There may be an awful lot of lawyer jokes out there but for more and more documentary filmmakers, the legal challenges they are up against when trying to tell a story are no laughing matter. Forty years after the initial publishing of The Pentagon Papers, the full truth about Vietnam is finally being released. Daniel Ellsberg has stated that what he did back then as an investigative journalist was actually legal. Today, post-9/11 and Patriot Act, not only would it be illegal, it would be much more difficult to find any published information at all. Some information has indeed disappeared completely. And for those wonderfully stubborn souls who keep searching for the truth and trying to get it out there in front of audiences, they often find themselves, especially in the US, attacked by layer upon layer of lawsuits funded by corporations with deep pockets.
Take the case of Bananas! and the hell the Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and his producer went through when putting on the screen the stories of workers who were "allegedly" suffering from infertility due to exposure to pesticides while employed by the biggest fruit company in the world. The well-known legal story of Joe Berlinger's never-ending battles with his film about Chevron's pollution and the health affects on people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Crude, overshadowed his message at times. And some turn to fiction to avoid the lawsuits by making feature films such as Michael Clayton which refer to the wrongs of companies such as Monsanto. And the list seems to be growing longer. Documentary filmmakers have enough problems trying to find the money to get their films made, but adding to that the mountains of legal bills and the time-consuming reality of defending oneself and one's film from being sued, one imagines the corporations are hoping that the filmmakers will back down and their docs will disappear.
But they won't.
And that was obvious by the lineup at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in the UK this past week. The screenings were full of both industry folks and regular folks and the conversations in the pubs afterwards showed that documentary film attacking serious subjects is alive and well. But will many of these docs go on to have a life on television and in cinemas?
In Europe, Asia and other parts of the world independent documentaries can find a home, on a national broadcaster, but when we hear the stories of the thousands of indie docs applying for small pools of funds, the only reason they end up being made is because of the passion of the filmmakers.
People across the globe are indignant about everything from the deadly silence on Fukushima to the reality behind the BP disaster and how our health is being affected, and many recent documentary films are showing us why we should be. I argue we need these factual-based programs more than ever before and the stories they tell are more urgent and more dramatic than ever before. The subjects they deal with affect our lives, our children, our planet.
More foundations, film institutes, equity funds as well as more and less well known production companies such as Participant, are supporting "social issue" campaign-driven documentaries. But what can they do when a film they are supporting is attacked by a company which has endless cash to throw at some of the toughest law firms around?
They tell their stories anyway.
Brands are looking to documentary films as a way to help improve their corporate social responsibility image, and perhaps at times there are good "fits" between a company and the message in a doc beyond what might be considered to be "green-washing". But often this is not the case, take, for example, one doc about pollution and climate change released last year in France was supported by the same oil companies which seemed to be causing the problems being confronted in the film. The press exposed this hypocrisy and it lasted all of one week in the cinemas.
Taking this idea of brand support for a documentary to the extreme is Morgan Spurlock's Pom: The Greatest Film Ever Sold in which the filmmaker literally brands not only almost every scene in the film, he ends up branding his own body by wearing a suit covered by logos. We are bombarded by advertising more now than ever before, and the effects this is having on us and especially on our children, is disturbing. Spurlock travels to Sao Paolo in his film to show us what happens when people become fed up with swimming in Consumerstan, they simply ban advertising in all public spaces... the problem is, for much of the world, the privatization of what was once public has reached turbo speed.
How do you feel about visiting a national park and having your escape from it all experience sponsored by companies which want a piece of your down time? Would you sacrifice your integrity, or that of your family and community's common grounds to Starbucks, Wells Fargo and Coca Cola in order to keep services being cut because of the financial crisis? What about your children's school? A recent debate on the BBC over advertising in the classroom seemed quaint compared to what school districts are up against in the US. Spurlock's documentary shows one district in Florida in which administrators seem to be looking for ways to sell out to keep their schools able to offer the same things they did pre-crisis.
Have we already sold our souls to be branded? Have we started down that slippery slope, never to return to some kind of private sphere in which we remain protected from someone wanting to sell us something? Or have we all become as Roseanne Barr recently wrote in her magnificent diatribe about the media industry which is one of the most empowering pieces about the industry ever written. (Entitled "Fame's a Bitch, It's Hard to Handle Then It Drives You Nuts") in which she makes it extremely clear that there are no powerful people in television "... unless they work for an ad company or a market-study group. Those are the people who decide what gets on air and what doesn't."
And though this is not always the case in much of Europe, with its so-called bans on advertising, especially for children, and with its subsidies etc., it is a warning that if the private channels (or public channels which are acting like private channels, or yes, the monopolies owned by folks like Berlusconi or the near monopolies of Mr. Murdoch), don't watch out, there will be no truth told by documentary films, nor on the news, or very little of it and not the bits we need to know most. And we will have to either throw the television out the window and lose what could be one of the greatest most powerful forces of educational, entertaining good ever invented (though it seems the man who invented the television would not allow one in his home!).
Barr finds solace in the same words that documentary filmmakers trying to get the truth out there can find some comfort in, from Sun Tzu's Art of War, "He who cares the most, wins" -- but it does not pay the legal bills.
I agree with BBC's Nick Fraser that filmmakers should not risk their lives to make a film, and we spoke of a friend of his, the French filmmaker, Christian Poveda, who was killed when he returned to El Salvador to do a follow up on his powerful doc, Vida Loca. But perhaps that is indeed what they will find themselves doing as they work to tell the truth and penetrate the layers of corporate protection (someone please explain to me again why in the United States corporations are still given the same rights as human beings, in fact were given those rights before African Americans and women were?!). Why should filmmakers have to choose between life and truth?
If we lose the independence of the documentary voice, we have lost our freedom to know, to be informed, to look for and find knowledge which can help us as human beings, parts of communities, and as citizens of a world which needs us to know and to want to be curious about it.
Documentaries can be wonderful ways to lose ourselves in reality, not virtual reality, not reality tv, but "real" reality; they are not only enjoyable to watch, but because they are based on these facts, force us to question when we are fed lies. Good documentary filmmaking preserves our common human accomplishments and documents the natural world and ways of life (which in some cases sadly is disappearing. See a great doc about disappearing cowboys and shepherds in Montana called Sweetwater).
We don't want to find that documentary filmmaking has become extinct, or worse, that the truth is now inaccessible, privately owned by a tiny elite who can afford all those lawyers. I would hate to think that if we do not support documentary filmmakers, or worse, ignore their work, because it challenges us, that they may one day stop challenging us at all and will disappear from the party. If we, the audience, do not care, then nobody will. We need to notice. Because documentaries tell us who we are, what our world is about, and give us that Truth. Without this, you might as well throw your television out the window.
A previous version of this post referred to the festival as the "Sex, Docs and Rockn'Roll Festival." The current version reflects the festival's correct name.
Wednesday, nearly eleven years after Tim Westergen and his colleagues started Pandora, it began trading on the public markets. I posted a blog post on the news, and suddenly was overcome by emotion, tearing up a little as I thought about Westergen who has been through hell and back as the founder of this company. His story is no different from any entrepreneur who dares to try to capture lightning in a bottle – but it is one with a happy ending.
There are two ways of looking at Pandora. You could look at through the lens of a life-long skeptical reporter who cannot reconcile the valuation of the company with its business reality — and there are many who are doing exactly that. The other extreme view is to look at it from the point of view of a startup founder, one who has been through his or her own ups and downs. I will let the skeptic take the day off for today. To me, Pandora’s story is about hope.
A Savage Beast
I remember meeting the Pandora team days after my former Red Herring colleague Alex Gove, then at Walden VC, introduced me to Larry Marcus (partner at WaldenVC and an investor in Pandora) and Westergen. The company was at that time called The Savage Beast and was building a music-genome project. Being a reporter who normally focused on the nuts and bolts of the Internet, I didn’t much care for the company, but I liked Westergen.
Over the years, he and I stayed in touch. The boom turned to bust and what was an idealistic quest turned into a journey over burning coals, with constant rejections and a test of faith. He has bobbed, he has weaved, he has pivoted –- and he has survived.
After all these years, and many rounds of funding, Westergen is not making billions of dollars, as many would assume – in fact, he owns a miniscule share of the company: 2.39 percent, which is worth just over $60 million at the closing price of $2.8 billion, a fraction of the money his investors are making. Something isn’t right about that, but that is the way of the world.
Can’t Buy Me Love
I know Westergen and I don’t think he started Savage Beast/Pandora for money anyway. All these years, he has been the same guy. A pair of jeans, a simple t-shirt, plain old sneakers and a bag slung across his shoulders –- and more importantly, an easy smile and willingness to believe that things will get better, if only he could fight for one more day. He did Pandora for one reason: love.
He loved the idea of building a music genome. Eventually the company figured out what the business model would be — and the team there will figure out profits as well. Most startups come from love, not a desire to make pots of money.
These days, it is commonplace to lionize the amount of money a start-up snags from venture-capital investments or billion-dollar valuations some investors place on a company and the insanity of the public markets. Nothing annoys me more than “money” defining one’s convictions. The world unfortunately tends to focus on the destination, not the journey undertaken. And raising money or the public markets are those destinations.
I often joke with my friends that startups are like climbing sheer rock without any support, always slipping a few feet, and then gaining an inch. It is that inch you climb that brings immense joy, even if it is short-lived. The rest is just fighting to stay alive, trying to get ahead and just getting it down.
Rejection shapes us as much as the positive news. Just ask Tim! Or Reid Hoffman! Ask them about how many times venture capitalists rejected their quest for investment dollars. Just because twenty investors reject the idea of a social network for professionals doesn’t mean that it is a bad idea or it is wrong -– it is just an idea that the world doesn’t quite understand yet.
Being a real entrepreneur is a long, lonely road as Tim’s journey tells us. Creating something that is lasting — something you love — takes time. Often a very long time! But in the end, the journey is worth it.
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A former associate director in charge of the University of Kansas ticket office and "gatekeeper" for stolen tickets was sentenced Thursday to 57 months in prison for her role in the $2 million conspiracy.
Peter Risdon Says:
May 16, 2011 at 2:40 pm | Reply
The paragraph you quoted from ends with this sentence:
“According to the best-sited stations, the diurnal temperature range in the lower 48 states has no century-scale trend.”
That was a surprise given the tenor of this post: “… maybe this is the end to questions as to whether surface temperature increases actually exist.”
Did you mean that we can now say the answer to that is that surface temperature increases do not exist? Or that, pace Keenan in the WSJ, the data do not contain statistically significant trends?
andyrussell Says:
May 16, 2011 at 2:58 pm | Reply
I don’t think diurnal temperature range is very important. Do you?
What’s more, the “century-scale” bit covers some interesting detail. Before Fall et al., it seems that the only work on diurnal temperature range showed a negative trend from the mid-century to 1980s-ish. What Fall et al. found was that this has increased again since the 1980s. So there’s no “century-scale trend”.
But that tells you very little about mean surface temperature trends.
Mark Says:
May 17, 2011 at 10:45 pm
I have heard it claimed that the reduction in diurnal temperature range over the past few decades provides evidence that GHG increases are responsible for the warming. In that sense, some people think diurnal temperature range is important.
Incidentally, I don’t think Fall et al. were the first to find that DTR has increased since the 1980s. I read a paper that said much the same thing a few years ago.
Sorry for the lack of references to back up these statements. I’m a little too busy at the moment to chase them up.
andyrussell Says:
May 18, 2011 at 8:43 am
Ok, so I’m probably not giving DTR as much significance as it deserves.
My point is that I don’t really care about DTR. I don’t think I know anyone who has a particular interest in DTR. If this paper had been published by anyone else I wouldn’t have looked at it. It’s not very interesting. It’s just another paper on climate observations that fits in with the “consensus view of climate change” or however you want to put it. That’s useful, but not to me or most people.
If, however, the paper had shown what Watts has been saying it would show for quite a while now (i.e. that the postitive temperature trend in the surface station record in the US was an artefact of poor station siting) then that would have been very interesting. To me and to many other people.
But it didn’t.
Ben Says:
May 16, 2011 at 4:49 pm | Reply
So Peter… If the diurnal high and the diurnal low both rise by 1°C, you think this means there has been no warming? After-all, the diurnal range hasn’t changed! Others might draw a different conclusion.
Peter Risdon Says:
May 17, 2011 at 8:26 am | Reply
I understand diurnal range has significance, and the relationship between day and night time temperature ranges is important, especially with regard to the period 1950 to 1980 when the effect of man-made global warming, it has been argued, was masked by a cooling but revealed by the changes in the relationship between these ranges.
I further understand that this argument is based on the idea that human pollution caused this daytime cooling, that it affected the range of day time temperatures as well as the difference between night time temperatures which continued to show warming, and daytime ones that didn’t. This makes day time temperature range significant: if this is right it would be expected to show a variation that correlates with human activity.
But this isn’t my field; I’m just reading what I can in an attempt to understand as much as possible about an important issue and, for me at least, that means reading Watts and reading this blog. Just searching out stuff you’re already disposed to accept isn’t good enough. My comment was prompted by what struck me as a somewhat partial quotation and exasperation: I’m with Feynman when he said you should point out the problems with a theory, not just the things that support it.
[It's not really a "partial quotation" is it? That sentence you are interested in is stuck on the end of the abstract as a new paragraph and isn't really related to the 2 sentences I quote and which are related to the subject of this post. I'm not really interested in DTR and I doubt Watts was either. - AR]
At least Watts invites people with different views to post on his blog and has been at the forefront of attempts to cross the ideological divide, not least with Judith Curry.
Ben, of course you’re right. Andy, a century is an arbitrary scale, of course.
I’d still be interested in your take on statistical significance.
JMurphy Says:
May 17, 2011 at 12:05 pm | Reply
In what way has Watts atempted to cross “the ideological divide” ?
Ben Says:
May 17, 2011 at 3:16 pm | Reply
Peter, I encourage a critical (i.e. thoughtful) reading of Anthony’s blog but my god do you really think he’s “at the forefront of attempts to cross the ideological divide”? Anthony has done more to harden denialist thought than anyone, with the possible exception Marc Morano.
The “different views” he solicits are unthreatening fig-leaves.
andyrussell Says:
May 17, 2011 at 3:24 pm | Reply
I’ve got no problem with most of what Keenan says, although he’s not the first/only person to be saying these things. There’s a JoC paper from 2010 and it was one of the useful points to come out of the UEA email enquiries (i.e. working more with stats people). Not sure where the funding was supposed to come from for these new people though!
I suppose the bigger problem comes down to climate science covering so much stuff – you can’t just look at problems from a stats/dynamics/modelling/chemistry/radiation/whatever perspective for too long before a) not getting very far or b) needing to doing something you’ve not done before.
omnologos Says:
May 19, 2011 at 7:21 am | Reply
Am surprised nobody claimed it was irrelevant as the US only covers 2% of the globe…
andyrussell Says:
May 19, 2011 at 7:43 am | Reply
Maybe that’ll be Watts’ next move: if you can’t find anything in the US, let’s give Europe a go.
I can’t imagine there’d be much enthusiasm left for such a project, though.