[lbo-talk] Re: Greenwald's Video (Has a new one on Fox News)

Michael Pugliese michael098762001 at earthlink.net
Sun Jul 11 23:38:24 PDT 2004


Podesta, mentioned below, Clinton W.H. official and Dukakis campaign official refused to push the October Surprise allegations against Bush 41. I walked a precinct w/ long-time Ca. State Senator Nick Petris in '88 who pushed Podesta repeatedly on this.

http://www.wnyc.org/onthemedia/ Scroll down to Outfoxed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/magazine/11FOX.html?pagewanted=all&position=

How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary By ROBERT S. BOYNTON

Published: July 11, 2004

The offices of Robert Greenwald Productions occupy a slightly rundown, horseshoe-shaped building in Los Angeles, just down the street from Culver Studios, the legendary movie facility where ''Gone With the Wind'' and ''Citizen Kane'' were filmed. Back in the day, the R.G.P. building, then a motel, was used by studio executives for liaisons with starlets and mistresses. Though no longer a Hollywood love nest, it still has a whiff of the illicit about it -- and still operates in the shadow of several corporate studios.

Robert Greenwald, a 58-year-old film producer and director with a number of commercially respectable B-list movies under his belt, has always tried to imbue his work with a left-leaning political sensibility. R.G.P. has been involved in the making of some 50 movies, including ''Steal This Movie,'' a 2000 film based on the life of the radical activist (and Greenwald's friend) Abbie Hoffman, and ''Crooked E,'' a satirical TV movie about Enron's collapse that CBS broadcast last year. Greenwald is presumably the only director in Hollywood to adorn his workspace with a quotation from Walt Whitman's ''Leaves of Grass'': ''The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots.''

One morning in late May, I visited Greenwald at his studio to watch the making of his latest documentary, ''Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism,'' which will have its premiere this Tuesday at the New School University in New York. Over the past couple of years, Greenwald has developed a ''guerrilla'' method of documentary filmmaking, creating timely political films on short schedules and small budgets and then promoting and selling them on DVD through partnerships with grass-roots political organizations like MoveOn.org. The process, in addition to being swift, allows him to avoid the problems of risk-averse studios and finicky distributors. His 2003 film ''Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War,'' a documentary that was critical of the Bush administration's drive to war, took only four and a half months from conception to completion, coming out on DVD last November as public doubts about the war began to grow.

''Outfoxed'' has been made in secret. The film is an obsessively researched expose of the ways in which Fox News, as Greenwald sees it, distorts its coverage to serve the conservative political agenda of its owner, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. It features interviews with former Fox employees, leaked policy memos written by Fox executives and extensive footage from Fox News, which Greenwald is using without the network's permission. The result is an unwavering argument against Fox News that combines the leftist partisan vigor of a Michael Moore film with the sober tone and delivery of a PBS special. A large portion of the film's $300,000 budget came in the form of contributions in the range of $80,000 from both MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, the liberal policy organization founded by John Podesta, the former chief of staff for Bill Clinton; Greenwald, who is not looking to earn any money from the project, provided the rest.

A week after its New School premiere, the film will be shown throughout the country in hundreds of small local screenings, arranged by MoveOn, where people will be able to watch and discuss it. Though the existence of ''Outfoxed'' has been quietly publicized, its particular nature and content have been closely guarded for fear, Greenwald says, that Fox would try to stop the film's release by filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit. Nobody has ever made a critical documentary about a media company that uses as much footage without permission as Greenwald has, and the legal precedents governing the ''fair use'' of such material, while theoretically strong, are not well established in case law. He has retained the services of several intellectual-property lawyers and experts to help him navigate the ambiguous legal terrain. (A Fox News representative, in response to several phone calls, said that no one in the legal department was available to comment on copyright issues.) ... The walls and bookshelves of Greenwald's office testify to his longstanding passion for liberal and left-wing causes: a photo of Coretta Scott King; a ''Free Leonard Peltier'' poster; books by Robert McChesney, the left-leaning media critic. Greenwald got hooked on making documentaries in 2000, when two filmmakers, Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler, came to him with hundreds of hours of film they had shot during the Florida recount. With his help, they produced ''Unprecedented,'' a 2002 documentary about how the Bush campaign prevailed in that contest.

Last year, Greenwald followed up that effort with ''Uncovered,'' his critique of the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq, which featured interviews with former intelligence analysts, weapons inspectors and Foreign Service officers. Once the film wrapped, Greenwald turned the traditional distribution model on its head. Rather than taking the time-consuming route of entering film festivals or courting theater distributors, he sold the DVD of ''Uncovered'' through the Web sites of various left-liberal organizations: MoveOn, The Nation magazine, the Center for American Progress and the alternative-news Web sites AlterNet and BuzzFlash. After about 23,000 orders in the first two days, the courtyard of the R.G.P. building was filled with stacks of DVD's waiting to be mailed out. When the number of orders hit 100,000, Greenwald enlisted a commercial distributor, which sold an additional 20,000 copies.

The populist MoveOn and the more centrist Center for American Progress collaborated with Greenwald on ''Uncovered.'' Both sensed that film was becoming an important medium for disseminating their anti-Bush, antiwar messages -- different though the organization's politics are -- and both provided financial support and helped spread the word. Podesta says that this kind of multimedia, multiorganization project is an effective way of reaching a younger demographic, which policy groups traditionally have difficulty courting. ''Given the choice between sponsoring a policy book that nobody reads and a documentary that sells 100,000 copies and is seen all over the country,'' he says, ''I'll opt for the latter.'' In the first half of what Greenwald calls his ''upstairs-downstairs'' distribution model, Podesta saw to it that every member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives was invited to a screening of ''Uncovered''; the Center for American Progress also sponsored additional screenings at other elite institutions in Washington and Cambridge, Mass.

Meanwhile, ''downstairs,'' MoveOn alerted its 2.2 million members to the film and sponsored about 2,600 ''house parties'' on the night that ''Uncovered'' was released. From Anchorage to Boston, people plugged their ZIP code into MoveOn's Web site, located the nearest party and watched and discussed the film with a few dozen of their fellow citizens.

Lawrence Konner, a screenwriter and producer whose production company, the Documentary Campaign, made ''Persons of Interest,'' a film about Muslim detainees in the United States, says that ''Uncovered'' ''demonstrated to the rest of us that there was a new way of marketing a documentary.'' The film's grass-roots success attracted a distributor, Cinema Libre, which took it to Cannes and sold it all over the world. A new version with additional material is scheduled for theatrical release in the United States on Aug. 13. <SNIP>

-- Michael Pugliese



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list