Marshall Curry

I read a thoughtful interview with Marshall Curry recently, whose work I greatly admire, in which he explained how he become a filmmaker:

I really loved documentaries. I watched them and read about them obsessively, and for years I thought, “That’s what I’d really like to do.” Eventually I realized that if I wanted to make a documentary, I just needed to leap into the abyss and try.

No film school – he just picked up a camera and began a personal project that eventually became Street Fight, his first feature film. It ended up being nominated for an Oscar. The film is about the 2002 mayoral race in Newark, New Jersey, which pitted an idealistic political newcomer, Cory Booker, against a long-time incumbent, Sharpe James, famous for his use of questionable campaign tactics. (Bonus info: watch the film (you can instant-play the film on Netflix), then click here to find out what Cory Booker is doing today).

I’m looking forward to seeing Curry’s latest film, Racing Dreams, which won best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year and continues to rack up more wins as it makes its way through the festival circuit. (Side rant: I wish major festivals would offer an option to screen their selected films online when they are at festival for those of us who can’t fly to the festival to see it in person. Gigantic Digital is one ray of hope on this horizon, but their list of films is still pretty short, although you can screen some seriously great documentaries online there like The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. I’d gladly pay the festival ticket price to be able to watch this current-year major festival films online.)

To continue my own education as a documentary filmmaker, I’m taking a cue from Marshall Curry by promising myself to screen 100 documentary films in the first 100 days of 2010.

I’ll be posting brief reviews of each film that I watch here, with an eye for how they were made, and outline the techniques and approaches aspiring filmmakers can learn from each.

So, what documentary films should be on my list?

Coming soon: killer screening room

It’s my wife’s birthday on Dec. 30th. And it’s a big one: she’s turning 39 … for the second time. It was tough for me to find a birthday present to equal the weight of this event, but I found one: I’m painting the entire upstairs of our home in the colors of her choice. That’s something we’ve been putting off since we bought the place nearly 7 years ago. And after spending the last three weeks splattered in paint, I know WHY we’ve been putting it off: it’s a ridiculous amount of work. But damn, it’s looking good, and the end is finally in sight.

To complete the transformation of our upstairs, we found an amazing, huge sectional couch on Craigslist, and hired can-do Seattle contractor Bruce Blessing, whose been doing great work for us for several years, to install some killer lighting. We’ll have it all done in time for Lara’s birthday bash here on the 30th.

As it turns out, I have a secret motivation in doing all of this: to create an amazing screening room for documentary films. The more I work on my own films, the more I appreciate the great work that other filmmakers have done and are doing, and I’m tired of watching them on my laptop. We’ve got a projector that shoots an 8-foot picture, and I just upgraded our internet to 12 mps. Netflix documentary queue, here we come.

What’s a year if it’s not full of changes? 2009 held some particularly big changes for me, most significantly my largely accidental decision to make a film, Shine: The Entrepreneur’s Journey. The film grew out of an event Biznik hosted in May, which was designed to help entrepreneurs create video profiles. Trouble is, nobody was signing up to attend the event. I was brushing my teeth one morning and had the idea: why not tell people we’re making a film, and the best stories will be included? 500 people showed up. So, we actually had to make a film. I ended up falling in love with the process of research, discovery, conversation, techno-geekery and collaborative magic that is documentary filmmaking.

So in August, I handed the reigns of Biznik to our hugely capable cofounder Lara Feltin, and chose to dedicate myself to documentary filmmaking full time. It’s a bit of a scary move, as career changes tend to be, but I know it’s the right one for me. And it’s a homecoming of sorts, signaling a return to my roots as a journalist, but with the freedom to strongly express a point of view that is all my own.

I’m creating this blog to share my personal journey into the fast-changing world of documentary filmmaking. In it, I’ll share the latest tools, techniques and resources for powerful visual storytelling, and spotlight the extraordinary work of other documentary filmmakers who are dedicated to doing meaningful work. And of course, use it to promote my own work with behind-the-scenes looks at work in progress.

A good blog, like a good business, should have a concise mission statement. Here’s mine:

To promote myself and all filmmakers dedicated to producing rigorous, inventive documentary films that matter.