NP Michael Moore

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Sunday, July 11, 2004
How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary
By ROBERT S. BOYNTON
 
The offices of Robert Greenwald Productions occupy a
slightly rundown, horseshoe-shaped building in Los
Angeles, just down the street from Culver Studios, the
legendary movie facility where ''Gone With the Wind''
and ''Citizen Kane'' were filmed. Back in the day, the
R.G.P. building, then a motel, was used by studio
executives for liaisons with starlets and mistresses.
Though no longer a Hollywood love nest, it still has a
whiff of the illicit about it -- and still operates in
the shadow of several corporate studios. 

Robert Greenwald, a 58-year-old film producer and
director with a number of commercially respectable
B-list movies under his belt, has always tried to
imbue his work with a left-leaning political
sensibility. R.G.P. has been involved in the making of
some 50 movies, including ''Steal This Movie,'' a 2000
film based on the life of the radical activist (and
Greenwald's friend) Abbie Hoffman, and ''Crooked E,''
a satirical TV movie about Enron's collapse that CBS
broadcast last year. Greenwald is presumably the only
director in Hollywood to adorn his workspace with a
quotation from Walt Whitman's ''Leaves of Grass'':
''The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves
and horrify despots.'' 

One morning in late May, I visited Greenwald at his
studio to watch the making of his latest documentary,
''Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism,''
which will have its premiere this Tuesday at the New
School University in New York. Over the past couple of
years, Greenwald has developed a ''guerrilla'' method
of documentary filmmaking, creating timely political
films on short schedules and small budgets and then
promoting and selling them on DVD through partnerships
with grass-roots political organizations like
MoveOn.org. The process, in addition to being swift,
allows him to avoid the problems of risk-averse
studios and finicky distributors. His 2003 film
''Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War,'' a
documentary that was critical of the Bush
administration's drive to war, took only four and a
half months from conception to completion, coming out
on DVD last November as public doubts about the war
began to grow. 

''Outfoxed'' has been made in secret. The film is an
obsessively researched expose of the ways in which Fox
News, as Greenwald sees it, distorts its coverage to
serve the conservative political agenda of its owner,
the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. It features
interviews with former Fox employees, leaked policy
memos written by Fox executives and extensive footage
from Fox News, which Greenwald is using without the
network's permission. The result is an unwavering
argument against Fox News that combines the leftist
partisan vigor of a Michael Moore film with the sober
tone and delivery of a PBS special. A large portion of
the film's $300,000 budget came in the form of
contributions in the range of $80,000 from both MoveOn
and the Center for American Progress, the liberal
policy organization founded by John Podesta, the
former chief of staff for Bill Clinton; Greenwald, who
is not looking to earn any money from the project,
provided the rest. 

A week after its New School premiere, the film will be
shown throughout the country in hundreds of small
local screenings, arranged by MoveOn, where people
will be able to watch and discuss it. Though the
existence of ''Outfoxed'' has been quietly publicized,
its particular nature and content have been closely
guarded for fear, Greenwald says, that Fox would try
to stop the film's release by filing a
copyright-infringement lawsuit. Nobody has ever made a
critical documentary about a media company that uses
as much footage without permission as Greenwald has,
and the legal precedents governing the ''fair use'' of
such material, while theoretically strong, are not
well established in case law. He has retained the
services of several intellectual-property lawyers and
experts to help him navigate the ambiguous legal
terrain. (A Fox News representative, in response to
several phone calls, said that no one in the legal
department was available to comment on copyright
issues.) 

If Greenwald is lucky, Fox will be gun-shy, having
earned nothing but public chiding when it brought a
trademark lawsuit last year against Al Franken, whose
book ''Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair
and Balanced Look at the Right'' ironically
appropriated Fox News's signature phrase ''fair and
balanced.'' (The judge dismissed the suit as ''wholly
without merit.'') But if Fox does sue, the fate of
Greenwald's film is uncertain. Dennis Reiff, an
insurance broker who has helped underwrite legally
sensitive documentaries like Michael Moore's
''Fahrenheit 9/11'' and Morgan Spurlock's ''Super Size
Me,'' says that typically ''even the mere threat of a
lawsuit can stop a documentary in its tracks.''
Greenwald is optimistic but guarded. ''I want to make
a great film,'' he says. ''But I'd like to do so
without losing my house and spending the rest of my
life in court.'' 

[...]
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/magazine/11FOX.html?th

--- Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote:
> 
> Good question, Tim -- but as I can choose which news
> channel I want to listen to, Fox, CNN, BBC or Sky ...

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