Sundance Documentary Panel--Working With Celebrities

                Listening to this Sundance documentary panel I learned a lot of good tid bits about making documentaries, though I feel like working with a celebrity in making a documentary would be far removed from where I am right now, there was still a lot of interesting information I gleaned. 

There was definitely an element of learning what to expect as far as the sometimes threads by which a documentary hangs, and also just some of the harder things that happen for a documentary to be made.

                Brett Morgen director of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck talked about how he had a lot of issues with the family in what was shown.  He had to sit down and watch scenes of Kurt on heroin with his mother, and she was angry after watching it.  In fact a lot of the family was angry with him because they felt like Kurt was embarrassed about his heroin usage and he wouldn’t have wanted to have been represented that way.  Morgen said he was able to convince them by talking about how Kurt would have wanted to demystify heroin usage, and remove himself from the glorification of heroin use that had come to be a part of his celebrity.

                Another thing was just so many legal issues, which I’m sure comes more with the territory of the celebrity documentary, but it was interesting to learn about fair use law.  The only way to claim fair use is if the clip is used to inform, but not at all impressionistic and so a lot of clips that a filmmaker tries to claim fair use on may not be worth the hassle of inevitable lawyers breathing down their neck and so they had to use more budget for clips that they maybe could have fought for fair use on. 

                As far as structure and usefulness, I think these panels are great and I’m glad they are available, I want to listen to more of them.  They have interesting topics, the one thing I would say is, maybe at this point in what I’m doing, they are a little to minute in scope.  Meaning they are current and I’m not quite in the place where the panels are immediately applicable.  But that being said, they are for sure useful in getting a better idea of what is going on in the documentary world, and like I was talking about above, understanding more what it is like to be a documentarian.