granola types. They got the film out to a community, and we raised a lot more money via fundraising than tickets. And this was way before social networking sites.

When you conceive of a film in the context of its community, you also get out of your own head, and are part of a greater purpose. All of this will sustain you through the dark days of computer freezes, legal clearances, and festival rejection.

Film Analysis: King Corn

2010-01-10T09:53:00.000-08:00

So I'm a couple of years late. I finally got around to checking out King Corn (2007) on Netflix. What a charming film! I'm well versed with the entire local food, Michael Pollan argument, so the film was preaching to the converted. What impressed me most about the film was the tone and mythic resonance. Most progressive, personal documentaries take on a confrontational tone with their subject matter or subjects, or posit the filmmakers as aggrieved and victimized. I respect the fact that the filmmakers embraced their average white guy persona and made no effort creating a film persona that they could use to amplify the confrontation with their subject matter. These nice young men have no interest in becoming the next Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock - they aren't affecting an "everyman" persona, they ARE typical, unaffected guys with no chip on their shoulder, and sans ax to grind. They are gimmick-free. How rare!

I realize that this observation flies in the face of my very first blog post, but, hey, like Whitman, I contradict myself. There are room for all kinds in the doc world.

The tone of the film is genial and exploratory. They certainly have an opinion, and anyone who's read Pollan knows the score, yet these fellows are much more interested in recruiting new members than preaching to the converted. Their willingness to spend time with farmers and other stakeholders and hear them out ultimately yields results - rather than pointing fingers and trying to "educate" the farmers at the center of the story, they clearly listen to their subjects and gain the trust that makes the farmers fee free to confess their own misgivings and frustrations - "We grow crap" says one of the farmers at one point.

The methods are low tech and DIY. By establishing the low-tech methods - crude stop-motion animations and hand-drawn graphs - you root for these young filmmakers and appreciate their ingenuity. This approach contrasts markedly with the high-budget, preachy "Food Inc.", which covers the same material. "King Corn" has broad appeal - "Food Inc." preaches to the converted. If you're going to take an unpopular, un-mainstream position, it pays, artistically, to embrace your constraints and have the artistic media means recapitulate the populist political message. Works with humor as well - Crude animation and puppetry works well with crude humor.

King Corn also works because it accesses Joseph Campbell's theories on the Mono-myth quite beautifully. It establishes, early on, that cheap corn policies began under the Nixon Administration with a secretary of agriculture named Earl Butz. Butz is seen in archival footage, speaking of the need for increased productivity, and calling for an end to farm subsidies that paid farmers not to grow. The journey of the film's heroes is to uncover the unintended consequences of these policies. We learn how industrialization has taken over farming, how unhealthy high-fructose corn syrup is, and how life in Iowa farm towns is anything but bucolic. We learn that America's farmers are now incapable of feeding themselves!

The final act of the film is to visit the now ancient and infirmed Earl Butz. Our youthful, suit-wearing, respectful heroes finally meet the man responsible for all these changes, good and bad, in the American diet and landscape. Not surprisingly, he defends his own policies - he had grown up on a farm himself, and back in the day it was hard-scrabbled, back-breaking work. The problems of abundance, Butz declares, are far better than the problems of subsistence. Our heroes are too polite to argue - or, like the viewers, realize that it would be a waste of time. Our last image of Butz is him being assisted into a van by a minimum-wage health aid assistant.

The parallels to the mythology, particularly the Parsifal myth of Arthurian legend and the Grail - Fisher King myth are obvious - in fact they are even called the "Corn King" myths. In these stories, a young, naive hero travels through a wasteland to meet the country's king, who is incapacitated from an old wound. Out of politeness, the young hero fails to ask the king what it is that has caused his illness, and leaves the castle. He later learns that if he had asked the question, a curse would have been lifted and the fertility of the king and kingdom restored.

The clever paradox of "King Corn" is that our abundance has led to a different kind of wasteland - a world of early diabetes death, obesity, soul-dead industrial farming that decimates communities and destroys bio-diversity in favor of monoculture. The question never asked - but which the audience is allowed to figure out on its own - is if Butz fully understands the unintended consequences of his role in the transformation of farming in America. What, now, can be done to create policies that mitigate the problems of abundance as well as scarcity?

Like any good "message" film, it leaves the question to be answered by the viewers.

It's a wonderful little film.

Vic Chesnutt, R.I.P.

2010-01-08T19:48:00.000-08:00

A great writer and musician has left us. The tribute on "Fresh Air" was quite moving; with my old school chum Jem Cohen, Guy Piciotto and Michael Stipe offering their thoughts on Vic's idiosyncratic, autodidact genius. They mentioned some of their favorite quotes from Vic's songs -

"I settled down on hurt as big as Robert Mitchum, and listened to Lucinda Williams. / Convenient lies, rubber knives, I'm a dastardly villain doing belly dives..."

"Feathers are floating down, and I can't dodge them, the tar is oozing from my little noggin'"

Chesnutt was also the subject of a moving documentary film "Speed Racer" by Peter Sillen. Documentaries on artists and the artistic process are common, and tend to be hagiography. This memorable film highlights Vic's demons - his breathtaking rage at the world. Not something you see very often. The documentary "Whatever Happened to Kerouac?" is a more typical, elegic - and I thought of a line from it when I heard about Chesnutt's suicide - I believe Gregory Corso was talking about how people grade writers - first the critics say that "the kid's got talent, then they say 'genius'. The only level that goes beyond that is 'divine'." Corso suggested that only Shelley qualified in the highest category.

I think Chesnutt approached divinity - particularly in performance. He was one of the few performers I've ever seen who could make time stand still. When he sang, the audience was always captive. He had an incredible sense of dynamics - as quiet as a whisper and as loud as a avalanche. At the same time, he was both microscopic and filling my entire field of vision. I'd watched him perform many times, and was a cameraman at one of his shows in St. Ann's in Brooklyn for Jem, and mumbled my heartfelt appreciation of his work to him in Seattle. I probably could have bought him a beer and done the shmooze, but felt, truth be told, unworthy.

I don't begrudge him in the slightest for his decision to end his own life. He gave his all for a very long time, against absurd obstacles. He was the real deal, an artist. The kind who made me glad to have been alive at the same time on the planet.

He could turn a little club into hallowed ground.

How to Make Enemies and Influence People

2009-12-30T17:41:00.000-08:00

"In August 1975, Rhodes spotted nineteen-year-old Kings Road habitué John Lydon wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words "I Hate" handwritten above the band's name and holes scratched through the eyes." - From the Sex Pistols Wikipedia entry

As a close follower of Ted Hope's Twitter feed, I find myself surfing to a variety of links discussing distribution of film in the age of the internet. Some of the luminaries of this field are the aforementioned Ted Hope, Scott Kirshner (not to be confused with the Boston Globe tech reporter) Peter Brodrick, and the authors of the books mentioned here.

Whew - forgive the link saturation.

I realized recently, while at a meeting of Connect the Docs, that I had a small bit of insight into these issues, insight gleaned well before netflix, youtube, "1000 fans" and well before movies on demand via download.

The case study I wish to offer is that of two documentaries - "Cover-up: Behind the Iran Contra Affair" and "The Panama Deception". How was it that these two documentaries managed to reach vast audiences without the help of a major distributor - the way Michael Moore did with his breakout hit, "Roger and Me"? How was it that they managed to win an Academy Award with a crudely shot, "unbalanced" diatribe against a man now regarded as one of America's greatest presidents?

The success of these films was due to the fact that they provided an antidote to the Kool-Aid that was being ladled out by the "mainstream media" (There actually was one back then - this was pre-internet, pre FOX news) that Reagan was a good man, a great president, and a legitimate leader. At the time, very little was offered up to contradict this viewpoint, despite the fact that a sizable portion of the population considered Reagan to be perhaps the worst thing to happen to America since Nixon - probably worse. Those people - and I was one of them - were being driven mad by the MSM's acquiescence to Reagan's carefully cultivated image, which masked his murderous foreign misadventures and domestic economic policies that America has yet to recover from.

Those passionate lefties, as well as the glum liberals, didn't quite know it, but they were desperate to see and hear their political views mirrored on movie screens. The Empowerment Project was able to seize the opportunity and provide a film that articulated a radical viewpoint -one that, I should say, has been pretty much been vindicated by recent history. Both films became the best distributed documentaries the years they came out - with no help from youtube, social networking sites, or Time Warner. And they were popular because they raised a stink.

There is something to be said for a distribution model that requires the content piss off the status quo. A model that eschews widespread popularity in favor of passionate devotees. Content that annoys and agitates.

I'm not sure that the left is the only one to figure this out. Rush Limbaugh was quoted as saying that the trick to success in broadcasting was to get 51% of the population to hate you. That is something for filmmakers to consider. It has been pointed out that the key to success in the atomized media environment is to have only 1000 true fans.

The problem is that most of us have mainstream sensibilities. We all like Beyonce, the Simpsons, and Star Wars. Documentary filmmakers, apart from Mark Burnett, might want to consider a goal of mainstream success as a trap. A goal of getting a low-budget documentary in a multi-plex is like spending your paycheck on lottery tickets. A much more reasonable ambition would be to seek out a niche market that might garner us a thousand or so true fans - a tipping point of a number that would provide a decent income, and maybe, just maybe, lead to bigger things. (I've got nothing against hope.)

So rather than look for ideas that have wide, mainstream appeal, how about sifting through your many ideas for those that are most distinct, idiosyncratic, annoying, and controversial? Which of your personal ideas and obsessions would Time Warner not touch with a ten foot pole? Goliath smote a million punks before David got lucky.

Embrace the idea of being an underdog. You're not a heavy weight - you're a bantam or fly-weight. You'll never fight Ali. You're running a counter-insurgency, and you're goal is to raise as big a stink as possible with limited means. When you think about your target audience, consider your target enemy. Think the Catholic Church will hate your movie? Send them a copy. They might help your publicity efforts. Your target audience will root for you more if they feel you need their help, that you are under siege, that you are standing up to power.

Choose your target enemy. Big Agriculture, Fast Food, General Motors.

And note that some of the most popular documentaries in recent years - King Corn, Food Inc, SuperSize Me, Roger and Me, define themselves by saying who they are standing up to, who they are not.

And remember, if you are successful, you'll be hated anyway. Elvis was hated. Dylan was hated. The Beatles were hated.

It was an old Broadway joke that he trick to having a successful show in Manhattan was to preview in Boston and get banned by the Catholic Church. The key to inspiring true devotion, paradoxically, is by inspiring a certain, useful level of hatred.