Around the Block: Doug Block's Doc Blog

From Jerusalem To San Francisco To BritDoc… What Time Zone Is This Anyway?!?

So much travelling lately my head is spinning, but got a particularly nice greeting upon landing in London this morning: a huge, two-page cover story spread on 51 Birch Street in the London Times, which announces the film is "rapidly becoming a phenomenon," among many other fine things.

I knew the article was coming, since the Times flew the journalist out to New York to see me, then down to Florida to interview my dad. I mean, you don’t do that for a capsule review. But the timing is particularly perfect in that I’ve come to England for the new festival, BritDoc, which starts tomorrow, and where I’m looking to raise money for two new docs I’m producing.

My first stop is the offices of Channel Four, where I show Program Exec Alexandra Finlay the 16-minute sample of The Danny Williams Story. It’s an amazing film about director Esther Robinson’s uncle Danny, who was Andy Warhol’s lover when he disappeared off the face of the earth in 1966. In searching for what happened to Danny, Esther unearthed 20 short films he shot in and around the Factory that are absolutely breathtaking, and seemingly hold the key to the mystery surrounding his life. Alex loves everything about the sample, but she does acquisitions and we don’t even quite yet have a rough cut. This is about planting the seeds, really.

On the way out, I stop by to see Tessa Payne in the Biz Affairs "office," which is actually a desk two down from Alex’s (the layout of Ch 4 is one of those endless open spaces, kind of like Jack Lemmon’s in The Apartment). I sign two copies of a contract and it’s official, 51 Birch has been licensed to More4 for the next 5 years.

On the bus ride out to BritDoc on the Oxford campus, I catch up on recent news in the Times, but the situation in the middle-East is beyond depressing. While coming into London from Heathrow, I’d noticed this charming graffiti on a passing wall: JEWS ARE EVIL MURDERERS AND NEED TO BE EXTERMINATED! Israel’s blitzkrieg of Lebanon is clearly going to have widespread repercussions for Jews everywhere.

Wherever I go, heat waves follow. San Francisco, where I spent 3 fabulous days at the SF Jewish Film Festival, was supposed to be in the high 60’s, but crept up almost into the 90’s (with no air conditioning at the 1400 seat Castro Theatre). Now England has followed suit - the dorm room I’m staying in at BritDoc is stifling and the forecast is for even higher temps tomorrow.

Lori will be joining me in the morning and, in addition to screening 51 Birch Street and my pushing individually for Danny Williams, we’ll be pitching a new doc we’ve just come on board for as Exec Producers, called American Harmony. It’s something that came to our attention recently and grabbed us both as simply a fun, quirky, vastly entertaining film. It follows a number of top Barbershop quartets over the course of the year through to the recent international finals, which took place while I was in Jerusalem. In other words, it’s a contest doc, and one that, almost unbelievably, came to an unprecedented, nail-biting conclusion.

Contest docs, hmm… Hoop Dreams, Spellbound, Mad Hot Ballroom, Wordplay… yep, they’ve done pretty well for themselves as a genre. So we’d like to think this is a no-brainer.  But when you've been Around the Block a bit, you learn life in the doc world is never that simple or easy.

5 Highlights From The Jerusalem Film Festival

1.  Holy crap, war is breaking out here, but you'd barely know it.  The festival locale is stunning, the weather is gorgeous, and the Israelis, if not exactly blasé, are calm and reassuring in a "been there, done that" sort of way.

2.  Introduce myself to an attractive blond in her mid-40's at a filmmaker lunch, recognize her familiar husky voice before recognizing her face, and realize it's Debra Winger, who's on one of the juries.  Discover she's still not enthusiastic about acting in movies anymore (or talking about it).  She's much more intent on quietly raising her 3 kids and running a non-profit relief organization.

3.  Spend much of a day following my nose through the streets of Old Jerusalem, wander into the Muslim Quarter and sample the Arabic coffee at a cafe while watching a totally exotic and unfamiliar civilization stream by.

4.  A party location for the ages - the Tower of David in the old city.  Afterwards, in the wee wee hours, walk back to the hotel with distributor Richard Lorber, a veteran of a zillion film parties, who calls it the most impressive he's ever seen.

5. A lowlight not a highlight, but memorable, for sure... Just as the second showing of 51 Birch Street is coming to the most important and emotional moment of the film, the audio track starts popping in and out every few seconds and the video begins to stutter.  After the most agonizing two minutes I've ever experienced at one of my own screenings, the audience shouts for the film to be rewound.  It is, and plays perfectly the second time.  I joke about it at the Q&A after, and it doesn't seem to interfere with the immediate reaction to the film, but Yours Truly is something of a wreck.  And this is the same PAL DigiBeta tape that needs to be shipped right away to BritDoc for our screening in just two weeks.  Yikes!

From Martha's Vineyard to Jerusalem

From being grilled by the legendary Mike Wallace to watching the World Cup final on a Jerusalem wall with hundreds of rabid fans (and seeing a legend fall), it's been a pretty surreal week.

51 Birch Street was the opening film of the Martha's Vineyard Summer Film Series run by Thomas Bena, who oversees the MV Film Festival in March, and the place was packed to the rafters.  It's held in the Chilmark Community Center, a large, decidedly un-air conditioned old room holding maybe 200 folding chairs.  I'd love to say it was the film, but as more than one person pointed out, there was nothing much else to do on the island.

After the screening, I brought up my mother's close friend Natasha, who lives on Cape Cod, my sister Ellen, who came down from Boston, and Marjorie, who came with the director.  The Sixty Minutes star hadn't seen the film before, so I was curious what his reaction would be.  He had some great questions, I just didn't expect them to be delivered one after the other, rapid-fire, without giving me the time to answer any.

"Why did you make this film?  Whatever possessed you to pick up the camera and start shoooting?  Where did you get this genius for getting people to be so honest on camera?  Did you know at the time you were making something that would play all over the world?  Where will you go from here?"

Mike Wallace is a charming, gracious guy, and I sure hope I look nearly as good when I'm in my 80's.  And far be it from me to tell him how to conduct an interview, so I just kind of laughed and did my best.  All I'll say is, he had me at "genius."

My favorite moment is when someone in the audience asked whether my relationship with my daughter had changed as a result of making the film. So, just like the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall, I mentioned my daughter Lucy happens to be in the audience, too, and had her come up and join us to answer the question.  God bless her little heart, she gave a very poised (and savvy) "Yes, I think I appreciate my parents better" answer, and the sentiment seemed to carry over during a visit to Brown on the way back to NY, the first of many college visits to come this year. 

Less than 24 hours later, I was in the air heading off to Israel.  Actually managed to get in about 4 hours of sleep, too, so I wasn't deranged by jetlag on arrival as I usually am.  Even took in two films: my first Hou Hsiao-Hsien film, Three Times, and Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist.  Polanski is being given a career tribute here, so he bounded on stage before the film played and not-so-jokingly called attention to the festival's disorganization.  Given that they refused to give me an advance itinerary of any sort, other than the name of my hotel, and that the ride I was promised from the airport failed to show up, I could kind of relate. 

But, hey, it's Jerusalem!, and the Mt. Zion Hotel is gorgeous, just up the road from the Cinematheque, and both have a stunning view of the old city, which I can't wait to visit tomorrow. 

After the Polanski film, I joined the mob watching the World Cup on the Cinematheque wall and enjoyed chatting with another impressive Israeli sight sitting next to me, a local actress/writer/director/singer/lecturer named Tamar Agnon, who, it turns out, is the grand-daughter of a well-known Israeli Nobel Prize winner, Shmuel Josef Agnon.

As the game went on into overtime, I had to pee terribly, but I just knew the minute I got up the winning goal would be scored.  After Zidane barely missed his header, I couldn't stand it any more, and of course the second I reached the bathroom I heard a roar go up outside.  I rushed out, fully expecting the game to be over, only to learn Zidane had been kicked out for head-butting an opponent.

Had he scored the game-winner, he would have retired as one of football's enduring legends.  Minutes later, he goes out in shame before over a billion viewers, and his team goes on to lose in a shootout. 

The hoariest sports cliche in the world is that it's a game of inches.  But I certainly can't remember a time when I've ever seen it proven more dramatically.