Interview: Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel on the Documentary “Finders Keepers”

Posted on October 7, 2015 at 3:30 pm

Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel have made some of my favorite documentaries, including “King of Kong” and “Make Believe,” bringing us into worlds that at first seem exotic and downright weird and seamlessly making us feel a part of small fringe communities like competitive video gamers still in cutthroat battles via the near-antique “Donkey Kong” or teenage magicians. Their latest is Finders Keepers, the story of one of the most improbable lawsuits ever filed — over ownership of a severed leg. John, the man whose leg it was wants it back from Shannon, the man who accidentally and unknowingly bought it in the disposition of storage facility contents seized for nonpayment and wants to keep it because he thinks it is his ticket to fame and fortune. I spoke to Carberry and Tweel about finding the funding for the film via Kickstarter and normalizing a story that seems at first to be outlandish and grotesque.

Co-producer Ed Cunningham first started covering the story. Carberry explained, “Initially Ed was coming off King of Kong in 2007 and looking for his next thing so this was kind of like his baby for awhile. He went out of his pocket for a bit flying out there with his little handycam. After a couple of years there wasn’t really much funding behind this and I came across Ed’s footage and we thought, ‘Okay, this needs to happen.’ It’s amazing by then crowdfunding came along and we got the Kickstarter together for eighty thousand dollars. That paved the way. It got us go out and shoot the bulk of the story and get into the edit room.”

They talked about creating sympathy and even identification with the characters. Tweel said, “We try to structure our documentaries in the same way that a lot of narrative fictional films are structured, kind of like a screenwriting type of format and so in doing that we are trying to tell the most universal story possible, whether it’s about arcade video game players or teenage magicians or two guys fighting over a leg. We’re constantly in search of the underlying truth in the ways in which our audience can connect with these people. And so really we struck gold here not just because John and Shannon are funny and quirky but they are also very vulnerable and honest and so are their family members. And so we were able to get to the kind of deeper levels to the story that you can relate with, like you can relate with a sister who has a drug addict as a brother and she is trying to protect him but also he’s hurting her. We felt like the parallel stories of these guys kind of mirror each other in so many different ways and that was something Bryan and I were very much interested in exploring.”

Ed Cunningham was the one who first made the people in the film feel comfortable talking very candidly in front of a camera. Tweel said, “Basically, he just laid everything out on the line. A) He was able to give them “King of Kong” and say, ‘This is the treatment we give. This is just a fair account. We’re not going to be playing this up or anything.’ But once you have a camera pointing at someone for long enough, they are just describing it like you’re a friend on the block or something. It’s completely natural for them because they’re with it they’ve been with it for so long so when they are talking without grinning or whatever about them hanging the leg in a tree in the front yard or something it’s because that’s their life. It’s not strange to them. And after working with them for a couple years it wasn’t strange to us either. The first time we screened at Sundance for the people we couldn’t believe the laugh it was getting because it had become incredibly normal for us having worked with it every day.” It also helped that Cunningham and Carberry were both born in Virginia, so the people in the movie did not think of them as Northerners trying to make fun of the hicks in the South.

One of the most fascinating elements of the film is that the documentary itself contrasts with at least three different “reality” television shows that became involved, including Judge Mathis, who finally resolved the dispute and sent John to rehab. So this is a documentary that includes the impact of a more heightened version of what they do. Carberry said, “I think that the reality TV version of the story is they are coming at it from a different angle and they are not there to give more of the context behind the story that we are. So we as much as possible like to let people talk themselves and let things kind of happen organically where reality TV is more operating on machine, a little bit like they have schedule and they’re cranking up shows. We’re just trying to show how that affects our characters.” “They are more hands on and we are hands off,” added Tweel.

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Trailer: “Back in Time” — Documentary About the Making of “Back to the Future”

Posted on October 5, 2015 at 8:00 am

Finders Keepers

Posted on September 24, 2015 at 5:27 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol and drug abuse
Violence/ Scariness:	Sad offscreen deaths, discussion of child abuse, some disturbing images of a severed limb
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 18, 2015

You might not think that a documentary about two men fighting over a severed leg would be funny, touching, and insightful, but it is. You might think that it would be a carnival freak show for the age of YouTube and Twitter, and it sort of is that, too, but mostly in the clips from the various television shows that got involved in this real-life gothic mashup of Southern culture, reality TV, dysfunctional families, substance abuse, money, tragedy, and two men, one plummeting from a life of wealth and privilege and one desperately aspiring for fame and fortune, both seeing the approval of fathers who are no longer here. And they became two men who fought each other for years over something the rest of us cannot imagine anyone would want.

Shannon Whisnant in a small-time operator in North Carolina, always up to some scheme or other. So of course he showed up to bid on items from a storage locker that were confiscated when the payments lapsed. He bought a small, rusty smoker and was surprised to open it and find inside a severed human leg, about mid-calf down, with the foot and toes. The film plays his 911 call. “I got a human foot.” “A what?” “A human left foot.” I love that he thinks that additional detail will somehow make a difference.

The foot belongs to John Wood, or at least it once did. It was amputated following a plane crash and he wanted to keep it. It seemed very reasonable to him once he heard that Whisnant had it that he would get it back. But Whisnant saw it as the golden ticket he always knew was coming to him, his chance for the big time. Oh, he had already appeared on “Jerry Springer,” but he had not achieved that level of fame he just knew in his heart was his destiny. He went on news shows to talk about his find. He started charging admission — $3 adults, $1 kids. He had t-shirts made. I would like to say they were tasteful but they were not. His twitter account is @fottmannc.

Whisnant met with Wood — at the parking lot of the Dollar General — to talk about the ownership of the foot. The details of the conversation are still disputed, but the next steps involved litigation. And more reality television.

The great gift of the film, which is at times hilarious and at times deeply moving, is that it takes this absurd dispute and humanizes the story so profoundly that by the end we are a part of it. It deals with the endearing and the obnoxious sides of American celebrity culture. It is abashing but also reassuring that the multi-year fight is finally resolved — with Solomonic jurisprudential nuance — by television’s Judge Mathis. But is is the almost unbearably intimate conversations with family members and the two men themselves that show us the inherent vulnerability of even those who at first seem cartoonish or grotesque.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong language, discussion of drug and alcohol abuse, discussion of tragic deaths and child abuse, and some grisly subject matter and disturbing images.

Family discussion: Why did both men want the foot? How did their relationships with their fathers affect their views of themselves?

If you like this, try: “Sherman’s March”

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Documentary Movies -- format

Meet the Patels

Posted on September 18, 2015 at 11:41 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for thematic elements, brief suggestive images and incidental smoking
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking, brief smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	September 18, 2015

The best documentaries — and the best movies and the best stories — are fascinatingly specific but universal as well. When actor/comedian Ravi Patel agreed to let his parents, Vasant and Champa, try to find him a wife according to the established traditions of their Gujarati Indian culture, he and his sister Geeta decided to make a movie about the process. While the details of how it works are fascinating and often hilarious, the joy of the film is how universal it is. We have all had parents try to push us according to their own ideas of what will make us happy. Maybe we do not get “biodata” marriageability information sheets on all of the prospects, specifying that caste and horoscope must be compatible and disclosing skin shade, but pretty much everyone has had calls from relatives who want to put us in touch with a wonderful girl/boy they don’t really know but their neighbor/podiatrist/brother-in-law assures them that the possible romantic partner in question has a great personality. Geeta, a documentary filmmaker, picks up a camera and follows Ravi through a series of remarkable encounters, from speed dating to a specialized version of OK Cupid to a Patel marriage convention. It is pretty clear which girl he is going to end up with, but that in no way impairs the fun of the film.

In part that is because the real stars of the show are the Patel parents, who are irresistibly adorable. As Ravi points out, they met through the traditional system, as did most of his relatives, and they are the happiest married couple he knows. It is clear that the Western system of romance, dating, and marriage is far from perfect, so why not try the time-tested system that worked so well for his parents? He is so broken-hearted after the end of his most serious relationship, with a girl who is not Indian, he thinks he might as well go along.

And we have a lot of fun going along with him. Ravi is a natural on screen, self-deprecating and very sincere in his search for love, his affection for his culture, his love for his family, and the struggle he has, like all children of immigrants, to find his identity somewhere between the old country and the new.

Parents should know that this movie has some family drama, and some smoking and drinking.

Family discussion: How did the couples in your family meet? What is the best way to find someone to love?

If you like this, try: “Sherman’s March” and “Bride and Prejudice”

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