Author Archives: admin

As usual, the pack of docs is insane. It will be extremely hard to reduce them to 5. I half wonder, as I do every year, if the Academy ought to give docs a bigger presence at the Oscars – a whole Oscars for DOCS, even, that honor things like writing and directing, etc. Either way, here are the films selected for the shortlist.

Apollo 11, Amazing Grace, American Factory, For Sama, Cunningham, Sea of Shadows, the Biggest Little Farm are a few that have made some noise already.

The 2019 Awards will be presented during a ceremony at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles on Saturday, December 7. Tickets are on sale now.

IDA Documentary Awards 2019 Features Shortlist

Advocate (Israel, Canada, Switzerland. Directors and Producers: Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche. Producers: Paul Cadieux and Joelle Bertossa)

Amazing Grace (USA / NEON. Producers: Alan Elliot, Tirrell D. Whittley, Sabrina V. Owens, Joe Boyd, Rob Johnson, Chiemi Karasawa, Spike Lee, Angie Seegers and Joseph Woolf)

American Factory (USA / Netflix. Directors and Producers: Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert. Producers: Jeff Reichert and Julie Parker Benello)

Apollo 11 (USA / NEON and CNN Films. Director and Producer: Todd Douglas Miller. Producers: Thomas Petersen and Evan Strauss)

Aquarela (UK, Germany, Denmark / Sony Pictures Classics. Director: Victor Kossakovsky. Producers: Aimara Reques, Heino Deckert and Sigrid Dyekjær)

Black Mother (USA / Grasshopper Film. Director and Producer: Khalik Allah. Producer: Leah Giblin)

Cunningham (USA, Germany / Magnolia Pictures. Director and Producer: Alla Kovgan. Producers: Helge Albers, Ilann Girard, Elizabeth Delude-Dix, Kelly Gilpatrick and Derrick Tseng)

Dark Suns (Canada / Dogwoof. Director and Producer: Julien Elie)

Diego Maradona (UK / HBO. Director: Asif Kapadia. Producers: James Gay-Rees and Paul Martin)

EARTH (Austria / KimStim. Director and Producer: Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Producers: Michael Kitzberger, Markus Glaser and Wolfgang Widerhofer)

For Sama (UK, Syria / PBS Distribution, FRONTLINE. Director and Producer: Waad al-Kateab. Director: Edward Watts)

Hail Satan? (USA, Sweden / Magnolia Pictures. Director: Penny Lane. Producer: Gabriel Sedgwick)

Honeyland (Macedonia / NEON. Director: Tamara Kotevska. Director and Producer: Ljubomir Stefanov. Producer: Atanas Georgiev)

Kabul, City in the Wind (Netherlands, Afghanistan, Germany. Director: Aboozar Amini. Producer: Jia Zhao)

Lemebel (Chile, Colombia / Compañía de Cine. Director and Producer: Joanna Reposi Garibaldi. Producer: Paula Sáenz-Laguna)

Midnight Family (Mexico, USA / 1091. Director and Producer: Luke Lorentzen. Producers: Kellen Quinn, Daniela Alatorre and Elena Fortes)

Midnight Traveler (USA, UK, Qatar / Oscilloscope Laboratories. Director: Hassan Fazili. Producers: Su Kim and Emelie Coleman Mahdavian)

One Child Nation (USA / Amazon Studios. Directors and Producers: Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang. Producers: Christoph Jörg, Julie Goldman, Christopher Clements and Carolyn Hepburn)

Our Time Machine (China / POV, Da Xiang. Directors and Producers: Yang Sun and S. Leo Chiang)

Present.Perfect. (USA, Hong Kong / Burn The Film. Director: Shengze Zhu. Producer: Zhengfan Yang)

Roll Red Roll (USA / POV. Director and Producer: Nancy Schwartzman. Producers: Steven Lake and Jessica Devaney)

Sea of Shadows (USA, Austria / National Geographic. Director: Richard Ladkani. Producers: Walter Kohler and Wolfgang Knopfler)

The Apollo (USA / HBO. Director and Producer: Roger Ross Williams. Producers: Lisa Cortés, Jeanne Elfant Festa and Cassidy Hartmann)

The Biggest Little Farm (USA / NEON, LD Entertainment. Director and Producer: John Chester. Producer: Sandra Keats)

The Cave (USA, Syria, Denmark / National Geographic. Director: Feras Fayyad. Producers: Kirstine Barfod and Sigrid Dyekjaer) 

The Edge of Democracy (USA, Brazil / Netflix. Director and Producer: Petra Costa. Producers: Joanna Natasegara, Shane Boris and Tiago Pavan)

The Feeling of Being Watched (USA / POV. Director: Assia Boundaoui. Producer: Jessica Devaney)

The Hottest August (USA, Canada / Grasshopper Film. Director and Producer: Brett Story. Producer: Danielle Varga)

The Proposal (USA / Oscilloscope Laboratories. Director: Jill Magid. Producers: Charlotte Cook, Laura Coxson and Jarred Alterman)

This is Not a Movie (Germany, Canada / National Film Board of Canada. Director: Yung Chang. Producers: Anita Lee, Allyson Luchak, Nelofer Pazira and Ingmar Trost)

IDA Documentary Awards 2019 Shorts Shortlist

30 for 30 Shorts: Mack Wrestles (USA / ESPN. Directors and Producers: Taylor Hess and Erin Sanger. Producers: Erin Leyden and Gentry Kirby)

A Love Song for Latasha (USA. Director and Producer: Sophia Nahli Allison. Producers: Janice Duncan and Fam Udeorji)

After Maria (USA / Netflix. Director: Nadia Hallgren. Producer: Lauren Cioffi)

All Inclusive (Switzerland / Some Shorts. Director: Corina Schwingruber Ilić. Producer: Stella Händler)

America (USA / Aubin Pictures. Director: Garrett Bradley. Producers: Lauren Domino and Catherine Gund)

Black to Techno (USA / Frieze. Director: Jenn Nkiru)

Easter Snap (USA. Director and Producer: RaMell Ross. Producers: Joslyn Barnes and Su Kim)

In the Absence (USA, Korea / Field of Vision. Director: Yi Seung-Jun. Producer: Gary Byung-Seok Kam)

La Bala de Sandoval (Ecuador / Vtape. Director and Producer: Jean-Jacques Martinod)

Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if you’re a girl) (UK, USA, Afghanistan / Lifetime Films, A&E IndieFilms. Director: Carol Dysinger. Producer: Elena Andreicheva)

Lost and Found (USA, Myanmar / National Geographic. Director: Orlando von Einsiedel. Producers: Mark Bauch, Harri Grace and Dan Lin)

Marielle and Monica (Brazil, UK / The Guardian. Director: Fabio Erdos. Producer: Marina Costa)

Sam and the Plant Next Door (UK / The Guardian. Director and Producer: Omer Sami)

Scenes from a Dry City (USA / Field of Vision. Directors and Producers: Simon Wood and Francois Verster)

Show Me the Way (USA / Topic.com. Director and Producer: Kate Kunath)

St. Louis Superman (USA / MTV Documentary Films, Al Jazeera Witness and Meralta Films. Directors and Producers: Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan. Producer: Poh Si Teng)

The Love Bugs (USA. Directors and Producers: Allison Otto and Maria Clinton)

The Nightcrawlers (USA, Philippines / National Geographic. Director: Alexander Mora. Producers: Joanna Natasekura, Doireann Maddock and Abigail Anketell-Jones)

The Separated (USA / The Atlantic. Director and Producer: Jeremy Raff)

The Unconditional (USA. Director and Producer: Dave Adams. Producers: Adam Soltis, Renee Woodruff Adams, Josie Swantek Heitz and Chris Tuss)

Valley of the Rulers (Serbia, Israel. Director: Efim Graboy. Producer: Dejan Petrovic)

The 35th Annual IDA Documentary Awards honorees, were announced earlier this week. The honorees are:

Academy Award and Primetime Emmy-winning filmmaker (and five time Academy Award nominee) Freida Lee Mock (Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, Anita) who will receive the Career Achievement Award

Emmy nominated filmmaker Rachel Lears (Knock Down The House, The Hand That Feeds) who will receive the Emerging Doc Filmmaker Award

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which provides pro bono legal representation and other legal resources to protect First Amendment freedoms and the newsgathering rights of journalists, who will receive the Amicus Award

And the film foundation and production company Cinereach that will receive the Pioneer Award

View on AwardsDaily.com

EXCLUSIVE: White Horse Pictures chairman Nigel Sinclair and president Nicholas Ferrall have made a multi-picture partnership with Reelin’ In The Years Productions president David Peck to create more documentaries in the film and TV space.

The companies have worked piecemeal on films since 2006. Those collaborations include the Ron Howard-directed Pavarotti and The Beatles: Eight Days A Week — The Touring Years, as well as Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, George Harrison: Living In the Material World, the upcoming docu on The Bee Gees that Frank Marshall is directing, and The Apollo, the Roger Ross Williams-directed docu that opened at Tribeca and will be launched on HBO this fall celebrating the history of the iconic Harlem theater.

Reelin’ In The Years is a gatekeeper in licensing archival footage that feeds these documentaries, with over 30,000 hours of music footage and much more in interviews in its arsenal.

Sinclair, who leads the White Horse docu team with documentary head Jeanne Elfant Festa and TV head Cassidy Hartmann, said formalizing the partnership made sense.

“Of course, David runs this amazing library, but he also brings to the table the passion and commitment of a true archivist who cares deeply about the historical importance of footage and the need to preserve it. His invaluable advice to us on projects has gone way beyond just curating the footage he represents and this new partnership is a chance for us to utilize his extraordinary knowledge to create some very high-level, archive-driven projects on subjects we all love.”

Said Peck: “I have worked with Nigel and the White Horse partners on nearly a dozen projects over the last 13 years, and their almost fanatical commitment to excellence touches on my passion, which is finding, cataloging and preserving archival footage from around the globe and making it accessible to professionals in the film and television industry.”

View article

Academy Award winner Ron Howard is directing a new documentary about the untold story of legendary opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.

View News Site.

“I’d like to be remembered as the man who brought opera to the people,” says the late Luciano Pavarotti in the opening scene of Pavarotti, the new documentary film about his life and career. Acclaimed director Ron Howard (whose recent directorial hits include The Beatles: Eight Days a Week and Solo: A Star Wars Story) showcased the film last night with an intimate screening at New York’s iPic theater, cohosted by the Cinema Society. Admirers of the legendary Italian opera singer included Patti Smith, Keegan-Michael Key, and Martha Stewart, who all made their way to the waterside theater for a special first look.

“I’ve listened to Pavarotti thousands of times,” said Smith ahead of the screening. “I’ve learned from him, and so I’m very excited to see the film.”

True to Pavarotti’s ethos, the film captivates even those who aren’t the most well versed in classical music and opera (such as this Vogue writer). “It’s very clear from the movie that one of his most important aims was to spread the world of opera to everyone,” agreed Nicoletta Mantovani, one of the film’s producers and also Pavarotti’s widow. “Luciano really admired the fact that opera was sung in the streets by people in the old times, like pop music now. So he wanted to bring [it] back.” The movie focuses on Pavarotti’s desire to democratize the genre: During his American tours he made a point of bringing concerts to small towns in the heartland that notably lacked an opera house, and his 1977 performance of La Bohème at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House was the first opera performance to be televised live. The film also touches on Pavarotti’s famous friendship with Princess Diana and his ensuing benefit concerts. To much criticism at the time, Pavarotti’s benefits featured musical collaborations between the maestro and rock musicians like Sting and Bono.

After the film, not even an expected downpour of rain could dampen spirits as attendees dashed across the street to the after-party. Howard was in high spirits too. “It really begins with enough access and fresh material to be able to offer a new perspective,” he said, noting the support he received for the documentary’s materials from Pavarotti’s managers, colleagues, and family. “In this case, we had the cooperation of the family, which meant their interviews, which were so personal, raw, emotional, but also comprehensive in terms of helping us understand Pavarotti. We also had these amazing photographs, videos, and tapes from their archives that we could work with to give audiences a lot of moments they’d never seen before.”

R17, a rooftop lounge atop Pier 17, played host to the party, with guests abuzz in conversation about the film. Cozy fireplaces and refreshing pamplemousse spritz cocktails provided a delightful segue into the rest of the evening. Conversation and Prosecco flowed for the rest of the night, punctuated by circulating platters of bite-size avocado toast and crisped potatoes garnished with truffle aioli.

Pavarotti opens in select theaters on June 7.

View Article.

Bette Davis patted him on the butt when she decided he was a good director. Henry Fonda gave him his first books on film theory. Lee Marvin got drunk and told him stories about John Ford’s sadistic side. Vincente Minnelli taught him to be a stickler for detail. Roger Corman advised him to pursue his own creative point of view in movies, but never forget the crowd pleasers like car crashes and naked women. Andy Griffith showed him, when he was just a young ’un, how to have fun while working hard. And Yul Brynner explained that when you take a shot of vodka and bite the glass, it had better be a prop glass made of sugar.

Ron Howard grew up in Hollywood working with the giants of the entertainment industry, and it gave him a fine appreciation for giants.

That is why, even though he’s more of a sports fan than an opera aficionado, he decided to make a documentary about opera’s Sultan of Swat: Luciano Pavarotti, the King of High Cs, a man of gargantuan talent and appetite, swathed in women and Hermès scarves, who died in 2007 and is perhaps inadequately immortalized on iTunes and YouTube.

“Seeing Michael Jordan take off at the free-throw line and slam dunk was mind-blowing,” Mr. Howard said. “In the same way, it’s hard to imagine that human beings can hit these notes.”

Peter Gelb, the head of the Metropolitan Opera, said the metaphor is apt: “Unlike pop singers who use microphones, an opera singer’s voice is produced by a purely physical effort, using his entire body like a vocal athlete and producing sounds from their diaphragms.”

Mr. Pavarotti was consumed with insecurity that he might not hit the high Cs, saying, “I go to die” as he walked onstage.

Larger Than Life

Over lunch at Patsy’s Italian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, the 65-year-old Mr. Howard said he was fortunate with the quality of the archival footage he and the other filmmakers got. Those included a video clip of Mr. Pavarotti’s early triumph as Rodolfo in “La Bohème” in Reggio Emilia, Italy, in 1961, with the audience gasping, and interviews with the singer’s first wife, Adua, his three older daughters and two of his “secretaries,” as the long-term loves who were part of Mr. Pavarotti’s entourage were known.

There are also home movies shot by Nicoletta Mantovani, the angelic-looking young assistant who became the singer’s second wife and the mother of his youngest daughter, Alice.

“Opera’s Golden Tenor,” as Time called Mr. Pavarotti in a 1979 cover story, was a volcanic life force whose voice could give you goose bumps and make your ears ring. His range of Bs, Cs and Ds, with a romantic, gleaming timbre, was “one of those freaks of nature” that came along only once in a century, as one conductor told Time.

The singer explained that his famous connection with the audience came from imagining his voice traveling along a separate thread to each member of the audience, with their applause sending back oxygen.

Mr. Pavarotti never learned to read music, relying on his own primitive sign system of arrows and other indicators that he would write into his scores.

He wasn’t a tormented artist. The rotund Italian tenor was joyous and generous, raising money for children in war-torn places including Bosnia and Kosovo, bringing opera to the people and traveling with his own prosciutto slicer, pots, pans and kilos of tortellini and cheese. 

The Met kept a buffet in the wings so he could snack between arias. His abrasive former manager, Herbert Breslin, wrote in “The King and I,” his dishy memoir written with Anne Midgette, that Mr. Pavarotti — whose weight swung between 240 and 350 — had to have gained and lost about 5,000 pounds during their years together.

“Opera singers are highly neurotic individuals who eat neurotically,” Mr. Gelb said. “It’s an impossible job. You try to hit notes, but you never know exactly what will come out.”

“Big P,” as his mentor and co-star Joan Sutherland called him, was irresistible, as the film shows. A radiant Princess Diana sat through a concert in the pouring rain for him. When Bono refused an invitation to write a song and record it with the tenor, Mr. Pavarotti made friends with Bono’s Italian housekeeper, who then pestered her boss until he succumbed. 

When Ms. Mantovani told Mr. Pavarotti that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and could probably not stay with him, he swept away her fears, announcing, “Until now I loved you. But from now on, I adore you.”

He was a regular guest on Johnny Carson, sang on the Grammy Awards, gave out an Oscar and collaborated with pop stars. He teamed up with Plácido Domingo and José Carreras to turn “the Three Tenors” into one of the top bands in the world. But as Mr. Breslin once told the author Manuela Hoelterhoff, one tenor was top dog: “Domingo would have to go pray in seventeen churches in Guadalajara to find that sound.” And “Seinfeld” had a running joke about forgetting who “the other guy” was.

Mr. Pavarotti’s first wife, Adua, says in the film that her former husband could be a diva: “He got used to having everything. If he had asked for chicken’s milk, they would have probably milked a chicken.”

Bono rages in the documentary against those who criticized the waning power of Mr. Pavarotti’s voice before the singer’s death: “The reason why he is great is because he has lived those songs,” adding that you can hear that “in every crack of his voice.”

Passed on ‘Star Wars’

Mr. Howard himself cannot sing, even though at age 7 he played the redheaded Winthrop Paroo in the movie version of “The Music Man,” warbling about the delights of Gary, Ind., and the Wells Fargo stagecoach.

“They put up with the fact that I could barely carry a tune,” he said. “I got the lisp down, my dad taught me the lisp, but the singing was always problematic.”

Despite his own pitchiness, Mr. Howard steeped himself in Mr. Pavarotti’s work and came up with a novel structure: to use the arias to fashion an opera about the tenor himself, with original remastered tracks at Abbey Road, the famous recording studio in London.

“We drew from 22 different operas, maybe 90 pieces of music,” the director said. “‘A Vucchella,’ about a woman being like a little flower, for when he rediscovered love. Pagliacci, the clown, when he was struggling to perform. ‘Tosca,’ when he knows he’s coming to the end.”

The film shows the opera star’s superstitious side. He kept a bent nail found in backstage scenery (or planted there by his assistants) in his pocket for luck. Mr. Breslin revealed that Mr. Pavarotti had two other superstitions: He banned the color purple and was skittish about the number 17, preferring to spend the 17th of any month in bed. 

Mr. Gelb recalled that once, in the 1980s, Mr. Pavarotti got out of the hospital and refused to take off his green plastic hospital bracelet because he thought it would be unlucky, even though Mr. Gelb, who was at the Met filming the singer’s performance for TV, told him the bracelet could be seen on camera.

“I used to have a lucky hat,” Mr. Howard recalled about a plaid newsboy cap a mentor gave him. But after he lost it, he stuck with one good luck charm:

“My wife”— Cheryl, a writer — “has been in everything I’ve ever done that’s not a documentary.” 

The Los Angeles Times once said that Ron Howard’s face reflected “mom and apple pie, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, a home run in the ninth and a basket at the buzzer.”

He is such an American icon that Andy Warhol asked to do twin portraits of him: one with the mustache he had in the mid-’80s and one after he shaved it off. He refused to shave off the ’stache for Mr. Warhol but did it spontaneously later, going into an airport restroom after he’d had a couple drinks to mourn the poor box office of “Cry-Baby,” the 1990 John Waters movie that his film company, Imagine Entertainment, produced.

If there was a phrenology skull mapping the cultural touchstones for baby boomers, Mr. Howard would be all over it, with “The Andy Griffith Show,” “The Danny Thomas Show,” “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,’’ “General Electric Theater” presented by Ronald Reagan, “The Twilight Zone,” “The Waltons,” “Dennis the Menace,” “Dr. Kildare,” “Gunsmoke,” “Gomer Pyle,” “I Spy” and “Happy Days.”

He might have been an even greater part of the cultural landscape if he had been more excited when George Lucas, who directed him in the 1973 classic “American Graffiti,” told him about his next idea.

“George tried to explain it as a kind of Flash Gordon movie but with better special effects,” Mr. Howard said. “And I thought it sounded like a pretty terrible idea. Sci-fi was really a B-minus genre. I liked ‘Planet of the Apes’ all right but I couldn’t possibly imagine what he was trying to do.”

By the time he realized “Star Wars” was a hot project, he couldn’t even get an audition.

Despite his unique résumé, he still identifies with the comment of his friend, the late, great writer William Goldman, who once confessed to Mr. Howard, “I feel like I got in on a pass.”

He has no hobbies and said if he had a free Saturday afternoon, he would work. Movies, he said, give you a Walter Mitty portal to step into wondrous worlds.

For “Splash,” he got to scuba dive to shoot underwater scenes with Daryl Hannah’s mermaid. For “Apollo 13,” he got to try a weightlessness exercise. For “Rush,” he explored the world of Formula One.

“I’m getting paid to have an adventure,” he said.

Escaping ‘Dopey Opie’

It seems impossible that Mr. Howard, the patriarch of a three-generation show business family, can be so nice and normal, especially because he started out-earning his father at age 8 and, by his own calculation, made more than the Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax by the time he was 11.

His father and mother fell in love as teenagers in Oklahoma. They got married in Kentucky, when they were working with a children’s theater troupe. His mother wore her Cinderella dress, and the dwarves from “Snow White” were the groomsmen. “There were only four dwarves,” Mr. Howard said. “It was a very low-budget production.”

His father, Rance, was a Depression-era Oklahoma farm boy. After Ron was born, he moved to Los Angeles to be a writer and actor. (He played the role of a farmer in “Chinatown,” and Ron Howard boasted that his dad once held the Guinness Book of World Records title for playing more men of the cloth than any other character actor.)

When Ron hit it big as Opie Taylor on “The Andy Griffith Show” and Richie Cunningham on “Happy Days” — Eddie Murphy called him “Opie Cunningham” on “Saturday Night Live” — Rance Howard continued to use his own paychecks to support the family, knowing that it could warp his son if he had the financial whip hand.

Following his parents’ lead, Ron Howard fell in love with his wife of 44 years, Cheryl, when he was a teenager. They live in a bucolic part of Connecticut and have four grown children, including two daughters who have followed him into acting.

At a Directors Guild of America gala a few years ago, Bryce Dallas Howard said that her father had been underestimated at times because he was dorky and earnest, “not the typical example of the edgy auteur filmmakers who earn instant cool cred in this business.”

How did he never rebel?

“You know, my version of rebellion, as I think about it, was this,” Mr. Howard said. “Early on, I could see what people’s expectations for my behavior would be and I did not want to fulfill their cliché sense of what a kid actor or a teen actor would be. And also, I’m an introvert.

“Kids would taunt me. Burbank is a working-class town. I got bullied and stuff in school because I was ‘Dopey Opie.’ I went to public school when I wasn’t doing the show. And it was pretty tough. I became very good at wrestling.”

As he grew older, he would get teased in bars and clubs. Guys would demand to know if he was going to buy a Corvette. “I got a white Volkswagen Beetle,” he said. “It was my way of saying, ‘Don’t put me in that other box.’” He said that the “very rooted, earthy, common sense approach” of his father kept him “sane and solid.”

Brian Grazer, who has what he calls “the longest partnership in Hollywood history” with Mr. Howard, met him in 1979 and later formed Imagine. In 1982, they produced the movie “Night Shift” with Henry Winkler and Michael Keaton about a proper, introverted guy who teams up with a jangly, extroverted guy. It echoes their own odd-couple relationship.

Mr. Grazer soon discovered Mr. Howard’s stubborn streak. He would beg Mr. Howard to talk at meetings with studio chiefs to no avail. But Mr. Howard had “a sixth sense,” Mr. Grazer said, about “what was transpiring” in a deal and who was “a scumbag.”

Mr. Grazer said that going full-bore into documentaries makes perfect sense for Imagine given that many of their company’s critical successes — “Apollo 13,” “Frost/Nixon,” “8 Mile,” “Friday Night Lights,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “Rush” — were true stories or inspired by true stories.

When Mr. Howard directed “Apollo 13,” he said that there was only one negative card written by an audience member after a test screening.

“Horrible!’’ a man wrote. “They would never survive!!!!”

“Of course, he didn’t know it was a true story,” Mr. Howard said, laughing. “So he thought it was sentimental crap. Well, I realized then and there, that’s one of the reasons you do a true story. Because often the behaviors and outcomes are more remarkable.”

The ‘Militant Middle’

Mr. Howard has already directed two music documentaries. The first, “Made in America,” about Jay-Z’s festival in 2012 in Philadelphia, he agreed to do on a whim because his family was out of town. Then he made “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week” in 2016.

“I was talking to Paul,” the director recalled, “and he said, ‘Look, I know you have final cut. The only thing is, so much has been made about the difficulties that we had later and they still resonate with me. But it’s only been in the last couple of years that, when I see a photograph of John and I, I just think, man, we were a great team. And we were great friends.’”

Mr. Howard, who is just as interested in ordinary people as extraordinary ones, is making a movie of J.D. Vance’s best seller, “Hillbilly Elegy,” for Netflix. It will star Amy Adams and Glenn Close, and filming is to begin this month in Georgia.

Shortly after our interview, Mr. Howard went to Atlanta to scout locations and the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, spurring outrage. Mr. Howard and Mr. Grazer said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter that they plan to go ahead with “Hillbilly Elegy” but will “boycott the state as a production center” if the law goes into effect in January.

“We see Governor Kemp’s bill as a direct attack on women’s rights,” their statement read in part.

About his interest in Mr. Vance’s book, Mr. Howard told me, “I am very concerned about this huge schism and mistrust in the country.”

As the director of the 1999 satire “EDtv,” with Matthew McConaughey as a guy who has a TV camera on him 24/7, Mr. Howard must see some parallels with the former reality star in the White House.

“I just feel that moving down this road where demagogy keeps succeeding is a real threat to our stability, our footing,” he said. “You don’t want the highest office in the land to be a great financial opportunity.”

He also fears we may now be addicted to operatic presidents.

“I don’t like the idea of celebrity presidents,” he said. “If I could wave a wand, there’d be two new rules: First, you’d have to have served in elected office to be eligible. The other thing is all campaign ads should be reduced to one thing: the candidate in front of a flag in a close-up talking to the camera. No music, no cut-aways, no sad kids, no angry moms.”

He got Fox News’s attention last year when he tweeted: “Honest question to #MAGA minders. When was America at its greatest? Can you tell me an era that reflects the ‘Again’ that you hope we return to?”

But the man who does not like to be typecast in his career is the same way about politics. He is excited by some of the new Democratic faces but said, “Mostly what I want is a common-sense problem solver who has some experience. I don’t care what party they’re from. I’d vote for a Republican if it was the right person.

“I keep wishing there was a third party, I keep calling it a militant middle.”

Mr. Howard is also working on a documentary about the aftermath of the wildfire that consumed Paradise, Calif.

“My mother-in-law used to live in Paradise and I have a lot of relatives and in-laws in Redding, California, nearby,” he said. “And suddenly there was this fire that wiped out a town. It’s a survival story. Will the town make it? Will the individuals within the town choose to keep the community together? What does that kind of devastation really feel like?”

Sara Bernstein, an executive vice president in Imagine’s new documentary unit, said that she and Mr. Howard went to film in Paradise soon after the fire.

“People were walking through the rubble of their burned-down homes, their lives destroyed, and yet they were so excited to see Ron Howard in their town,” she said. “They would shout out, ‘Hi, Opie!’ and then pour their hearts out to him on camera. And it really hit me that for the people of Paradise, who have lost every tangible memory of their life, Ron represents a living memory to them. They were not just talking to a world-famous director, but they were opening up to an old friend. And that’s the magic of Ron Howard.”

View Article

Ron Howard’s documentary about the iconic opera singer screened Wednesday, allowing audience members to relive Pavarotti’s most powerful performances.

Ron Howard shared his feelings of stage fright with the late opera singer Luciano Pavarotti, he told the audience at Wednesday’s Creative Artist Agency’s screening of the documentary Pavarotti.

As Howard demonstrated in his film, Pavarotti experienced extreme nervousness before performing. Howard said he could relate to Pavarotti, finding screenings “nerve-racking” he told The Hollywood Reporter.

“I’m always anxious because I’m never 100 percent sure how an audience is going to receive the scenes,” Howard told THR. “I’ve learned over the years that you can have a real belief in what it is that you’ve done, and somehow it’s not communicating to people the way you thought.”

Film is not only “entertainment through ideas,” but also a medium of communication, Howard said. He often has to reconcile what interests him and his understanding of the project with how people receive the film.

Howard and Brian Grazer’s company, Imagine Entertainment, worked with Nigel Sinclair and Guy East’s White Horse Pictures to produce the film in collaboration with Polygram Entertainment and StudioCanal. Paul Crowder joined the creative team as editor along with Mark Monroe as a writer. Together they took the film through the trial-and-error process of documentary filmmaking.

“People that don’t make docs [fail to] realize how much you depend on doing things wrong so you can get it right,” Monroe said. “A lot of the writing is in the editing. The shaping of the story — you’re learning as you go in terms of what works and what doesn’t work.”

Even with Pavarotti’s large impact, many people still do not consume opera regularly, Monroe added. “We did a lot of exploration into helping audiences understand opera,” Howard told THR. “I really wanted to let audiences understand how physical it is. It’s almost athletic what [opera singers] achieve.”

Pavarotti chose an art form that required “so much discipline,” throwing himself completely into his craft, Howard said. To have any success as an artist, a person has to have good taste and the bar has to be very high, Howard added. At the same time, that individual might feel insecure about not living “up to the possibilities of a project.” Howard described it as the “yin and yang of living an ambitious creative life.”

The biggest takeaway from the film for Howard was that the ambitious person in “the pursuit of excellent relationships, excellent living, excellent work … may find it frustrating,” he told THR. “Because if you’re that type of person, you may never actually reach it in your mind. But for all the rest of us observers, we’re going to say, ‘Wow, what a life.'”

Pavarotti hits theaters June 7.

View Article

Pavarotti hits theaters June 7.

The 2019 Tribeca Film Festival got off on the right, tapping foot thanks to its opening night screening of The Apollo, Roger Ross Williams’ documentary about Harlem’s iconic theater, in the legendary hall that inspired it.

To squeeze 85 years of performances — many of them debuts or career-launching sparks — from Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Lauryn Hill, Public Enemy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, Gregory Hines, Savion Glover and scores more into a documentary that doesn’t span the course of an entire day is a feat. To do so while seamlessly incorporating the cultural, communal and political forces that wove and continue to weave strong threads throughout the Apollo’s history and identity is herculean.

To squeeze 85 years of performances — many of them debuts or career-launching sparks — from Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Lauryn Hill, Public Enemy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, Gregory Hines, Savion Glover and scores more into a documentary that doesn’t span the course of an entire day is a feat. To do so while seamlessly incorporating the cultural, communal and political forces that wove and continue to weave strong threads throughout the Apollo’s history and identity is herculean.

Williams succeeds in both respects, as The Apollo is a testament to the Apollo’s significance as a touchstone for black entertainment and culture as rich as its source material. (It will eventually reach a wide audience when it airs on HBO.) This wasn’t lost on the crowd who filled the theater’s 1,683 seats on Wednesday night (April 24).

“For 85 years, some of the greatest talent in history has graced this stage,” said the director during his introduction. (He touched the Tree of Hope, the lovingly worn tree stump that all Apollo performs approach before they take the stage, before he reached the microphone.) “Tonight is about celebrating that history and what it means to black people. Our struggle is defined by our music and our art. The film is a celebration of how far we’ve come, and a reminder of how much further we need to go. In the word of my esteemed composer Robert Glasper, don’t turn back now, we’ve come too far not to make it.”

This mission was apparent in Williams’ encyclopedic approach, as The Apollo is rife with reel treasures and testimony from pop, R&B and rock n’ roll’s most exclusive pantheon. Some of the pieces of footage, such as Hill’s debut on the Apollo stage one Amateur Night, is familiar; others, like a 12-year-old Wonder leading a full-band MoTown Revue with nothing more than his voice and a harmonica, are rarities. Frank Schiffman, the co-founder of the Apollo, kept copious, cheeky notes on the talent who came through the stage door on 126th street, and snapshots of these cards were shared (along with boisterous commentary from Dionne Warwick). From its first Amateur Night to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, which was adapted for the stage for the first time at the Apollo in 2018, The Apollo packs in several lifetimes of history without overwhelming the viewer with information or putting them to sleep in between concert clips.

If he were to simply rely on the stuffed vault of archival material, he’d have a fine documentary on his hands, but Williams took The Apollo from great to extraordinary by stressing how necessary it is to study the connection between current events and the creators living through them, and how thhis impacts the theater as much the art that keeps it open. Several artists share stories of touring through the Jim Crow South and performing throughout the Civil Rights Movement, and Robinson and Patti LaBelle recall sleeping in station wagons, being denied service in Southern restaurants and facing various hostilities on tour.

These experiences were the polar opposite of what they found at the Apollo. James Brown’s funeral was held there in 2006 after a lifetime spent performing at the theater (and recording some game-changing live albums, too), and Williams takes the time to connect the significance of 1968’s  “Say It Loud, I’m Black & I’m Proud” to the tumultuous period in which Brown released it. When footage of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” rolls, Williams anchors the somber protest anthem with a discussion about why Holiday’s label hesitated to release it and how she was able to perform it, free of censorship and corporate interests, on the Apollo’s stage.

The inclusion of Paul McCartney’s voice is a potent move, one that attempts to right a wrong frequently perpetrated in the writing of rock history. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and other white, guitar-slinging musicians are often dubbed the forefathers of rock n’ roll in lieu of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Howlin’ Wolf, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the other black artists who actually laid the groundwork for American popular music at large. By putting McCartney in front of camera to share his adoration of black music — and specifically his insistence that the Beatles desperately wanted to make a pilgrimage to the Apollo when they first touched down stateside — Williams makes space for these artists while setting the record straight.

This all underscores the heart of The Apollo, which stresses that the theater isn’t a shrine for the stars of yesteryear, but a blank canvas for new work and new stories — even in the toughest times. Footage of Between the World and Me’s run opens and closes the documentary, with Angela Bassett, Common and more giving voice to Coates’ words throughout the production.

Written as a letter to his young son in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, Between the World and Me confronts the violent racism of the real world through the trauma of Coates’ lived experience, and The Apollo shows discussions between the play’s cast members as they unpack his text and its themes. Williams’ lens then turns to Coates as he watches Bassett read from the wings. It’s a moment as moving and incendiary as when Franklin brought the room to their stamping feet, or when Brown whipped himself into a frenzy, or when Hill returned to the Apollo alongside the Fugees after her Amateur Night debut.

And that, in a single shot, is the whole point: The Apollo trusts black voices to tell their stories in their vivid, brilliant, revolutionary ways, and The Apollo put that relationship under a much-deserved spotlight.

Before Williams came out, Tribeca Film Festival founders Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal delivered their opening remarks. “In these disturbing times, when the administration is promoting divisiveness and racism, by being here tonight, we’re making a statement that we reject it,” De Niro said to thunderous applause. It was just another night at the Apollo, and those nights are worth celebrating well into the next 85 years.

View Article

The Tribeca Film Festival in recent years has opened with documentaries about the soul and institutions that are pillars of New York City, whether with subjects like Saturday Night Live or local native and music mogul Clive Davis, and this year was no exception as the 18th Robert De Niro-Jane Rosenthal co-created event shined a spotlight on Harlem’s holy entertainment venue: The Apollo Theater on 125th street, subject of the premiering Roger Ross Williams’ HBO documentary The Apollo. 

“Every time I set foot in this hall of art and entertainment, I can feel its incredible history. I hear the echoes of the artists who performed here, the audiences who came here to be entertained, to applaud, sometimes to jeer, and often to be moved. In these disturbing times when the administration is promoting divisiveness and racism, by being here tonight, we’re making a statement that we reject it,” said De Niro to great cheers.

“No you don’t! Not in this house! Not on this stage!,” De Niro shouted at the Donald Trump presidential administration.

“Amen!” responded attendees in the house.

Typically, Tribeca kicks off the festival at the Upper West Side Beacon Theatre which seats 2,894. With The Apollo, natch, premiering at The Apollo, attendance was smaller this year given the venue’s three-tiered 1,506 seating capacity.

The doc, a six year journey in the making, covers plenty of ground, largely beginning with the theater’s swing era (The Apollo was built in 1913-14) of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, moving to Ella Fitzgerald forgetting her lines in a song and finding her scatting voice, to a 13-year old Lauryn Hill getting rejected by the crowd (only to return years as an adult and knock their socks off), to James Brown being a beacon during the black-power revolution with his anthem “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” and to President Barack Obama becoming the first U.S. President to step onto the legendary stage of African American art and culture which has triumphed over racism and oppression through history.

One of the more current-day story lines running throughout the doc is the stage rehearsal and 2018 spoken word performance of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” the author’s letter to his teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being black in the United States and the racist violence woven into American culture. In the face of adversity, The Apollo was a safe haven for the voice, no matter how big or small, of African American culture.

Largely run by Frank Schiffman during the swing and Motown eras, he amassed a huge index card file on acts that played there, how much each grossed, and a brief and blunt critique of their performances. That said, while the Cotton Club and Savoy had white-only audiences, The Apollo was a venue that African Americans could call their own. Quite often more established black acts during the Motown era would forgo playing the establishment in favor of white only venues, but that changed when The Apollo reached out to Eartha Kitt, who made a point to absolutely play there.

It was through Schiffman’s talent booker Ralph Cooper that The Apollo first launched its legendary Amateur Nights, giving a voice to fresh and burgeoning comedy and musical acts. New talent would come in from around the country, sometimes broke, for a shot to audition. The crowd at The Apollo was scary for any performer, as Richard Pryor explains in the film, being known to boo acts off stage. However, The Apollo wasn’t a venue for button-down dramatic theater, but for passion and soul. Booing was a right of passage and for any act gracing the stage, it only served to make them better.

Keeping The Apollo alive financially was always a risky proposition (even with Gladys Knight & The Pips performing several shows from 11am to 11pm during their 1960s beginnings) and the business model couldn’t sustain itself through various owners. In 1991 the state of New York bought the Apollo and created the non-profit Apollo Theater Foundation to run it.

Last night, Williams, who won an Oscar for the 2010 short subject doc Music by Prudence, said, “For 85 years, the greatest talent in history graced this stage. Tonight is about celebrating that history and what it means to black people. Our struggles are defined by our music and our art. This film is a celebration of how far we’ve come, but how farther we need to go. In the words of my esteemed composer Robert Glasper, ‘Don’t turn back now, we’ve come too far not to make it.’”

View Article

The legendary Harlem show palace gets the documentary it deserves, a bracing and moving look at how a parade of extraordinary popular artists redefined black America — and America, period — from one stage.

Director: Roger Ross WilliamsWith: Pharrell Williams, Leslie Uggams, Jamie Foxx, Patti LaBelle, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Smokey Robinson, Paul McCarney, Charles Rangel.

Official Site: https://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/apollo-2019

You should never take for granted a documentary that fills in the basics with flair and feeling. Especially when the basics consist of great big gobs of some of the most revolutionary and exhilarating popular art ever created in this country. Roger Ross Williams’ documentary “The Apollo,” which kicked off the Tribeca Film Festival on a note of soulful celebration (at a premiere held, of course, at the Apollo Theater), fills in the 85-year history of the 1,506-seat show palace on 125th St. in Harlem that changed black culture and changed American culture (no, it was more than that — the Apollo changed black life and changed American life). The movie brings off that feat in a bracing and moving way: by flowing back and forth between past and present, performance and political activism, so that by the end we know in our bones how false it would be separate them.

Countless astonishing spectacles of black expression were experienced, for the first time, on the Apollo stage. But in “The Apollo,” an event that stands out is the weekly gladiatorial talent show known as Amateur Night, an Apollo institution ever since the theater began its life in 1934. The glory of Amateur Night was at once aesthetic and existential. Anyone who wanted to could get up on stage, which meant that even the most marginalized members of a marginalized community could have a voice. The Apollo gave them access. You could say that the dream that drives every music-competition reality show was born, decades before, at the Apollo. And though the Apollo didn’t have judges, it had something every bit as judgey (and dramatic): the audience. They were the toughest crowds on earth, and loved nothing more than to exercise their power by booing someone off the stage.

But that didn’t mean Amateur Night was anything but a joyous free-for-all. To make the grade, you had to shine; the audience was celebrating its own high standards. And the effect of all that energy was to burnish (or, in some cases, just burn) the talent in front of it. Ella Fitzgerald first appeared on Amateur Night in 1934, when she was 17; she forgot the lyrics to the song she was singing, so she started scatting — and the rest is history. But then we see an Apollo clip of Lauryn Hill from the late 1980s, when she was just 13. She’s pitchy as hell, and the crowd rejects her. (In this case, history would have to wait a few years for a reset.)

On Amateur Night, the excitement was in knowing that you could see just about anything (including an act that might change the world). And that’s the excitement of watching “The Apollo.” The movie, through its addictive and exhaustively researched film and video clips, salutes a shocking range of genius, from Duke Ellington leading an orchestra so tight that each note seems to glisten to Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” with a bitterness so acidic it stings, from Little Stevie Wonder doing the apocalyptic version of “Fingertips (Pt. 2)” that became famous to Aretha Franklin performing a ’70s rendition of “Respect” that makes the studio version sound shy, from Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins tap dancing with such exquisite synchronization that their simplest steps are hypnotic to Richard Pryor entering the mind of a white cop who “accidentally” kills a black citizen in a way that makes the laughter freeze in your throat.

Swing and bebop, funk and soul; crooners and torch singers; Motown and the avant-garde; blackface in the ’30 and drag in the ’60s; stand-up comedy and spoken-word poetry: the Apollo was a protean stage of the imagination, a place that stretched the limits, then reset and stretched them again. What was enacted on that stage, every night, was possibility.

Along the way, there are great stories, like Smokey Robinson talking about how first-timers got the cramped eighth-floor dressing rooms and had to work their way down, or Leslie Uggams recalling how after doing her first show there, and getting ready to leave the theater, she was told that she had four more shows to do that day. Performers typically did 29 shows a week. And if can’t quite be said that all of them were underpaid, we do get a glimpse of the typed index cards that Frank Schiffman, the hard-nosed promoter who bought the place in 1934, kept on each and every act. He sounds like a utilitarian (but weirdly tasteful) Hollywood mogul as he grinds out notes that are tough, fair, and rooted in a financial paradigm. Yet at a time when the Cotton Club and the Savoy were whites-only venues, he was opening doors.

The Apollo, the movie argues, was a kind of “university” for its performers, who tried out aesthetic styles and moves that became world-famous. Paul McCartney talks about how the Beatles, who had baptized themselves in the sound of groups like the Isley Brothers (“Twist and Shout”), were eager to visit the Apollo during their first American tour, but were steered away from it because it was “too dangerous.” That was a paranoid white view of the violence of the inner city, and there’s a touching story about how a chain of people formed around the Apollo to protect it during the Harlem riot of 1964. (Not a pane of glass was broken.) Then again, it’s not as if the Apollo had to hide from the black-power revolution. It was practically launched there — almost literally, with James Brown’s epochal performance of “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

What did the Apollo in, ironically, was the mass success of the artists it helped launch. They’d gotten too big to play there, a situation exacerbated by the fact that there weren’t enough seats. Part of the magic of the Apollo is its majestic intimacy; I saw Prince perform there from the balcony, and felt like I was practically on top of him. But by the mid-’70s, its days as a headline spot were over, and it closed its doors, as if succumbing to the general urban decay around it, as money got sucked out of Harlem and into the suburbs. The movie tells the happy-ending story of how the Apollo was renovated and saved, first by the former Manhattan borough president Percy B. Sutton (who, though he tried, couldn’t make it a successful business), and ultimately by the State of New York, which set up the Apollo Theater Foundation to sustain it.

The Apollo remains a mythical historical attraction and a still-active theater that draws over a million visitors annually. The movie is framed with the rehearsal, and 2018 performance, of “Between the World and Me,” a stage version of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ incendiary, free-form manifesto written as a letter to his teenage son about the experience of being black in America. It’s the only piece of non-musical, non-dance drama in the movie, yet its presence serves to coax out something essential: that every moment of stage performance the Apollo Theater ever saw was political — not because it carried some underlying social or political message, but because it represented, through the incandescence of its artistry, the assertion of blackness in the world. Malcolm X said that equality for African-Americans should be achieved by any means necessary. The Apollo demonstrated — and “The Apollo” deftly captures — how one of the means to achieve it was beauty.

Tribeca Film Review: ‘The Apollo’

Reviewed at Tribeca Film Festival (Gala), April 24, 2019. Running time: 98 MIN.

PRODUCTION: An HBO release of a White Horse Pictures, The Lagralane Group production. Producers: Lisa Cortes, Nigel Sinclair, Jeanne Elfant Festa, Cassidy Hartmann, Roger Ross Williams.

CREW: Director: Roger Ross Williams. Screenplay: Cassidy Hartmann, Jean Tsien. Camera (color, widescreen): Michael Dwyer. Editor: Jean Tsien, John S. Fisher. Music: Robert Glasper.

WITH: Pharrell Williams, Leslie Uggams, Jamie Foxx, Patti LaBelle, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Smokey Robinson, Paul McCarney, Charles Rangel.

View Article