Fahrenheit, Fries, Fox, & Fairness: The New Political Documentary
Aspen Film Festival Panel Discussion, October 2, 2004
Transcribed for the Center by Liesl Groberg

The panel consisted of Pat Aufderheide, moderator; speakers Julia Bacha, Jeff Gibbs, Robert Greenwald and Morgan Spurlock. It was introduced by Aspen Film Festival director Laura Thielen. Biographies for the panelists are at the end of the transcript.

Laura: Good afternoon everyone. I want to thank you for joining us at our panel on the new political documentary. As a preamble to our discussion this afternoon I want to thank Rock the Vote and The November 2nd Campaign because it’s really important, it doesn’t matter what side you are on, it’s important to vote. So if you haven’t had a chance to register, there’s a booth downstairs they would love to sign you up.

As you know, the last several months, the screens have been filled with really interesting documentaries that have received a lot of airplay, print play, a lot of discussion. And it is our pleasure this afternoon to welcome some people who were involved in those very documentaries. They are very, very busy people and we’re just delighted to have them with us this afternoon, and they’re going to show you some clips, talk about their films, take your questions.

And to get the afternoon going I would now like to introduce our moderator, Pat Aufderheide. She is a professor at American University. She is also the director of the Center for Social Media. She was here in 2002 and she led a great seminar that we held at ShortsFest on filmmaker response to 9/11. Please join me in welcoming Pat Aufderheide.

PA: Thank you, Laura. And thank you all for coming. You are really a wonderful community of filmgoers to be with. All right, we’re going to spend a couple of hours together, and I’m going to introduce you to some amazing people I’d like to spend a few minutes kind of setting the scene for you, and then ask each filmmaker to show you a really short clip that illustrates something interesting about the challenges they faced in making these films about very hot political subjects. And then I’d like to begin a conversation with them and with you.

So let me just go back to the scene setting. As you know, and as Laura just mentioned, politically charged documentaries have been very big news lately. You saw Fahrenheit 9/11’s box office bonanza—absolutely broke all records for a documentary. You saw brand new ways of distributing films. Robert Greenwald’s “Un” series: Unprecedented, Uncovered, Outfoxed. You’ve seen the way that the powerful have taken these films very personally. McDonald’s actually paid for ads to attack Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me. There have been charges that these films trigger campaign finance issues, and there have been threats to take them to the Federal Elections Commission. And we’ve seen films that were not originally made with an intent to directly affect an election, being caught up in this great new interest for watching political films, and Control Room is an example of that.

This interest has really brought to the fore what people expect of documentary. And it’s triggered a conversation that I’ve been having more and more, and that I believe we’re going to have today: What is it that we expect from a documentary and of documentarians? What do we think that is? What a great place this is now to ask these four different people to think about that with us: Julia Bacha, who edited Control Room, Jeff Gibbs, producer and composer of Fahrenheit 9/11, Robert Greenwald, the director and producer of Outfoxed, Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me.

Very, very different films and filmmakers. Very different approaches. What do they have in common? They are all documentary filmmakers and they share with other indie documentary filmmakers a passion to express a point-of-view. They strategize how to make that point-of-view interesting, how to make it persuasive to an audience. And if they are documentary filmmakers, what is that? What is this form?

This form is as old as film itself, and it’s a form that’s been morphing ever since. As you can see, it’s a big and sort of sloppy word… if you can flip the cable channels and the majority of time you’re coming up with something that could be called a documentary, it’s a very wide range. You can have something, if you look back in history, something that is a visual poem, like Joris Ivens’ famous film Rain, which was a film he made about a rainy day in Amsterdam, and it became famous as one of the great film poems. You can have something that is highly politically-charged, Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera, made in order to celebrate the Soviet Revolution. Actually it wasn’t terribly popular with the Soviet audience, but it was really popular with artists everywhere. You can have something as romantic and as nostalgic as Nanook of the North. And each of these films has descendents.

What are documentaries not? Is there anything that would not be documentaries? Well, they’re not fiction; they didn’t make the stuff up. They’re not public affairs news shows either. They’re not entertainment, even though they’re entertaining. They’re the audio-visual equivalent of an essay. They’re an argument, and they show you something, the look and feel of something. And that something is point-of-view. So docs make a claim to be telling you something honest about something real--something honest about something real. Not that they are not unbiased; they certainly have a perspective. But they are honest. Louie Menand recently wrote an article in The New Yorker, and he put this so beautifully that I thought I would just share these three sentences with you. He said:

“Whatever you think of Michael Moore’s immensely satisfying film about the awful Bush administration and its policies, and reasonable people can disagree of course, one thing that cannot be said is that it is an outlaw from a documentary tradition. ‘The documentary tradition’ sounds like a grand phrase, but it includes everything from Nanook of the North to Girls Gone Wild. And there’s no doubt that it’s an eclectic form. The documentary section shelves Michael Moore next to National Geographic, films about bad presidents next to movies about butterflies, bodybuilders and Eskimos. These films do have one thing in common, though: they share with you things you what was not intended for you to see.”

And among the many, many kinds of films in that general category, there is a long and honorable tradition of social and political documentary made by people who take a firm position and show you the ground on which they’re standing. And let me just remind you of some for the wonderful films we have in that tradition: Harlan County, USA made on the side of the coal miners; The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophül’s film that made the French take a very hard look at their claims that everyone that they knew had somehow been in the resistance during World War II; Shoah, which explored not how the Holocaust could happen, but exactly how it did--especially those guys who agreed to run the trains. Think of The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris’ film that freed a man condemned to die. Or The Murder of Emmett Till, which re-opened this murder case, which was moribund, and has never been solved. So all of these are engaged, political films that stand as great films in the history of documentary.

You can look around, but what I don’t think you can find is an objective documentary tradition. So there are plenty of docs that are not social and political. There are nature docs and you can have the history of furniture making. There are not any docs that are not informed by ideology and ideas. A film about dolphins takes a stand about what you should care about when you care about dolphins.

I think that sometimes controversy settles on whether a documentary is balanced and whether it’s true for very interested reasons, simply in order to discredit them. And I think for several of the films made by filmmakers on this panel, we have seen the politics of response go immediately into motion once they have been out. At the same time, even though we know that’s true, I think everyone in the audience also has the same question. And it only gets louder, this question, the more stuff that starts coming out. What can we trust it? Who can we trust? Should we trust an independent voice that doesn’t come with a brand name to carry some legitimacy with it? Why should we trust i This question of trust is a real core issue for documentary because documentary is a film that shows you the inside of a point of view.

So that’s the issue I think we’re addressing today with these filmmakers, and we’re going to hear their stories. What we’re going to do is first, launch this discussion with a very short viewing. We’ve asked each of the filmmakers to choose a two-minute clip, and to talk to us very briefly about it. The first person we’re going to do that with is Robert Greenwald.

[Robert Greenwald joins Pat on stage. Audience applauds. Pat and Robert take their seats and house lights go down. Two-minute clip from Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism is played, featuring Bill O’Reilly denying that he says “shut up” and then clips of O’Reilly telling guests, “shut up.” Clip is followed by applause from audience.]

PA: Tell us why you picked that clip to show us. What kind of problems did it pose for you to get that?

RG: Well, I picked that clip because I wanted to have a pleasant afternoon, and there are other clips that are not as pleasant. That particular clip was indicative of many things that I tried to accomplish with the film. First of all and most importantly was, it is film, and we’re using clips from Fox to tell the story. So from the beginning, I conceived of the idea to make it as filmic as possible, if you will.

And I had a series of categories that we were looking at. I had monitors all over the country watching Fox News, and they had these eight or nine things to look for. One general category that we had when we began, was these sort of interruptions—it was actually called “bullying the guests” was the original category that this then became. And the monitors would find different things and then send it to us. Two things that emerged from this in the course of the editing, which I thought were particularly interesting. One is that we did not go into this knowing that O’Reilly had said, “I never said shut up,” and then having all these wonderful examples of it. But the more that we worked on the film, the more upset we became with parts of O’Reilly’s behavior. It’s really hard to watch it on a consistent basis. And then, somebody found in an old interview that he’d said this, and said, “Boy, I wonder if that’s accurate,” and we started going through the thousands of clips that we’d broken out. And the editor came to me and said, “You know, we may have something here,” we’d originally had two. Well, then we were like, possessed, to find the rest of them. We did Lexis-Nexis searches and we asked all the monitors to keep looking and built the rest of it into sequence you saw.

The other part of it that we talked about before a little bit was, for those of you who are documentary filmmakers, we got these clips not by asking Fox’s permission—you can imagine how happy they would be to license them to us—but we got them under the basis of something called Fair Use. We have a wonderful lawyer and a team of lawyers who worked with us pro bono, or we would never have been able to make the film otherwise. And they have this category called Fair Use, which is if you are only able to tell this story using these clips, then you are entitled to use them because it’s a Fair Use. You aren’t taking them for some other purpose, that the only way to do this clearly with the – you know, seeing it all, hearing it all and… seeing their faces up there—is a Fair Use. So these two things came together—sort of a creative desire to use the techniques of Fox—edit them together and give a sample to people who don’t always watch Fox News, as well as on the legal front, are being protected and guided by these really great men and women who said, “You’re allowed to do this, and here’s the reason why.”
Pat: Thank you. Okay, I think we’re ready to view the next clip. And that would be Julia Bacha. [Audience applause.] We’re going to show a clip from a film that Julia edited, Control Room.

[A two-minute clip is played, showing the translator at the satellite news service at work. Audience applause.]

PA: …the control room of al-Jazeera at the time of the Iraqi invasion. Julia tell us something about why you chose that clip to show us, what does it show us about the challenge of making that film?

JB: Well, one of the things, the main thing we wanted to do with the film was expose a little bit about al-Jazeera to the public, mostly the American public… European as well, but Europeans know a little bit more about it. Because during the war al-Jazeera was demonized to such a point that people started thinking that it was Osama bin Laden’s or at best, was Saddam Hussein’s television. And so we were like, well what is the way to do this? And instead of telling them, “This is what it is; this is not what it is,” we thought it would be better to just have a camera there following these people around in this sort of like cinema verité tradition, let the people then choose and decide what they thought about it. Like let’s see these people, let’s see the al-Jazeera journalists [at work.] And we were, you know, in a sense, very lucky to get this sort of a sequence. When you are there 24 hours a day, things happen, you know they have to choose the stories they’re going to show. They have to choose the stories they are not going to show. And then to show who are these people without telling you who they are.

The other part of it was, how are we going to put this in perspective, the work they are doing? And it was very convenient that Central Command, which was the American Coalition Media Center was 10 miles away from al-Jazeera in Doha, Qatar, so we got access to that as well. And then the premise of the movie becomes both a cinema-verité experience inside al-Jazeera and inside Central Command, and then with you being able to be there, which—there is no other way the public would have access to that--without being told, “Think about it.” Which I think is a great thing about cinema verité, because, of course, there’s a point of view, and you’re coming from a certain perspective when you start to do this, but it gets the people to think about these matters instead of giving the thing all chewed up for them and already all thought about.

PA: Thank you, Julia.
JB: You’re Welcome. [Audience applause.]

PA: And now we’d like to go to Jeff Gibbs, producer and composer of Fahrenheit 9/11. [Applause. Clip Plays, showing Iraqis going about peaceable daily life before the invasion.]

PA: Jeff, I think of all the films that have come out, Fahrenheit 9/11 has probably been under the most frontal attack for not being fair or not being balanced… and what did you want to show us about facing the challenge of speaking to an audience about these issues in this clip?

JG: Well, I probably wanted to show this clip because I think attacking and killing people based on a lie is the worst atrocity of our time. And the only thing I’ll say about November 2nd is the only way we can show that we want to make up for that is by exercising our right to vote.

One of the claims made was that it wasn’t fair to show the happy Iraqis as human beings, that we should be showing the atrocities. Well, maybe it would be fair and balanced to show the atrocities but I think we already know about the atrocities of Saddam Hussein. What we don’t know, is seeing people from the middle east and Iraq living their lives and being happy. And when we were cutting the film, Iraq—as horrible as it was—the bombings and the casualties weren’t hitting me like they should, and I realized a couple of our producers had been there just before the war and had footage. And we needed to see what the real human beings, you know, were like that we attacked. [Applause.] I think part of our contribution is having two hours to tell you what you’re not seeing in the rest of the media—the liberal, left, right, whatever it is, I mean—They’ve all got the same clips of Bush. Did you see some of the same expressions of Bush that you saw in the debate? Isn’t that stunning? And they don’t show us the angry Bush, the confused Bush, the over-controlled Bush. That footage is available to all the networks—every single bit of that footage—but they never chose to show that to you. So, to me we’re just balancing out the things that you don’t see.

PA: Got it. The things you were not intended to see.

JG: The other reason I wanted to show this, is—we’re talking about the art of filmmaking, we spent so much effort to bring out the sound to that section because that’s an important part of how you experience a film; I think the sound in these films is extremely important in moving documentaries up the next level.

PA: Can you give us any one example in that section that we just saw of some of the problems you faced in getting the sound right?

JG: Just—you know, well, we actually brought the guys from from George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch to help mix the sound for this. So we were up all night, night after night just doing the sound editing for this.

PA: Great. Well, thank you, Jeff. And finally, our last panelist, Morgan Spurlock, is the one person on the panel who has not made a film that is directly about issues that are on top of the election agenda. But nonetheless, on issues that affect us every single day. Morgan? [Clip from Super Size Me follows, in which Spurlock shows elementary school children pictures of famous figures including Jesus and George Washington, and after scattered recognition children can all identify Ronald McDonald. Applause.] …Why’d you decide to do it that way? What’d you want to show us about that clip?

MS: A couple things that are in that clip… much like you and I were talking about earlier, you know, this is an issue that really isn’t in the forefront of a lot of our minds. You know, fast food and obesity, to get that correlation and that link is not something people really talk about, and especially in a war year, it’s something that’s kind of been overshaded in a lot of ways. And for me, to really make it an important issue—to make people start to think about it—you just have to connect it to something people care about in a lot of ways. And for me I think the reason this clip is important, is because it really starts to show you where it starts; it starts to show you the insidiousness of the marketing, the way they target kids, and, you know, where it begins. Where does the first step of this education—or mis-education— of children start, that leads them down this path? And that really does begin with young children.

The other thing that I think this clip really shows, is how important it was for me to really make humor a part of the film. You know, nobody likes to be told what to do; I don’t like to be told what to do. Just ask my vegan girlfriend. And so for me, from the very beginning, it was important to create a movie that not only provided a vast amount of information and really made people start to think, but also, on a level, didn’t preach to them, was entertaining. You know, like the Mary Poppins song, “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” That was kind of our goal from the beginning--to create something that would provide a balance for the viewer.

PA: Well, thank you very much. [Audience applauds.]
MS: Thank you.

PA: What we’d like to do now is invite all our panelists up here to join us for a discussion. [Other panelists return to take seats on stage.] You’ve seen each other’s clips and you’ve really faced very different challenges, but let’s talk a little bit about the ethics that you, yourself, think about as you’re working through the material. And the question of, as you say, Morgan, reaching an audience—“spoonful of sugar,” making sure it’s entertaining for people—but also, that you feel that this is a fair representation of what you really want to say.

MS: I think from the beginning, whenever you create a film, especially a film like any of these on the panel that really bring up some very important issues, as a filmmaker I think the most important thing is to make sure you create a project that is built on a foundation of fact and on a foundation of truth. And for us from the very beginning we were doing a vast amount of research. Just like Robert, we had a team of lawyers who were helping us make sure that there was nothing libelous that was coming out in the project--nothing that could be deemed slanderous in any way. We needed to be sure that everything that was backed up by a vast amount of documented material that would show that everything that we talked about in the film is true, and that would provide very little room for question. Because you know once you create a film that’s based in this matter, it’s kind of hard to refute the truth, it’s kind of hard to argue with things that you can provide documentation for.

PA: Robert?

RG: Yeah. We had a very similar process. In going and looking at Fox News, which nobody had ever done before--which I was shocked to find out--I wanted to use a series of techniques to make the case, not just one thing, and not do it the way Fox News would do it, which is to have somebody screaming at you, saying this is the way it is. So we used four different techniques. Iinterestingly, in their various attacks on me and the film, Fox has never responded to the substance, it’s only been things around the edges. So besides our own monitoring, we actually commissioned a study for the movie done by FAIR, and they watched Brit Hume for 25 weeks, and they just monitored who the guests were: 80% Republican, 20% Democrat; and it’s a primary news show. We got these memos that were sent out, that a source inside Fox News was gracious enough to get to me. They were 15 memos that go to the editors, writers, producers, telling them how to interpret events politically. And then I had nine former employees from Fox News, talk about the political direction that they were given, and I had the clips themselves. So I felt having these four categories put me on very strong ground in terms of the attacks I expected.

PA: Well, Jeff, I know that you guys—

JG: We went through the same thing. We had several researchers, full-time, then we had our own fact-checkers, and Miramax had fact-checkers, and the attorneys went through it. And the same thing with the attacks. They’re attacking the things around the edges and the message, but they don’t really attack the facts in the film.

PA: Julia, you were dealing with a very, very misunderstood, or even unknown subject.

JB: Yeah, I think Control Room is a little bit different from these other three movies because it was a lot about being there, just shooting, you know what’s going on, and then going through the footage and finding compelling, interesting characters that we felt like then, through some research would exemplify what al-Jazeera is and what it wants to represent. But it wasn’t a direct attack—you know it wasn’t so much about McDonald’s is bad for you, or Bush is bad for you, or Fox News is bad for you, it was more about, you know, let’s be there…

MS: I agree with all three of those. [Audience laughter.]

JB: I agree completely, too. Well, maybe ours was al-Jazeera is good for you. You know? And so in that way, it was more of an experience of finding a way to get the viewer into our characters as we follow them and into a story that could show them that some of the perceptions and some of the propaganda that they’ve heard about al-Jazeera were not true. And some of the stuff that came from Central Command, which is where all of the western media was located, being fed by Brooks and their people, was not quite correct. One thing that they were very upset and disappointed a little bit about, was we wanted to get more of the American journalists’ point-of-view, but the American journalists had all signed contracts with their channels that they wouldn’t speak to anyone, that they couldn’t talk. So we got David Shuster from ABC and Tom Mintier, who I think were very brave, especially Tom, who I after, especially, after the Lynch case came along, got really mad and just decided to speak out a little. But it was hard. That’s why they don’t have such a prominent presence in the movie--they really were very reluctant to speak.

PA: Well, so, let me get this straight. Everybody here has verified and re-verified their facts. Lawyers are making a very good business here out of making sure that everything is not only true, but also is not litigate-able. These films all establish well-known things actually: Fox is not fair and balanced, McDonald’s is not a healthy diet, the four core ideas in Fahrenheit about the Bush administration, al-Jazeera’s characterization… Why does it take an independent filmmaker working with few resources, starting from zero basically, to do this?

MS: Because the media will never tell you.

PA: Talk to us a little bit about why it takes four courageous people like you on stage to do this.

MS: This is something I’ve spoken to a few people about. Especially in the world we live in today, we live in a world where documentary film, independent documentary film has truly become the last bastion of free speech. It really has. [Audience applauds.]

I’ve been traveling around the world promoting this film now, and no matter what country we go to, there’s a newspaper, TV station, radio or magazine that won’t talk to me, that won’t do a story about the film, simply because McDonald’s is one of their biggest sponsors. McDonald’s has called them and threatens them, and says we’re going to pull away our advertising if you talk about him or this movie and slowly but surely, they walk away. This is a company that sells burgers and fries that has that kind of power, so you have to ask yourself what else are we not getting?

‘Cause the fact is you’re not getting a lot, or what you do get is a very watered down version of the truth, because the tentacles of the corporations and the ties they have with the media conglomerates run deep. And it’s the buddy system, and they’re going to you know, watch each others’ backs and what you’ll get is a very bland version of what’s really happening around the world. And so with this world of free speech that we live in, you know we live in this fantastic place where it’s freedom of speech, so long as it’s okay with the sponsor. And that’s not a very free world.

PA: Well, Robert, you’ve actually worked in the heart of Hollywood very, very successfully. Why do you think it took a brand new production and distribution mode to get the points that you’ve made in your last four documentary films?

RG: Well, sponsors don’t get to be sponsors by being courageous. It’s not what they’re in the business of doing, taking chances. They want equal opportunity for everybody to love them. By the way, just a side note, which I must say, which is one of the reasons, and I know this is totally non-partisan, but for the liberals and progressives in the audience, we’ve been asleep at the wheel in not complaining more, because sponsors really can be affected. And I can tell you, a letter a phone call, I mean it really, really makes a difference.

But because the media, as we were just saying, is essentially a profit-making media, and even PBS now is getting the hell beat out of it by the Republicans in Washington, there’s very little room for these kinds of voices to come out. By the way, I think it’s the books and the documentary films now… the two together have been in the leadership of getting these other ideas out there. And unfortunately the bigger the corporations, the more interests they have, and the more conservative they have, in the larger sense of not wanting to upset the apple cart.

MS: And unfortunately most people in America don’t want to read books, so movies tend to be a great outlet for a lot of people.

PA: Jeff, did you have a comment you want to make?

JG: Yeah, my feeling lately, as depressing as it sounds, we don’t have a left-wing media, we have no media in some ways in this country. It was so depressing after the war, and that was part of our motivation of making the film, to sit there and try and find news about what was actually happening to the people of Iraq, and you couldn’t get it. You know, Saturday, you turn on NPR and you’ve got Car Talk and Pep Talk and Dr. Zorba and… I’m listening, and it’s like, I love all those shows, Prairie Home Companion, but here’s my liberal network, and then there’s something brought to you by Archer Daniels Midland—what the hell is that on the liberal network? You know, in favor of genetically engineered food. It’s totally depressing. And then, we get some news from NPR and the BBC is on locally.

But then, after doing this movie I went back to Traverse City in Michigan, and the local folks are telling me that they have a Mideast: Just Peace film series on Palestinian issues, and the local NPR station would not run their community announcement on the community bulletin board because it was political. They had raised money to try and get Amy Goodman on their local college station. The college intervened and refused to allow Amy Goodman to be on the local station.

With Fahrenheit, media would be called after the film came out and be told and threatened, and hopefully Michael will reveal some of these stories sometime. And journalists would apologize to him after he appeared on the show where they attacked him. Mel Gibson was going to fund Fahrenheit 9/11; he got word that he would never visit the White House again. Disney, refused to distribute the film, despite the fact—who’s on Disney?

RG: Rush Limbaugh…

JG: Rush Limbaugh. So they can have Rush Limbaugh every day of the week spewing hate, but they can’t have our $500 million that they would have earned if they would have kept the film. [Audience laughter and applause.]

MS: And you wonder why Eisner’s losing his job.

JG: But the last thing I’ll say about that is, we still underestimate the power of Fox and thank you so much for all, everyone’s work here because—we call it Hate Radio and Hate TV. You know when I walk around cities with Michael, when there’s been something on Hate Radio or Hate TV, on O’Reilly or Limbaugh, you can see it that afternoon. People come up to Michael, and they’re angry and hateful. And if we don’t take back the media, it doesn’t matter who wins the election, we’re in big, big trouble.

PA: This sudden focus on documentary is fascinating to me, as someone has who has been writing about documentaries for more than two decades, It’s sort of a dowdy and unfashionable corner of the film world, comparatively speaking. Suddenly it’s glamorous. Suddenly it’s interesting.

JG: You all feel more glamorous? [Panelists laugh.]

PA: And it’s changed a lot in the last few years with new cable channels… but it’s really astonishing what you guys with your films have done to call attention to the whole medium. And so, I remember talking to Jehane Noujaim, the director of Control Room, last January at Sundance, and thinking, “Gee, I really hope this film gets an audience. I hope I won’t have to sneak a preview to friends who I really want to see it.” And then, of course, in the excitement of this summer, Control Room goes into 400 theaters, so finally, I can tell my friends about it. Very, very exciting. I’d like to talk a little bit about new opportunities of distribution. And I’d also like to talk about what happens when right-wingers figure out how to make documentaries now that their popular.

RG: I attribute this to Michael Moore’s solution to the unemployment problem. He has a bunch of untalented right-wingers making documentaries about Michael Moore now... in am effort to solve unemployment because Bush isn’t solving unemployment.

I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. Part of it is because the right wing has outlets, in other words—

PA: If you had Fox then…?

RG: If we had Fox News and we had Hate Radio, some of what we’re talking about might have gone out that way. We don’t have those outlets, so our energy and our drive and our passion and our creativity goes into these films. And the other thing, and it’s no secret, the media, even if it were politically neutral, is a thirty-second, sound-byte media. Well, we’re living in this extraordinary time now; I mean look at the issues that we all, as citizens are struggling with. Terrorism. Clearly, we can’t just go around bombing countries. Well, there’s got to be a hell of a discussion and a debate about that. 30-seconds? I don’t think so. Healthcare? Michael’s next film. 46? 47 million Americans without healthcare. Thirty-second sound-byte? I don’t think so. Out-sourcing jobs? You know, what are we going to do? Build bigger and bigger barriers? So, I think it makes even more of a need for these kind of films and more on a going-forward basis, because people need information and views that they can sink their teeth into.

JG: The other thing that’s exciting is… we shot Fahrenheit 9/11 in 16mm and mostly HD, but here are four films shot with mini DV cameras and archival footage. I mean, that’s amazingly accessible now to everyone to be able to use a camera. I don’t know about Control Room…

JB: Yeah, I was very surprised and very excited about the prospect of—you know, it was all shot on a Sony PD150, which was bought in Doha. It was the only camera available there. It was bought and we started shooting, and then back to Cairo. And then, we have two laptops. It’s a 12-inch Mac laptop and a 15-inch Mac laptop; no extra screens. And there you go; it’s all your creativity, and this small technology allows you to do this amazing thing that then can reach, as Control Room did, a very big and eager audience. And I think this is something that might change a little bit, because if the media is a lot about profiting, and there is a lot of demand for that kind of information which these documentaries are showing—how is that going to affect the media? I mean, is the media going to respond to exactly the opportunity to get—you know—$400 million. These films are going to become now popular and money-giving. Michael Moore says, “They are giving me the rope that I’m going to hang them with.” And I think that’s true.

PA: Morgan is trying to get a word in edgewise.

MS: Yeah, I know, I think the fantastic thing about technology now is that it’s really leveled the playing field in every way. And I think that what’s happened is if you have a good idea and a camera and a computer, you can make a movie, and not only make a movie but make a movie that can effect change that can get out there and be seen by a mass audience in a way that’s never been possible. I guarantee you the minute that Michael’s movie opened, its opening weekend and suddenly opening weekend it made 25 million dollars, every studio in California was clearing their slate and saying, “okay what documentaries are we going to make now?” Because here is a movie that was made for $6 million, that in its opening weekend made $25 million, you know and now has made 118 in the U.S., $250 million worldwide so far. You know, suddenly people are seeing dollar signs and that will fuel this creative energy, in some ways, but for me, I think you have to be careful not to get into bed with the wrong people.

PA: I ‘d like to talk to a little bit about that because I think—and here, I will show my age— I’ve been through several cycles now where people have said, “Finally we have the technology and it will really level the playing field.” And it never levels the playing field. Not yet anyway. And so I’ve been really watching this time around, strategies, not just the technologies. Because I also teach in a film school. I can tell you beautiful and also awful things that are done with PD150s. So, we do think that the kind of creativity that’s added makes an enormous amount of difference. But, let’s talk a little bit about strategies by which we not only make but we find the audience. And I just want to kick that off with Robert, because I think what you’ve been doing with the “Un” series is such an interesting experiment.

RG: Well, I wish I could say I had this brilliant vision that I could then expound in a very pompous way to all of you, but I really kind of found my way into it, one step at a time, half luck and half desperation. The first movie that I produced, Unprecedented, about the Florida 2000 election, my fondest hope was that in five years some history student would find it on a shelf someplace. It never occurred to me that there would be any distribution of it ever, frankly. But, you know: those who don’t learn from history are forced to repeat it—so that was my goal to contribute so there would be a record of this tragedy.

And what happened was, we kept trying to finish the film and, even though I volunteered and had a lot of equipment, we needed some money, and as we would go around showing five or ten minutes of it to raise a little money, people said, “Well, what are you going to do with it?” And over time, it turned out there were political groups around the country—People for the American Way, the NAACP, most prominently—would say, “Well, when the film is ready we want to screen it.” So we finished it, and then we started screening it. And we said, “Wait a minute. This is interesting.” And then we set up a little website because people asked me, “How can we get copies?” And we’d be selling them in the lobby afterward; that was our primary distribution method for a while. And you know, we’d be like, “Oh my God! We made $500!” It was like victory one day; I’ll never forget. We had the dollar bills and, you know, you could get your hands on it. It was an amazing feeling. That was our highest grossing weekend. And a thrilling one, too.

So then we set up the website, and people started ordering it on the website. Hmmm, this is kind of interesting—but [we] didn’t really compute it. Then the next time, when I got the idea to do Uncovered, which happened last June, and I wanted to do it quickly, because the film is specifically about the fact that we were not given accurate reasons about the reason for going to war. It actually isn’t about the war itself. I wanted to get that out while the debate was still going on. So, I’m thinking to myself, “I gotta do this film quickly,” and having worked in Los Angeles, and having dealt with gatekeepers for many years, I knew that if I dealt with them my great great-grandchildren would be discussing what to do with the film. So I reached out to the people I knew, and it worked. Because one was MoveOn.org, who I’d done anti-war stuff with, and the other was Center for American Progress in D.C.. And I called them and I said, “A—I need a little money, and B—would you guys be the Paramount Studios and figure out a way for Center to put it on the screens, and MoveOn would put it on the internet.”

So they said, “Sure. Why not?” And then, emailing up and back— because as you know with MoveOn they never talk on the phones,I it’s all email--so the day before we were going to release Uncovered—and I did use my theatrical training because I put together MoveOn, Alternet, BuzzFlash, The Nation Institute, and we screened for the first time. And that was opening day with Uncovered, having used the Unprecedented model, so we now had an opening day. And I emailed Wes that day and said, “So what do you think? How many copies will we sell?” And he said, “Not bad. Maybe a thousand, maybe 1500.” And I said, “That’s pretty good. It’s a documentary.” And they were charging $29.95. Well, that Monday that Uncovered was offered to MoveOn members. In three days they raised a million dollars with that film for anti-Bush ads.

Then we realized—oh boy—we’re really on to something here. And then the house parties followed, three thousand people having house parties. So when it came time with Outfoxed, the escalation in my mind was—‘cause the mistake I made with Uncovered, not having any idea it would be that successful, there was no political connection to the movie in the sense of organizing or in asking or saying, “Here’s what we would like you to do,” which, I don’t think the film can do but the organizations can do. So with Outfoxed from the beginning we were married, if you will, to the groups doing this incredible work in media reform. From day one, they knew about the film, and there were the plans where they would use it as a tool to get out into the world.

Now we had this sort of alternative strategy, and now that we had it, ironically, we found—a commercial distributor came to us who sells DVDs commercially, and we got theatrical distribution, but never having pursued them, they came our way.

PA: That’s I think the big news here—is that you went from an entirely alternative distribution and also got theatrical distribution. And I think for other people here, it’s sort of been the other way, you’ve been able to pull in the kind of networking after launching theatrical. Is that right?

MS: Well, I think for us with Super Size Me and for Control Room, the benefit of getting accepted into Sundance was that’s already a fantastic feather in your cap, and it really legitimizes your movie in so many ways, that suddenly you know quells a lot of your distributor’s fears, that there is an audience for it. And so for us, for me especially, making this little movie for $65,000, now suddenly having it be there, makes distributors say, “Wow, this is something that could potentially be profitable for us. Let’s wait and see if anybody sues him at Sundance.”

PA: I remember seeing it and being surrounded by people who said, “God what a great movie—it’ll never get its clearances. They’ll never get it out. The lawyers will never…”

JB: Yeah, this gossip started going around that you were being sued and they were shutting you down.

MS: Yeah. I think there were McDonald’s people walking around in trench coats, “Oh yeah, it’s never getting out. No one’s ever going to see that movie.” No, but I think through Sundance over the two weeks that it’s there, a lot of distributors see there is an audience for this movie. They get audience response, they gauge how it is after the first couple of days, and once the dust settles they see the legitimacy as well as the profitability. And I think that coming on the heels of Bowling for Columbine, they realize that there is an outlet.

PA: [To Jeff Gibbs] Did you guys expect the explosion of the box office that happened?

JG: No, I never worked on a film before Bowling for Columbine. I went to high school with Michael. At that time my only thought was, “Please God, don’t let me ruin my friend’s film.” Or let it do as well as Roger and Me anyways, and it tripled [it]. On Fahrenheit, we were initially thinking how can we possibly top Bowling for Columbine? So we’ll do the best we can. There were starting to be these polls I think, that said that half of all Americans wanted to see this film as the movie was being cut, around the time that Disney decided to not distribute it. Actually they decided after seeing—they sent an executive to see the movie and that’s when they decided that it was actually a good movie, and they better not show it. We had reverse problems from you guys. But we were so nose to the grindstone, and just so—we couldn’t even stop to think—we were just trying to get it out before the election.

JB: But that was great publicity. The whole thing, I mean, the first page of The New York Times. I was like, “Wow.”

JG: Every time they attacked the film, we’d just sit there going, “How stupid can you be? This is only going to help.”

MS: Yeah, and that’s the thing with most of these films, I think, is there’s no such thing as bad PR. You know, any time someone will talk about these movies, it just furthers the awareness. It furthers the desire for people to see it, and I think that’s a positive.

JG: We have not been sued, for Bowling for Columbine or for Fahrenheit 9/11, you know, so that tells you something. James Nichols was trying to file suit saying that he didn’t know who Michael Moore was but…

PA: That’s tough to argue. I’ve been wondering if anyone has a question out here.

Audience Member: …Is our audience response reacting to the fact that we feel we’ve been lied to, and we’re out there seeking the truth? Or is it a shift in the type—or the way we want our information to come to us?

PA: I think that the films that are on hot social and political issues are a subset of this huge documentary boom. It’s the fastest growing segment of film. And it’s being fed, I think, by multi-channel television and multi-screen lives that we lead. There’s a lot more acreage to fill, and many, many channels— or programmers are trying to fill it with relatively low-cost material. That’s been the driver for reality TV; that’s certainly been the curiosity for documentary TV that’s tapped into a whole kind of production that was harder to get to people when there were fewer screens. But your first point--do we feel suspicious of what we’re not already hearing--I think that several people on this panel said just that, that there is a growing sense of “Wait a second. Where is there something authentic that I might actually really believe?”

MS: Yeah, I think we’re starved for information in the world today. I think we are hungry for it. We’re seeking it out. We want it. And we’re not getting it; we’re not getting it from newspapers and television. And I think we are anxious to find it anywhere we can, and these movies are playing that role in some part. And also just to address the other part as well, I think reality television has opened up the world of documentary films, and made people who would never go see a documentary film interested in a lot of ways.

JG: I think the thing about film is, maybe this is part of your point, we’re so sick of sound-bytes and small amounts of information maybe sitting for an hour and a half, two hours with something, is much richer. The thing about film is, I think we make a mistake if we think of it in terms of just the cognitive part of the experience. And I think many people try to make documentaries in the old way where it’s a lot of you know white guys talking heads sort of thing and the more you can stay away from that, take people in the middle someplace they’ve never been before.

PA: Can you just say not the old way? There have been wonderful documentaries from the beginning of the genre.

JG: Yes forever.

PA: There are bad documentaries all the way through too.

JG: Point well taken. But it’s providing this whole cinematic experience where you really you’re taken somewhere you’ve never been. The sound has a lot to do with that. You can make a movie cheaply, but getting a film to look great and to sound great is extremely expensive and extremely tedious and time consuming. That’s why I wanted to show this war section. We attempted to mix that in the way that it would be like a fiction film where you were really there in that place and at the end of the two hours that you would have a film experience in addition to the learning…And that’s how we learn, too, we just don’t learn through information. We learn through our whole reaction to the experience.

MS: I tell you one thing that I love that’s happening right now is that for years we would go to the cinema to escape. The cinema was an escape: a place where we could go and not think about our lives and what’s happening. And now here is this incredible boom of movies that is taking us to the cinema to really look at our lives and to look at what is happening in the world [applause]. And that’s a beautiful thing.

RG: I think that—and Jeff talked about it earlier--the media’s coverage of the war was one of those watershed moments. There were millions of people in this country, let alone in the rest of the world,who had very strong opinions and there was nowhere in the primary media for them, and it’s a tragedy what went on [applause]. You know, if you looked at the primary news channels it was generals planning, “Should we bomb them or should we invade by land?” And that was the nature of the discourse, for crying out loud. And people knew that that was wrong and I think that’s when they started in large numbers looking for alternative media. They knew they weren’t nuts. So they went to Alternet, the BBC, other things. And I think that we’re all in a sense feeling that turning point which is why, you know that question, “Well, I think that after the election will all of this stop?” I don’t think so. I think it’s only going to continue. Because it’s a large, vigorous audience that’s not prepared to accept getting its information from those sources.

JG: We tried to go to al-Jazeera and they shut it down. The war was over and they kept shutting the website down.

JB: No, I know. This thing about calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” How can a news channel have all of its little titles and funky editing and montage “Operation Iraqi Freedom”? The point of a lot of Control Room was to show, okay, this is what they’re getting. Because a lot of the problem in terms of international affairs that we are having now is how we are perceiving them and them perceiving us. And we know how we are perceiving them but we don’t really know how they are perceiving us. What is the information that they’re getting? What is this information war— that is actually more important than the military war?

The idea that you’re going to go and bomb a country without authorization from any international community and that the people are going to accept that. Meanwhile, they’re receiving their information from a channel like al-Jazeera, which, you know has a point-of-view of their own. They definitely do. They are focused on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, heavily. And rightly so, in my opinion. But the fact of the matter is that when the Arab people are seeing on their television blood and oppression and the United States supporting Israel then, this is the war you have to win. It’s not the war with bombs. It’s the war we are actually thinking about, what we’re doing and [how] we’re going to change our policies.

Then people are going to start thinking about the United States in a different way. And going through the characters I think this is very important to what we want to do with Control Room. I don’t know how many people have seen it, but we have three main characters, and one of them is Lieutenant Rushing who is a press officer. One of the problems that we encountered was, How are we going to portray these people and how is that going to affect their life – their real life – because these people are real people. We are putting them in a fictionalized way to make their story interesting, but they actually are people that have to go back to whatever they’re doing. Lieutenant Rushing had serious problems with it. He is leaving the military. He asked to be released because he was shut down by the military because he wasn’t allowed to talk to the media during the Control Room press frenzy. And he is now free to talk from the fifteenth of October, which is when, one week later, the DVD of Control Room is going to be released. It will give him the opportunity a little bit before the election to really say all of his opinions and all that he is thinking about from an American perspective.

Which is the great thing—'I was there. I went there with these convictions. I really believed the things our American government did at the time. But I learned a lesson.’ [And that] gave him an opportunity to speak out.

PA: Before I take the next question, you said, “We fictionalized,” and used that word “fiction”. And we’ve been talking about honesty and authenticity. Tell me what you meant by “We fictionalized his life.”

JB: “Fictionalized” means we are trying to tell in ninety minutes a one-month story. If we could show all of the footage of everything that was going on then we would. And actually this is the point of the DVD, it’s to have more of his own stuff, but you are cutting a ninety-minute film and you want this to be sort of cinema verité; you are there.

PA: But you don’t feel like you invented things?

JB: No. You don’t invent anything. The story is there. But when you are editing it you are going to put it in a way that there is a story line going and people are drawn into it so that they are emotionally carried by the characters and the characters – this is what I meant by “fictionalized” – it’s not, as he said, a talking head. You are not seeing someone saying, “al-Jazeera is this, this and that.” No, you’re seeing this guy making an authorization and going to do something. So it’s kind of like these people in a fiction film because you are just watching their lives.

PA: Question?

Audience Member: I want to begin by saying thank you for your courage. [Applause] And speaking of courage I’d like to ask a very sensitive question and that is as a result of doing these very bold films has there been pressure put on you in your own personal lives, because one of the things that I am sensing is that there is a silent majority that is living under fear to speak out. That I’m going to be audited by the IRS. Have there been repercussions and, if so, how do you deal with it?

PA: Her question, much shortened, and correct me if I got the sense of it wrong, is have people suffered pressure or repercussions in their own lives that make it difficult for them to go on doing this given the amount of controversy and conflict that has arisen as a result of the films.

RG: I’m from New York also, so you know, you have to define pressure. I mean, if somebody [laughter] I mean if I wasn’t getting attacked for doing this then I’ve done a helluva lousy job frankly.

So really that was my expectation that I would and that’s part of it. The attacks that I received on the works that I did against the war during the buildup were actually much, much worse. I mean that with the phone calls and the threats and the “we’re going to come get you” and all that kind of silly stuff. With the films, there have been some, but I like to frame it in the positive sense because I think it’s important that we not back down in any way and even yell even louder. And none of it makes any difference. You know, sticks and stones.

O’Reilly called me a “smear merchant.” That’s great. I love the man. And Fox News for a couple of days went after a bunch of people in the movies. But finally we held together and the people from Fox News held together and they came back at them. And similarly with Uncovered. They’re messing with the wrong people. They’re messing with the CIA. That’s moronic. These men and women know how to fight. And in Uncovered I had all these great CIA and Pentagon sources and they started to go after them when the movie came out, but they knew. And as Joe Wilson, Ambassador Wilson says, “We’ve got sharp elbows and we’re not afraid to use them.” In fact he claims that’s the problem with liberals: our elbows aren’t sharp enough. He would lecture me on being tougher.

PA: Let’s talk a little about the cost in your career and your personal life in trying to take on a controversy.

JG: Well, you know, it did dawn us during the edit room toward the end. Especially in that section where Bush is nodding his head and it goes into the Saudis and Halliburton and I was like, “Are we in some kind of trouble here? Are we making some people mad?” The toll on Michael has been very heavy. He’s been attacked and attacked and attacked. We have the same feeling. If we hadn’t drawn blood then they wouldn’t be attacking us like this. But I’m more concerned with, again, we go back home, and Bush came to town and there were a thousand protestors. We didn’t see that on the national news. There were people arrested and you didn’t see that. A town of 20,000 and on the way out, this didn’t happen on the way in and this tells me something, people were yelling at the protestors: “Traitor,” “Whore,” “Slut.” “Get a job.” So I’m more concerned about how they have intimidated the average citizen and the other networks. Fox has intimidated the other networks into shutting up.

MS: Playing their game as well. MSNBC is suddenly turning into a Fox junior.

JG: Where is our courage? Why doesn’t Kerry turn to him say, “Mr. President, flip-flop, flip flop. What about just being a flop?" [Applause, Laughter.]

PA: So, in a way, both of you are saying the question isn’t “Why does it take courage for me to do this, but why don’t people with much more power than me have more courage to do this?”

MS: Yeah, and the other thing I think is really important, too is you make a film that gets people talking, and gets people inspired, and begins a dialogue, you have an obligation to see it through as the creator of that project, as the person who’s gotten that message out there. The thing that I’ve just started doing with even with this movie, is we’ve just started taking the movie to colleges, to high schools, to junior highs. You know, putting the movie in the hands of the people who really need to see it—parents, teachers, kids—and getting that message out there. You know, we’re going to be at over a hundred schools before the end of this year. And if you can do anything to inspire those people to want to change, to want to go out there, to let their voice be heard, to sharpen their elbows, that’s an important thing. And I think that all of us realize that there is an obligation that comes with making a movie like this.

PA: Julia, did you find yourself more in the spotlight than you were comfortable with?

JB: Well, I’m not an American citizen, so—

MS: So you can leave anytime you want. [Laughter.]

JB: On the good side, I can leave and go back down south, and you know I’m just fine. But on the bad side, if at some point I’m applying for this or that or say what it is then, you know, they might or might not. So far I haven’t really had any problems that I wouldn’t have otherwise, but Jehane Noujaim, the director of the film, she was called for an audit as soon as the film came out… maybe it was just a coincidence. You never know. And you know, our characters got in a little but of trouble—Lieutenant Rushing was actually personally hurt a lot. And I’m very proud of him and of his wife, because they went through this a smear campaign, like the military were very attacking Lieutenant Rushing’s wife, Paige.

PA: That’s something we haven’t talked that much about, which is the responsibility you have to your subjects… how much you know. They have no idea, usually, what’s going to happen to them. You probably have a much better idea.

JB: We were very afraid on the edit room. This was the main concern and I was very happy to have all of the characters and all of the people that which were in the film come to me and say, “You exactly portrayed us correctly.” This is the best, most rewarding thing that can happen. And that they are ready to represent that because, in a way, at the end of the day you are editing what they said. And when you are editing you are choosing and picking. It was great to feel that everybody felt that they were themselves. You know, like, “That’s me.”

JG: [to MS] Did you sign a release for your film?

MS: Of course not, because in about another year I’m gonna sue me for a lot of money. [Laughter]

PA: More questions?

Audience Member: About privacy issues and talking about subjects. Very popular documentaries. Their subjects, for instance, women have been portrayed in newspapers, billboards, and in trailers for the documentaries in very unflattering situations to advertise the documentaries. What do you think about using subjects like that both in trailers and promotions and the documentaries themselves?

RG: Out of my league.

JG: I can’t respond to that but I can tell you about for our film the distinction was if you were the recruiters in the film and didn’t know that it was Michael Moore, I think that was ok because we need an entrée into a world that we don’t usually see. The mother of the dead soldier certainly knew who we were and anyone who was in a position like that as a citizen they all had the chance, she had the chance to decide to not do that and the thing that I felt best about for her is that she reported as the process went along for the first time getting relief and being able to sleep in some peace. But you wonder sometimes, this is going to affect people’s lives very profoundly.

MS: But, I think the thing is, is that if there’s a camera on you, and you say something you need to be aware that that could go somewhere. What’s the top line of the Aspen News?

Audience Member: If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.

MS: “If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.” [Laughter.] That really sums it up. If the camera is pointing at you, don’t say anything stupid. Because that could easily get seen. There was the lawyer that we interviewed in the film who was suing McDonalds. We asked him, the first time we talked, “Why are you suing McDonalds.” He goes, “Oh you mean besides monetary compensation? You want to hear a noble cause. Is that it?” And then he goes into this whole blah blah blah thing. But that’s the first thing he said, then I said, “That’s all we need. [Laughter] We can stop right now.” But, instead we sat there for an hour and a half as he like rambled on about nonsense. But the thing was, once again, he summed up his stance in two seconds.

Audience Member: Thank you for having the courage to make these films. Making my own films, the challenge is to try to come up with the money to do it. It’s the $500 weekends. It’s very hard to get patrons to give money to cause which is not going to result in any financial return. It’s nice that Fahrenheit has opened things up to where it becomes an investment proposition, but we all know what happens when the marketplace determines what art gets made. I wonder whether documentaries have reached a point in there economic development where there’s enough interest enough money enough possibility to put together a national organization to have funds available to sponsor and encourage really high quality documentaries.

MS: Like the NEA? Oh no.

RG: Well, part of it is that you have to separate the political documentaries. And you asked about this earlier, I go into these meetings and they say, “God, we loved that movie. It was great. Now, um, could you do something not political for us?” So that’s sort of being careful who you go to bed with. I think money is always a problem. I’ve made 55, 56 films and I’ve begged for every single one of them ultimately. You’re a high class beggar in different forms and it’s very hard. And documentaries are always going to be brutally hard. To me the solution always is get the price as low as possible. And then you do everything that you desperately can. They were going month to month on their movie, as we are. I don’t think that there will ever be a pot of gold that we’ll be able to go to and say, “Please fund us.” I think it’s always going to be brutally hard and unfortunately it comes with the job.

MS: I was moving furniture while we were making the film because I had no money. I was going on Craig’s List to find out who was hiring people and I would go do part-time jobs while the editors would be there just so I could pay their rent and pay for us to eat.

JG: Yeah, I was substitute teaching during Bowling for Columbine.

JB: And I was babysitting.

RG: And that’ll encourage you.

MS: The glamorous world of filmmaking.

JG: When we went to the Oscars I was like “Oh this is cool, there’s four documentary film makers and this is great.” I just want to commend the Aspen Film Festival for having us because this, in a way, much more than Cannes or the Oscars, this is bringing us together, this is our peer group and this is a great kickoff and to networking and to building on this new art form or this alternate art form.

Audience Member: First of all, thanks for bringing your glamour to our community and also to the use some of the words of Nancy Frazier “creating an alternative public sphere” because these alternative views haven’t been expressed. I guess I want to say, “thank you” and I hope this is the nexus of more information getting out there. Thank you.

Audience Member: I have a two part question. Number one. I have been living in Russia for three years and there’s a lot of outcry here because Putin controls the media. But the media I see in Russia is real news delivered by intelligent people. They don’t comment on Putin but they show the world. In Aspen, I have four Russian channels I get here, I see ten times more news from Russia even about America than I do in the media. So what is the hypocrisy of jumping on the Russia and Putin when our media is completely perverted by commercial exploitation. Next question. You have someone like Dish Network who’s got 500 channels and maybe 50 are selling aggressively crap all the time. Nothing but materialism shoved down your throat many times presented as if it were journalism. Why can’t you get access and enough money to buy channels to deliver the message you need?

PA: What I’m going to do is take both of those questions as statements because we just have so many people who need to ask questions to the filmmakers and they’re both great questions that all of us would love to have a better answer to.

Audience Member: I’m just picking up on something that you’ve already said. We’re getting into the area of neutral documentaries. I don’t know what, Antiques Roadshow. And then more polemical documentaries, some political, non-political you said. Are we going to have a future of left and right documentaries or maybe pro-environmental and pro-industry documentaries, and people questioning each others’ sources? I don’t know, but I’m raising that question.

RG: I don’t think anybody knows.

Audience Member: …I wonder what kind of a role books have played in your own lives in making these documentaries?

MS: At least for me, books play an important part in my life in gathering information. In educating myself even beyond school when I was forced to read books and now when I don’t have to and for me, even the process of making a movie. When you’re doing vast amounts of research books become a incredible resource because there’s so much information you can get in a book that you can never find in a brief article or in a lot of places so I find them to be something you just can’t live without.

RG: I would agree with that. Once of the purest most joyous moments is beginning a film and then going and getting every book I can find and looking at this pile and knowing in six months or something I’m gonna know a hell of a lot about that because that’s what I have to do before I can start asking all of the questions. So, to me I couldn’t do it without them frankly.

JB: I think this is actually the joy of being a filmmaker. Even if your film doesn’t get out there, every project you are going to learn so much. Knowing that by the end of it even if you, you don’t really get distribution, you learned yourself and you’re going to take that to the next step or maybe you’re going to, you know, just tell that to a couple of people it’s fantastic. If people read books, there wouldn’t be such a need. Documentary filmmaking is great, but more even of this information, more of the thinking that is I think the important part is getting the information. Processing it yourself. Getting to conclusions that you arrived at yourself instead of that people gave you except that people don’t do that that often anymore…

PA: We have a panel member here whose operation produces books that end up on the bestseller list.

RG: That was part of what was difficult about making the movie is that we had to do the book first. That really helped to do the research for the book and then we of course collected hundreds of books to help make this template. But the thing I’ve been realizing lately is that nonfiction films – and I like nonfiction because it’s sort of like literature--it’s a new form of literature that’s accessible to people. And many people who are good storytellers and good writers would probably be really good and helpful in this medium because it’s really the same skill.

And that’s why, despite the cheapness of the technology; it’s still really difficult to do this, because you have to be able to tell a good story, which is not an easy skill to have. But I do have actually a response to the previous statement which was why don’t we have more choice in what we hear. Simply, the thing we’ve always heard, the corporate control of the media. Sounds trite. Disney, got a $300 million bailout by a Saudi prince for EuroDisney. That’s one small factor. GE, MSNBC, NBC. And how much in defense contracts does GE have? Hundreds of millions of dollars. You look at what their interests are. They’re not the same as the people’s interests.

PA: So you’re making the link back to what Morgan was saying which was the largest corporate America have links into media.

RG: They control. They completely control it.

JB: I just want to say one thing about this. It is an option to turn on the television and watch this stuff. At the end of the day you can turn off your television and not watch this stuff.

PA: We’re approaching the end of our time together. Robert wants to say one thing before I go on to the next two questions.

RG: Just about the point that everyone is making. If you go to outfoxxed.org which is our website there are ten, twelve, fifteen groups working to reform the media. Everything from the work in Washington on the structural work with the FCC to local low-powered radio stations to media monitoring. Ultimately we have to do something about it so we don’t just whine and kvetch about it. And there are people doing something about it and if it’s an issue that you’re concerned about, I just encourage everyone to do that. Whatever your taste is there’s an organization doing work in that area.

Audience Member: Have you given any thought to libraries across the nation or internationally?

JB: Right now, Control Room is owned by Magnolia Pictures, unfortunately, so they are in charge of what’s happening. They are in theatrical and Lion’s Gate bought the rights to the DVD, which is coming out on the 26th of October. So from the 26th you can order it online, and you get it. It’s out in a lot of theaters in the cities in the United States as well. We hope, I hope dearly, that we can do a lot of what Super Size Me has gone through. Going to universities. And we go. We went to Columbia. But, it hasn’t really been that kind of like everywhere sort of thing— let’s really do it. I was surprised by how much media we got but I guess with the overall media, it didn’t get out so much.

RG: We are making an effort with our films because we don’t have Magnolia to get them to the libraries right now. In fact, if you want to call your local library, ask them to order it. If you want to get it to a school, or university, if you email me, we’ll send you a free copy to get it there. We’re absolutely committed to do it.

MS: And if you go on Alternet, which is a fantastic organization, you can buy a copy of Outfoxed and some of the money goes to them and pays for the DVD, which I think is great. It’s where I got mine. [Laughter] We’re getting Super Size Me out to as many schools as possible. We’re using some of the profits we made on the movie to underwrite getting it to as many schools as we can. We also had a screening in July at the Library of Congress for every United States Representative, for Senators for all their staff. The day the DVDs came out we shipped 1100 copies to Washington to every member of Congress. Two to every office. To all the public policymakers who deal with the food in schools, what kids are getting fed, and I think that the great thing that these movies can really do is to start to instigate change in a way that makes people think and want to be active. [Applause]

RG: The last thing I would say, I can’t speak for the others, but for the "Un" movies and Outfoxed, you don’t need to buy more than one copy. Buy one copy and then burn a copy. Make as many as you want. Get it to your friends. [Applause]

JB: Same here.

JG: Fahrenheit’s already shown on Cuban television.

Audience Member: I was in New York this summer. I was talking with someone from Canada and he’s very much on the left, and he’s a Bush-hater. But I was discussing the scene in from Fahrenheit 9/11 when you were in Toronto and you show that people don’t actually lock their doors, but in fact he was telling me that, in fact, it’s just like New York. And I was just thinking that you can use any micro example to distort something, like if somebody was very pro-Bush they could say he just gave fifty million dollars for minorities and that would make him look like he was very pro-minorities and pro-education, but in fact, he’s not. I was wondering if we should really be looking at your films not from an academic standpoint, but more from an entertainment standpoint?

JG: You could look at it from both angles, and the fact that you and your friend had a discussion about that is exactly the point of the film.

MS: I agree.

JG: I’m from Michigan, and if you went to Detroit and you go across the river, and try and take a survey of who has more locks on their doors, the people in Michigan and Detroit and Flint have way more locks on their doors than the people in Canada. So, you know, it’s hard to argue from anecdote, but the point is whether we’re right or wrong we got people thinking, and hopefully, we got all our facts straight; we tried very hard on that.

PA: We have one more question.

Audience Member: I’m from Michigan too, and I was a reporter from the Detroit Free Press I’ve been to hundreds of meetings with the editors when they’re deciding what stories get what play where in the paper, and never once was there a time when the publisher came storming down and said you’re not going to do that story because X, Y or Z, a person or company won’t advertise any more. We’ve written tons of op-ed about industry and the screw-ups that they’ve made. And never once did higher-ups say, “You can’t write that.” So I just want to clarify that, you know, not in every instance of every media company that’s owned by Knight-Ridder that there would be such an example of censorship.

JG: Oh, I’ve written for the Detroit Free Press, too and I agree that newspapers can be a source of great, great information. But let me tell you another thing about the Free Press, they called me wanting to know, “Is it true Michael Moore drives a limo? Is it true he lives in a penthouse? Is it true…?” And I said, “Have you ever ran the story about why Detroit is the most segregated city in this nation? And we made two movies that include the issue of race, and we live in the worst city—you know, the most racially divided city in the country.” So, I think it works both ways. There is a great freedom, but part of why I’m challenging the media is, why is that interview never done with me about the movie, and yet they want to know if Michael takes a limo to the airport.

MS: Whether you’re a writer, whether you’re a filmmaker, whether you’re an author, whatever you create is subjective. From the beginning, from the minute you pick up a camera, from the minute you put your pen down, from the minute you get into the edit room, you’re making a choice about what the person who is reading it or watching it is going think or feel or see. So it’s all subjective in every way, and you know, I think that’s something people need to realize.

PA: It’s so important to have the skills to identify how people argue and how people present their point-of-view, because if you don’t you are really disempowered as a viewer, and you don’t understand the points that you’re making. The point that Morgan’s making is that there’s no way to tell anybody a story about anything without making choices about how you want to tell it. And you can make those choices yourself and know why you made them or you can follow somebody’s orders and they’ll be the one that made them, but there’s no third road. Any last comments before we let these people go on to the next event at this very exciting film festival?

RG: We need all of your support for all of our films in whatever way you choose to do it, because that allows the films to continue to get made. It means getting them, it means showing them to your friends, but I think, at least for me and from what everybody else has said, it’s not just watching the film. Hopefully, these films become engines for the kind of social change for the kind of world and the kind of country we want to live in. And we’re doing what we can do to help all of you have tools to make that change. [Applause.]

Laura: I’d like to thank Pat and everyone on the panel. It was really great. And I know you probably still have questions that you’d like to ask of our guests. What I’m going to ask is that, they need to do something backstage for about 5 minutes, then we’re going to bring them down to the street level, so that you can talk to them outside in the fresh air and the sun. So thank you very much for joining us.

Biographies of panelists:

Julia Bacha, Editor and Story Advisor of CONTROL ROOM

Julia Bacha was on her way to Tehran University, Iran, when she met director Jehane Noujaim in Egypt. After looking through a quarter of Jehane’s 200 hours of footage on the war in Iraq, Bacha decided to stay in Cairo in order to cut down the fascinating footage into a 90 minute film. She plans to resume her studies at Tehran University in 2005. Originally from Brazil, Bacha came to New York in 1998 to study Middle Eastern history and politics at Columbia University, from where she graduated magna cum laude in 2003, receiving Phi Beta Kappa honors. Alongside her academic studies, she pursued her interest in documentary photography by portraying life in the Brazilian Amazon, the Indian Himalayas and the mountains of Cuba and Jamaica. She was an assistant editor in Bruno Barretoís Casamento de Romeu e Julieta, and she served as an additional editor in Swimmers, a Sundance Lab project, and Room, executive produced by Michael Stipe and Jim McKay. She is currently editing a documentary on conjoined twins for National Geographic. In October she will be moving to Jerusalem to work on an independent film about civilian initiatives for peace in the region.

Jeff Gibbs, Producer and Composer of FAHRENHEIT 9/11

Jeff Gibbs’ film career began when his high school buddy Michael Moore invited him on a shoot for Bowling for Columbine. By night’s end Jeff had discovered two of the main characters in the film and Michael and his crew asked him to stick around. Jeff faxed in his resignation from his “real job” in the middle of the night and went on to help produce many of the famous scenes in Bowling for Columbine -- including the opening sequence. When contract problems left Michael with no original music for Bowling for Columbine he remembered Jeff’s musical background. With just 12 hours notice, Jeff went to New York City in hopes that he could come up with something meaningful. He scored the entire film in four days including thirteen original compositions, two of which are featured on his solo piano CD, “Reflections.” Jeff then directed, produced, and filmed most of the extras on Bowling’s DVD. He also served as a researcher/writer on the team that helped Michael create “Stupid White Men”, the best-selling non-fiction book of 2002, and “Dude, Where’s My Country?” the first printing of which was 1 million copies, and he also named. (See the dedication from Michael in “Dude.”) When work began on Fahrenheit 9/11 Jeff joined the staff full-time in New York City as co-producer. He was involved in every aspect of production, from plotting the story line to producing shoots. In addition he composed the highly-praised original score.

Robert Greenwald, Director and Producer of OUTFOXED

After producing and/or directing more than 50 television movies, miniseries and feature films, director Robert Greenwald expanded his creative focus in 2001 to include documentary filmmaking. Inspired by the controversy over vote-counting in Florida, he executive produced the 2002 documentary, Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (directed by Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler), which has been widely seen in film festivals, on the Sundance Channel, and on DVD. The success and political impact of that project led Greenwald to commit to two additional “Un” documenataries -- Uncovered, which he produced and directed, and the upcoming Unconstitutional, directed by Nonny de la Pena, about the erosion of American civil liberties following the events of September 11, which will be released in the fall of 2004. Greenwald recently produced and directed the documentary, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, which was released on DVD in July. Greenwald’s films have garnered 25 Emmy® nominations, four Cable ACE Award nominations, two Golden Globe nominations, the Peabody Award, the Robert Wood Johnson Award and eight Awards of Excellence from the Film Advisory Board. He was awarded the 2002 Producer of the Year Award by the American Film Institute.

Morgan Spurlock, Director of SUPER SIZE ME

A native of West Virginia, Spurlock is an award-winning writer, director and producer. He is also the founder of The Con, the New York based production company. Super Size Me is Spurlock’s first feature film. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Spurlock has conceived and created more than 60 projects during his 12 years in the industry. From commercials to music videos to television shows, Spurlock has had the privilege of working with such companies as MTV, ESPN, NBC, FOX, TNT, VH-1, Sony and MCA Records. In 1999, Spurlock’s full-length play, The Phoenix, won the Audience Favorite Award at the New York International Fringe Festival. He subsequently picked up Best Play honors at the Route 66 American Playwrighting Competition in January, 2000. The Con created the hit web show I Bet You Will in 2000, and jumped the program from the Internet to MTV in 2002, becoming the first show ever to do so. After producing 53 episodes for the network, the company took its profits and used them to fund their first feature film, the fast food documentary Super Size Me.

“We live in a world where documentary film, independent documentary film has truly become the last bastion of free speech. It really has.” –Morgan Spurlock

Biographies of Panelists

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