Interview: Sarah Colt on the PBS Documentary “Walt Disney”

Posted on September 13, 2015 at 3:18 pm

Sarah Colt’s two-part “American Experience” documentary about Walt Disney is a fascinating look at one of the towering figures not just of film history but of American history. Disney revolutionized film and the way we tell stories with his animated features, nature documentaries, and family entertainment. He created a new industry and a new way for families to vacation together with Disneyland and the Disney World properties. He was a pioneer of new technologies from sound recording to photocopiers and animatronics. And he built one of the world’s most successful businesses. It premieres September 14 and 15, 2015, on PBS stations.

Director Sarah Colt told me that the Disney company opened up its vast archives for her with no restrictions and no right to review the film before it was made public.

It was really an amazing thing and we were thrilled. It made the project possible. From a documentary film maker’s perspective who has worked on a bunch of historical films this was like a dream come true. Because I was making a film about an artist, a filmmaker, and an animator. So not only was there material of him and the behind the scenes kind of stuff that you are always looking for but also his work. To be able to use big chunks of “Snow White” as part of the story was just amazing. So that was just incredible. I’ve never made a film about a filmmaker before. That was very fantastic to have all that material. And their photograph collection is very well organized. They have a really good database and we could access what we needed. The footage of the behind the scenes kind of material was harder to find because the Disney Company. They are not a professional archive and that’s not their main purpose so not surprisingly their collection is not necessarily all in one place, it’s in lots of different places and it was a lot of work. They totally helped us but it wasn’t a one stop thing where you just look in a database and there’s all the material. There was a lot of hunting and talking, asking questions and then were these big moments of excitement when we found things. I’ll give you an example, the footage of Disney playing baseball with his colleagues. I had seen it once somewhere in another film but we were not finding and nobody at Disney could find it and then all of a sudden they found it and not only did they find it but it had sound. Most of the footage from that era as you probably know doesn’t come with sound attached, so we do sound design. So when you hear those voices cheering Disney as he is hitting the balls and running the bases, those are the voices of the people there and those kinds of finds were very exciting because they helped to really tell the story in a way that you wouldn’t be able to do without that kind of material.

Disney’s fascination with using new technology is a theme of the documentary and there is a charming example of one of his earliest cartoons, before he had his own company, with a real little girl interacting with animated characters, like this Laugh-o-Gram production from 1923, featuring Walt Disney himself.

He was an innovator, no question in a lot of different areas, and technology was definitely an important part of his ability to innovate. So he was always pushing things. It wasn’t that he was actually inventing things but he would see how other people were doing things and he had these ideas to take them to the next level. I think sound is a great example of that and we use that as our main example of his technical innovation in the film. Other cartoonists were using sound and experimenting with sound and sound was becoming a part of the movie business. But what Disney did with sound was to take it and really make it an integral part of what the film was about so that the film didn’t make sense without sound, instead of the sound just being kind of layered on top of it. He had a way of pushing things and what I think is really interesting too is that he understood the potential. It wasn’t that he figured all these things out, it was like he had an idea and then he would surround himself with the most talented people in every category. If you’re thinking about artistry, the most talented artists, when it came to technology the most talented people with that, so a perfect example is his collaboration with Ub Iwerks. You know Ub Iwerks was very talented but also he really was technically amazingly savvy. So Ub helped Disney take things to the next level. I don’t think alone either of them could have done what they did but together they did these amazing things. So Disney was always collaborating with the top people. Now he was always in charge, there was no question that he was the visionary, he was in charge but he recognized talent and he was able to attract talent. And that’s how I think his technological innovation happened because I don’t think, he certainly wasn’t technical wiz, it was more that he was figuring out how to do that with other people’s talent.

But the documentary is frank in showing that he cultivated talent and he appreciated talent and yet he alienated a lot of the talent, resulting in a strike and defections to a rival studio, both which hurt him deeply.

He was a complicated boss. I think he was a very good leader. He knew how to create a sense of excitement, he knew how to translate vision and get other people excited about it but at the same time I think he could be quite insensitive. He treated some people very kindly, very well and then treated other people not as well and he was very unaware of how he alienated people. As the film portrays, the strike is the ultimate example of something that could have probably been avoided by a leader who had been more aware of himself and what was going on around him. He was blind to things that were happening right in front of him and so he could be a very difficult boss. I think he was very demanding. He demanded the highest level of performance from people and some people did very well under that but some people were mad that they were not being properly compensated. They were working long hours without being recognized for the work they were doing. I think he could be very difficult and so he was charming but he was also I think demanding and difficult.

One of the film’s most moving sections concerns the brief time Disney spent as a child in the small town of Marceline, Missouri, which he thought of always as the happiest time of his childhood. Disneyland’s Main Street and many of the settings of his film reflected his idyllic memories of Marceline.

Right from reading the first biography it was clear that Marceline was a hugely important place and whether it’s a real place or more of an imagined memory of a place it was crucial and so it was clear that we needed to include it in both his upbringing but also how he remembered it. And so we were especially happy to have footage of his return to the town with his brother as adults. It was just such a wonderful way to be able to take note of how important Marceline had been to him as a child and how important it was to him. And then what better way to see him as a middle-aged man in a suit kind of visiting this little town in the Midwest and how important it was. So I feel like that’s where my job as a documentary filmmaker is so fun because it’s like you’re using these finds that you have, we found that footage and I was like, “Okay, this is the scene and this is going to be how we really show how it builds into Disneyland and what does Disneyland mean and so Marceline is in a way kind of a version of a Disneyland for Disney. For Walt Disney it is this place in imagination, a place where he felt safe, a place where he was with animals and nature and an escape from the troubles and the problems of real life and so I think that’s what Marceline represented for Disney and then Disney takes that and makes Disneyland.

Colt wants the film to show people Disney as a person, a man of vision, a man of sentiment, and a dreamer who always liked to remind people that it all started with a mouse.

When people hear “Disney” they may think of the company or its products. It’s very easy now especially with the amazing success of the Disney company since his death to forget who he was and that he was a real person. I want people to be able to take away that he was human and that he was human both an exemplary human being and also he had flaws, and he was complicated and that some of his greatest successes came out of difficult things from his own personal life and experience. And that it’s a layered and much more a kind of deep and interesting story than the legend of Walt Disney.

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

Trailer: Dane Dehaan as James Dean and Robert Pattinson as his Photographer Friend in “Life”

Posted on August 22, 2015 at 8:00 am

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd4q7vF__8Q

Photographer Dennis Stock befriended James Dean and saw him as the symbol of a cultural upheaval that inspired him to a naturalism with his photos like what Dean was doing with his acting. Pattinson plays Stock and Dane Dehaan plays Dean in “Life,” co-starring Sir Ben Kingsley and Joel Edgerton.

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Trailer: Trumbo with Bryan Cranston

Posted on August 16, 2015 at 7:19 am

Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo, the brilliant screenwriter whose experiences during the McCarthy era inspired some of the greatest movies ever made about freedom. Trumbo was blacklisted but continued to write screenplays by having them attributed to “fronts,” men who were hired to take credit for them. During this period, two of his fronts were awarded Oscars, which were later re-presented to the man who was truly responsible for them.

Straight Outta Compton

Posted on August 13, 2015 at 5:38 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language throughout, strong sexuality/nudity, violence, and drug use
Profanity:	Constant very strong and crude language, racist and homophobic terms
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drugs, drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness:	Violence including guns, fights, riots, sad deaths
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	August 14, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	January 18, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B013P0X16Q

“What does NWA stand for?” asks Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), who is offering to become the manager of a new rap group from the Compton area of Los Angeles. “No Whites Allowed?”

“No,” Eric “Eazy-E” Wright answers: “N**** Wit Attitude.”

NWA liked to think of itself as speaking truth to power, a CNN of oppressed minorities. When the Detroit police force told them that they would be arrested for obscenity and inciting violence if they performed their notorious “F*** the Police” in concert, they performed it. And they were arrested. When they were accused of glamorizing drugs and violence, they said they were journalists, reporting what they saw. They had a lot of attitude, a lot of anger, and a lot of ambition. They were savvy about what we might call branding. When their song “F*** the Police” got them a warning letter from the FBI, Eazy understood that it was the best possible publicity to present them as rebels being attacked by the Man, marketing money could not buy.

Much of the story is familiar from every other musical biopic you’ve ever seen plus every single episode of “VH1: Behind the Music.” 1. Talented young people from a marginalized community are told that their music is neither good nor commercial. “If you find the next Bon Jovi, call me,” says one label executive as he walks out of their performance. 2. And then they find their audience. They become successful beyond their wildest dreams. 3. And then they discover that fame and money present their own challenges, including fights over money and the direction of the business. But this biopic, produced by the original members of NWA is unexpectedly sweet, even tender, presented with affection and perspective. (Perhaps this is the reason the film omits the genre’s most frequent cliche, the scenes of family members complaining that the musical superstars are not spending enough time at home.)

The script is sharp, often funny, and compelling. When a kid on a school bus taunts a thug in a nearby car, the thug boards the bus at gunpoint to tell the kids to treat him with respect — and stay in school. “We just got a motivational speech from an OG ,” says O’Shea Jackson, soon to be Ice Cube.

It has one of the best ensemble casts of the year and all of the performances are superb. But a considerable percentage of the movie’s power comes from its timing. While the events it depicts occurred three decades ago, it could easily be referring to the current headlines about police abuse and the virulent persistence of racism throughout American society. The footage of Rodney King being brutally attacked is chilling because it shows us where NWA’s anger came from and reminds us of how little progress we have made. More chilling than the attitude from NWA is the way that the constant trauma from the community and the society around it have created a particular kind of ambition. This first generation born after the heyday of the Civil Rights movement does not want promises or the traditional idea of progress. They are not about passive resistance and sit-ins. They are not looking for a seat at a segregated lunch counter. They want to tell their stories. And their contempt for the system is so deep that they show no interest in activism or putting their money back into the community.

Jason Mitchell gives a star-making performance as Eazy-E, the fearless and canny co-founder of NWA who started Ruthless Records with money he made dealing drugs. O’Shea Jackson, Jr. plays his real-life father, better known as Ice Cube, who created the lyrics for many of the group’s biggest and most influential pieces. And Corey Hawkins is Dr. Dre, master of the turntable. The movie is well over two hours and never seems long, but with that running time there should have been space for more about the creative drive. We see the guys writing in notebooks and there is a funny scene with Eazy as a last-minute substitute Dre has to show how to get on beat for their first recording. But we never get a sense of what it feels like to create these songs or to perform them before thousands of fans or how they felt about the complaints that their lyrics were misogynistic. Later we glimpse Ice Cube working on the screenplay for “Friday,” the first film from this movie’s director, F. Gary Gray. But we do not learn that it would be even more influential in Hollywood than NWA was in music. Instead, we get an admittedly very funny call-out to that film (“Bye, Felicia“). And we get fan service scenes re-creating Eazy’s pool parties and spouse service scenes like Cube meeting Nicole. There are two other members of the group we learn very little about.

There is still room for a more objective NWA story as cultural and political history. At middle age, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy’s widow are not as clear-eyed about their own history as NWA was in calling themselves citizen journalists, matching the harshness and brutality around them with the force of their rap. But this is a compelling story with a message as vitally important now as it was during NWA’s brief recording career, with plenty of attitude and then some.

Parents should know that the film includes very strong and crude language, drug dealing, smoking, drinking, wild parties, nudity, sexual references and situations, sad deaths, peril and violence, and archival footage of police brutality and riots.

Family discussion: Was NWA right to perform their song in Detroit? Do you agree that they are journalists? Should there be limits on song lyrics that are profane or bigoted?

If you like this, try: the documentaries about A Tribe Called Quest and Tupac Shakur and the music of NWA

The End of the Tour

Posted on August 6, 2015 at 5:20 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language including some sexual references
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Reference to suicide
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 7, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	November 9, 2015
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0153C71X8

Form illuminates content in this imperfect but compelling film based on the real-life audiotapes of a four day interview of author David Foster Wallace in the final days of his book tour for Infinite Jest.

The subject of the interview is David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), whose writing was densely and intricately layered. The journalist doing the interview is David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), also a recently published novelist, though his book attracted no attention.

Lipsky persuades his editor at Rolling Stone that Wallace, whose book is a critical and commercial hit, would be a good subject for the magazine. And Wallace, now in the final days of his book tour, agrees to let Lipsky come along. Their wide-ranging (in geography and subject matter) conversation over four days reflects a constantly shifting set of expectations, assumptions, and goals for a construct so essentially artificial it hardly makes sense to call it a relationship. And yet, Lipsky literally moves into Wallace’s man cave of a home and for that time there is a simulation of some kind of friendship between them, at times even a sense that they could be friends, which they both seem to find unsettling and appealing. Wallace’s writing had a fractured, self-referential quality, filled with asides and meta-commentary. So it makes sense that the film has some of those qualities as well. If there were such a thing as cinematic footnotes, they’d be here. Instead, the context itself provides the footnotes. Wallace, whose great subject was American consumer culture, ends up in Minnesota’s Mall of America, eating in the food court as the indoor roller coaster zooms by.

Janet Malcolm famously described a journalist as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” We see some evidence of that in “The End of the Tour” but there are several other layers as well. The two men are about the same age, both writers, one lauded as one of the great novelists of his generation, one who released a book that got no attention at all. So Lipsky wants more from Wallace than a story. He is looking for guidance, validation, understanding. He acknowledges that he wants what Wallace has. At the same time he wants to understand why Wallace does not seem to want it. The two men are both relentless, even obsessive, self-observers. As Lipsky is recognizing the gulf between the kind of superficial details that make up a celebrity profile and what it means to actually know someone, he tries to find some kind of foothold. He wants to prove himself to his editor (in real life, the article was never published). And he wants to prove to himself that he is somehow in the same species as Wallace. There is a Mozart/Salieri element here as Lipsky’s greatest talent may be his ability to appreciate Wallace’s genius.

The commitment to verisimilitude is claustrophobic at times because almost all of the dialogue is taken directly from the tapes. An opening scene where Lipsky first hears of Wallace’s suicide and digs out the tapes adds nothing to the story. And yet again this is a case of form following content, as the near-obsessive, even fetishishtic, constricted particularity of the conversation is the kind of thing one of Wallace’s characters might do. The most telling moment in the film is when Wallace admits that he does not mind being profiled in Rolling Stone. He just does not want the profile to make it appear that he wants to be profiled in Rolling Stone. That is exactly the kind of fractured, Schroedinger-ian attraction/repulsion Wallace felt to the themes of his work: the gulf between presentation and reality, between observing and being, between attention and distraction. As Lipsky knew, it is a privilege to be a part of that conversation, even as we must be aware that it is the kind of entertainment — even at this ambitious level — Wallace would both want and not want to see.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong and crude language, sexual references, drinking, and smoking.

Family discussion: Why did Wallace agree to the interview? Why did he get angry with Lipsky?

If you like this, try: the books by David Foster Wallace and “My Dinner with Andre” and listen to the excellent interview with David Lipsky on the podcast, “The Moment“