Pillar of the doc industry died Bill Jersey died in July 24, 2026. Over his long life of 99 years, he helped many filmmakers figure out how to a make a good documentary film. Check out this episode DocTalk, a show produced by The Documentary Channel back when Jersey’s Oscar-nominated “A Time for Burning” aired…
The post Filmmaking is an Act of Faith, said the Late Bill Jersey appeared first on Channel Nonfiction.
Pillar of the doc industry died Bill Jersey died in July 24, 2026. Over his long life of 99 years, he helped many filmmakers figure out how to a make a good documentary film. Check out this episode DocTalk, a show produced by The Documentary Channel back when Jersey’s Oscar-nominated “A Time for Burning” aired…
The post Filmmaking is an Act of Faith, said the Late Bill Jersey appeared first on Channel Nonfiction.
Don Siegel, the Hollywood journeyman director best known for helming Dirty Harry and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, never won an Oscar. He technically was never even nominated. Yet he began his directorial career with two short films that won Academy Awards in 1946. Warner Bros. staff producer Gordon Hollingshead received credit for the honors, which went to Siegel’s directorial debut, the drama Star in the Night, for Best Short Subject (Two-Reel), and to Hitler Lives, for Best Documentary (Short Subject). Hollingshead was also nominated that year for Best Short Subject (One-Reel) for the documentary Story of a Dog, which did not win.
Hitler Lives was certainly the easier production of the two for Siegel and Hollingshead, as it’s a slight reworking of a short documentary that already existed called Your Job in Germany. Written by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel and directed by Frank Capra, the original version was made for the United States War Department, for military eyes only. Warner Bros. acquired the rights to release the film to the public but had to give it a new name and change the narration and music (RKO did the same thing with Geisel and Capra’s Our Job in Japan for the Oscar-winning feature Design for Death, which I’ll write about in a future column). The studio also added a few new sequences.
Nonfics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The initial film’s purpose was to train soldiers heading to Allied-occupied Germany. Reminding viewers that the country’s leaders had already attempted grand imperial conquests in Europe three times over the last century, the documentary warned that a Fourth Reich could be around the corner. Americans sent to Germany were urged not to trust, let alone befriend, its citizens because they’re all a “potential source of trouble.” Youth were especially suspect due to the assumption that they were all brainwashed their whole lives by Nazi propaganda. But in general, it was thought safer for the U.S. to be cautious of all, disbelieving that a nation’s worth of people could suddenly change their allegiance after defeat, especially given Germany’s history.
While the whole film feels uncomfortably xenophobic and presumptuously fear-mongering, at that time it was probably effective in defending the occupation, particularly if it were meant to sell the idea of a longer stay than the one after World War I. Geisel and Capra argue that we were duped into thinking, “Why, these people are okay! It was just that Kaiser we had to get rid of.” Hollingshead and Siegel, with writer Saul Elkins, kept that line along with admitted recognition of Germany’s cultural supremacy, and then this segment: “We bit. We poured in our sympathy. We pulled out our armies. And they flung Chapter 3 in our faces.” The publicly sanctioned version removes a subsequent expletive but retains the sentiment of deja vu and a tease of a Chapter 4. “It can happen again,” the films suggest. Hitler Lives adds, “The voices of millions of dead cry out, ‘This time we must not have died in vain. This time Germany must not rise again.’”
Don Siegel, the Hollywood journeyman director best known for helming Dirty Harry and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, never won an Oscar. He technically was never even nominated. Yet he began his directorial career with two short films that won Academy Awards in 1946. Warner Bros. staff producer Gordon Hollingshead received credit for the honors, which went to Siegel’s directorial debut, the drama Star in the Night, for Best Short Subject (Two-Reel), and to Hitler Lives, for Best Documentary (Short Subject). Hollingshead was also nominated that year for Best Short Subject (One-Reel) for the documentary Story of a Dog, which did not win.
Hitler Lives was certainly the easier production of the two for Siegel and Hollingshead, as it’s a slight reworking of a short documentary that already existed called Your Job in Germany. Written by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel and directed by Frank Capra, the original version was made for the United States War Department, for military eyes only. Warner Bros. acquired the rights to release the film to the public but had to give it a new name and change the narration and music (RKO did the same thing with Geisel and Capra’s Our Job in Japan for the Oscar-winning feature Design for Death, which I’ll write about in a future column). The studio also added a few new sequences.
Nonfics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The initial film’s purpose was to train soldiers heading to Allied-occupied Germany. Reminding viewers that the country’s leaders had already attempted grand imperial conquests in Europe three times over the last century, the documentary warned that a Fourth Reich could be around the corner. Americans sent to Germany were urged not to trust, let alone befriend, its citizens because they’re all a “potential source of trouble.” Youth were especially suspect due to the assumption that they were all brainwashed their whole lives by Nazi propaganda. But in general, it was thought safer for the U.S. to be cautious of all, disbelieving that a nation’s worth of people could suddenly change their allegiance after defeat, especially given Germany’s history.
While the whole film feels uncomfortably xenophobic and presumptuously fear-mongering, at that time it was probably effective in defending the occupation, particularly if it were meant to sell the idea of a longer stay than the one after World War I. Geisel and Capra argue that we were duped into thinking, “Why, these people are okay! It was just that Kaiser we had to get rid of.” Hollingshead and Siegel, with writer Saul Elkins, kept that line along with admitted recognition of Germany’s cultural supremacy, and then this segment: “We bit. We poured in our sympathy. We pulled out our armies. And they flung Chapter 3 in our faces.” The publicly sanctioned version removes a subsequent expletive but retains the sentiment of deja vu and a tease of a Chapter 4. “It can happen again,” the films suggest. Hitler Lives adds, “The voices of millions of dead cry out, ‘This time we must not have died in vain. This time Germany must not rise again.’”
Yael Bridge is a documentarian through and through. Her first few shorts were all documentaries. Her feature-length debut,The Big Scary ‘S’ Word,…
The post Yael Bridge Moves Emotions And Minds With Her New Documentary Who Moves America first appeared on Film Threat.
After its much-reported Venice premiere, Israel’s culture minister is vowing to strip citizenship from the two Israeli filmmakers behind “NAZA.”
In the doc, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor interviewed 24 people whose faces and voices were digitally altered to protect their identities, many of them Israeli military and intelligence whistleblowers, who describe the purported use of AI-powered targeting systems in Gaza that they say killed Palestinian civilians.
Israel’s military, the IDF, says the anonymous sources in the documentary, whose faces we do not see, “cannot be verified,” and that the allegations are “categorically false.” Its main argument is that the film rests on testimony from people whose identities, service records, and involvement can’t be confirmed, and that some claims concern strategy “clearly beyond the knowledge of junior-level soldiers.” The IDF called the film’s claim that a strike was approved with up to 500 expected civilian deaths “completely false.”
Israeli Minister of Culture and Sports Miki Zohar called the documentary’s victory at Venice “shocking” and accused its creators of a “betrayal of the state.”
“The self-loathing that burns in the creators, who are willing to harm their homeland just to get applause from anti-semites around the world, is inconceivable,” Zohar said Sunday in a post on social media, adding that he would “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of” both filmmakers.
Zohar has “contacted the Director General of the Population Authority and the Director General of the Ministry of Interior to examine the denial of Israeli citizenship” to the documentarians “for breach of trust for the country and cooperation with the enemy, and to examine how the materials were obtained, who is behind them and whether in the framework of their attainment or publication, actions have been carried out that can help the enemy in time of war.”
Abraham and Szor previously shared a 2025 Oscar for “No Other Land,” about Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, which they co-directed with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. They will be back in the Oscar race this year with “NAZA,” which, much like their last film, might have to go the self-distribution route.
“You are a disgrace and an embarrassment to the entire people of Israel. Go away!” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said on X. “I am certain that your friends, that is to say our enemies Hamas in Gaza, will welcome you with open arms.”
Greetings friends,
This morning, at Stonykill Coffee and Records in Chatham, New York, I bought a used hardcover copy of Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. It’s a searing, hilarious, shocking novel I first read as a teenager—after watching the River Phoenix movie version 100+ times on a VHS tape I owned. (That movie was part of my own small movie collection at the time.)
The inscription makes it clear that this particular hardcover was purchased 44 years ago, as a gift, for Dave from Bruce.
I’ve written many such inscriptions in books over the years. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of loving a book is passing it along to someone else who I hope will love it. (Or buying a second copy for them, and keeping the first for my own library.)
That pleasure has almost completely disappeared from my life, because I mostly buy books on my Kindle, which just kinda sit inside the machine, little grainy black and white thumbnails in a digital library I don’t really even own. Point being: I can’t pass them along. And I know a lot of other people also read on Kindle, or some other e-reader, or on their phones, or who knows.
So I give a lot fewer books as gifts these days.
I still do it — it’s just a LOT less often.
I used to also gift an awful lot of music (handmade mixtapes, or new or used CDs), and movies too (VHS tapes, DVDs). Like, all the time. Cheap copies of art were maybe my standard gifts, for decades of my life.
Today I can’t remember the last time I gifted a movie.
Actually I do — I gifted someone Elizabeth Lo’s Stray on iTunes (or Apple TV, or whatever it’s called). I remember it was hard to figure out how to do it, but I did it. I think I was even able to attach a brief message with it which would have been sent in an email. It sort of felt like I had sent him homework, instead of a gift. I mean… really, an email, Penny?
Even if a digital download is a kinda lame gift, I STILL like the idea that by buying a movie, I am supporting the film itself. I want to support the artists behind it, as well as its funders and distributors.
But if I am reading the current support page correctly, it seems Apple has eliminated the gifting feature (lol). As far as I can tell, Amazon doesn’t allow it either. Point being, I’m no expert here, but it seems like it’s not actually all that easy to gift a download, and anyway I can’t know what platform(s) the recipient is on, or really ANYTHING about how they watch movies.
In my opinion: this stinks.
I adored this recent piece (gift link 😊) by about how the big movie studios will almost certainly take the wrong lesson — as usual — from this summer’s surprising surge at the box office.
Hollywood’s paucity of imagination means the answer is often the most facile: They liked sharks, so let’s give them more sharks. The business is obsessed with “content,” a word that always makes me think of a bunch of interchangeable blobs, meant to fill empty space. Streaming algorithms run on the logic of content. If you like this action movie with a strong female lead, you’ll like that one. If you dig tales of miserable wealthy people in beautiful places, here are 50 more. It’s all content to fill your day, one as serviceable as the next.
Alissa argues instead that people love going to the movies for two reasons: (1) they show up because they trust and like the directors and stars — the human beings behind these works of art; and (2) they want to share an experience with friends and strangers in the dark. Both reasons are about human connection.
Lewis Hyde’s essential 1983 book The Gift argues that art belongs simultaneously to two different economies: a market economy and a gift economy.
A work of art can be bought and sold, of course, but its life AS ART depends upon its essential nature as a gift — a sacred, even magical thing that the artist freely receives, in the form of talent or inspiration or tradition, and then transforms, in order to pass the gift along to others.
Hyde is not saying artists shouldn’t get paid or that all art should be free. He’s saying a market exchange ends when both parties receive what they paid for. A gift exchange does the opposite: it creates an ongoing bond between the giver and recipient. As the gift continues moving, that bond expands outward, connecting people into a community. “The gift must always move,” Hyde writes.
For the first few decades of my life, when a work of art gave me something, one obvious way I kept the gift moving was by literally giving a copy to somebody else. It was a common ritual in my life, made possible by the ubiquity of widely used physical media.
The physical object — a book, a CD, a DVD — allows me to do two things: 1, pay money to support the art (and hopefully the artist) and 2, choose one particular work, separate it from the infinite ocean of culture, wrap it, and place it in another person’s hands. I can even inscribe a message onto it, in pen or magic marker, a message that could last for — who knows!! — maybe even 44 years. Maybe more.
I may give fewer books as gifts today, but at least I can assume everyone I give a book to has the correct technology to read it. Bruce doesn’t need to determine whether Dave owns the correct brand of book player — or whether he owns a book player at all — before giving him The Mosquito Coast!!!!
In other words, the digital era has put a dent in the perfection of book as gift, but man… it’s really decimated music and movies as suitable objects of everyday gift-giving. It’s turned everything into content, as Alissa points out.
It’s not all bad, obviously. The digital world has also wildly improved the speed and scale at which “the gift can move” in ways that are wonderful. Every time I send an Instagram meme to a friend, what is that but a gift in the truest Lewis Hyde-ian sense? And technological progress has probably made my entire career possible in the first place. So who am I to complain?
But as much as I love this newsletter, I do see it as content, not my art. I think you should TOTALLY gift it to a friend who you think will love it! But in some ways, a Blu-ray copy of NUTS! might be a better gift.
At the turn of the millennium—the peak of American CD sales—consumers bought 943 million CDs. By 2018, that figure had fallen to approximately 52 million—a decline of more than 94 percent. DVDs and Blu-rays also underwent a collapse: American spending on physical movie formats fell below $1 billion in 2024, a decline of 23.4 percent from 2023.
I clearly remember digitizing all my CDs and DVDs, and then doing what — throwing them away? I threw them all away!??! Eventually, of course, I lost most of the digitized albums too — some hard drive failure or another meant losing EVERYTHING, over and over again, including rare demos by, like, high-school friends’ bands.
It’s devastating, really. But it felt like progress at the time. I guess it was progress, of a sort. Richard Brody wrote beautifully about what we lose when we lose our physical media in the streaming era.
It’s not like CDs and DVDs are such super awesome objects. The plastic cracks, the discs scratch… they kinda suck as like, beautiful objects.
But they were affordable, I could assume anyone I gave them to had the right media player for them, and they were a great size to gift-wrap and put under the tree. And they had movies on them!! Whole-ass entire-work-of-art movies!!!
I’m realizing digital culture weakened one of my own primary everyday rituals through which I used art to create bonds between people. To build a web between my old VHS copy of The Mosquito Coast, to Bruce and Dave, to Paul Theroux. To you.
This is Alissa’s point, and it’s a good one: people love going to the movies with friends. I say this as someone whose own film recently surpassed $250,000 at the box office — meaning I played my own modest part in that great summer box office. (That kind of signal tells my industry that maybe it’s a good idea to back my next film. Or Alissa would say: it should… but maybe it will just lead to a few more animal movies! 🦉)
So I love that the film is fulfilling its role in both the economic and gift economies.
But I am still thinking about, like, birthday presents.
It’s not always practical to plan a movie date as a gift. You could do a gift card to a local theater, or a subscription to a service you like? It’s not quite the same thing as choosing a particular movie for someone. We’ve established digital downloads kinda suck, and are hard to do (even if they do send an economic signal to the industry).
Hence… yay for physical media!!! Things like vinyl and Blu-rays have certainly staged a comeback — these media have proven to work really well for a certain part of the population. But how many people have the right players, and how do you know if your friend is one of them?
So this leaves me back where I started: this sucks!!!
I am not a pessimist by nature, and I’m not trying to just write some wail of dismay here, a Luddite’s lament about physical media — which, after all, I personally have more or less given up — but it sucks that I don’t know how to gift movies to people anymore.
Do you know how?
Do you gift movies?
How?
Is it realistic to just hope everyone will choose to meaningfully move back to physical media collections?
44 years later, I know nothing about Dave or Bruce. But the inscription preserves one fact about their relationship: Bruce wanted Dave to read The Mosquito Coast. I don’t know if Dave ever did read it. But I do know this everyday act of gift-giving was renewed when I traded $8.00 in merch sales money to the proprietor at Stonykill Coffee and Records.
The inscription also preserves a small act of faith in the art itself. Bruce thought this particular book was worth buying, worth placing in Dave’s hands, in order to say “thank you,” to say “this made me think of you,” to say “I hope you will love this.” In doing this, Bruce also sent an economic signal to the publishing industry that this Paul Theroux guy is someone worth publishing.
And now the book — and a brief story about these two other strangers — has been passed on to me, which led me to write this newsletter, which you have just read.
What a gift.
Our epic 6-week run at IFC Center with Wild Inside has come to an end. It’s still in select theaters nationwide, for another few weeks.
Tons of film festival news coming soon, but I’ll start with Lunenburg, Hamptons, Hot Springs and Folkestone. FlacoDocumentary.com or @FlacoDocumentary on IG for details.
BUY MERCH!
ICYMI: I announced a new film! Please check your family’s home movie collections for elephants in American circuses and zoos!
Greetings friends,
This morning, at Stonykill Coffee and Records in Chatham, New York, I bought a used hardcover copy of Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. It’s a searing, hilarious, shocking novel I first read as a teenager—after watching the River Phoenix movie version 100+ times on a VHS tape I owned. (That movie was part of my own small movie collection at the time.)
The inscription makes it clear that this particular hardcover was purchased 44 years ago, as a gift, for Dave from Bruce.
I’ve written many such inscriptions in books over the years. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of loving a book is passing it along to someone else who I hope will love it. (Or buying a second copy for them, and keeping the first for my own library.)
That pleasure has almost completely disappeared from my life, because I mostly buy books on my Kindle, which just kinda sit inside the machine, little grainy black and white thumbnails in a digital library I don’t really even own. Point being: I can’t pass them along. And I know a lot of other people also read on Kindle, or some other e-reader, or on their phones, or who knows.
So I give a lot fewer books as gifts these days.
I still do it — it’s just a LOT less often.
I used to also gift an awful lot of music (handmade mixtapes, or new or used CDs), and movies too (VHS tapes, DVDs). Like, all the time. Cheap copies of art were maybe my standard gifts, for decades of my life.
Today I can’t remember the last time I gifted a movie.
Actually I do — I gifted someone Elizabeth Lo’s Stray on iTunes (or Apple TV, or whatever it’s called). I remember it was hard to figure out how to do it, but I did it. I think I was even able to attach a brief message with it which would have been sent in an email. It sort of felt like I had sent him homework, instead of a gift. I mean… really, an email, Penny?
Even if a digital download is a kinda lame gift, I STILL like the idea that by buying a movie, I am supporting the film itself. I want to support the artists behind it, as well as its funders and distributors.
But if I am reading the current support page correctly, it seems Apple has eliminated the gifting feature (lol). As far as I can tell, Amazon doesn’t allow it either. Point being, I’m no expert here, but it seems like it’s not actually all that easy to gift a download, and anyway I can’t know what platform(s) the recipient is on, or really ANYTHING about how they watch movies.
In my opinion: this stinks.
I adored this recent piece (gift link 😊) by about how the big movie studios will almost certainly take the wrong lesson — as usual — from this summer’s surprising surge at the box office.
Hollywood’s paucity of imagination means the answer is often the most facile: They liked sharks, so let’s give them more sharks. The business is obsessed with “content,” a word that always makes me think of a bunch of interchangeable blobs, meant to fill empty space. Streaming algorithms run on the logic of content. If you like this action movie with a strong female lead, you’ll like that one. If you dig tales of miserable wealthy people in beautiful places, here are 50 more. It’s all content to fill your day, one as serviceable as the next.
Alissa argues instead that people love going to the movies for two reasons: (1) they show up because they trust and like the directors and stars — the human beings behind these works of art; and (2) they want to share an experience with friends and strangers in the dark. Both reasons are about human connection.
Lewis Hyde’s essential 1983 book The Gift argues that art belongs simultaneously to two different economies: a market economy and a gift economy.
A work of art can be bought and sold, of course, but its life AS ART depends upon its essential nature as a gift — a sacred, even magical thing that the artist freely receives, in the form of talent or inspiration or tradition, and then transforms, in order to pass the gift along to others.
Hyde is not saying artists shouldn’t get paid or that all art should be free. He’s saying a market exchange ends when both parties receive what they paid for. A gift exchange does the opposite: it creates an ongoing bond between the giver and recipient. As the gift continues moving, that bond expands outward, connecting people into a community. “The gift must always move,” Hyde writes.
For the first few decades of my life, when a work of art gave me something, one obvious way I kept the gift moving was by literally giving a copy to somebody else. It was a common ritual in my life, made possible by the ubiquity of widely used physical media.
The physical object — a book, a CD, a DVD — allows me to do two things: 1, pay money to support the art (and hopefully the artist) and 2, choose one particular work, separate it from the infinite ocean of culture, wrap it, and place it in another person’s hands. I can even inscribe a message onto it, in pen or magic marker, a message that could last for — who knows!! — maybe even 44 years. Maybe more.
I may give fewer books as gifts today, but at least I can assume everyone I give a book to has the correct technology to read it. Bruce doesn’t need to determine whether Dave owns the correct brand of book player — or whether he owns a book player at all — before giving him The Mosquito Coast!!!!
In other words, the digital era has put a dent in the perfection of book as gift, but man… it’s really decimated music and movies as suitable objects of everyday gift-giving. It’s turned everything into content, as Alissa points out.
It’s not all bad, obviously. The digital world has also wildly improved the speed and scale at which “the gift can move” in ways that are wonderful. Every time I send an Instagram meme to a friend, what is that but a gift in the truest Lewis Hyde-ian sense? And technological progress has probably made my entire career possible in the first place. So who am I to complain?
But as much as I love this newsletter, I do see it as content, not my art. I think you should TOTALLY gift it to a friend who you think will love it! But in some ways, a Blu-ray copy of NUTS! might be a better gift.
At the turn of the millennium—the peak of American CD sales—consumers bought 943 million CDs. By 2018, that figure had fallen to approximately 52 million—a decline of more than 94 percent. DVDs and Blu-rays also underwent a collapse: American spending on physical movie formats fell below $1 billion in 2024, a decline of 23.4 percent from 2023.
I clearly remember digitizing all my CDs and DVDs, and then doing what — throwing them away? I threw them all away!??! Eventually, of course, I lost most of the digitized albums too — some hard drive failure or another meant losing EVERYTHING, over and over again, including rare demos by, like, high-school friends’ bands.
It’s devastating, really. But it felt like progress at the time. I guess it was progress, of a sort. Richard Brody wrote beautifully about what we lose when we lose our physical media in the streaming era.
It’s not like CDs and DVDs are such super awesome objects. The plastic cracks, the discs scratch… they kinda suck as like, beautiful objects.
But they were affordable, I could assume anyone I gave them to had the right media player for them, and they were a great size to gift-wrap and put under the tree. And they had movies on them!! Whole-ass entire-work-of-art movies!!!
I’m realizing digital culture weakened one of my own primary everyday rituals through which I used art to create bonds between people. To build a web between my old VHS copy of The Mosquito Coast, to Bruce and Dave, to Paul Theroux. To you.
This is Alissa’s point, and it’s a good one: people love going to the movies with friends. I say this as someone whose own film recently surpassed $250,000 at the box office — meaning I played my own modest part in that great summer box office. (That kind of signal tells my industry that maybe it’s a good idea to back my next film. Or Alissa would say: it should… but maybe it will just lead to a few more animal movies! 🦉)
So I love that the film is fulfilling its role in both the economic and gift economies.
But I am still thinking about, like, birthday presents.
It’s not always practical to plan a movie date as a gift. You could do a gift card to a local theater, or a subscription to a service you like? It’s not quite the same thing as choosing a particular movie for someone. We’ve established digital downloads kinda suck, and are hard to do (even if they do send an economic signal to the industry).
Hence… yay for physical media!!! Things like vinyl and Blu-rays have certainly staged a comeback — these media have proven to work really well for a certain part of the population. But how many people have the right players, and how do you know if your friend is one of them?
So this leaves me back where I started: this sucks!!!
I am not a pessimist by nature, and I’m not trying to just write some wail of dismay here, a Luddite’s lament about physical media — which, after all, I personally have more or less given up — but it sucks that I don’t know how to gift movies to people anymore.
Do you know how?
Do you gift movies?
How?
Is it realistic to just hope everyone will choose to meaningfully move back to physical media collections?
44 years later, I know nothing about Dave or Bruce. But the inscription preserves one fact about their relationship: Bruce wanted Dave to read The Mosquito Coast. I don’t know if Dave ever did read it. But I do know this everyday act of gift-giving was renewed when I traded $8.00 in merch sales money to the proprietor at Stonykill Coffee and Records.
The inscription also preserves a small act of faith in the art itself. Bruce thought this particular book was worth buying, worth placing in Dave’s hands, in order to say “thank you,” to say “this made me think of you,” to say “I hope you will love this.” In doing this, Bruce also sent an economic signal to the publishing industry that this Paul Theroux guy is someone worth publishing.
And now the book — and a brief story about these two other strangers — has been passed on to me, which led me to write this newsletter, which you have just read.
What a gift.
Our epic 6-week run at IFC Center with Wild Inside has come to an end. It’s still in select theaters nationwide, for another few weeks.
Tons of film festival news coming soon, but I’ll start with Lunenburg, Hamptons, Hot Springs and Folkestone. FlacoDocumentary.com or @FlacoDocumentary on IG for details.
BUY MERCH!
ICYMI: I announced a new film! Please check your family’s home movie collections for elephants in American circuses and zoos!
Director Mary Mazzio tells IndieWire about putting the story of the first all-women’s team at the America’s Cup before the world’s harshest critics.
Matteo Lane is a stand-up comedian, painter, singer, and now a Broadway performer. In this interview, we talk about how all of these skills come together in his impassioned creative process. To Matteo, all art comes from “the base of a tree and then it grows out in different places.” You never know how one artistic pursuit is going to feed into another.
We discuss his performance as Billy Flynn in Broadway’s “Chicago,” how he develops a comedy special from bar shows to international tours, the history of gay representation in comedy, the creative spark that led him to pursue painting and illustration at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his passion for Maria Callas, and why he believes in “working towards the masterpiece, not on the masterpiece.”
