I don’t want to discourage anyone to not pursue their dreams. I just want to encourage people to do it in a realistic manner. On the other hand, I also don’t think anyone should live their life dedicated to being safe and secure. We do need to pursue and push for better things. But then again, I also don’t think anyone should be reckless in that pursuit. Cracking the code about trying the impossible (aka a life in the arts) is a back and forth proposition, and success is often based on good timing as much as merit.
If you ask me, pursuing a career in Indie Film these days requires one to have an alternative money stream to pay the bills, and there lies the rub.
Do producers ever get enough love? Is our work acknowledged for what it is? I hear from other producers, and when they speak openly and honestly, they often say no.
It’s not a constant song, but it is a refrain I know quite well. It is not self-pity. Producers don’t wallow, but still t happens so much: a producer — sometimes a stranger to me, sometimes a close friend — tells me their experience of making their film, their labor of love. The movie comes out, and now it is only about the director. They were once so close, virtually married or the bestest of best friends, but now, it feels like they never really knew each other.
This is my letter to the under appreciated producer; maybe it is the letter I wish someone sent to me.
Don’t be so hard on yourself! You worked to make it better. That effort is what we all need allies on, and you gave that to that film and the world is better off for it. Remember that.
Who knows whom the work will touch and why? You improved the truth of the characters and their world. We can’t get things to where we really hope that they really need to be, without all the steps from all the directions, over and over again. You made it better, but they didn’t see. You made it better, but they forgot where it once was. You made it better, and only you now know what else it could have been.
Sometimes it seems like it is to no avail, but sometimes it is quite the opposite. Yet, we the audience, we the creators, we still all overlook what has occurred. Don’t expect those that were with you to be any different. They have moved on and are looking for something else. They needed you when, but now they need something else.
Recognize your contribution and hold it close to you — even if it was something you tried to give to another, and they failed to acknowledge it. That’s what it’s going to be again, and again, and again and again and again. You know the truth. Try to let that be enough.
There won’t ever be anyone to truly appreciate your gifts other than your family and those that love you. That sucks. And it’s wonderful too. Truly.
Do it for yourself and those that recognize it — sometimes it will filter through to the bigger world, but don’t expect it to.. Don’t expect, or even ask or hope, for those that you directly gave it to, to notice. They won’t. Don’t expect those around the film, to be any different either. They aren’t interested in your contribution; they are thinking now about how to keep their job or find the next one. It’s the film biz after all!
We who know you, love you and know who you are and what you did. Ah… if only that was enough! The world has changed for what you’ve contributed, but everyone’s focus is elsewhere. Live and comfort in the secret of the truth that you know. Let it be. Move on.
What do you do? You have no money but KNOW your film has an audience. Even sometimes with great content, the world conspires and leaves us all alone, just meat for the vipers. Often, a good movie is not enough to make it in this world. Faced with surrender or the long hard road, it’s then that the real filmmakers, the ones passionate about their babies, are willing to sharpen their claws and dig in.
Audrey Ewell first guest posted with the now legendary “Younger Audiences & Creators Tell Old Fogies To Shut The F Up!”. She has continued to be a generous contributor, sharing her knowledge and experience in both making and distributing her work. Today’s guest post is a case study in DIY/DIWO distro. Read on!
Until The Light Takes Us, a documentary about black metal (a violent music scene from Norway) premiered at the ’08 AFI Fest in LA. We spent the next year playing festivals and turning down terrible offers. It was a hard time for film, and a terrible time for docs, as you may recall, but no time would ever be so hard that I’d be willing to take a $10,000 MG on an all-rights deal, with a 25% back-end that we’d probably never see anyway, or a 25K all rights offer from another distributor who wouldn’t guarantee theatrical or even DVD. We didn’t want to just get shunted to the VOD ghetto to sink or swim without any support.
By the summer of 2009, confident that the film had a sizeable and reachable audience, we decided to keep our rights and do it ourselves.
INITIAL BUDGET: zero dollars. This was before people were talking about working distro dollars into your budget. It had never occurred to us that we’d go DIY; ours was an award winning film with a passionate core audience and enough headline grabbing content (murders, suicide, church arson, nationalism, Satanism) that we thought our floor was a little higher. But a mix of bad economic timing and a treatment some buyers thought was too “arty” limited offers. We knew we had to take a DIWO approach – doing it with others. The others we had at that point were our fans. And thankfully, they showed up.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND ORGANIZING: Remember Myspace? When we got back from Norway, where we’d filmed for two years, we actually set aside time every day to send out 300 invites/messages to likely fans. We built up about 18,000 fans there, and then watched as everyone stopped using the site. Then Myspace randomly deleted our page anyway. That sucked, but was a good lesson. We don’t own social media pages – so have a lot of them. But we’d at least gotten the word out to those 18K people. One of those fans offered to make us a facebook page. I said sure, and we now have over 200 of those; more than half are fan-made. I encouraged fans to make pages for their city, as I think it gives them more of a sense of ownership and involvement with the film’s success there, and because they know their community better than I do, and are already part of the audience, so it becomes peer to peer marketing. BTW, you can now do on Twitter what we did on Myspace: just follow people you think will be into your film, or who talk about similar films.
THEATRICAL DIY: We put out the word that we were taking the film on tour. We told fans that we needed 3 things to bring it to their city: 1) a list of the indie/arthouse theatres near them 2) calls/letters/visits to those theaters to request the film 3) commitments to flyer and blog for us.
Our fans happen to rock, so we got the help we needed. I booked the film into 12 cities, either one-offs or weekends – I billed these screenings as sneak-peaks, wary of over-playing markets that we’d want to hit with longer runs. (And I avoided NY and LA.) The screenings were a success. My partner Aaron Aites and I did our first one in Austin during but not part of SXSW. A risky move. Our amazing new friends at the Alamo Drafthouse were kind enough to clear a midnight screening with the festival (fair warning: if you go this route, you risk pissing off the festival unless it’s cleared with them). Since Aaron’s band Iran was playing that year, we piggybacked our travel arrangements, got press lists from friends, and promoted it to film and music fans alike. A perfect fit. The screening sold out. Next stop: Seattle International Film Festival. I mean, we weren’t technically in it… but that didn’t stop us getting some of the indie film write-ups that were in the air. We booked a few late nights at the Northwest Film Forum – sold them out. One kid told us he’d driven 5 hours to see the film, not sure if he’d ever get another chance. We did Q&As, then headed to Portland for more of the same.
We continued with non-piggyback screenings, with lots of sold-out shows. We tried to hit the right balance with press – enough to get the word out, not so much as to have shot our load if we made it back later with a longer run (which was always the end-game). Toward the end of our solo bookings, we decided to just go for it in San Francisco, a market where we knew we had a huge audience – we booked a week with a museum screening series and went after press. We were about to approach distribution services to take over, so we wanted to show we could perform over longer runs. And we did. Variance Films came on about a week later, and the first thing they did was get us moved over to the Roxie, continuing our SF run.
DISTRIBUTION SERVICE, THEATRICAL DIWO: We then raised a P & A budget of 25K off the strength of those solo screenings and having Variance onboard. $25,000 dollars: AKA “nothing,” to distributors. And we started our formal US and Canadian theatrical release.
Variance handled bookings, ads and co-promotions, we managed street teams and did nonstop interviews, and also brought on co-promotions through our music contacts. A very deserved shout-out to Emma Griffiths at EG-PR who took on this indie doc about a foreign music scene and worked it like crazy. We also eventized many of our screenings: we launched in NY with a party at the Knitting Factory where Dave Pajo of Slint/Papa M, Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio, and some of our other indie rock friends played (btw, our film is about metal – this did not impress the core audience terribly much, but we had a secondary audience that we wanted to reach, and we also had a second NY launch party a few days later which was all metal bands). We continued to open runs with giveaways, bands, parties. For our Canadian premiere, the film was projected onto a giant screen made of ice, outside, in the winter (fitting our film’s aesthetic and subject matter). Elsewhere, fans flyered like crazy, set up FB pages for their town, blogged, talked about it on forums. We only ran print ads when theaters demanded it. People came out. Our opening weekend per screen avg in NY was over 7K . Sadly, we only had one screen here, the indie loving Cinema Village.
We grossed about 140K overall, in 35 cities. We paid back the theatrical investors, with a little extra on top. Toward the end of our run, the film went up on the Sundance Channel’s broadcast schedule, and theaters backed off. By then we’d drastically expanded our fan base and found distribution partners for DVD, VOD, Digital, TV, etc with Factory 25, Gravitas, The Sundance Channel, and Dynamo on our own website (since we kept non-exclusive streaming). I like retaining some control over this thing, and I like having partners, so this is the best of both worlds, and it was brought about largely by our theatrical success.
KNOWLEDGE TRAVELS (AND SO DID WE): In fact, it worked so well that I repeated this process in Europe. I set up a three week screening tour (mostly at festivals and arts venues with cinemas) from London to Krakow, met contacts who facilitated us selling the film to a German distributor, and then took everything I’d learned and theatrically distributed the film in the UK in the spring of 2010. That made a profit, and we then self-released a very profitable DVD there. We later sold digital/VOD rights to a UK company.
The rewards of all these DIY and DIWO releases were great: the film has a much higher profile, my partner and I have fantastic contacts and relationships with great companies and venues and people all over the US and Europe, we’ve grown our own audience, (with street team captains who I know by name and keep in touch with because they’ve become a part of my world), and had utterly amazing experiences. The downside is that I stopped being a filmmaker for two years, and became a distributor, promoter, sales agent, community organizer, online work-bot; it was 18 hour days, 7 days a week, and it was completely exhausting. Now at the end of it, I’m glad I did it, but I can’t wait to make a film again!
I hope this is helpful info for some of you who are doing this now or are thinking about it. I’m happy to clarify anything in the comments.
— Audrey Ewell
Audrey Ewell is a filmmaker living in Brooklyn, NY with her partner Aaron Aites and their three rescue animals. More info on her current film can be found at http://www.blackmetalmovie.com
Although this majestic beast sure seems comfortable doing it. Did you know that no White Tigers have lived (or been seen) in the wild since the late 50’s? There are probably now White Tigers alive than ever before — but they all live in zoos or parks. I guess we shouldn’t let them know about the one that we keep under our bed, eh?
How do you do it? If the mainstream industry and the mainstream festivals are not responding to your work, does it mean there’s no audience or community for you work? HELL, NO! You just have to bring it to where they are. It might be hard. It might be grueling. And it will be brutal, but it can be done.
Filmmaker Bob Ray guest posts today to show us all how it is done. He has hit the road couch surfing and community building. The kindness of strangers can be key but nothing is more so than being true to what you love and have made.
Bringing It To The People, The Badass Way: No Distrib, No Festivals, A Lot Of Help & Support
I’m honored to throw down a blog entry here. I follow this feed and put to use the wisdom gleaned from these pages. There’s a dialogue out there (and in here) about the ever-changing distribution landscape, the role of film festivals, self-distribution and the like. I hope my experience adds to this conversation and we’re all the richer for it. We’ll see, it might. It just might.
The stranger we met on Craigslist was nice enough to let us crash at his apartment in Boston. The suspiciously empty living room and the lack of a single morsel of food in the kitchen led me to believe that this was either a freaky sex pad or a murder house. We never found out which. The ghost of a woman and her dog haunted a New Orleans mansion we’d been at only weeks before. There were high-rise chickens in Florida, a crippling stunt and a pitch to IFC in NYC. I sat in the theater chair where Lee Harvey Oswald was nabbed. Whiskey-slapping in Greensboro, a near riot in Mobile and a fistful of pills in Houston. Weirdness abounds. And that’s just a few of the nights of the last film tour. Hey, at least we didn’t go to jail this time.
Around mid-2010 I finished my newest film, Total Badass. I skipped the film fests and, instead, I’ve been touring the film all over the US. With my hometown of Austin as the hub, I toured for five weeks out West and another five weeks out East. I screened in over 60 cities and racked up about fourteen thousand miles in total. I traveled America and had a blast. Now I’m perched to tour Europe in a few months. Australia and New Zealand look pretty tempting as well.
Name’s Bob Ray. What’s important to know is this: I’m an Austin-based filmmaker who will whip out films of all manner: narratives, cartoons, docs and music videos, short and/or long. Lately, it’s been all docs and ‘toons. Long docs and short ‘toons. My first two feature length flicks, the stoner comedy Rock Opera (1999) and the roller derby doc, Hell on Wheels (2007), premiered at SXSW and went on to screen at tons of fests, get great reviews and land small distribution deals that saw the films released on DVD and Video on Demand. All in all, my flicks have screened at over 75 film festivals in a handful of countries and garnered plenty of spectacular reviews. I attended many of these film fests and had a blast while making a pile of new filmmaker friends. All good stuff.
Despite my previous successes (or maybe in light of them), from the get-go it seemed that the odds have been stacked against Total Badass. Here’s why: Total Badass is a raw film. Raw by design, but it’s raw. At its core, the flick is a gritty and hilariously offensive, yet touching tale of a man striving to leave his creative mark while dealing with a family crisis and trying to fly straight long enough to finish felony probation. It’s a funny and intimate story about redemption, finding your purpose and the importance of family, but along the way, there’s plenty of way-over-the-line humor, high doses of drug abuse, rowdy music, graphic sex, racy racial humor, weed dealing and some dangerous trashcan jumping. You might find it hard to believe (and for some, this is almost a requirement for documentaries), but Total Badass contains no agenda to affect social change, end oppression or save the planet (I’m all for those things, btw). Total Badass features no famous artist, celebrity, singer, philanthropist, comedian or politician. Total Badass is a film about Chad Holt by Bob Ray. And you’ve never heard of either of us.
To overcome these crippling blows, I felt that what the film really could use was a big, wet stamp of approval from a top shelf fest. I feared that most fests would be too timid to screen the flick due to the rampant cocaine snorting and cock sucking, er, the controversial subject matter. I needed someone keen who could see the forest for the freaky trees, someone who could peer through the bong smoke and embrace the heart and soul that lie at the center of the film.
With fingers XXX-ed, I entered Total Badass into several top-tier film festivals: Sundance, Berlin, Rotterdam, IDFA, SXSW, Tribeca, Slamdance, Los Angeles, True/False, Full Frame, etc. We found not a lick of love there. I soon grew sick of waiting for others to validate my work. And I was annoyed with blasting off entry fee after entry fee like shooting bullets at the night sky.
Sometimes it seems the world is against me. Here I was again: me versus everybody. Plan A was shot. I needed a plan B.
I know what I want, I just need a new way to get it. The goal is to get the film out and in front of the people who’ll appreciate it. I want to get the flick reviewed and hopefully build an audience for my movies. I want to do the work that’ll do the film justice. There’s no point in making the damn thing if no one’s gonna see it, right? I am also, by collecting piles of fantastic reviews and making waves, looking to get the attention of the film biz and, ideally, find a distributor to pick up wherever I leave off. If I can actually make some spare change in the process, all the better. It’s sure to be an adventure wrapped in a lesson and shoved up an enigma.
It’s very DIY around here. I’m willing to sleep in strange places. I’m willing to drive long stretches and make new friends of total strangers. Even with a lack of money, there are other ways to get things done.
Bands surround me. I live in the Live Music Capitol of the World. I’ll take a page and tour around, band-style. I’ll hop in a car and hit a new city every night, screen films, do a Q&A, sell merch and party. I’ll repeat for weeks on end. Sounds solid. But first I gotta sell the idea to a bunch of cinemas.
My name carries little to no weight. It sounds kinda cool and reads palindrome-y, but that’s about it. So I partnered up with some names that do. The Alamo Drafthouse has screened many of my films. SXSW has shown 11 of my films in the last 10 years. The Austin Chronicle gives me ink with kindness. The Austin Film Society is a benevolent institution that likes to help. I teamed up with them all. These would be my promotional partners. I’ll package and pitch the tour as a slice of Austin coming to towns near and far. Everybody loves Austin’s weirdness.
It’ll work because my films are Austin-centric. Total Badass is about an Austin underground icon, Rock Opera is a fictional tale set in the real Austin music scene of the late 90s and then there’s Hell on Wheels. I was privy to the birth of modern roller derby and I made a doc about it. Roller derby has since exploded in popularity and Hell on Wheels is the de-facto history book for the movement and Austin is its birthplace. This doc enjoys a built in fan base in every city where roller derby exists, and that’s all of them. If I can convince cinemas to screen two films a night, I can double dip with a screening of Hell on Wheels and Total Badass. And with Hell, I can team up with derby leagues in a cross-promotional extravaganza. So I did that.
Booking is a pain in the ass. Packed with maps, spreadsheets, emails, pitches, phone calls, scheming, plotting, conning, negotiating, math, business b.s. and other seemingly endless and entirely thrill-less work, it all pains my ass. And it takes forever. Four months before the launch date for the tour I was researching and contacting cinemas, partnering up with derby leagues and filling up the calendar. Here’s a depressing surprise: just finding indie cinemas is a bit of a chore. Some cities, big cities even, just don’t have one. On the flip side, you’ll occasionally come across theaters that are totally down with the idea and jump right on in.
Business-wise, I work out door splits. Usually, I get around 50%. I’ve yet to four-wall a venue and couldn’t afford to if I wanted to. What the cinemas want to know is how we’ll be bringing an audience. Cuz we all know that it’s not with ads, as there’s no ad budget. The way we do it around here is with piles of hard work and creativity.
Promotion was grass roots. We teamed up with derby leagues and partnered w/ local film groups and local filmmakers. We worked with fests that had screened my past works. We sought out music, culture or film writers who have written about off-the-beaten path events and harassed them for press. We sent out press releases, screeners and email reminders. We teamed up with radio stations and held ticket giveaways. We hit up university film clubs and sought to meet professors who’d encourage their students to attend. We teamed up with film societies to help spread the word. We reached out to every blog, newspaper, ‘zine, and radio station and angled for coverage. Getting the word out is half the battle.
On the tour, we screened some of my CrashToons cartoons (www.CrashToons.com) in front of Total Badass and Hell on Wheels. The ‘toons are super-short and punchy-funny and set a good tone for the night. Chad Holt, the subject of Total Badass and a good friend, accompanied me on the tours, contributed to the tour journal (http://crashcamfilms.com/tourjournal.htm) and hosted post-screening Q&As with me. With Hell on Wheels, we partnered up with leagues all over to present the flick. This partnership allows us to grow our audience and hopefully turn on some local filmgoers to the derby scene in their own community. After Hell screenings, I’d do a Q&A w/ the derby gals.
Steve Bloom & Shirley Halperin’s fine stoner film guide “Reefer Movie Madness” features a killer review of my first flick, Rock Opera. I contacted the author and we scored a case of books to give away as door prizes. We also gave away DVDs of Rock Opera, to help tie it all together and to create a more festive environment. After the Q&A, I’d mingle with filmgoers and sell DVDs, shirts and posters and give away stickers and condoms (for the after-parties, duh).
Life on the road is odd and fun. Of the ten weeks on the road, we only needed to rent a motel twice and only slept in the car twice. The rest of the time, we found couches, beds and floors to crash on. Sometimes, during the Q&A, we’d beg for a crash-pad. It usually worked. People like to help.
My experiment, in part forced by a flood of film fest rejection letters, has me evaluating the value of film fests versus taking it straight to the people. In one sense, I got out of touring what I would have gotten out of film fests: loads of reviews. Behold a pu pu platter sampling:
“Total Badass is both a portrait of life on the artistic and social fringe and a thriller… a working-poor man’s cross of Frederick Wiseman and Hunter S. Thompson.“
-The New York TImes
“The title couldn’t be more apt.”
-Time Out New York
“Total Badass is a wild, unique ride, deep into the Austin counterculture… it’s entertaining and shockingly funny, and undeniably touching… a thunderbolt of a documentary.”
-Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“[Total Badass director] Bob Ray is Austin’s newish lowbrow Maysles brother… Chad Holt comes off charmingly as equal parts Texan Keith Moon and crispy Richard Benjamin, talking blue streaks and rolling joints in his probation officer’s parking lot.”
-Village Voice
“A ballsy feature-length documentary… a totally unapologetic profile of the ubiquitous Austin hero.”
-Vice Magazine
“A psychological treat”
-Phoenix New Times
“An outrageous and hilariously seedy journey into the Austin underground… [Total Badass] bravely goes where no documentary film has gone before.”
-Flavorpill
What we didn’t get was the attention of industry folks. I’m not sure we’re on anybody’s radar. But we are armed with badass reviews, so we’ll try to work that angle next.
Also in the con column, I personally missed the camaraderie and fun of screening flicks with new and old film friends and peers at film festivals. This is not to be overlooked. Many, if not most of my filmmaker pals I’d befriended at fests. While on tour, I met up with and crashed at the houses of lots of these same folks. Film fests are a fantastic way to connect to likeminded peers in a kickass film friendly environment.
Back to the pros: in addition to one hell of an adventure and some awesome reviews, I found in my possession a bit of cash. I spent about seven grand on Total Badass (not including my time, and I did not pay myself). I grossed a little over eight grand on these tours. I’ve yet to do the math and find the net (there are many things to factor: gas, printing, shipping, DVD replication, t-shirt and poster costs, food, etc.), and none of this takes into account working my ass off for four months to book and promote the tour and being on the road for five weeks (twice). But when I guestimate the expenses, I still come out ahead.
Now, for many filmmakers out there, making a film for seven grand sounds nuts. And grossing eight grand on a tour is peanuts. But for us low-to-no budget filmmakers, this is all good stuff. I’m not sure how touring would transfer to a larger film with a greater budget. There might be something to the old adage “you gotta spend money to make money.” I might have more insight on that if I’d ever spent money, or had money to spend. But with no budget to promote, the attendance was hit or miss. We had some big hits, but also a few whiffs. I read of people spending upwards of $10,000 for a publicist for a single film festival screening, or dropping twenty grand for theatrical publicity. Those numbers blow my mind. For all I know, that’s money well spent. Maybe you sell soooo many more tickets that it comes back to you. I have no idea. My little film cost only $7000, so spending nearly three times that amount (let alone finding the money in the first place) seems like a steep hill.
Since we’re talking about cash and film fests, let me add this: It’s tough being at a film festival screening where 600 people are watching and enjoying your film. It’s awesome that they are there and all is going well. But when your film costs $7000 to make you figure that each person paid $10 to see the flick, and if you could keep all the box office, you could almost pay off the cost of making your film. Granted, there might not be 600 people at your screening if it weren’t for the fest, and the theater needs their cut (and I do realize that most film fests work tirelessly to put on a good show and have a great deal of overhead, so I begrudge them not). But if you don’t get a cut of the door, and you aren’t one of the few to benefit from industry and press exposure at said fest, the fun and experience might not be so sweet in the long run. At the end of the day, meeting filmmakers and having a blast is great, but you have a movie that still needs to be paid for.
If you submit and do not get into fests at all, the taste is downright bitter. I entered Total Badass into upwards of a dozen fests and all it did was add about ten percent to the budget with fest fees. We got nothing for our effort. Didn’t move an inch. All I have to show for that pile of spent cash is a digital stack of rejection letters and greater debt. It can be quite irritating.
In the end, It’s kinda hard to tell if I’m better off not having hit the fest circuit. On the one hand, I racked up some pretty amazing adventures and I made my budget back (depending on how you do the math). On the flip side, I really did miss the fest atmosphere and being able to meet up with fellow filmmakers.
I hope Total Badass will manage, one way or another, to find its place in cinematic history alongside films like American Movie, Billy the Kid, The King of Kong, Hated and Grey Gardens. In such terrific flicks about interesting folks with passion and drive, we spend time with these individuals and find that despite their eccentricies, we share common needs, desires and goals. The small, universal truths.
Still in the thick of things with Total Badass, I’m currently setting up a European tour. The costs will be greater, but so will the adventure. If you wanna help us get there, swing by http://kck.st/g4VgjJ and throw down for the cause.
In the mean time, if you’re itchin’ to eyeball some clips from Total Badass, go here: http://www.TotalBadassTheMovie.com and click the “peek” page.
My CrashToons cartoons loiter here: http://www.CrashToons.com They are NSFW but are funny and super-short.
If you wanna keep abreast of our tours, the site with all that juicy info is: http://www.BadassFilmTour.com
If all goes well in Europe, we might attempt a New Zealand and Australia tour in late 2011.
Kevin Smith recently began traveling with his new movie Red State. Maybe touring films around is catching on. Surely his tour will proceed on a much grander scale. Perhaps we can compare notes later on.
And, if you’ll pardon the personal shout-out, I’d like to say a HUGE thank you to Mia Cevallos, the producer on Total Badass and the Tour Producer without whom I could have done none of this. You rule, Mia!
— Bob Ray
With ass kicking music videos for the likes of Nashville Pussy, Fuckemos and Riverboat Gamblers, a slew of freaky CrashToon cartoons, and three critically acclaimed features: the stoner-comedy Rock Opera (SXSW ‘99), the modern era roller derby doc Hell on Wheels (SXSW ‘07) and his newest flick, the crazy-fun, touching and out-there documentary Total Badass, Bob Ray catapults the Austin counterculture onto the big screen, reveling in its inspiring, unique and deliriously offbeat glory. Behold the oddities and awesomeness: www.CrashCamFilms.com
What is it that a camera sees? Do we need to accept and conform to the dominant storytelling paradigms, or is there actually more that we can be striving for? Perhaps no life and work embodies these questions as well as Ricky Leacock. Filmmaker David Van Taylor guest posts today with an examination of him and these issues, and the difference between documentary and essay film. There is a lot that can be said about these subjects, certainly enough for a six hour documentary AND many blog posts.
For over a decade, Lumiere Productions has been working to create TO TELL THE TRUTH, a 6-hour history of documentary film. As the title suggests, we’re not interested in appreciating documentary just as an art form, in “film for film’s sake.” We’re exploring how documentary operates in the real world, where non-fiction films have both causes and consequences.
One joy of this project was our in-depth 2004 interview with the late lamented Ricky Leacock. Ricky was part of a small group that helped invent “Direct Cinema” (aka “cinema verité”) in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s. For many, this was the beginning of “real documentary,” since much of what came before entailed what we now call “re-enactments” or other intrusions that Ricky and his colleagues found a way to avoid.
Here’s a clip where Ricky describes his awakening, with the help of Bob Drew, to a new documentary concept. Note—he’s not talking about equipment or even technique. He’s not talking about intrusion or reenactment. No, the most critical shift was his understanding of what constitutes an interesting subject and a worthwhile impact on the viewer.
The (much-deserved) postmortem ado about Ricky has stressed this ability to be “fascinated,” and his lifelong quest to convey “the feeling of being there.”
But … it has been scarcely noted that these core convictions about what makes a good documentary are, if not dead, then distinctly out of fashion. We are in the midst of a documentary renaissance in theaters, on TV, at festivals. It is dominated, though, not by Ricky’s brand of cinema verité, but by essays and exposés on distinctly important topics—in Ricky’s words (not mine!), “films that convert people to this that and the other thing … all this left-wing, politically-correct bullshit.”
This opposition—between films “fascinated” by human stories and films that aim to change people’s attitudes about a critical issue—is not new in the history of documentary. It wasn’t new at the time of Ricky’s epiphany, either. For all their innovations, Leacock et al. were also standing on the shoulders of Ricky’s erstwhile mentor Robert Flaherty. The director of Nanook of the North, Man of Aran and Louisiana Story—whose work prompted the popular coinage of “documentary”—created observational, character-centered story films before the technology existed to do so. He believed the essence of filmmaking was “non-preconception.”
But in the same era as Flaherty, a very different mold was being forged half-way across the globe. Committed Soviet Communist Dziga Vertov, in Man with a Movie Camera, Three Songs of Lenin, and Enthusiasm, pioneered montage-driven essays about mass movements and social issues. The films, often distributed through innovative grass-roots “outreach,” were explicitly intended to change the world.
You can view documentary history as a pendulum swinging between these two poles—observational and argumentative, Flaherty and Vertov—due to shifting historical and political contexts. For example, the argument film dominated in World War II, when governments around the world sponsored documentaries for propaganda. Observational cinema returned, as “cinema verité,” in the ‘50’s, when McCarthyism (like Stalinism) made direct political expression dangerous.
As I see it, most prominent documentarians these days are children of Vertov, whether they know it or not. (Most don’t.) I’m not sure we yet have the historical perspective to know why that is. It may have something to do with a long-term conservative political tide that has left many viewers eager for a strong opposing voice. But whatever the reason, critics, viewers, film students today seem more likely to complain that a documentary doesn’t make a clear statement than to complain that it has an axe to grind.
I’m pretty sure Ricky couldn’t have been too happy about that. I’m less certain how I feel about it. Maybe the argument film is what we need as a culture right now. And let me be clear: these are not simple, black/white distinctions, even at their root. Vertov was a master of “fly-on-the-wall” filming, though he then manipulated the heck out of it in editing. (He also coined the term “kino-pravda,” which translates as “cinema verité,” now connoting a very different kind of film than those he made.) Flaherty, on the other hand, was famous for manipulations as he was filming—there’s a shot in Nanook where you can see the rifle the Eskimo would have used if Flaherty hadn’t asked him to use an old-fashioned spear—but made films that appeared as seamless and natural as life itself.
The controversy at the time about Flaherty’s poetic liberties still echoes today. HBO is about to release Cinema Verité, a (fictionalized) condemnation of how observational filmmakers allegedly exploited the Loud family in the ur-reality series. Perhaps it’s always the case that f you put something on the screen that appears unmanipulated, from Nanook to An American Family, you open yourself to feelings of betrayal when viewers discover that the documentary lens has in fact had a hand in shaping events.
Maybe that’s another reason argument-driven documentaries dominate today. We’re all convinced that everyone’s trying to spin us, from elected officials to news reporters to the kid with the Flip camera. So maybe the best we can hope for is that they’ll spin us straight—not pretend that they’ve gone in without preconception and are just trying to convey the feeling of being there.
Figuring out the last couple of decades will probably be the hardest part of making TO TELL THE TRUTH. I’d love to hear what anyone out there—documentary filmmakers, dedicated viewers, or just film lovers in general—thinks about this perspective on recent doc history. Am I on target, or full of BS? If I’m right that argument-driven docs dominate the scene now, why do you think that is? And is it something to be embraced, to be combated, or somehow to be transcended?
Right now my personal feeling is: Ricky, please don’t go. We need you more than ever.
— David Van Taylor
David Van Taylor and Lumiere Productions are currently completing 2 episodes of TO TELL THE TRUTH. For more on the history of documentary, including additional clips of Ricky Leacock, please follow TO TELL THE TRUTH on Facebook.
