TV/Film/Stage/Art News
Encouragement
Written by Sally Potter on Mon, 12/14/2009 – 11:22.
The prevailng atmosphere facing all students who are deciding to devote their lives to filmmaking is indeed one of massive discouragement, even if it doesn’t look that way on the surface. There is really only one way out of this morass….to get going. As someone once said to me : ‘it takes longer if you don’t get started’.
Simple though this may sound, it is in fact the hardest lesson to learn. Even those of us who have been at it for quite a while have to repeat the decision to continue with the habit of just getting on with it, whatever the feelings of the day are. Doubt, insecurity and so on are just feelings we have to live with. They shouldn’t determine or shape what we do or how we do it. Then, bit by bit, a body of work emerges.
The huge advantage for any filmmaker starting out now, including and perhaps especially women, is that you can make a film very cheaply. Most women are still poorer than most men in their social class or ethnic group and in the past this created a double disadvantage. But a mobile phone, a borrowed camcorder, in fact any piece of equipment can be used and used and used to develop the necessary fluency with the medium. What counts in the end is practice.
For women the most important decision is often a deep and interior one: to give up being a victim now and forever. Don’t wait for ‘support’…it may not come in the form you long for. Instead try to remember that as a woman you hold up half the sky and that the world of imagination comes free of charge, is infinite and is yours.
A True Legend Never Dies
At Cannes, the Economy Is On-Screen
CANNES, France — Anyone who doubts that the movie industry is still partly a handshake business had only to watch the glad-handing, backslapping and double-cheek air-kissing at the Vanity Fair-Gucci party at the Hôtel du Cap on Saturday night. This is where, some 30 minutes by private car or pricey taxi from Cannes, you could find after midnight the likes of Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay and the founder of the busy company Participant Media, remeeting and greeting the likes of Michael Barker, who with Tom Bernard runs Sony Pictures Classics and who could later be seen in an intense tête-à-tête with the director Brett Ratner.
Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent as a married couple in Mike Leigh’s “Another Year,” a Cannes Film Festival competition entry.
And what did the director of “Rush Hour 3” (Mr. Ratner) and the distributor of Michael Haneke’s “White Ribbon” (Mr. Barker) have to talk about? “He wanted,” Mr. Barker said later of Mr. Ratner, “to know what the parameters for doing a deal with us on a lower-budget film would be. It’s not him as a director, but him as a producer. He’s spreading his wings in the film business on a number of projects.”
The hotel, the onetime playground of the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor, remains a favorite of moguls, models and junketing movie companies, even if their numbers have declined along with those of the news media. No matter how hopeful the headlines, the global economic crisis has already shaped up as one of the defining stories at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Its effects are evident both in empty theater seats and on-screen with a movie like “Inside Job,” a documentary about the crisis from Charles Ferguson, another dot-com entrepreneur turned moviemaker. Like his first documentary, “No End in Sight,” Mr. Ferguson’s new movie tells a complex story exceedingly well and with a great deal of unalloyed anger.
Financed by Sony Pictures Classics, which plans to release it in the fall, “Inside Job” lays out its essential argument, cogently and convincingly, that the 2008 meltdown was avoidable. As Matt Damon’s voiceover guides us through the past decade, Mr. Ferguson mixes charts, television clips, still photos and newspaper headlines fluidly with star interviews (George Soros, Eliot Spitzer) and some choice words from less familiar faces, including a brothel madam and a therapist who each catered to Wall Street in the bubble years. The movie ends not long after Robert Gnaizda, formerly with the Greenlining Institute, a housing advocacy group, characterizes the Obama administration as “a Wall Street government,” a take Mr. Ferguson clearly endorses.
It’s too bad that the outrage that fuels “Inside Job” is nowhere evident in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” Oliver Stone’s limp follow-up to his 1987 film, “Wall Street.” So far the big-ticket names have failed to impress, with Ridley Scott receiving a thrashing for “Robin Hood” and Woody Allen not faring any better with “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” his latest multi-strand trifle about vexed relationships featuring strong (Naomi Watts) and less so (Josh Brolin) actors apparently again left to their own devices. Mr. Allen remains a major attraction in France, and the crowd of civilians seeking tickets outside the festival headquarters was thicker than usual before the Saturday screenings, impervious to the pitying looks of those who had seen his film.
With few exceptions, the competition, meanwhile, has yet to catch fire, leading critics to wonder if the festival customized a generally mainstream slate for this year’s jury, headed by Tim Burton. So far the most enthusiastically embraced competition entry has been Mike Leigh’s “Another Year.” Set in contemporary London, it centers on Tom and Gerri, played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, a happily, even a touch smugly married couple whose lives are marked by their seasonal visits to their garden. As spring melts into summer and then fall, friends and family come and go talking and sipping tea while doing more talking. The talkiest, a desperate singleton, Mary (Lesley Manville), is as twitchy as the main character in Mr. Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” but without the charm or interest.
By Sunday evening the strongest competition film, at least for me, was the deceptively straightforward “A Screaming Man,” from the Chadian-born director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a self-designated exile living in France. The story turns on a former swimming champion turned hotel pool man, Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), whose world collapses when he loses his job to his only son. With its initial unhurried rhythms and emphasis on quotidian details — one gently sexy early scene shows Adam and his wife feeding each other watermelon — the film creates a misleading sense of calm, which makes the coming tragedy all the more devastating. What begins as modest portrait of a happy family gives way to a story in which the encroaching civil war decimates not only the country, but also the soul of a man who believes the pool is his entire life.
The film was greeted warmly on Saturday after its first press screening and might make its way to the United States, if only on the festival circuit. The American marketplace is tough even for non-African filmmakers, as Cristi Puiu’s critically lauded but commercially unsuccessful “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” showed a few years ago. On Friday Mr. Puiu was back at Cannes, again out of competition in Un Certain Regard, with “Aurora,” a slow-burning tour de force that transfixed critics for three hours. This is the second film in Mr. Puiu’s cycle, “Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest,” about middle-class Romanians haunted by poverty, and which he has called a tribute to Éric Rohmer, who made his own “Six Moral Tales.”
A mystery in which the largest questions are existential rather than procedural, “Aurora” involves a solitary man, played by Mr. Puiu himself with an increasingly disquieting stare, who about an hour into the film buys a gun and then, a half-hour later, fires it. It’s uncertain what haunts the man, whose name, Viorel, like so many other significant details, emerges late or not at all. Instead of pumping up the narrative with familiar thriller (and musical) beats, Mr. Puiu builds tension through absence, creating palpable unease through lingering silences, a dearth of heightened drama — before the gun goes off, the exchanges are fairly banal — and an emptied-out apartment. Only later do you grasp that this man has been hollowed out too.
Changing Our Perception of the World is a Good Thing
Watch this scene from the West Wing
For more information on the Peters Projection Map click here.
Read The Label
from Free Press
Diversity: More than good intentions?
Inside, PBS report is light on specifics; outside, NALIP seeks data to pursue change
Published in Current, April 14, 2009
By Steve Behrens
For public TV, the dialogue about its minority representation is going public again.
It’s about how Latinos, African Americans and other ethnic groups are represented on the screen — and the related matter of how well they’re represented in decision-making.
On Friday, PBS President Paula Kerger will meet with leaders of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers and answer questions at their conference in Newport Beach, Calif.
In the next few weeks, public broadcasting’s minority consortia will assess the situation in an open letter to the system, says Stephen Gong, chair of public TV’s National Minority Consortia and executive director of the Center for Asian American Media.
At the PBS Showcase Conference in mid-May, the chiefs of PBS’s major series will meet with minority producers to scout the way ahead.
With Ken Burns hitting the road to promote his fall PBS release The National Parks, he already has attracted a demonstration in San Antonio echoing complaints about the lack of Latino veterans in his series The War two years ago.
The turmoil that arose from that issue also prompted network leaders to undertake a yearlong study, the PBS Diversity Initiative on Content. PBS submitted the report in November to the study’s funder, the Ford Foundation, but didn’t release it publicly.
Several minority advocates who received the report said they appreciated PBS’s effort, but they found it wanting.
NALIP’s Diversity Committee wrote to Kerger March 4 [letter], saying the association was “happy to celebrate PBS’s many successes” but repeating its 2005 request for data on the diversity of public TV’s executives and program decision-makers.
Gong, from the Asian-American consortium, said the PBS report is “the result of well-intentioned people trying to get a handle on a complex issue. … The best you can say about it is the intention is there.”
His counterpart in the National Black Programming Consortium, Jacquie Jones, is feistier, hitting public TV below the teacup: “PBS needs . . . to ready itself to explain how the 30-year-old British import Masterpiece Theatre is a more appropriate primetime series than the Latino Public Broadcasting series Voces,” which gets lower priority in the PBS schedule even though it “addresses our actual populace and its needs,” she wrote in an e-mail to Current.
PBS’s president doesn’t fight the general point.
“I agree with the consortia that there is a long way to go,” Kerger said in an interview last week. In the treatment of minority subjects, “public television in its early days was ahead of the curve,” but later, Kerger says, “I think we became too comfortable that we were more proactive than we had been.”
Now she’s confident that a stream of new PBS programs about minority topics is more than a good intention.
Kerger cites the Feb. 23 American Experience doc, A Class Apart by Carlos Sandoval and Peter Miller, about a landmark case in the Latino civil rights movement. She also points to this week’s premiere of the five-part doc We Shall Remain, which covers momentous moments in Native American history.
This fall brings a WGBH/BBC four-parter, Latin Music U.S.A., and a new season of Latino Public Broadcasting’s doc anthology Voces. CPB has put funds into The Latino Americans, an eight-hour history from WETA and LPB. And multiple sources say documentarian Hector Galán is developing plans for a history of Hispanic Americans in the military [The War Within].
Baseline for progress
NALIP makes clear that it doesn’t want pubTV employment figures for strictly academic reasons. In its decade as an advocacy group, it has collected and used figures for assessing the performance of TV networks.
The data are essential for the association to measure progress and identify trouble areas, says Kathryn Galan, executive director. “We went in 10 years ago and created memorandums of understanding with each of the networks for free sharing of data.” The networks assigned vice presidents to promote diversity and gave them budgets.
The National Latino Media Council, including NALIP, joins other ethnic advocates in publishing an annual report card for minority hiring and contracting at the four big commercial networks. Last year, NBC got a B and the others B-plusses. [criteria]
As for PBS, the group asked for data on hiring of writers, directors and producers by the major program strands and producing stations for at least the past nine years — data that the association has sought since 2005.
“In addition,” the letter to PBS said, “NALIP would like to see Latino representation at the executive level on one or more of the primetime strands, as well as on the National Program Service’s editorial board. We believe that these steps will help PBS diversify and to grow the audiences of the future.”
Jones of NBPC doubts PBS will be able to overcome its major challenges if it can’t “come up with basic numbers in terms of the diversity of its workforce, despite a grant of hundreds of thousands of dollars to do just that.”
By observation, Jones already believes public TV has a “stunningly un-diverse workforce.”
Kerger acknowledges that “we haven’t fully wrestled with how to properly benchmark where we are,” and she’s wary that public TV can be misunderstood.
With NALIP’s focus on Hollywood and the big networks, it may expect PBS to resemble them, Kerger says, but public TV is less centralized, and most of the jobs are outside of PBS. It would be more effective for diversity advocates to reach out directly to production units, she says.
Still, pubcasting has some figures to tout. Among PBS’s new hires in the past year, a little more than 40 percent are people of color, Kerger says. In fiscal year 2008, minority employees filled 30 percent of PBS jobs, according to the diversity report.
As for employment in the broader realm of public TV beyond PBS, it’s hard to quickly reshape its ethnic mix iwhen the workforce is barely growing or even shrinking. Yet in 2007, public TV managed to increase slightly its minority employment, from 18.7 to 19.2 percent, though its total employment shrank by 2.7 percent, according to CPB figures.
Consensus analysis
The 88-page PBS report, recently obtained by Current, includes extensive appendices listing what major stations and producers have done, but it’s not full of numbers, targets, campaign-like timetables or, understandably, big spending plans. The report says it couldn’t go into quantitative analysis because pertinent data are fragmented among so many autonomous units. Also, the most recent broad content analysis of pubTV programming was a CPB study done in 2000.
The 20-page core of the report is based on 78 interviews, mostly with public TV professionals, minority and white. The interviews were conducted by the Haydee M. Rodriguez, the diversity initiative’s executive director since its start in fall 2007. The report also draws on the initiative’s July 2008 meeting of 40 system and minority leaders. From their analyses of public TV’s situation, the report offers a series of general recommendations.
A brief summary:
* Promote diversity among leadership and programming decision-makers. Identify individuals to promote, hire and assign to content decision-making teams; expand recruitment and nontraditional sourcing. Include diversity objectives in execs’ performance evaluations.
* Aid diversity across all media platforms, including online, where future audiences already gather. Start young producers on the online side. Build on PBS.org’s strong minority usage. The proportion of Latinos using PBSKids.org is 74 percent higher than the proportion among users of other websites in general, according to QuantCast, the report said. For African-Americans, it’s 14 percent higher; for Asian-Americans, it’s more than double.
* Compile baseline data on content diversity and start measuring progress. PubTV’s national organizations, stations and producers must first agree on how to evaluate on-air diversity and collect data, the report says. PBS might also look at diversity more broadly, including gender, age, religion, socioeconomic status and sexual orientation, it adds.
* Develop a national database of minority talent and subject-matter experts. It could be compiled in partnership with the Independent Television Service and minority consortia.
* Offer fellowships to help minority professionals train for promotion into staff positions at major production units. Follow the model of the commercial networks’ diversity efforts but add funding to pay salaries for a year or two after trainees join the staff.
* Refine content plans by improving review and approval processes. Ask for diversity goals in production proposals.
* Expand PBS’s public stature among minorities. Reach out in new ways; demonstrate commitment through choice of subjects.
* Share information on best practices. Start sites in PBS Connect and on the Web.
“What we’ve heard from PBS leadership is that it’s their full intent to implement the recommendations in this report,” says Rodriguez.
For decades, pubcasting has had various projects that train promising young minority employees by exposing them to intensive training and varied work experience. One of the latest is PBS’s Leadership Development Program, now approaching its third year.
The one-year program now involves about a dozen station employees with leadership potential, and it could be expanded if funding can be found, Kerger says.
“It raises the profile of certain individuals,” comments Gong, from the Asian-American consortium, “but the size of the effort is very incremental,” even for a small industry. “I don’t mean to damn it or dismiss the sincere efforts,” he adds.
Much of the talk in and around the PBS Diversity Initiative is about executive demographics. The report says a participant at the July meeting expressed a typical view: “Leadership diversity — at the stations, national affinity groups and board level — makes every other priority fall into place.”
It also supports credibility. “You can say, ‘We’re committed to diversity,’” Rodriguez observed in an interview, “but if your leadership is all of one [ethnicity] … many stakeholders who care about public broadcasting find that questionable.”
So it was “a huge step” last fall for PBS to hire Michael D. Jones, an African-American attorney and former securities exec, as its chief operating officer last year, Rodriguez says.
In her 18 months at PBS, Rodriguez says she’s met many wonderful people. She’s particularly high on the chief content officer: “John Boland gets it. He was fully engaged in the process.” She also admires the spunk of CPB President Patricia Harrison: “I’m impressed with Pat. She’s not afraid to bring up the issues, not afraid to offend the system.”
And she has hopes for Joaquin Alvarado, the young broadband evangelist and filmmaker from San Francisco given two portfolios by Harrison: He’s CPB’s senior v.p. for diversity and innovation.
Of color, on screen
Diversifying the faces on TV is a big objective of the whole exercise, an objective that Sesame Street producers adopted long ago.
Pubcasters, like activists, are tired of seeing people of color interviewed only about issues of race relations, Rodriguez told Current. “You want a Latino or an African-American talking about the economy. The tendency is that only the members of the dominant community have anything to say about the war or health care or the issue of the day.”
In January she liked seeing Nature interview a black guy about his run-in with a skunk.
Ken Burns’ National Parks series provides “a perfect example of incorporate diversity seamlessly,” Rodriguez says. “He has this absolutely charming African-American ranger talking about how impactful it was, being at one of the national parks on a cold morning and watching a buffalo lying in the snow.” Other preservationists of color appear, including an early Latino parks leader, she says.
Burns may have changed his ways since his oversights in The War ignited a political firestorm, but he’ll probably have to endure more criticism. Numerous journal articles and masters’ theses are in process, says Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, the University of Texas journalism professor who shaped the activist critique of the doc.
Rivas-Rodriguez sees failings not only in Burns’ awareness but also in public TV’s oversight—“No one at PBS raised the red flag about it”—and in the National Endowment for the Humanities’ system of scholarly advisors who, she believes, sometimes sign off on projects without adequate involvement.
Stephen Gong extracts some hope from the “transformative” election victory of Barack Obama, which brought a new generation into civic life at the same time it raised hopes among people of color.
Gong also sees that potential in hiring younger people such as Alvarado. “If you can reach a younger generation, you can bring the diversity with it,” he says. “The barriers are not as great within the younger generations.”
The barriers to diversity also are down in online media, compared with a TV channel, which speaks to only one interest at a time, Gong adds. “If we can involve this generation and the new technologies, it promises to transform all of our work and make exciting things possible.”
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