Documentaries in the News, Pantsuit Edition

Well, it looks like there will be a bright shiny future for documentary filmmakers. As long you really want to be a corporate shill when you grow up.

That's right: one channel for influence peddling in the decade ahead will certainly be political documentaries funded by corporations. If you realize a particular candidate might restrict your Widget sales, just because they tend to be unsafe, unhealthy, unwholesome Widgets that maybe could use the tiniest bit of regulation, well: get a hit piece going. You probably only need to sway a small percentage of minds. So what a cost-effective way to buy an election: a whole fleet of "documentary" Swift Boats. A little fleet of films that "question" if that candidate isn't really hiding a taste for cannibalism, or a secret past filled with much, much worse. No real evidence needed.

You know, the type of film that wouldn't get out into the world without someone who benefits from creating fear, doubt and uncertainty wildly tossing distribution money around to clear the path ahead.

(Later, the opposition candidate -- who coincidentally supports a policy of complete deregulation of Widget production -- will say "I don't know why my opponent won't answer these charges of devouring children in Satanic rituals.")

You're probably way ahead of me here, because I know you keep up on your Supreme Court decisions. But just in case, let's review why a documentary film was at the heart of today's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to overturn limits for corporate spending for or against political candidates.

Citizens United used 'Hillary: The Movie' to take on McCain-Feingold

'David Bossie, a veteran Republican campaign operative who made his mark investigating the Clintons, thought his group could offer a conservative answer to Michael Moore's successful films. After Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" premiered in 2004, Bossie's Citizens United group released "Celsius 41.11."

And after it became clear that Bossie's longtime enemy Hillary Rodham Clinton would run for president, Citizens United released another flick: "Hillary: The Movie." Featuring a who's-who cast of right-wing commentators, the 2008 film takes viewers on a savaging journey through Clinton's scandals. The sole compliment about the then-senator comes from conservative firebrand Ann Coulter: "Looks good in a pantsuit."'

Follow the link, read the rest.

Not Up To Speed: Documentaries in the News

Pop quiz, hotshot.

There's a bomb in your theater. No, not a literal bomb. A bomb in the sense of a faux documentary. One of those anti-scientific gibberish-friendly films, allegedly filled with discredited arguments given by allegedly highly-paid Discovery Institute think-tankers, "finding" what they're allegedly paid to find. (Which is? "God did it." Writing abstracts for their "research" papers must be fairly simple, really. Allegedly.) You know the kind: the banana fits so well in your hand, it must have been designed to be there. That kind of bomb.

Once the Discovery Institute press release goes out, allegedly trying to make it sound like a Smithsonian sponsored event, the bomb is armed. If you show the film, somewhere down the road folks will say: part of the funding we gave you went to .... Intelligent Design documentary screenings? Then somewhere else, on an internet discussion board you don't really want to visit, someone will pause from posting about the government disclosure of aliens and post about the screening and how it shows even the Smithsonian doubts evolution. Which, they know, was really engineered by aliens, anyway.

But -- ha! -- here's the catch. If you slow this thing down, there will be a holy cry arising about how you're suppressing dissenting views. Whatsa matter, afraid someone will find out your whole Darwin thing doesn't even mention the shape of the banana?

So you're moving forward, 50 miles an hour, toward certain doom. If you drop below 50, the whole story blows up. What do you do? What do you do?

The L.A. Times has full story.

California Science Center is sued for canceling a film promoting intelligent design

L.A.'s California Science Center will start the new year defending itself in court for canceling a documentary film attacking Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. A lawsuit alleges that the state-owned center improperly bowed to pressure from the Smithsonian Institution, as well as e-mailed complaints from USC professors and others. It contends that the center violated both the 1st Amendment and a contract to rent the museum's Imax Theater when it canceled the screening of "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record."

“The director of the documentary told me..."

Marcia Clark reports that David Wells lied in Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

Polanski's Lost Alibi

'“I lied,” Wells told me yesterday, referring to his comments in the movie that he told the judge how he could renege on a plea bargain agreement and send Polanski back to jail after he had been released from a 42-day psychiatric evaluation—the heart of Polanski’s claims of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct. “I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I did. The director of the documentary told me it would never air in the States. I thought it made a better story if I said I’d told the judge what to do.”'

Will this change the position of the 100+ directors who have signed the petition supporting freeing Polanski?

Besides removing one of the arguments those supporting Polanski have used, it leaves one curious about the process of interviewing Wells. Will the production of the documentary become a discussion in the -- already overflowing -- set of ethical questions documentarians face?

Documentaries in the News

John Cage once told this story:

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression “free as a bird,” Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, “You know? They’re not free: they’re fighting over bits of food.”

There's a sense, as the distribution system for documentaries seems to slowly implode, that there's a glut of content. So, a lot of documentarians are fighting over bits of food.

With the wind blowing in that direction, the Los Angeles Times asks:

Ken Burns: Was a backlash inevitable?

"While Burns is one of the best known and most watched documentarian of recent times, he has also acquired his share of detractors. Though he's generally respected by critics and scholars, a backlash has been building, dismissing him as middlebrow, charging that he's repeating himself, that he's too earnest, too dark or naively patriotic."