criterionforum.org

Two more weeks till the deadline.

Up to now:

myself, kieslowski_67, colinr0380, Annie Mall, Dylan, yoshimori

Shouldn't this thread be in the LISTS section?

You know, I never understood the point of this thread... Is anyone else just as lost as I am?

JusteLeblanc wrote:You know, I never understood the point of this thread... Is anyone else just as lost as I am?

They're creating Top 100 Movies lists for each decade by compiling personal lists. Voting is based on whoever bothers to send in a list. I'm lost as to what else it could be?

4. Serials will be counted as one film.

5. Short films are allowed.

In preparation for the 00's list (and i'm sure others have this question, indeed, one of the above posts may have been about just such an issue), I would eagerly like to put "The Hand" section of the compilation film Eros in my list as a short film. However, the movie as a whole probably doesn't deserve a place on the list. Can someone put Woody Allen's section of New York Stories, or Rodruigez's section of Four Rooms on their list (in the appropriate decade, of course)?

Kambei wrote:In preparation for the 00's list (and i'm sure others have this question, indeed, one of the above posts may have been about just such an issue), I would eagerly like to put "The Hand" section of the compilation film Eros in my list as a short film. However, the movie as a whole probably doesn't deserve a place on the list. Can someone put Woody Allen's section of New York Stories, or Rodruigez's section of Four Rooms on their list (in the appropriate decade, of course)?

This was discussed way back, and I can't remember the outcome, but it seems that in practice segments of portmanteau films are being considered as films in their own right, with Toby Dammit making the 60s also-rans and Life Lessons already attracting at least one vote for the 80s (see above).

I would eagerly like to put "The Hand" section of the compilation film Eros in my list as a short film.

Please do.

You have one week from today to submit your 80s list.

Up to now:

myself, kieslowski_67, colinr0380, Annie Mall, Dylan, yoshimori, Godot, Gregory, jorencain, henryfoool, lord_clyde, emcflat

Mine will be ready by that deadline. Right now it's a Top 57, and I have four more movies to watch. For these reasons, I expect next weekend to be semi-torturous.

backstreetsbackalright wrote:Mine will be ready by that deadline. Right now it's a Top 57, and I have four more movies to watch. For these reasons, I expect next weekend to be semi-torturous.

Shee-yit, I already have my nineties list ready.

I know it's not all that well known, but I'm still surprised that no one has yet voted for Andrzej Zulawksi's Possession (1981), starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill.

A criterionforum.org thread for Possession is alreadyhere. The film's several champions have not (so far) submitted an 80s list. (Calling idioteck, Gordon McMurphy, Galen Young, g30, anthony!)

I'll be submitting my list closer to the deadline.

I guess I better prepare to defend my darling.

lord_clyde wrote:

backstreetsbackalright wrote:Mine will be ready by that deadline. Right now it's a Top 57, and I have four more movies to watch. For these reasons, I expect next weekend to be semi-torturous.

Shee-yit, I already have my nineties list ready.

Well, I've got my 90s list worked out up to #45. And also my 80s list was "done" back in August.... But as far as I'm concerned, with thing's like this nothing is final until the list is due. There are just too many films I haven't seen!

I hear the rule about "no episodic TV," but I think Eyes on the Prize (Hampton, 1987) falls under the category of documentary mini-series, so would it count? It has enormous moral power and holds up very well, and was done at a time when African American filmmakers were really struggling (still are, really) to gain a foothold in the industry. Just getting it funded and aired on PBS in a climate of civil rights backlash in the 80s was a victory and I would love to include it on my list. (Don't mean to hard sell it, but feel free to vote for it if approved.)

Not familiar with Eyes on the Prize but after looking it up on imdb, I don't see why it couldn't be counted. It's pretty much one documentary split up in parts if I'm not mistaken. So go for it.

Curses, I wish I had voted for Eyes on the Prize. I somehow left it out completely. Off-topic, but I wonder what the chances of a DVD set are.

Gregory wrote:Curses, I wish I had voted for Eyes on the Prize. I somehow left it out completely. Off-topic, but I wonder what the chances of a DVD set are.

Slim to non-existent, on account of the rights clearances, I believe. I was reading about this very recently but have no recollection where (NY Times?). Apparently, the rights for images, music, footage were initially cleared for varying periods, according to the budget available at the time, and they started expiring in the early nineties, since when the series has been unavailable.

Found it! It was the Times (and it looks like some brave soul is working on clearing those rights for DVD release):

October 16, 2005

The Hidden Cost of Documentaries
By NANCY RAMSEY

THE moment seemed innocuous enough.

Michael Vaccaro, a fourth grader, had just left P.S. 112 in Brooklyn and was headed home with his mother. Two filmmakers were in front of him, their camera capturing his every movement on video, when his mother's cellphone rang.

"It was such an indicator of today's culture," said Amy Sewell, a producer of "Mad Hot Ballroom," the documentary that follows New York City children as they learn ballroom dancing and prepare for a citywide contest. "Michael's mom had just asked him how school was, her cellphone rings, she answers it, and the look on his face says, 'I don't get to tell my mom about my day.' "

In addition, the ringtone was "Gonna Fly Now," the theme from "Rocky," and the neighborhood was Bensonhurst. "How perfect was that?" Ms. Sewell said.

Perfect, but a problem. Had the ringtone been a common telephone ring, the scene could have dropped into the final edit without a hitch, the moment providing a quick bit of emotional texture to the film. But EMI Music Publishing, which owns the rights to "Gonna Fly Now," was asking the first-time producer for $10,000 to use those six seconds.

Ms. Sewell considered relying on fair use, the aspect of copyright law that allows the unlicensed use of material when the public benefit significantly outweighs the costs or losses to the copyright owner. But her lawyer advised against it. "I'm a real Norma Rae-type personality," Ms. Sewell said, "but the lawyer said, 'Honestly, for your first film, you don't have enough money to fight the music industry.' " After four months of negotiating - "I begged and begged," Ms. Sewell said - she ended up paying EMI $2,500. (Total music clearance costs for "Mad Hot Ballroom," which featured songs of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, came to $170,000; total costs over all were about $500,000.)

Today, anyone armed with a video camera and movie-editing software can make a documentary. But can everyone afford to make it legally?

Clearance costs - licensing fees paid to copyright holders for permission to use material like music, archival photographs and film and news clips - can send expenses for filmmakers soaring into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Jonathan Caouette's "Tarnation," for instance - a portrait of a young man's relationship with his mentally ill mother that Mr. Caouette edited at home, on a laptop computer - was widely reported to have cost $218. In fact, after a distributor picked up "Tarnation," improved the quality with post-production editing and cleared music rights, the real cost came to more than $460,000. Clearance expenses were about half the total.

Securing rights to music has long been a serious challenge. Ten years ago, for instance, the filmmaker Steve James paid $5,000 to include the song "Happy Birthday" in "Hoop Dreams," the 1994 documentary that followed two Chicago basketball players through high school. One memorable scene portrayed a young man's 18th birthday, as the family sang "and his mom baked him a cake," Mr. James said. "It was an important scene, there was some amazement that Arthur had made it to 18. Of course, we wanted that in."

Scrutiny by rights holders has increased, Mr. James said, as the profit potential in documentaries has risen. "When I was starting out, documentaries were under the umbrella of journalism," he said. "Now, the more commercially successful documentaries have become and the more they're in the public eye, the more they're perceived as entertainment."

In another change, said Peter Jaszi, a law professor at American University, "rights holders are slicing their bundle of rights in finer and finer ways and selling them off in smaller and smaller pieces." He asked: "Would music copyright owners 10 years ago have predicted they'd be making a substantial part of their money over ringtones on cellphones?" (It's now a reported $3 billion industry.) As a result, he said, there's been "a tremendous upsurge in intellectual property consciousness and anxiety on the part of all kinds of users."

Mr. Jaszi is an author, with Patricia Aufderheide, the director of American University's Center for Social Media, of a report titled "Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers," for which 45 filmmakers were interviewed. Among the more striking examples he cites is "Eyes on the Prize," the series on the civil rights movement. Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard, has called "Eyes" "the most sophisticated and most poignant documentary of African-American history ever made." But it was last broadcast in 1993, and while schools or libraries may have a copy, it is not legally available for sale or rent on DVD or video.

"There's a whole generation out there who have not seen the program," said Sandy Forman, an entertainment lawyer heading a project to reclear the rights so that "Eyes" can be rebroadcast and distributed to the educational market. "When the rights were originally cleared, they were acquired for different terms. Some were in perpetuity, some were for 3 years, some for 7, some for 10." Once just one group of rights expired - and there are 272 still photographs and 492 minutes of scenes from more than 80 archives, plus the music - "we had to pull the film from distribution."

In August, the project received $600,000 from the Ford Foundation and $250,000 from the New York philanthropist Richard Gilder. PBS's "American Experience" is considering a 2006 broadcast of "Eyes."

"It's not clear that anyone could even make 'Eyes on the Prize' today because of rights clearances," Mr. Jaszi said. "What's really important here is that documentary commitment to telling the truth is being compromised by the need to accommodate perceived intellectual and copyright constraints."

On occasion, storytelling takes a back seat to legal and financial considerations. When Jon Else was completing his film "Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle," a backstage look at an opera company that won a Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, he wanted to use a scene in which the stagehands watched "The Simpsons" as Wagner roared overhead.

"I felt it was a wonderful cultural moment to see two stagehands playing checkers while the gods are singing about destiny and free will and Marge and Homer are arguing on the television set," Mr. Else said. "We got permission from Matt Groening's company," which produces "The Simpsons," and then went to Fox.

"The first response was $10,000 for four seconds," Mr. Else said. "When I explained this was for public television, they replied that was their public television minimum. We eventually worked our way down to $7,000, but it was at the end of production, we were exhausted and out of money." It became more complicated. "Fox said, Wait a minute, any chance you're going to sell this? It wasn't the case of Fox being intractable jerks; it's just this odd gray area.

"At the last second, I replaced it with a shot of a film that I own," he said, adding, "I'll burn in journalistic hell for that."

The Ford Foundation is heading an effort to get the interested parties to reduce or waive fees for Eyes, and last I heard, there was some optimism that this would get done. It is a shame that this piece is not available for schools or the general public. Rosa Parks's death yesterday only underscores the need for this story to be told.

Sorry-somehow I missed zedz's on-target post. I can report that the original film elements for the series have now been properly archived following the dissolution of filmmaker Henry Hampton's Blackside, Inc., so the material is now ready to go in case a digital transfer is indeed forthcoming. There is also talk of making the extraordinary interview collection available on-line or in some other format.

Back to the list.

I definitely watched "Eyes on the Prize" in my 11th grade American History class. I should pay a visit to my old high school and try to make a copy of their tapes.

Up to now:

myself, kieslowski_67, lord_clyde, henryfoool, jorencain, Gregory, yoshimori, Dylan, Annie Mall, colinr0380, Godot, emcflat, kambei, zedz, kirkinson, scotty, Langlois68, Arcadean, dekadetia, ola t, Brian Oblivious, duane hall, Penny Dreadful, clutch44

Today's the last day to submit your 80s list.

For those of you who wish to start composing the 90s and 00s lists, here's the deadline: the 90s list = November 30th and the 00s list = December 31st.

The 00s list should be easy. Since we are now halfway through the decade, vote for only 25 films and the final list will list the top 50 films. Is everyone okay with that?

Is the deadline for the 80s list still tonight, or is it too late for me to submit my list?

Arn77, no its not too late. I will not start adding up all the votes until tomorrow at around noon.

Michael wrote:The 00s list should be easy. Since we are now halfway through the decade, vote for only 25 films and the final list will list the top 50 films. Is everyone okay with that?

Can we keep the 00s the same as the other decades? I know it will be one of the hardest lists for me to make, and I have well over 50 worthwhile titles from around the world. What does everyone else think?

Kambei wrote:

Michael wrote:The 00s list should be easy. Since we are now halfway through the decade, vote for only 25 films and the final list will list the top 50 films. Is everyone okay with that?

Can we keep the 00s the same as the other decades? I know it will be one of the hardest lists for me to make, and I have well over 50 worthwhile titles from around the world. What does everyone else think?

I can go either way. I currently have about 65 titles that would happily sit on an 00s list, but as far as firm placement goes, I've only made it up to #25. My feeling is that if we go much further out than that, the list will become more arbitrary.

Of course, for the sake of being difficult, I should mention that be the time the deadline comes around, we'll be 60% through the decade, so a list of 30 films would be more technically precise.