Interview: Director Steve James on the Roger Ebert Documentary “Life Itself”

Posted on July 5, 2014 at 3:32 pm

Roger Ebert said that Steve James’ documentary “Hoop Dreams” was the greatest film of the first decade of the 21st century. He wrote, “A film like “Hoop Dreams” is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.”

Those last two words became the title of Ebert’s autobiography. And when it came to make a documentary about Ebert’s life, James was the one Ebert wanted to make it. There were no restrictions or approvals from the subject. Ebert wanted his story told the way James thought best.

I spoke to James about making the film and the great loves of Ebert’s life.

Roger loved it when his friend Bill recited the last page of The Great Gatsby. Why was that so important to him?

I think Bill really nails it in the film so I’m just going to steal his thoughts on it. Number one it’s a great piece of writing and Roger loved novels. He probably loved novels as much as he loved movies.
In fact when he was younger, quite young he was one of those guys that had charted out his life. He was probably about 17 when he said, “OK, I’m going to be a newspaperman and then I’m going to be a political columnist then I’m going to move to New York to be a novelist.” He charted that out.

So literature meant the world to him and that passage meant a lot. But I think what Bill says in the movie is true. It’s that it was about a self-made man. Now in Gatsby’s case there was a lot of artifice there. It wasn’t with Roger but that notion that you can come from modest or nothing background and make something grand of yourself I think appealed to Roger as a small-town kid from Urbana who went on to the big city and sort of conquered the world in his own way but in an honest way. And then you know it’s about loss. I think Bill talks about in the movie about the loss of Roger’s father and death and the way in which death sort of haunted Roger. When he lost his father at that young age, it was not something he ever really got over according to Bill. Bill tells stories about other passages that he loved too that of course Bill committed to memory. He would quote something and then Roger would say, “Tell me again.” Or they would be at a dinner table and he would say, “Bill, give me the last page of Gatsby or this Yeats poem. And Bill is one of those guys that just commit a lot of great stuff to memory including a great editorial passage from when Roger was in college that is just remarkable.

He was a fully formed writer at the beginning as Bill says.

Yeah. I mean if I was a writer I would have hated this guy. I mean really hated them, just hated him. He wrote so well, plainly but with spiritedness and well chosen adjectives.

How did you find someone to do the narration who sounded so exactly like Roger?

Really I owe this to Chaz and her team. They were looking for someone to come in and read some of his great reviews, audio recordings. We had been for editing purposes using the book narrator. He did a perfectly good job but he didn’t sound anything like Roger. So we had been using him in editing because it’s convenient, but I knew I wanted to replace him and my thinking up until they found Stephen Stanton was that we would just find someone who kind of sounded like Roger but we weren’t going to try to channel the actual Roger. But then when she said, “We found this guy, you should hear him,” I was just like, “Oh my God!” And then my next concern though was, he was doing like a review on the show so it was kind of swashbuckling Roger and all that, it was kind of big and broad. So then I had him I reach out to him and had him read some of our narration passages that we had chosen that are much more intimate and he said, “Okay, I’ll do it but send me whatever kind of intimate recording.” So I sent him Roger’s Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross and we just sent him another interview that was done in Champaign with him where he was very relaxed and kind of speaking more quietly, more conversationally. He is not an impressionist; impressionist does not do him justice. He is an actor who can act in other people’s voices. He read the memoir himself before we did at the recordings. He listened to these tapes religiously and then he came in and he took directions like, I would say, “Oh, that was great but I feel like it could be even a little more private like we are just across the table together and you are speaking” and then he would boom! He was remarkable! He is so good that even though in the movie, in his voice, in doing Roger’s voice, he said, “When I lost my ability to speak…” there are a lot of smart people who say, “How did you get Roger to record it?” That irony of, “No way, that can’t be him,” just doesn’t even dawn on some people because they are just so immersed and that is what I wanted it to be. I did not want to fool you which is why I made sure you know if you are listening closely enough but on the other hand I want you to immediately forget it because it’s Roger’s words.

How do you as a filmmaker bring together several very distinct episodes in his life?

You could call it a three act, four act, or even five act life. He had a lot of adventures and he went to a lot of places in his life. He left a small town, he went to Chicago and became a newspaper man and fell into this job reviewing movies and then there was drinking and then he gave that up. Then there’s the TV show and then Gene’s dying and then the cancer and then the blogging. I mean it’s like there are so many aspects to Roger’s life. Plus he loved to go to the Cannes film Festival and he loved to go to the Conference on World Affairs and a lot more.

I felt like I wanted to use the present as a springboard to the past, something he does in a memoir in places which was really moving to me and so I wanted to do that. But otherwise when I do interviews, I do interviews with people for hours on end and we talked about a lot of stuff and not all that got in the movie but when you start to put the movie together, you start trying to identify what are the strongest strains in his life and I guess what I kind of came to realize is, and I did not realize this from the start but I came to realize that the film is kind of ultimately a series of love affairs. It’s a love affair with writing, it’s a love affair with movies, it’s a love affair even with Chicago of course. And then there’s Chaz.

And kind of like what all those love affairs add up to, in a weird way it is a love affair with Gene Siskel. It’s a torturous one but it’s a love affair. It’s like he had a series of love affairs but he was never not true to his wife. It all adds up to this kind of love affair with life. I mean he called the book Life Itself, not My Life and Movies or Me at the Movies. “Movie” is not in the title. It’s life itself that was the grand movie of his life, you know what I mean?

Was it hard for you to maintain objectivity as Roger became seriously ill?

I never worry about trying to maintain objectivity in that kind of journalistic way. Because like for instance I knew that this ultimately was going to be an admiring portrait of Roger Ebert because I wouldn’t have wanted to make it otherwise. I am not that kind of filmmaker. I want to be around people I am interested in. And so I knew that so it was never going to be objective in any kind of purely journalistic way. I did not go out of my way to find someone who hated Roger or something. But I went out of my way to find people critical of his contributions. I knew that I wanted it to be honest, though, and I think there is a difference between honest and objective. Honest is it may have a point of view and I feel like all my films do but I try not to make my point of view blow out of the water and eliminate anything that’s contrary to it, that’s contrary to who this person is or that there is other ways to look at this person. And so that was important. I mean when I saw how stubborn Roger could be with Chaz, I was a little surprised until I thought about it, “Well, you don’t get to be Roger Ebert and you don’t survive all he’s been through without being stubborn.” And I am not talking about just doing this; I’m talking about 20 years with Gene Siskel. You don’t get to be that way without having a stubborn streak in you. He had had a toughness about him that was essential to his success. He also had a generosity about him that everyone commented on that didn’t just happen late in life. Although he became even more generous, it was there all along.

In the film we hear filmmakers talk about how instrumental he was in helping them. How did he help you with “Hoop Dreams?”

First, he and Gene reviewed the film on the show when it was just going to Sundance. For them to even review it was remarkable because it had no distribution and it was three hours long and they knew that. And so they watched it and then they decided they were going to go on the show while it was at Sundance and they said something to the effect of, “You can only see this film if you are at the Sundance film Festival but we really feel that this film should be seen by a wider audience.” And they just sort of planted this flag. Sundance made an enormous difference because up until then, it was the three-hour documentary about two kids playing basketball that no one ever heard of and nobody was really going to see it. It was getting some buzz with the audiences a little bit but the distributors weren’t. And then suddenly, it was like we were a hot ticket at Sundance and we had ended up with three or four different offers and none of that would have happened without what they did, no way that would’ve happened even if they loved it.

And then over the years, Roger continued to write very thoughtfully about my work and support my work. Three years ago when “The Interrupters” came out, when it premiered at Sundance, we had sent a screener to him, just hoping that he would watch it. I don’t tweet but someone told me, “Roger just tweeted this wonderful thing about the film at Sundance.” He knew that we were premiering there; he knew exactly what he was doing. He had 800,000 Twitter followers; it was picked up, it was tweeted all around and then he continued to champion that film right up through the end of the year and was outraged when we did not get shortlisted for the Oscar. He was just such a supporter of my work. For me to be able to kind of do this film means a lot.

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Interview: Joe Berlinger of “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger”

Posted on July 5, 2014 at 8:00 am

Joe Berlinger is one of my favorite directors and it was a treat to talk to him about “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger,” his new documentary on the trial of the notorious gangster. We know Bulgar was a crook. What this movie explores is the manipulations and cover ups from the law enforcement that kept Bulgar from being prosecuted for decades.

If you had a chance to interview Whitey and he agreed to tell the truth, what would you ask him?

The most important question is the central assertion to his claim that he had on immunity deal with Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan and the reason that’s such an important question is it goes to the heart of whether or not he was an informant and if he was not an informant the level of corruption and abuse of our institutions of justice is like significant.

The film raises the question of how much crime you can allow an informant to commit to hold on to his credibility. Presumably killing is over that line.

David Boeri is a WBUR Reporter who says that as long as informants are the mother’s milk of criminal investigations we have to be really careful because on the one hand you they can’t blow their cover but it doesn’t mean they should be killing people with institutional knowledge because that puts the government in the position of picking and choosing who should live and who should die and that’s not the role of government. You know to empower the Irish mob so that they can bring down the Italian Mafia; there’s something inherently wrong with that. And it wasn’t just limited to Boston. We see the same thing in Gregory Scarpa’s cas. There’s no question he was a major informant there to bring down the Colombo Crime family and over 50 people were killed under his watch. There’s something wrong with that system. One of our bedrock principles of our legal system is a defendant should be able to present whatever vigorous defense he wants with the presumption of innocence. Again this is not a wrongful conviction cases, but the guy should have been able to present his point of view.

I love the line in the movie from one of the witnesses: “Of course I lied; I’m a criminal.” What do you do when everybody that’s testifying is a liar by definition?

The three star witnesses for the government are murderous thugs. I mean could you imagine somebody going up for trial for 20 murders and getting 12 years? He’s a serial killer and yet the government treats him as a star witness, now how is that guy incentivised? It’s what I love about the movies, it is a true Rashomon experience and yet the truth rises to the top and something stinks. The real story has been swept under the rug because it’s just implausible on so many levels that all that murder and mayhem and bad behavior is solely the responsibility of one relatively low level agent and his corrupt supervisor, it’s just not plausible.

I really want to know how truthful is the claim that he had a deal of protection and frankly it’s an important question that is the major disappointment that I had in observing the trial because that was a question that was not allowed to be aired. Even before the trial began, the judge ruled that the immunity claim was not allowed to be brought up in trial so that was disallowed as a line of inquiry. It’s a complicated question but he should have been allowed to bring that up at trial because it’s a central question to the saga and I was disappointed that the judge would not allow because I think it was pretty clear that no matter what happened at trial Whitey Bulger was not going to walk out of that preceding a free man. Right from the start he admitted to being a drug dealer and loan shark.

I was really interested in the comments on the file by the woman who’s an expert on informants. Normally when someone gets immunity, isn’t that very well documented?

Well there are two levels, if there was a personal deal of protection like, “Hey, keep me from getting bumped off from the mob and I’ll keep you from being indicted”. That’s not going to be documented. That’s a personal deal of protection. There were were all these hallmarks of a fake file and in civil proceedings and in the proceedings against Connolly the government acknowledged that much of that informant file was faked by John Connolly. You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to say you faked the files in the proceedings against Connolly then let’s talk about where is the real file if he was an informant? And there are just so many things that don’t hold water. Again I don’t know whether he was or wasn’t but something stinks. If he was an informant then there’s some basic protocol that wasn’t being followed by like targeting the head of the gang, he was the head of the gang.

The first person we see in the film is a man who was threatened by Bulgar and is looking forward to testifying against him. But he was murdered before he could appear in court. At the end, the film tells us the murder was unrelated. Really?

I can see it’s a legitimate coincidence but to me the importance of it is that when Rick’s body was discovered on the news and that rippled through the courtroom, everyone — reporters, observers, family members — all were debating, almost like as if they were debating a horse race or a Red Sox game, they were debating with equal plausibility whether or not it was in the government interest to knock him off or in Bulger’s interest to knock him off. I was just kind of stunned by the fact that the government was even considered a possibility, which is demonstrative of the complete erosion of faith in their institutions that they would actually believe they might have a hand in it. That demonstrates why this trial should not have been so narrowly focus on confirming the obvious. The obvious is okay he’s crook, we know it let’s let Bulger talk about whatever he wanted to talk about.

This story has so many people and so many incidents and so many boundaries being crossed, how do you try to help people keep that straight? How do you address that is a filmmaker?

It’s a very challenging story and in addition to that there’s a certain subtlety that I hope the audience gets. I was very conscious that there is a certain amount of the conventional story that you need to tell to set the table and then you have to start picking that conventional story apart and do it in kind of a seamless way. I was so worried that some people would walk thinking, there’s no problem with the conventional story. So the challenge is you start with what everyone says is the truth and then you start showing what the issues are with while still maintaining that that’s still a possibility. You know, people expect to be told what to think and many filmmakers believe you have to have a very singular point of view. I’ve always in all of my work tried to embrace multiple points of view and then hope that the truth rises to the top. And look, I do want to say for the record I don’t think everyone in law enforcement or everyone in the FBI is rotten. I think the majority of people in law enforcement and the majority of people who are in persecution take their job seriously. And actually I think Wyshock and Kelly are the heroes of this story on a certain level because they came to town in the early 90s being sent from other places said, “what the **** is this?” And against the will of their own Justice Department they were fighting vociferously to bring about those indictments, the indictments that ultimately led to this proceeding. They fought tooth and nail for those against their institutions but at a certain point at this trial they now were put in the position of defending the institution that they once fought against in order to bring these indictments. And you can’t serve two masters; you can’t defend an institution that screwed up while you’re simultaneously trying to get to the root of the problem.

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Crime Directors Documentary Interview

Life Itself

Posted on July 3, 2014 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for brief sexual images/nudity and language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	References to drinking and alcohol abuse
Violence/ Scariness:	Scenes of illness, sad death
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	July 4, 2014

Roger Ebert, the most influential film critic of all time, gets the film he deserves directed by one of the many filmmakers he championed, Steve James (“Hoop Dreams,” “The Interrupters”). It is co-produced by Martin Scorsese, whose emotional appearance in the film to talk about the impact of the support—and criticism—he received from Ebert is one of the highlights.

But this is not the story of a movie critic. It is the story of a life, a big, grand, messy, vital, generous life. It was a life with every bit as much drama, comedy, tension, romance, insight, compassion, and, as Ebert would say, civilizing influence and empathy creation as any of the films included in Roger’s pantheon of Great Movies.

The film shows us Ebert as a child in the university town of Urbana, Illinois, as a college student there, as a young newsman who, still in his 20’s, became the movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and later a pioneering presence on television and online. He drank too much until he admitted that he was an alcoholic. He and Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel created a television show that began on the local PBS channel, WTTW, and then went into national syndication and moved to commercial television. While some print critics complained that it was stunt-ish, the show elevated serious engagement with movies to a nationwide conversation. A highlight of the film is the testy outtakes from the show, making it clear that the competitiveness and tinge of animosity that made their on-screen interactions so fascinating were toned down from the real strains between them. And it turns out Siskel hung out with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion during the wild era of the 60’s. “Roger may have written ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,’ but Gene lived it,” Siskel’s widow says with a smile.

The intensity of the competition between the two critics is very funny. So are the outrageously awful clothes and haircuts (there are some things even the ’70s does not excuse) and the amateurishness of the early episodes. But the very real respect and, ultimately, admiration, between them makes it clear that this was one of the most significant relationships of Roger’s life. It was his devastation over Siskel’s decision not to tell anyone about his own illness that made Roger resolve to be very open and honest about his own.

Ebert had great hungers, which led to excesses, not just in alcohol and food but in work, producing more reviews and books than any other critic and dabbling as a screenwriter in the legendarily awful “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” Once he stopped drinking, he developed the courage to pursue his greatest hunger, the hunger for love and intimacy. The man who called movies “an empathy machine” was ready, at age 50, to begin to feel those feelings outside of the screening room. It is deeply moving to witness Ebert’s transformation through his finding a deep romantic love and a large extended family at age 50 with Chaz. And then he got cancer, and we see the impact his illness had on his writing. He lost a great deal, but, James shows us, he found more.

Roger loved movies deeply, personally, viscerally. With this documentary, the movies return that love.

Parents should know that this movie includes scenes of illness and a sad death, some strong languages, discussions of alcohol abuse and alcoholism, smoking, and some sexual references and images from movies with adult material.

Family discussion: What were the most important turning points in Ebert’s life? Do you agree that film is an “empathy machine?”

If you like this, try: Roger Ebert’s books and his mesmerizing shot-by-shot commentary on Citizen Kane

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Critics Documentary Movies -- format

June 28, 1969 — The Stonewall Uprising

Posted on June 29, 2014 at 11:52 am

We observe the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising this weekend. I wonder if any of the men who fought back against police oppression and brutality back in 1969 could have imagined that some day marriage equality would be the law for over half the population and likely to be extended to all very soon, or that our celebration of LGBT people would be called “Pride.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FflMkSZQa3Y

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Documentary

Interview: Robert May of “Kids for Cash”

Posted on June 23, 2014 at 8:00 am

One of the most outrageous scandals in the history of the U.S. justice system involved two judges who took undisclosed multi-million dollar payments from the developer of a privately owned and operated facility for incarcerating teenagers. A “law and order” judge named Mark Ciavarella was elected after promising to take a hard line on kids who broke the rules. Even before he took the payments, he imposed the harshest possible sentences for even the most trivial of violations. Over 3,000 children were taken away from their parents and imprisoned for years for crimes as petty as creating a fake MySpace page making fun of a school vice-principal or shoplifting a few DVDs. The kids who emerged were often permanently damaged by years of imprisonment and exposure to brutal fellow inmates.

The heroic intervention of Juvenile Law Center, founded in 1975, the oldest non-profit, public interest law firm for children in the United States led to the exposure of the scandal and the incarceration of the two judges who took payments from the developer.

Robert May’s searing documentary about this scandal and the larger problems of our juvenile justice system is called Kids for Cash. It is now available on VOD. I was grateful to get a chance to ask him some questions about the film.

How did the tragedy at Columbine affect the support Ciavarella got for his hardline approach in the first campaign?

The first campaign was in 1995 and the Columbine shootings occurred in 1999. Judge Ciavarella ran on a “lock-em-up” platform in 1995 and the community loved the idea. After Columbine, he felt that he had been ahead of his time in that he was always tough on kids. After Columbine, he simply had even more support for Zero Tolerance.

One of the people in the movie suggests that the schools were supportive of his approach because it was a way for them to get rid of troublemakers. Is that your assessment as well?

Yes, schools routinely invited Ciavarella to speak at assembly’s letting kids know that if they came before him, he would be glad to send them away. Schools, police and the community at large, liked the “idea” that he was a zero tolerant judge so; he was very popular on the “speaking circuit” and had a busy speaking schedule to prove it. And lastly, he always made good on his word, he would send the “troublemakers” away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q21KnjiJ0xI

Did any kids ever appear before Ciavarella and go home?

Yes, he did not send every kid into detention. His placement average was 22% during his tenure in that 22% of the kids who went before him, were locked up.

Since the Supreme Court’s Gault decision in 1967, courts are not supposed to give harsher sentences to teenagers than to adults but it seems that this was the case here. Was that because the parents were found incapable of handling them?

While the Gault decision was landmark in that finally kids had some rights, kids are still not afforded all the same rights in a practical way. For example, if they want to appeal their “conviction” that process takes so long that they will be in and out of incarceration before the appeal is likely heard. And because of indefinite probation and zero tolerance, kids can easily be re-incarcerated. Kids should never be able to waive their rights to counsel because they’re kids, yet many states allow for kids to appear without legal representation. Also, the so-called crimes like fighting, verbal altercations etc., it would be extremely rare for an adult to be charged and incarcerated for similarly detailed offenses.

The judge tells a very compelling story about his own teenage law-breaking and his parents’ reaction. How do you think that affected him? Did he apply the same hard line to himself? What do we learn from his daughter’s comments?

To Judge Ciavarella, it seemed clear that his parents had the right idea on discipline and tough love. He felt that his parents know how to raise their children and by contrast, stating in the movie, “parents don’t know how to be parents.” He felt that the juvenile system was there to take over and teach kids what their parents were not. He also was a zero tolerant parent to his own three kids who told me how if they “simply left the top off of the toothpaste tube, they would be grounded.” He was proud of how his parents raised him and was proud when telling us the story of how his father knocked him out thereby teaching him right from wrong. He completely missed the irony of his current situation.

Why did he agree to talk to you and what did you do to gain his trust?

I felt that the media had painted a very one-sided story and so I first approached Judge Ciavarella with that thought in mind. Specifically, I approached him with the idea that we intended to do a film on the scandal and wanted to tell the story from the perspective of both the victim and the villain. I pointed out that I felt he was the “villain” in our story, which he quickly acknowledged. Initially he was interested in talking to us but only after the federal prosecution was over. That was a deal breaker for us because we wanted to follow the active story and stay behind the scenes as he went through the prosecution. After a few weeks of consideration, he contacted me to let me know that he would participate under the condition that he not inform his attorney. That of course seemed crazy to me however, he was a lawyer and a judge and so if he was ok with that, I would be too. The same presentation was then made to Judge Conahan who agreed to take part in the film under the same terms.

How did you first hear about the case and what captured your interest?

My producing partner (Lauren Timmons) and I were working on another project, a fiction film about power, greed and kids…(seriously) when the scandal broke in January 2009. We were actually working in Pennsylvania at the time where this “fiction” film was to take place. And, while my offices were in NYC, I actually live in Luzerne County PA where the scandal took place. I became fixated with how such celebrated guys, “judges” could fall so far right under the noses of the community, and me. While I did not know either of the judges, it’s likely that I voted for them both. The way the story had been portrayed was basically this – One-day these greedy judges who had been scheming for years to lock kids up in exchange for millions of dollars, finally implemented their plan… and then got caught…with a relative “period” after the story. That seemed ludicrous to me as there are always many parts and layers to a story and that’s what I was looking to uncover. I got more than I bargained for because at first, I had no idea that there was a bigger story looming about how we treat kids and that basically, no one cared.

Would things have been different if the new facility was built by the government and not by a private firm?

Yes, the scandal would have never occurred, Judge Ciavarella and Conahan would still be judges, thousands of kids would still be locked up for years and the larger story about the way we treat kids everywhere would never be known to the general public.

Ciavarella is adamant that it was never “kids for cash” and the prosecutors chose not to charge him with that in part because the number of kids he sent away did not increase after the payment he received. So, why chose that for the title?

Good question and one that gets asked now and again. In fact, during Q & A’s for the film, some folks routinely mentioned that the story was larger than the accusation of sending kids away for money. And to me, that was the point. The idea of this title took me right back to when I first heard of the scandal (by the same name) it grabbed my interest. The phrase “Kids For Cash” stuck, in that it was a sexy story as far as the media was concerned and it’s all anyone talked about – a judge locking kids up for money. I like films that respect the audience for their ability to think and I wanted our audience to ponder and be curious about a likely larger story without having the film be preachy in the face of a tell-all title. At first, this was a simple story that was in essence minimalized by the razor focus on one guy, “the judge,” when in fact it took an entire community to support what he was actually doing to the kids (money or not). Then to learn that his practices are basically in play all around the country without any exchange of money really does lead to the bigger question of “just how are we treating kids who need special care and attention?” I also wanted the story structured in the same way that the public was first introduced to the story, then in the second act, begin to peel back the layers of complexity without a voice-over telling the audience how to think and finally in the third act, present the broad consequences of both the judges actions and the actions or lack of actions of others leading to an awareness of how little respect “we” have for adolescence.

What was your biggest challenge in making this very complicated story understandable?

Well first, getting the judges to agree to talk with us for what turned out to be years and keeping that all a secret. And, to that point, I felt a bit of a rush when I was told that their attorneys first found out that their clients had participated in the film (for years) when the trailer started playing in movie theaters. But really, the biggest challenge in telling the story was the balance of stories between the villains (judges) and the victims (kids and families). That took a couple years of editing and many NDA (non-disclosure) research screenings with moviegoers and advocates. In other words, we knew that if the balance between the villain and the victim was off, people would be confused. Perhaps one of the most notable comments we’ve received regarding this balance was from the critic Carrie Rickey who said “I see about 400 films per year and I’ve never seen a film that puts the villain and the victim in the same story in such a compelling way as in “Kids for Cash.”

Have there been any improvements in the juvenile facilities in Pennsylvania as a result of the litigation? Are teenagers given any counseling or educational services?

Yes and no. For example, juveniles must now be represented by an attorney when in juvenile court and kids can only be handcuffed and shackled in court under certain circumstances. There is also an effort in Luzerne County where the scandal occured, to improve the system overall and fewer kids are being sent away there. Also, “evidence based programs” which deal with the entire family, not just the kids, are becoming more popular but that popularity is very slow. People who see the movie all around the country leave the theater (now perhaps their living rooms) angry and disillusioned about the complete disregard and disrespect for kids and are demanding change. Evidence based programs is a good start but people need to know that they exist and that they are needed and… cost about one tenth of the cost to lock a kid up. That said, out of the top ten most populated states, Pennsylvania currently ranks number one on the incarceration of children – this, five years after the scandal.

What is your sense of how other communities are handling juvenile justice?

We’ve learned from screenings all around the US, that communities really are unaware of how kids are treated when they fall into the system. They are unaware of how schools greatly contribute kids into the system. And, they are unaware of how long a kid can remain in the system. After a screening in Denver CO to a large group of juvenile court judges, one judge stood up after the screening and said “what’s this thing you refer to in your film as ‘indefinite probation’ we don’t have that here in Colorado.” Before I could respond, another judge immediately said “yes we do, you can hold a kid until they are 21 years old – every state utilizes ‘indefinite probation’.” Another judge stood up and said “well, if a family sees this film in Colorado and their child comes before juvenile court here, they will see that we do things right.” My response was this… “I’ve screened the film to regular moviegoers all around the country and when they find out that that 54% of the kids in Luzerne County Pennsylvania were not represented by an attorney, they draw a straight line to the money. However, you do know that in this state 45% of ALL juveniles across the entire state are not represented by lawyers and in three jurisdictions , it’s as high as 60%.” That judge sat down with a red face. I have many many stories just like this one that exemplify how unaware not just the public is, but how unaware judges, lawyers, school officials and others are when it comes to the treatment of kids within the system.

There are some despicable people in this film but also some heroes who show remarkable courage and integrity. What kept them going?

There are some real heroes in the film for sure. First, the newspaper reporter Terrie Morgan had worried about the stories she’d been hearing on how kids were being treated and whiles she wrote about those stories, few paid much attention. This seemed to be true in other communities around the country as well. A reporter reports a few parents complaining about the treatment of their kids and the communities pay little attention instead the reaction is more like “oh please, just because you’ve got a bad kid, stop complaining and start parenting.” Second, Hillary Transue’s mother Laurene is one of those mothers who was going to stop at nothing until she got her daughter out. While other parents had similar passion, they were fraught with obstacles not unlike Laurene’s. The main difference is that Laurene found the Juvenile Law Center who took on her fight. This center has been around for 40 years now and is the largest non-profit children’s law center in the country and specializes in advancing the rights of children. Prior to the film, those who really needed their services were the only people who knew them and even then, few knew about their work. The Juvenile Law Center systematically reviewed the circumstances surrounding Hillary’s case and were moving to get her out. But that also proved to be very difficult because they were taking on a powerful judge will little if any support from the community. It was not until the federal government announced that they had been investigating the judges and the connection to the newly built for-profit juvenile detention center that a “perfect storm” began to brew.

How are the kids doing?

Because of how this film has affected me personally, I have stayed connected to all of the kids and families and I am continually taken by the scars they have. They all still suffer in some way. Charlie is still suffering with addiction and has been jailed twice since the film has been released. That said there are a few good things to report. Amanda had a baby girl and still resides in California with her father and while she still suffers from PTSD, the film has allowed her to face her past and hold her future in a more promising way. Hillary Transue is now in grad school at Wilkes University (Pennsylvania) and is a grad assistant in their Creative Writing Program. Justin is about to begin college and plans to attend Wilkes University in the fall. Sandy (Ed’s mother) is still dealing with the grief of losing her son but is very active in support of change within the system. Judge Ciavarella’s daughter Lauren has formed an unusual connection with both Hillary and Justin as she moves to advocate for change within the juvenile system. All of the kids and families remain connected to the film in that they are still anxious to participate in panel discussions. In fact, Hillary and Justin were part of a panel in Washington DC when the film screened on three separate occasions for the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Congress on Capitol Hill and for the U.S. Dept. of Education. They are moved by the kindness and concerns from those who see the film, feelings that they had never experienced in their early life within the system.

What’s your next project?

That is a question that I’m being asked all the time now and I’m grateful that people are interested enough to pose it. It will be hard for me to transition into another project after five years on Kids For Cash, a film, which changed my entire view of the world. But, I have a number of projects both fiction and non-fiction that I’m considering. It would be great to take a few months off in between but I’m not sure that’s in my DNA.

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Crime Directors Documentary Interview