Documentary Sayings And Quotes

Truth is stranger than fiction," as the old saying goes. When I watch a documentary, I can't help crying and then I think to myself, "Fiction can't compete with this." But when I mentioned this to a veteran manga artist friend of mine he said that "fiction brings salvation to characters in stories that would otherwise have no salvation at all." His words strengthened the conviction of my manga spirit.

Okay, 'Best Party Ever' -- to me, that's like saying 'Best Gym Ever' or 'Best Nature Documentary Ever,' like how good can it really be?

When we came and rented the North Perth home, my father had a little ice chest, and on top of the ice chest was a radio. And we were sitting at our lunch time on Sunday eating dinner after church, and my Mum says, ‘Look where we’ve ended up. We’ve got a table cloth on our table, we’ve got food on our plate, and we’re listening to music.’ That was a big thing for my mother. - Mrs Helen Doropoulos, Greece

Everybody keeps saying be satisfied with Jesus's love, and he will give us our daily bread. I keep waiting, but we never get any bread, so I have to go out and do things for myself.

You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There's been twelve TV documentaries, three movies and eight books about me. I'm more popular than any of these designed-by-pedophile pop moppets littering the music television and the gossip columns. I've killed more people than Paris Hilton has desemenated, I was famous before she was here and I'll be famous after she's gone. I am the mainstream. I am, in fact, the only true rock star of the modern age. Every newspaper in America never fails to report on my comeback tours, and I get excellent reviews.

You see the profound effect literature can have on life? Who says it's all a waste of time? If only I could produce one book that left someone with that kind of ferocious grievance. If you have read one of my books, you probably feel cheated out of however much money it might have cost you, and you'll certainly begrudge the time you wasted on it. But even at my most bullish and self-aggrandizing, I can't quite make myself believe that I've actually wrecked someone's life. Any documentary evidence to the contrary will be gratefully received.

If life is a movie most people would consider themselves the star of their own feature. Guys might imagine they're living some action adventure epic. Chicks maybe are in a rose-colored fantasy romance. And homosexuals are living la vida loca in a fabulous musical. Still others may take the indie approach and think of themselves as an anti-hero in a coming of age flick. Or a retro badass in an exploitation B movie. Or the cable man in a very steamy adult picture. Some people's lives are experimental student art films that don't make any sense. Some are screwball comedies. Others resemble a documentary, all serious and educational. A few lives achieve blockbuster status and are hailed as a tribute to the human spirit. Some gain a small following and enjoy cult status. And some never got off the ground due to insufficient funding. I don't know what my life is but I do know that I'm constantly squabbling with the director over creative control, throwing prima donna tantrums and pouting in my personal trailor when things don't go my way. Much of our lives is spent on marketing. Make-up, exercise, dieting, clothes, hair, money, charm, attitude, the strut, the pose, the Blue Steel look. We're like walking billboards advertising ourselves. A sneak peek of upcoming attractions. Meanwhile our actual production is in disarray--we're over budget, doing poorly at private test screenings and focus groups, creatively stagnant, morale low. So we're endlessly tinkering, touching up, editing, rewriting, tailoring ourselves to best suit a mass audience. There's like this studio executive in our heads telling us to cut certain things out, make it "lighter," give it a happy ending, and put some explosions in there too. Kids love explosions. And the uncompromising artist within protests: "But that's not life!" Thus the inner conflict of our movie life: To be a palatable crowd-pleaser catering to the mainstream... or something true to life no matter what they say?

War crimes, you say? No matter how many policies you put on paper, in reality, there are no rights and wrongs in war. War itself is a crime. War cannot be justified. I believe, the only people, in this world, whose opinions matter, are the ones who go the extra mile to help other people expecting nothing in return. Soldiers who fight fiercely for their country, the doctors in Sri Lanka's public hospitals attending to hundreds of patients at a time for no extra pay , the nuns who voluntarily teach English and math to children of refugee camps in the north, the monks who collect food to feed entire villages during crises, they are the people worth listening to, their opinion matters. So find me one of them who will say: they wish the war didn't end in 2009, that they wish Sri Lanka was divided into two parts. Find me one of them who agrees with the international war crime allegations against Sri Lanka, and I will listen. But I will not listen to the opinions of those who are paid to find faults in a war they were never a part of, a war they never experienced themselves. I will not listen to the opinions of those who watched the war on tv or read about it on the internet or were moved by a documentary on Al Jazeera. The war is over. The damage is done. Let Sri Lanka move on. So our children will never have to see what we've seen.

What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they 'disappeared', 'were lost'? Would it be said that they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them.

Ah,” Tesch says. “Very admirable of you. You know, it reminds me of a documentary I saw last month, a little Czech film about an outsider artist who refused to show her work during her lifetime. She lived in Praha, and—” “Oh,” Clark says, “I believe when you’re speaking English, you’re allowed to refer to it as Prague.” Tesch appears to have lost the power of speech.

There is a saying among the peoples of the Northwest Coast: “The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife,” and Robert Davidson, the man responsible for carving Masset’s first post-missionary pole, imagines this edge as a circle. “If you live on the edge of the circle,” he explained in a documentary film, “that is the present moment. What’s inside is knowledge, experience: the past. What’s outside has yet to be experienced. The knife’s edge is so fine that you can live either in the past or in the future. The real trick,” says Davidson, “is to live on the edge.

Gift cards?” Hi’s complaining brought me back to the present. “Why not just hand me a note that says: I don’t care enough to make an effort.” April 7. Hiram Stolowitski’s sixteenth birthday. “When exactly were we supposed to shop?” Shelton was scrolling Rex Gable emails on his laptop. “It’s been a hectic week, bro.” “I bought you Assassin’s Creed six weeks before your birthday,” Hi shot back. “Waited in line all afternoon. The guy behind me smelled like fish tacos, but I stuck it out.” Ben clapped Hi’s shoulder. “If it helps, I didn’t remember to get you any gift. Tory and Shelton picked that up. I signed the card though. See? Ben. Right there.” “These are the memories that scar,” Hi huffed. “I’m gonna be so complicated when I grow up. I’ll probably film documentaries.

I keep thinking about Marcus Garvey and what he says about black people knowing themselves. It's clear that if the so-called Negro goes to school, he earns a degree for knowing the white man, but not for knowing himself. All he learns about himself is slavery. Slavery is not a history of a man; it's a misfortune of a race of people. The black man needs to know the dignity of our race. The only way he will get this knowledge is to take it for himself.

It is no longer taboo to say that President Roosevelt required Pearl Harbor to drag a war-weary American public into supporting another World War. Discussion of FDRʼs foreknowledge of the Japanese attack is not only the subject of books by respected historians, but of documentaries on cable television.

I was holding on to hurricane nights and lit candles and my acoustic guitar resting in your hands. I was holding on to the sound of your voice saying my name and the peace I felt with your arms around me. I was holding on to documentaries in bed and your beautiful eyes closed as you sang Rocket Man and all the songs we never finished. I was holding on to our first text and last phone call and the plane ticket you offered but never sent. I was holding on to our first Christmas together and the last few Christmas Eves apart and I've been thinking we should be together. we should be kissing even if there isn't any mistletoe because if I have you there' no reason to celebrate and fuck, your lips were mine. They were always supposed to be mine. I was holding on to hope and banana pancakes on Sundays. I was holding on to Main Street and sunsets in Jersey. I was holding on to two streets that separated us and blizzards that couldn't keep us apart. I was holding on to you. I was holding on to us. And it was killing me.

Some say while religious fundamentalists betray reason. Moderates betray faith and reason equally." -Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion(Documentary)

Documentary evidence says where there is smoke there is fire, be it holy smoke or otherwise.

Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight -acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates “whiteness.” These folks left the film saying it was “amazing,” “marvellous,” incredibly funny,” worthy of statements like, “Didn’t you just love it?” And no, I didn’t love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The "we" evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.

The sense of modernism is often seen in the determination of each of the arts to come as close as possible to its own particular nature, its essence. For instance, lyric poetry rejected anything rhetorical, didactic, embellishing, so as to set flowing the pure fount of poetic fantasy. Painting renounced its documentary, mimetic function, whatever might be expressed by some other medium (for instance, photography). And the novel? It too refuses to exist as illustration of a historical era, as description of society, as defense of an ideology, and instead puts itself exclusively at the service of “what only the novel can say.

I also knew you wouldn't remember this trip, because you're only five years old, and our pediatrician had told us that children don't starting building memories of things until after they turn six. When I realized that, that I was ten and you were only five, I thought, fuck. But of course I didn't say so out loud. I just thought, fuck, silently, to myself. I realized that I'd remember everything and you maybe wouldn't remember anything. I needed to find a way to help you remember, even if it was only through things I documented for you, for the future. And that's how I became a documentarist and a documentarian at the same time. (p 213)

[Michael] Callen and (...) one of his last interviews, with the documentary crew that had followed him to Ohio. “I realize some people could look at my life and say ‘Oh, it was so sad. He died of AIDS and isn’t that tragic.’ But what I want to come through is that even after all the pain and all the torture, and even having AIDS, I can honestly say that being gay is the greatest gift I was ever given. I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Why you choose happiness, so you think that the sad moments like somebody dieing - it's equal to happiness? !?!?!?!??! So you think that time crimes like this in auschwitz which don't have proof so far from what they say in the reports from Mr.Death (Documentary film!)... so this is equal to (How to say it???!?!) to happiness?? WTF, crime equal to happiness, sadness also so what's left? Oh, oh I know the Joker (Note: He is a nice character isn't he?)

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto. The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out. A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.” Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag. This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done. After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber? What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here. It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness. “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?” They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

You might have saved the Dance," I say loftily, "but I saved this school from Cats." "Not all heroes wear capes," Ryan says, pushing open the classroom door. "You know, I kind of like Cats." "You like watching aviation disaster documentaries too," I say blandly, hiking up my backpack on one shoulder.

The documentary also includes Trump summarizing his thoughts years after the USFL fold: “It was a nice experience,” he says. “It was fun. We had a great lawsuit.” Tollin extended Trump a courtesy in 2009 by sending him a rough cut of the film before it aired on ESPN. Trump was not happy with what he saw. In what had long before become a pattern when he was displeased, Trump took a thick, felt-tip pen to Tollin’s letter before mailing it back: “A third rate documentary and extremely dishonest—as you know. Best wishes,” Trump wrote, adding his distinctive, jaws-like signature. “P.S.—You are a loser.” Trump underlined the last word. To

The Netflix documentary Sour Grapes is a fascinating insight into this world. A crooked, though brilliant, Indonesian wine connoisseur called Rudy Kurniawan was able to replicate great burgundies by mixing cheaper wines together, before faking the corks and the labels. He was rumbled only when he attempted to fake wines from vintages that did not exist. I am told that it is possible to detect a forged Kurniawan wine by analysing the labels, but not by tasting the wine. I hate to say this, but Rudy was an alchemist. Several experts I have talked to in the high-end wine business regard their own field as essentially a placebo market; one of them admitted that he was relatively uninterested in the products he sold and would sneak off and fetch a beer at premium tastings of burgundies costing thousands of pounds a bottle. Another described himself as ‘the eunuch in the whorehouse’ – someone who was valuable because he was immune to the charms of the product he promoted.

Did you ever notice? Darkness seems to make people speak in short sentences. “YES,” she said. “And when the lights come on, we open up and ramble and say absolutely nothing. But in bed in the dark we’re urged on by the monkey waiting in our sleep.” “What monkey?” “We become documentary. We become newsreels telling what we think is the truth. Our listener is really no more than a fragment of the dark. The true audience is darkness itself. We unwrap our lives to it, trying to appease the monkey.

A documentary about Ernest Shackleton’s early twentieth-century exposition to the South Pole shows the classified ad Shackleton put in a London newspaper:   “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” Ernest Shackleton.2 Men responded to Shackleton’s advertisement in droves. Why? Because the mission was clear. The cost and potential loss both drew the right men and made sure the wrong men didn’t sign up. God’s mission, similarly, is not for the faint of heart. Even becoming a Christian, according to Jesus, should be weighed heavily. Luke says, “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish”’ (Luke 14:28-30).

Orange Book produced after the outbreak of war by the Russian government to justify its actions during the crisis, the editors backdated by three days the Austrian order of general mobilization so as to make the Russian measure appear a mere reaction to developments elsewhere. A telegram dated 29 July from Ambassador Shebeko in Vienna stating that an order of general mobilization was ‘anticipated’ for the following day, was backdated to 28 July and reworded to say ‘The Order for General Mobilization has been signed’ – in fact, the order for Austrian general mobilization would not be issued until 31 July, to go into effect on the following day. The French Yellow Book played even more adventurously with the documentary record, by inserting a fictional communiqué from Paléologue dated 31 July stating that the Russian order had been issued ‘as a result of the general mobilization of Austria’ and of the ‘measures for mobilization taken secretly, but continuously, by Germany for the past six days . . .’ In reality, the Germans had remained, in military terms, an island of relative calm throughout the crisis.

The internal documentary record in the United States goes way back, and it says the same thing over and over again. Here’s virtually a quote: the main commitment of the United States, internationally in the Third World, must be to prevent the rise of nationalist regimes which are responsive to pressures from the masses of the population for improvement in low living standards and diversification of production; the reason is, we have to maintain a climate that is conducive to investment, and to ensure conditions which allow for adequate repatriation of profits to the West.

Oppenheimer later said that at the sight of the unearthly mushroom cloud soaring into the heavens above Point Zero, he recalled lines from the Gita. In a 1965 NBC television documentary, he remembered: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

I don’t know if the other defectors had the same problems, but for me the most difficult part of the program was learning to introduce myself in class. Almost nobody knew how to do this, so the teachers taught us that the first thing you say is your name, age, and hometown. Then you can tell people about your hobbies, your favorite recording artist or movie star, and finally you can talk about “what you want to be in the future.” When I was called on, I froze. I had no idea what a “hobby” was. When it was explained that it was something I did that made me happy, I couldn’t conceive of such a thing. My only goal was supposed to be making the regime happy. And why would anyone care about what “I” wanted to be when I grew up? There was no “I” in North Korea—only “we.” This whole exercise made me uncomfortable and upset. When the teacher saw this, she said, “If that’s too hard, then tell us your favorite color.” Again, I went blank. In North Korea, we are usually taught to memorize everything, and most of the time there is only one correct answer to each question. So when the teacher asked for my favorite color, I thought hard to come up with the “right” answer. I had never been taught to use the “critical thinking” part of my brain, the part that makes reasoned judgments about why one thing seems better than another. The teacher told me, “This isn’t so hard. I’ll go first: My favorite color is pink. Now what’s yours?” “Pink!” I said, relieved that I was finally given the right answer. In South Korea, I learned to hate the question “What do you think?” Who cared what I thought? It took me a long time to start thinking for myself and to understand why my own opinions mattered. But after five years of practicing being free, I know now that my favorite color is spring green and my hobby is reading books and watching documentaries. I’m not copying other people’s answers anymore.

Which philosophers would Alain suggest for practical living? Alain’s list overlaps nearly 100% with my own: Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. * Most-gifted or recommended books? The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Essays of Michel de Montaigne. * Favorite documentary The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years. It started with their 7th birthdays (Seven Up!) and continues up to present day, when they are in their 50s. Subjects were picked from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Alain calls these very undramatic and quietly powerful films “probably the best documentary that exists.” TF: This is also the favorite of Stephen Dubner on page 574. Stephen says, “If you are at all interested in any kind of science or sociology, or human decision-making, or nurture versus nature, it is the best thing ever.” * Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would have said, ‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’ . . . I always had this assumption that if you appreciate the moment, you’re weakening your resolve to improve your circumstances. That’s not true, but I think when you’re young, it’s sort of associated with that. . . . I had people around me who’d say things like, ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? I mean, this the limit of your ambition?’ and when life’s knocked you around a bit and when you’ve seen a few things, and time has happened and you’ve got some years under your belt, you start to think more highly of modest things like flowers and a pretty sky, or just a morning where nothing’s wrong and everyone’s been pretty nice to everyone else. . . . Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creatures. You only need to tap us or hit us in slightly the wrong place. . . . You only have to push us a little bit, and we crack very easily, whether that’s the pressure of disgrace or physical illness, financial pressure, etc. It doesn’t take very much. So, we do have to appreciate every day that goes by without a major disaster.

First there was Caine’s patently false “confession.” Then there was the fact that the FAYZ Legal Defense Fund racked up three million dollars in its first two weeks. Then there was a judicial panel that took statements from eminent scientists and concluded that the FAYZ was in fact a separate universe and thus not covered under California law. Finally, there was a shift in public opinion following the involvement of the two popular movie stars, the McDonald’s documentary starring Albert Hillsborough, the likelihood of a major Hollywood feature film, and the kiss seen round the world. Polls now showed 68 percent of Californians wanted no criminal charges brought against the FAYZ survivors. The kiss alone would have wrecked the career of any prosecutor or politician who had anything bad to say about Astrid Ellison or Sam Temple.

The popular 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma illustrates how AI’s personalization will cause you to be unconsciously manipulated by AI and motivated by profit from advertising. The Social Dilemma star Tristan Harris says: “You didn’t know that your click caused a supercomputer to be pointed at your brain. Your click activated billions of dollars of computing power that has learned much from its experience of tricking two billion human animals to click again.” And this addiction results in a vicious cycle for you, but a virtuous cycle for the big Internet companies that use this mechanism as a money-printing machine. The Social Dilemma further argues that this may narrow your viewpoints, polarize society, distort truth, and negatively affect your happiness, mood, and mental health. To put it in technical terms, the core of the issue is the simplicity of the objective function, and the danger from single-mindedly optimizing a single objective function, which can lead to harmful externalities. Today’s AI usually optimizes this singular goal—most commonly to make money (more clicks, ads, revenues). And AI has a maniacal focus on that one corporate goal, without regard for users’ well-being.

In a widely viewed documentary titled Singularity or Bust, Hugo de Garis, a renowned researcher in the field of AI and author of The Artilect War, speaks of this phenomenon. He says: In a sense, we are the problem. We’re creating artificial brains that will get smarter and smarter every year. And you can imagine, say twenty years from now, as that gap closes, millions will be asking questions like ‘Is that a good thing? Is that dangerous?’ I imagine a great debate starting to rage and, though you can’t be certain talking about the future, the scenario I see as the most probable is the worst. This time, we’re not talking about the survival of a country. This time, it’s the survival of us as a species. I see humanity splitting into two major philosophical groups, ideological groups. One group I call the cosmists, who will want to build these godlike, massively intelligent machines that will be immortal. For this group, this will be almost like a religion and that’s potentially very frightening. Now, the other group’s main motive will be fear. I call them the terrans. If you look at the Terminator movies, the essence of that movie is machines versus humans. This sounds like science fiction today but, at least for most of the techies, this idea is getting taken more and more seriously, because we’re getting closer and closer. If there’s a major war, with this kind of weaponry, it’ll be in the billions killed and that’s incredibly depressing. I’m glad I’m alive now. I’ll probably die peacefully in my bed. But I calculate that my grandkids will be caught up in this and I won’t. Thank God, I won’t see it. Each person is going to have to choose. It’s a binary decision, you build them or you don’t build them.

You remember that documentary they showed us in sixth grade? The one about Hurricane Katrina?” “Yeah.” I shrug, remembering how we’d all piled into the media center to watch it on the big, pull-down screen. I don’t recall much about the movie itself, but I’m pretty sure Brad Pitt had narrated it. “What about it?” "I had nightmares for weeks. I have no idea why it affected me the way it did.” “Seriously?” He nods. “Ever since, well…let’s just say I don’t do well in storms. Especially hurricanes.” I just stare at him in stunned silence. “You’re going to have fun with this, aren’t you?” “No, I…of course not. Jeez.” How big of a bitch does he think I am? “I’m not going to tell a soul. I promise. Okay? What happens in the storm shelter stays in the storm shelter,” I quip, trying to lighten the mood. His whole body seems to relax then, as if I’ve taken a weight off him. “Did you seriously think I was going to rag on you for this? I mean, we’ve been friends forever.” He quirks one brow. “Friends?” “Well, okay, not friends, exactly. But you know what I mean. Our moms used to put us in a crib together. Back when we were babies.” He winces. “I know.” “When we were little, things were fine. But then…well, middle school. It was just…I don’t know…awkward. And then in eighth grade, I thought maybe…” I shake my head, obviously unable to form a complete sentence. “Never mind.” “You thought what? C’mon, don’t stop now. You’re doing a good job distracting me.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. Call it a public service. Or…pretend I’m just one of the pets.” “Poor babies,” I say, glancing over at the cats. Kirk and Spock are curled up together in the back of the crate, keeping the bromance alive. Sulu is sitting alone in the corner, just staring at us. “He’s a she, you know.” “Who?” “Sulu. Considering she’s a calico, you’d think Daddy would have figured it out.

Our mathematics is a combination of invention and discoveries. The axioms of Euclidean geometry as a concept were an invention, just as the rules of chess were an invention. The axioms were also supplemented by a variety of invented concepts, such as triangles, parallelograms, ellipses, the golden ratio, and so on. The theorems of Euclidean geometry, on the other hand, were by and large discoveries; they were the paths linking the different concepts. In some cases, the proofs generated the theorems-mathematicians examined what they could prove and from that they deduced the theorems. In others, as described by Archimedes in The Method, they first found the answer to a particular question they were interested in, and then they worked out the proof. Typically, the concepts were inventions. Prime numbers as a concept were an invention, but all the theorems about prime numbers were discoveries. The mathematicians of ancient Babylon, Egypt, and China never invented the concept of prime numbers, in spite of their advanced mathematics. Could we say instead that they just did not "discover" prime numbers? Not any more than we could say that the United Kingdom did not "discover" a single, codified, documentary constitution. Just as a country can survive without a constitution, elaborate mathematics could develop without the concept of prime numbers. And it did! Do we know why the Greeks invented such concepts as the axioms and prime numbers? We cannot be sure, but we could guess that this was part of their relentless efforts to investigate the most fundamental constituents of the universe. Prime numbers were the basic building blocks of matter. Similarly, the axioms were the fountain from which all geometrical truths were supposed to flow. The dodecahedron represented the entire cosmos and the golden ratio was the concept that brought that symbol into existence.

Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?

write animal stories. This one was called Dialogues Between a Cow and a Filly; a meditation on ethics, you might say; it had been inspired by a short business trip to Brittany. Here’s a key passage from it: ‘Let us first consider the Breton cow: all year round she thinks of nothing but grazing, her glossy muzzle ascends and descends with impressive regularity, and no shudder of anguish comes to trouble the wistful gaze of her light-brown eyes. All that is as it ought to be, and even appears to indicate a profound existential oneness, a decidedly enviable identity between her being-in-the-world and her being-in-itself. Alas, in this instance the philosopher is found wanting, and his conclusions, while based on a correct and profound intuition, will be rendered invalid if he has not previously taken the trouble of gathering documentary evidence from the naturalist. In fact the Breton cow’s nature is duplicitous. At certain times of the year (precisely determined by the inexorable functioning of genetic programming) an astonishing revolution takes place in her being. Her mooing becomes more strident, prolonged, its very harmonic texture modified to the point of recalling at times, and astonishingly so, certain groans which escape the sons of men. Her movements become more rapid, more nervous, from time to time she breaks into a trot. It is not simply her muzzle, though it seems, in its glossy regularity, conceived for reflecting the abiding presence of a mineral passivity, which contracts and twitches under the painful effect of an assuredly powerful desire. ‘The key to the riddle is extremely simple, and it is that what the Breton cow desires (thus demonstrating, and she must be given credit here, her life’s one desire) is, as the breeders say in their cynical parlance, “to get stuffed”. And stuff her they do, more or less directly; the artificial insemination syringe can in effect, whatever the cost in certain emotional complications, take the place of the bull’s penis in performing this function. In both cases the cow calms down and returns to her original state of earnest meditation, except that a few months later she will give birth to an adorable little calf. Which, let it be said in passing, means profit for the breeder.’ * The breeder, of course, symbolized God. Moved by an irrational sympathy for the filly, he promised her, starting from the next chapter, the everlasting delight of numerous stallions, while the cow, guilty of the sin of pride, was to be gradually condemned to the dismal pleasures of artificial fertilization. The pathetic mooing of the ruminant would prove incapable of swaying the judgment of the Great Architect. A delegation of sheep, formed in solidarity, had no better luck. The God presented in this short story was not, one observes, a merciful God.

With the false claim that the Germans murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland during WWII, since the end of WWII, the world has been saturated with films, documentaries and books on the Holocaust. Anyone worldwide who dares to investigate the Jewish Holocaust claims, is branded an Anti-Semite and Holocaust Denier. In our democratic world, a person who is accused of a crime is deemed innocent until irrefutable evidence proves them guilty. What has happened to democracy in Germany, Poland, France and Switzerland where people accused of Holocaust Denial are not allowed to provide any evidence that would prove that they are not guilty? In the Middle Ages, people accused of being witches, were also allowed no defence and were burned at the stake. As burning at the stake and crucifiction is not allowed in today's world, the best that the Jewish leaders and holocaust promoters can achieve is incarceration where no one can hear claims backed by years of very thorough research. The Jewish success in blocking my book "The Answer Justice", their failed attempts to stop the book "Chutzpah" written by Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father were held in German concentration camps, the incarceration of revisionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf in Germany and David Irving in Austria: these are all desperate attempts to end what they call Holocaust Denial. The English historian David Irving was refused entry to Australia in 2003 at the behest of the Jewish community (representing only 0.4% of the Australian population) thus denying the right of the other 99.6% to hear what David Irving has to say. Proof of Jewish power was the blocking of the public viewing of David Irving's film. The Jewish owners of the building locked the film presentation out which resulted in the headline in the "Australian" newspaper of: " Outrage at Jewish bid to stop the film by David Irving called "The Search For Truth in History" . Sir Zelman Cowan who was Governor General of Australia and a man much reverred in the Jewish community, has stated in the Jewish Chronicle (London) that "The way to deal with people who claim the holocaust never happened, is to produce irrefutable evidence that it did happen". I agree 100% with Sir Zelman Cowan. I am quite certain that he and other Zionist Jewish (Ashkenazim) world leaders are aware that a United Nations or International forensic examination of the alleged gas chamber at No. 2 Crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, would irrefutably prove the truth to the world that xyclon B cyanide has never been used as alleged by world Jewry to kill Jews. In 1979 Professor W.D. Rubenstein stated: "If the Holocaust can be shown to be a Zionist myth, the strongest of all weapons in Israels's propaganda armory collapses. The Falsification of history by Zionist Jews in claiming the murder of six million Jews by Germany, constitutes the GREATEST ORGANISED CRIME that the world has known.

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. This also applies to us, bipedal apes. Ever since our ancestors swung from tree to tree, life in small groups has been an obsession of ours. We can’t get enough of politicians thumping their chests on television, soap opera stars who swing from tryst to tryst, and reality shows about who’s in and who’s out. It would be easy to make fun of all this primate behavior if not for the fact that our fellow simians take the pursuit of power and sex just as seriously as we do. We share more with them than power and sex, though. Fellow-feeling and empathy are equally important, but they’re rarely mentioned as part of our biological heritage. We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like. As Katharine Hepburn famously put it in The African Queen, ”Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” This opinion is still very much with us. Of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none are as bleak as those of the last three decades, and none as wrong. We hear that we have selfish genes, that human goodness is a sham, and that we act morally only to impress others. But if all that people care about is their own good, why does a day-old baby cry when it hears another baby cry? This is how empathy starts. Not very sophisticated perhaps, but we can be sure that a newborn doesn’t try to impress. We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them ”animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being ”humane”. We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves. It wasn’t until an ape saved a member of our own species that there was a public awakening to the possibility of nonhuman humaneness. This happened on August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion. That Binti’s behavior caused such surprise among humans says a lot about the way animals are depicted in the media. She really did nothing unusual, or at least nothing an ape wouldn’t do for any juvenile of her own species. While recent nature documentaries focus on ferocious beasts (or the macho men who wrestle them to the ground), I think it’s vital to convey the true breadth and depth of our connection with nature. This book explores the fascinating and frightening parallels between primate behavior and our own, with equal regard for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I remember a television program I saw once... The program was a documentary, about one of those wars. They interviewed people and showed clips from films of the time, black and white, and still photos... The interviews with people still alive then were in colour. The one I remember best was with a woman who had been the mistress of a man who had supervised one of the camps where they put the Jews, before they killed them. In ovens, my mother said... From what they said, the man had been cruel and brutal... The woman said she didn't notice much that she found unusual. She denied knowing about the ovens. ...He was not a monster, she said. People say he was a monster, but he was not one. What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit for little pieces of raw steak. How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation. A big child, she would have said to herself. Her heart would have melted, she'd have smoothed the hair back from his forehead, kissed him on the ear, and not just to get something out of him either. The instinct to soothe, to make it better. There there, she'd say, as he woke from a nightmare. Things are so hard for you. All this she would have believed, because otherwise how could she have kept on living? She was very ordinary, under that beauty. She believed in decency, she was nice to the Jewish maid, or nice enough, nicer than she needed to be. Several days after this interview with her was filmed, she killed herself. It said that, right on television. Nobody asked her whether or not she had loved him. What I remember now, most of all, is the makeup.

A filmmaker made a short documentary about this happy-go-lucky teenager on death row, called My Last Days. It showed Zach living happily, hanging out with his family, and playing music. Everybody loved Zach. When you see the footage, you can’t help but like him. As you watch him laugh and love and sing, you catch yourself forgetting: this kid is about to die. Zach’s family tells the camera how knowing he would die has helped them realize what matters in life and to find true meaning. “It’s really simple, actually,” Zach says. “Just try and make people happy.” As the 22-minute film closes, Zach looks into the camera, smiling, and says, “I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting, and didn’t really lose.” Not long after he said those words, Zach passed away. When Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley of Upworthy saw the film, they thought, This is a story that needs to be heard. Now just over a year old, Upworthy has become quite popular. In fact, it recently hit 30 million monthly visitors, making it, according to the Business Insider, the fastest-growing media company in history.* (Seven-year-old BuzzFeed was serving 50 million monthly visitors at the time.) The Zach Sobiech story illustrates how Upworthy used rapid feedback to do it: According to Upworthy’s calculations, My Last Days had the potential to reach a lot of people. But so far, few had seen it. The filmmaker had posted the documentary under the headline, “My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech.” Though descriptive, it was suboptimal packaging. In the ADD world of Facebook and Twitter, it’s no surprise that few people clicked. Upworthy reposted the video with a new title: “We Lost This Kid 80 Years Too Early. I’m Glad He Went Out with a Bang,” and shared it with a small number of its subscribers, then waited to see who clicked.

I’ll write you a note a day,” Peter says suddenly, with gusto. “That’ll drive her ass crazy.” I write down, Peter will write Lara Jean one note every day. Peter leans in. “Write down that you have to go to some parties with me. And write down no rom coms.” “Who said anything about rom coms? Not every girl wants to watch rom coms.” “I can just tell that you’re the kind of girl who does.” I’m annoyed that he has this perception of me, and even more annoyed that he’s right. I write, NO DUMB ACTION MOVIES. “Then what does that leave us with?” Peter demands. “Superhero movies, horror movies, period films, documentaries, foreign films--” Peter makes a face, grabs the pen and paper from me, and writes down, NO FOREIGN FILMS. He also writes, Lara Jean will make Peter’s picture her phone wallpaper. “And vice versa!” I say. I point my phone at him. “Smile.” Peter smiles, and ugh, it’s annoying how handsome he is. Then he reaches for his phone and I stop him. “Not right now. My hair looks sweaty and gross.” “Good point,” he says, and I want to punch him. “Can you also write down that under no circumstances can either of us tell anyone the truth?” I ask him. “The first rule of Fight Club,” Peter says knowingly. “I’ve never seen that movie.” “Of course you haven’t,” he says, and I make a face at him. Also: mental note, watch Fight Club.

In spite of the death of the big croc, I felt that our time at Cattle Creek had been superb. Even before we got back to the zoo and saw the footage, there was a hint in the air that something special had been accomplished. We were elated at saving one crocodile and bitterly disappointed at the one that had been shot. Perhaps Steve felt the failure to save the Cattle Creek croc from poachers more strongly than I did. He was normally an action man, focused on his next project. I wasn’t used to him being gloomy or fixated on mortality. But he kept asking me to promise him that I’d keep the zoo going if something happened to him. “Promise me,” he said, wanting me to say it out loud. I solemnly promised him that I would keep the zoo going. “But nothing’s going to happen,” I said lightly, “because the secret to being a great conservationist is living a long time.” On the drive back to the zoo, we had talked for a long time, a marathon conversation. We didn’t know whether our Cattle Creek documentary would make a huge difference or not. But we agreed that through our zoo and our shared life together, we would try to change the world. I told him about my days at the vet hospital in Oregon, and the times I’d sit on the floor and weep, I’d be so overwhelmed by the pain and suffering visited upon innocent animals. But that burden seemed much easier to bear now, because I had someone to share it with. Steve truly understood how I felt. And I was someone who could sympathize with the depth of his dedication to wildlife. There was a big wide world out there. We were just a small wildlife park in Australia. It was absurd to think the two of us could change the world. But our love seemed to make the impossible appear not only possible, but inevitable. I look back on the talk we had during the ride to the zoo from Cattle Creek as helping to create the basis of our marriage. No matter what problems came along, we were determined to stay together, because side by side we could face anything.

It felt fantastic to be back filming again, and it made me realize how much I missed it. The crew represented our extended family. I never once caught a feeling of annoyance or impatience at the prospect of having a six-day-old baby on set. To the contrary, the atmosphere was one of joy. I can mark precisely Bindi Irwin’s introduction to the wonderful world of wildlife documentary filming: Thursday, July 30, 1998, in the spectacular subtropics of the Queensland coast, where the brilliant white sand meets the turquoise water. This is where the sea turtles navigate the rolling surf each year to come ashore and lay their eggs. Next stop: America, baby on board. Bindi was so tiny she fit on an airplane pillow. Steve watched over her almost obsessively, fussing with her and guarding to see if anything would fall out of the overhead bins whenever they were opened. Such a protective daddy. Our first shoot in California focused on rattlesnakes and spiders. We got a cute photo of baby Bindi with a little hat on and a brown tarantula on her head. In Texas she got to meet toads and Trans-Pecos rat snakes. Steve found two stunning specimens of the nonvenomous snakes in an abandoned house. I watched as two-week-old Bindi reacted to their presence. She gazed up at the snakes and her small, shaky arms reached out toward them. I laughed with delight at her eagerness. Steve looked over at me, as if to say, See? Our own little wildlife warrior!

This was a media beat-up at its very worst. All those officials reacting to what the media labeled “The Baby Bob Incident” failed to understand the Irwin family. This is what we did--teach our children about wildlife, from a very early age. It wasn’t unnatural and it wasn’t a stunt. It was, on the contrary, an old and valued family tradition, and one that I embraced wholeheartedly. It was who we were. To have the press fasten on the practice as irresponsible made us feel that our very ability as parents was being attacked. It didn’t make any sense. This is why Steve never publicly apologized. For him to say “I’m sorry” would mean that he was sorry that Bob and Lyn raised him the way they did, and that was simply impossible. The best he could do was to sincerely apologize if he had worried anyone. The reality was that he would have been remiss as a parent if he didn’t teach his kids how to coexist with wildlife. After all, his kids didn’t just have busy roads and hot stoves to contend with. They literally had to learn how to live with crocodiles and venomous snakes in their backyard. Through it all, the plight of the Tibetan nuns was completely and totally ignored. The world media had not a word to spare about a dry well that hundreds of people depended on. For months, any time Steve encountered the press, Tibetan nuns were about the furthest thing from the reporter’s mind. The questions would always be the same: “Hey, Stevo, what about the Baby Bob Incident?” “If I could relive Friday, mate, I’d go surfing,” Steve said on a hugely publicized national television appearance in the United States. “I can’t go back to Friday, but you know what, mate? Don’t think for one second I would ever endanger my children, mate, because they’re the most important thing in my life, just like I was with my mum and dad.” Steve and I struggled to get back to a point where we felt normal again. Sponsors spoke about terminating contracts. Members of our own documentary crew sought to distance themselves from us, and our relationship with Discovery was on shaky ground. But gradually we were able to tune out the static and hear what people were saying. Not the press, but the people. We read the e-mails that had been pouring in, as well as faxes, letters, and phone messages. Real people helped to get us back on track. Their kids were growing up with them on cattle ranches and could already drive tractors, or lived on horse farms and helped handle skittish stallions. Other children were learning to be gymnasts, a sport which was physically rigorous and held out the chance of injury. The parents had sent us messages of support. “Don’t feel bad, Steve,” wrote one eleven-year-old from Sydney. “It’s not the wildlife that’s dangerous.” A mother wrote us, “I have a new little baby, and if you want to take him in on the croc show it is okay with me.” So many parents employed the same phrase: “I’d trust my kids with Steve any day.

Around the time Steve finished the eagle enclosure, we got our first blast of bad press. An Australian program ran an “expose” on the zoo, on our documentaries, and on Steve. There it was, on national television for all of Australia to see. Steve’s wildlife work wasn’t real. He was a magician, and what people saw on screen was sleight of hand. The program cut deep for Steve, who had spent his whole life cultivating relationships with wild animals and wanted to share his passion with the world. It really hurt his feelings, and I suffered to see him suffer. The incident was a lesson in the way the world worked. The fact that people actually made up stuff for the show got to me. In the end, Steve handled it better than I did. I experienced bad dreams and felt a little sick. I never minded if people said bad things about me. I knew who I was and what I stood for. But to hear someone say something bad about Steve really cut me to the core. Luckily, better days were just around the corner.

Steve knew the sharks intimately by now. “The big tiger sharks will show up at eleven o’clock,” he said. And sure enough, they did, right on the dot. We had the shark cage and the dinghy, with myself (and Igor), Steve, and Sui. I sat in the dingy and watched the enormous tigers as they circled around. They had to be more than fourteen feet long, and some of them were larger than the boat itself. I quickly figured out that because of my great belly I was very unbalanced. I had to be careful so as not to tip the boat. Sui was an old hand at all of this. She planted herself in the center of the boat and lay down, sticking to the safest spot possible. Steve enjoyed going into the cage. The sharks came up to him one by one, trying to open this strange container and get to the nice yummy food inside. “They have a childlike curiosity,” he told me, breaking to the surface before lowering himself down again. “They’re really trying to figure out how to get me!” I got to experience them on the surface, in the dinghy. Tiger sharks don’t just feed under the water. They readily take food off the surface, too, and even lift themselves partially out of the water. Huge tiger sharks, wider across than I was (which at that point was saying a lot) came up to taste the boat, taste the motor, and put their heads all the way over the back of the dinghy. I was fascinated and had to stop myself from reaching out and stroking them. Of course I didn’t dare move, because I needed to counterbalance the boat, so the sharks wouldn’t rock it over. After a day of filming, my opinion of sharks was even better. Steve was right. Bringing people into close proximity to wildlife was all you had to do. I fell in love with tiger sharks that day. As it turned out, that was the last documentary of my pregnancy. For the next few weeks I’d be restricted to working at the zoo.

When Barack Obama took office, the fossil fuel industry was not only eager to preserve its perks but also more militant in its opposition to climate change science than ever. Skocpol notes that 2007 had been a turning point in the fight. That year, Al Gore was awarded both a Nobel Peace Prize and featured in an Academy Award–winning documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth. The film featured Mann’s hockey stick graph. Gore’s acclaim and Mann’s simple chart helped raise concern about global warming to a new peak, with 41 percent of the American public saying it worried them “a great deal.

Well, I guess that;s a good move, you asking everyone 'cause I might not've come if it were just you and me." He takes his eyes off the road right when I take a look at him and he's got this big smirky smile on his face. I laugh and say, "Maybe you had better watch the road.

We are always concocting theories about how the world works and why people act in the ways they do. We invent motives for them, as if it's possible for us to know, but more often than not these explanations are like flimsy cardboard state sets we put up in front of reality because they are simpler and less distracting than what's actually there. I think I became a documentary filmmaker to try to get a truer view. It's not that film can't lie or distort or be used for dastardly purposes, it's that sometimes the camera extracts from the faces and bodies of its subjects what they do not say aloud. I was sixteen when I first saw Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity, and after that, I couldn't stop thinking about he expressiveness of people's hands when they are controlling their faces.

It is impossible to view Calamity Jane today without responding to the gay subtext; hell, it’s not even subtext—the lesbian aspects of the film are all right out there. Dressed in buckskins, with a cap on her head and a red bandana around her neck, dirt streaking her face, Calamity says to Katie, “You’re the purtiest thing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know a woman could look like that.” Hugging Katie, she invites her to move in with her to “chaperone” each other. Helping Katie out of the horse and wagon, Calam tells Katie, “We’ll batch it here as cozy as two bugs in a blanket.” And after Katie cleans the entire cabin, the finishing touch is a front-door stencil that reads “Calam and Katie.” It’s not exactly difficult to guess which woman is the butch one in this relationship; similarly, it is no accident that The Celluloid Closet, the documentary examination of Hollywood’s depiction of gay men and women on film, contains footage of Doris Day in buckskin singing “Secret Love,” the very title itself a code in 1950s America.

In this respect images are more precise and richer than literature. To say this is not to deny the expressive or imaginative quality of art, treating it as mere documentary evidence; the more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist 's experience of the visible.

I’ve never really stopped making documentaries. I’m one of those fiction film directors who never stopped being a documentarist. I try alternating between fiction and documentary because I believe we never stop learning, and let’s say that I learn an enormous amount by making documentaries. […] For me there’s no fiction without its documentary side, no film without aesthetic intent.

I say that physical beauty is something that we no longer need. Calli doesn't mean that you'll never see anyone as beautiful. When you see a smile that's genuine, you'll see beauty. When you see an act of courage or generosity, you'll see beauty. Most of all, when you look at someone you love, you'll see beauty. All calli does is keep you from being distracted by surfaces. True beauty is what you see with the eyes of love, and that's something that nothing can obscure.

As Justice Kennedy—the presumed swing vote among the justices—noted, If we concede … that a short, 30-second, 1-minute campaign ad can be regulated, you want me to write an opinion and say, “well, if it’s 90 minutes, then that’s different.” It seems to me that you can make the argument that … 90 minutes is much more powerful in support or in opposition to a candidate. Olson disagreed, however, stating that the Court had previously found that broadcast materials whose purpose was to “inform and educate,” in addition to mere persuasion, were “on the line of being permissible.” As a documentary film, Olson argued that Hillary: The Movie held greater potential than the typical 30-second campaign commercial to educate viewers. Justice Souter did not appear to be persuaded, saying, [The film is] not a musical comedy. I think we have no choice, really, but to say this is not issue advocacy; this is express advocacy saying “don’t vote for this person.” And if that is a fair characterization, the difference between 90 minutes and 1 minute, either for statutory purposes or constitutional purposes, is a distinction that I just cannot follow. Souter’s question suggested that his position was that neither the length of the film nor its general level of information was relevant to whether Citizens United could legally broadcast it. Because it was (to Souter, presumably) a totally one-sided description of why Hillary Clinton was unfit for the White House, the movie amounted to electioneering of the sort proscribed by the BCRA.

It’s like an emulsion of artistry and healing, like a, a spiritual acupuncture,” she declares. “The use of negative space really brings his screaming face energy into the visual realm,” Roland says hoarsely with a swallow.

At least Lars was curious about the appeal of jazz to black folk; for most observers, such ponderation is akin to contemplating why gorillas like bananas. The attractiveness of jazz to the nonblack is well documented in publicly funded documentaries where experts speak of jazz in the past tense. They look authoritatively into the camera and ingratiate themselves with the Man by saying things like, “White people were hearing something in jazz that says something deeply about their experience. I’m not sure that it would have been this way if we were not a country of immigrants . . . so many people felt kind of displaced . . . I think that was part of its amazing appeal, was how it spoke to feeling out of sort and out of joint and maladjusted.” What hogwash. Does my fondness for classical music make me well adjusted? Besides, people who are really fucked up don’t turn to jazz; they turn to heroin, opium, whiskey, and Vonnegut.

We don't need cameras here; we have enough trouble controlling our eyes! I waste my time looking and not seeing. If a camera helped us to see, we would be better off-but it would not be us, seeing. A camera distracts you. It makes you less of a person. Words are even worse; they make birds Ay away, and they make us dizzy with noise. Who can pay attention to the world while someone chatters? The books of the Anglos are as noisy as their planes overhead. My mother says that the books fill up our head with words, and take over our eyes, too. We end up seeing what the words told us about. We stop seeing; the noise of the words takes over. I have a cousin who is a New Hopi; he went to a BIA school, and lived with the Anglos in Albuquerque. He came back to us and said that he doesn't look at the mesa anymore. He doesn't watch the clouds, see them meeting, leaving each other, doing a dance for us. He thinks about them; he talks to himself about them. He wishes his head could be quiet, the way it used to be. Stick with the Anglos, and you have a noisy head!

Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.

I mentioned a television documentary Julie and I had watched at Gilly’s house and that Jill remarked on how his Park Street flat was filled with women’s cosmetics and perfume bottles in the bathroom. “What?” Michael exclaimed. Sometimes I thought the word was not a sign of deafness but of stalling. Jill had suggested Michael had quite a full love life before she met him. “Did she?” Michael asked mildly. “So what I want to know,” I said raising my voice, “did you get around or did you go out and get that stuff to impress her.” Julie tittered. “I don’t know where it came from,” he said in that sort of comic-evasive tone he was good at slipping into. Julie brought up Gilly’s comment on the draining board in Michael’s flat. “What’s that?” he asked. Julie suggested he had selective hearing and could even hear what others said quietly when he wanted to. “What’s that? Say it again,” he said, with a straight face.

I would like to clarify one thing about the 1970 USC game. Talk about urban legend. There have been numerous stories and documentaries about Coach going to the USC dressing room after that game and bringing Sam Cunningham back into our locker room and saying, “This is what a real football player looks like.” I was there and it didn’t happen. It wasn’t unusual for Coach Bryant to go to a visiting locker area after a game and congratulate the other team if they beat us and he did do that after the game. But he never brought anyone back to our dressing room.

And if you tell a good story, it feels is. A couple looked at this film and said it was the first time that they had ever felt that as they watched something, that they felt as if what they were watching was happening now rather than in the past. And that is the highest compliment someone could ever pay. They might say it was the greatest documentary ever, but it wouldn’t be the same thing as it felt as if it was happening now. There was a familiarity. And that is what we wanted. We wanted to remove the distance between us.

I was remarkably calm. Calm and fatigued. There would be no violence. It was like a storm coming up. The café chairs are carried inside, the awnings are rolled up, but nothing happens. The storm passes over. And, at the same time, that's too bad. After all, we would all rather see the roofs ripped from the houses, the trees uprooted and tossed through the air; documentaries about tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis have a soothing effect. Of course, it's terrible — we've all been taught to say that we think it's terrible. But a world without disasters and violence — be it the violence of nature of that of muscle and blood — would be a truly unbearable thing.

The men in her life were clean-cut, well-bred, reliable, unpretentious and good company. “Diana is an Uptown girl who has never gone in for downtown men,” observes Rory Scott. If they wore a uniform or had been cast aside by Sarah so much the better. She felt rather sorry for Sarah’s rejects and often tried, unsuccessfully, to be asked out by them. So she did washing for William van Straubenzee, one of Sarah’s old boyfriends, and ironed the shirts of Rory Scott, who had then starred in a television documentary about Trooping the Colour, and Diana regularly stayed for weekends at his parents’ farm near Petworth, West Sussex. She continued caring for his wardrobe during her royal romance, on one occasion delivering a pile of freshly laundered shirts to the back entrance of St. James’s Palace, where Rory was on duty, in order to avoid the press. James Boughey was another military man who took her out to restaurants and the theatre and Diana visited Simon Berry and Adam Russell at their rented house on the Blenheim estate when they were undergraduates at Oxford. There were lots of boyfriends but none became lovers. The sense of destiny which Diana had felt from an early age shaped, albeit unconsciously, her relationships with the opposite sex. She says: “I knew I had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead.” As Carolyn observes: “I’m not a terrible spiritual person but I do believe that she was meant to do what she is doing and she certainly believes that. She was surrounded by this golden aura which stopped men going any further, whether they would have liked to or not, it never happened. She was protected somehow by a perfect light.” It is a quality noted by her old boyfriends. Rory Scott says roguishly: “She was very sexually attractive and the relationship was not a platonic one as far as I was concerned but it remained that way. She was always a little aloof, you always felt that there was a lot you would never know about her.” In the summer of 1979 another boyfriend, Adam Russell, completed his language degree at Oxford and decided to spend a year travelling. He left unspoken the fact that he hoped the friendship between himself and Diana could be renewed and developed upon his return. When he arrived home a year later it was too late. A friend told him: “You’ve only got one rival, the Prince of Wales.

In 2002, BBC jounalists Fergal Keane and Mark Dowd made a documentary for the Panorama programme in which they asked how much Whithall had known about Gukurahundi. Sir Martin Ewans, who was high commissioner in Harare at the time, went on camera to say that his instructions from London were 'to steer clear of it' when speaking to Mugabe.

That’s what they say at the start of every small town true crime documentary.

I have drawn heavily on many terrific documentaries, particularly Disappeared (1999), The Disappeared (2013), and Ed Moloney’s film I, Dolours (2018).

(About the last quote from Camus) Camus says that the society of merchants, looking upon liberty as a “right for themselves” not a “duty toward others”, and this is the remark that I am attracted to: free will and liberty of human beings, further than being their right, is their duty. We say duty toward God…

Brain damage is never a good idea, no matter what your friends say!

He is come with Cindy. Somehow, he has convinced her he is a straight so he can punch on your head and make overpasses at me.” Roshan shivers and sticks out his tongue in feigned disgust. Wynn picks up his donut and looks it over before stealing another bite. “It’s punch down, babe. He’s saying he’s going to punch down on me. Implying that his corporeal existence is above mine. Which would be funny if it didn’t feel true.” Wynn sinks his teeth into the donut, sighing heavily, and Roshan tries to smile encouragingly from his thrift store a seaboard away.

No, I mean, she got robbed.” He says, falling into his propensity to rant, and thus begins his thesis of How Tiana from A Disney Movie Got Robbed, “That prince Naveen is just worthless, P. Here is this inspired go-getter of a girl who was trying so hard to achieve on her own. She was no nonsense, no drama. Just a fucking hero. She gets. Naveen.

Before an artist can make good art, they must go out and experience life. Before a writer can write, they need something to write about. It’s not enough to know facts. You must know feelings – fear and forgiveness and hate and salvation and everything in between. Some things you can’t learn in books or podcasts or documentaries. You have to walk through the fire and burn away your bias and illusions. Say yes to the adventure of life. Find out what you’re capable of. Get lost. Go dancing. Look the devil in the eye. Fall in love. Get your heart broken. Move to a place you’ve never been before. Feel happiness so deep it makes you cry. Learn to laugh at your sorrow. And once you have traveled and learned and loved and lost, go back home and make your art. You will know what to say, and it will be true.

I did not say I liked politics. I hate them. I scorn them. I do not call upon you to like them or even respect them. I am simply telling you: DON'T IGNORE THEM.

What’s fascinating is that most guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment remained hesitant to apply ‘tough’ tactics at all, even under mounting pressure. Two-thirds refused to take part in the sadistic games. One-third treated the prisoners with kindness, to Zimbardo and his team’s frustration. One of the guards resigned the Sunday before the experiment started, saying he couldn’t go along with the instructions. Most of the subjects stuck it out because Zimbardo paid well. They earned $15 a day–equivalent to about $100 now–but didn’t get the money until afterwards. Guards and prisoners alike feared that if they didn’t play along in Zimbardo’s dramatic production, they wouldn’t get paid. But money was not enough incentive for one prisoner, who got so fed up after the first day that he wanted to quit. This was prisoner number 8612, twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, who broke down on day two (‘I mean, Jesus Christ […] I just can’t take it anymore!’21). His breakdown would feature in all the documentaries and become the most famous recording from the whole Stanford Prison Experiment. A journalist looked him up in the summer of 2017.22 Korpi told him the breakdown had been faked–play-acted from start to finish. Not that he’d ever made a secret of this. In fact, he told several people after the experiment ended: Zimbardo, for example, who ignored him, and a documentary filmmaker, who edited it out of his movie.

In the documentary Bowling for Columbine, heavy metal musician Marilyn Manson was asked what he would say to the kids and to the people in the community where the school shooting took place, an act some said was inspired by his music. “I wouldn’t say a single word to them. I would listen to what they have to say,” he said. “And that’s what no one did.

As I’ve said throughout this book, networked products tend to start from humble beginnings—rather than big splashy launches—and YouTube was no different. Jawed’s first video is a good example. Steve described the earliest days of content and how it grew: In the earliest days, there was very little content to organize. Getting to the first 1,000 videos was the hardest part of YouTube’s life, and we were just focused on that. Organizing the videos was an afterthought—we just had a list of recent videos that had been uploaded, and you could just browse through those. We had the idea that everyone who uploaded a video would share it with, say, 10 people, and then 5 of them would actually view it, and then at least one would upload another video. After we built some key features—video embedding and real-time transcoding—it started to work.75 In other words, the early days was just about solving the Cold Start Problem, not designing the fancy recommendations algorithms that YouTube is now known for. And even once there were more videos, the attempt at discoverability focused on relatively basic curation—just showing popular videos in different categories and countries. Steve described this to me: Once we got a lot more videos, we had to redesign YouTube to make it easier to discover the best videos. At first, we had a page on YouTube to see just the top 100 videos overall, sorted by day, week, or month. Eventually it was broken out by country. The homepage was the only place where YouTube as a company would have control of things, since we would choose the 10 videos. These were often documentaries, or semi-professionally produced content so that people—particularly advertisers—who came to the YouTube front page would think we had great content. Eventually it made sense to create a categorization system for videos, but in the early years everything was grouped in with each other. Even while the numbers of videos was rapidly growing, so too were all the other forms of content on the site. YouTube wasn’t just the videos, it was also the comments left by viewers: Early in we saw that there were 100x more viewers than creators. Every social product at that time had comments, so we added them to YouTube, which was a way for the viewers to participate, too. It seems naive now, but we were just thinking about raw growth at that time—the raw number of videos, the raw number of comments—so we didn’t think much about the quality. We weren’t thinking about fake news or anything like that. The thought was, just get as many comments as possible out there, and the more controversial the better! Keep in mind that the vast majority of videos had zero comments, so getting feedback for our creators usually made the experience better for them. Of course now we know that once you get to a certain level of engagement, you need a different solution over time.

It’s not, at least as I have internalized it, about perfectionism at all costs (something Roone wasn’t especially concerned about). Instead, it’s about creating an environment in which you refuse to accept mediocrity. You instinctively push back against the urge to say There’s not enough time, or I don’t have the energy, or This requires a difficult conversation I don’t want to have, or any of the many other ways we can convince ourselves that “good enough” is good enough. Decades after I stopped working for Roone, I watched a documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about a master sushi chef from Tokyo named Jiro Ono, whose restaurant has three Michelin stars and is one of the most sought-after reservations in the world. In the film, he’s in his late eighties and still trying to perfect his art. He is described by some as being the living embodiment of the Japanese word shokunin, which is “the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good.

Don't look for the state of the art most expensive cameras. You should be capable today with fairly simple equipment of high caliber. You can edit on your own laptop, and you can make a film yourself for, let's say, even a feature film under $10,000. Learn from the documentary film school. Really didn't have any equipment or any money.

So Disney merely has to stoop down to pick up reality as it is. 'Built-in spectacle', as Guy Debord would say. But we are no longer in the society of the spectacle, which has itself become a spectacular concept. It is no longer the contagion of spectacle which alters reality, it is the contagion of the virtual which obliterates the spectacle. With its diverting, distancing effects, Disneyland still represented spectacle and folklore, but with Disneyworld and its tentacular extension, we are dealing with a generalized metastasis, with a cloning of the world and of our mental universe, not in the imaginary register, but in the viral and the virtual. We are becoming not alienated, passive spectators, but interactive extras, the meek, freeze-dried extras in this immense reality show. This is no longer the spectacular logic of alienation, but a spectral logic of disembodiment; not a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion, transubstantiation of each of our cells. An undertaking of radical deterrence of the world, then, but from the inside this time, not from outside, as we saw in what is now the almost nostalgic world of capitalist reality. In virtual reality the extra is no longer either an actor or a spectator; he is off-stage, he is a transparent operator. And Disney wins on yet another level. Not content with obliterating the real by turning it into a 3-D, but depthless, virtual image, it obliterates time by synchronizing all periods, all cultures in the same tracking shot, by setting them alongside each other in the same scenario. In this way, it inaugurates real time — time as a single point, one-dimensional time, a thing which is also without depth: neither present, past nor future, but the immediate synchrony of all places and all times in the same timeless virtuality. The lapsing or collapsing of time: this is the real fourth dimension . The dimension of the virtual, of real time, the dimension which, far from superadding itself to the three dimensions of real space, obliterates them all. So it has been suggested that in a century or a millennium, the old 'swords and sandals' epics will be seen as actual Roman films, dating from the Roman period, as true documentaries on Antiquity; that the Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, a pastiche of a villa from Pompeii, will be confused anachronistically with a villa from the third century B.C. (as will the works inside: Rembrandt and Fra Angelico will all be jumbled together in the same flattening of time); and that the commemoration of the French Revolution at Los Angeles in 1989 will be confused retrospectively with the real event. Disney achieves the de facto realization of this timeless Utopia by producing all events, past or future, on simultaneous screens, remorselessly mixing all the sequences as they would — or will — appear to a civilization other than our own. But this is already our civilization. It is already increasingly difficult for us to imagine the real, to imagine History, the depth of time, three-dimensional space - just as difficult as it once was, starting out from the real world, to imagine the virtual one or the fourth dimension.

The band could not have known that the Alvin brothers were already well aware of Los Lobos, and had been for more than five years, for they had seen the band’s TV debut on La Cultura in 1975. “The first time we had ever heard of them,” says Dave Alvin, “Phil and I were at home, and we watched a thing on the local PBS station, channel 28. It was a half-hour documentary on this band from East L.A. that played traditional acoustic Mexican music from all of the various states.” Phil Alvin adds that the Lobos’ example in fact had an impact on the genre-defying way in which the Blasters conceived of their own music: “I remember watching it and really being just impressed, particularly about the way they talked about Mexican music and the variety of it. When we went down to Rockin’ Ronnie’s and he kept pressuring us to say we played rockabilly and stuff like that, I remember thinking of those guys when I [told him]

Thus it was probably inevitable that Los Lobos would approach the members of the Blasters and attempt to get their music to the more established band. Memories of their first meeting have dimmed over time: both the Alvins recall it taking place backstage after a show they played at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, while the Lobos remember it as happening at a date somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, possibly at the Country Club in Reseda. Rosas says, “At the end of the show, Dave and Louie were walking out to the car in the parking lot, and Phil Alvin was walking right there next to them. Their cars weren’t that far from each other. Everybody looked at each other. And I guess Dave and Louie said, ‘Hey, man, we’re fans. You guys were great tonight.’ Then Phil does a double take. He says, ‘Hey, where do I know you guys from? . . . Did you guys do a documentary or something?’ You know how Phil is—he’s a walking library. So Dave and Louie go, ‘Yeah, we did do a documentary, way back, some years ago.’ That’s how the connection got made, right there.

In the 1980s, Australia had a few home-grown immunisation sceptics, although the great majority of parents immunised their children. In 1996, a film-maker made a supposedly scientific documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She interviewed people who were both pro- and anti-immunisation in equal numbers, ‘for balance’. She was pregnant with her first child, and concluded the documentary by saying that she had not yet decided whether or not to get her baby immunised. I was one of the doctors interviewed. When the documentary was shown in Australia it generated considerable debate and controversy. Two weeks later I was in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and gave a presentation to the hospital about immunisation. A number of the audience told me they recognised me from the documentary, which had been shown that week on PNG television. They were puzzled as to why anyone would make such a film. Their wards were filled with children with severe tuberculosis, newborns dying from tetanus, and babies with severe rotavirus gastroenteritis, all preventable by immunisation. On their streets were people crippled forever by poliomyelitis. But Papua New Guinea did not have the money or the public health infrastructure to deliver vaccines effectively to its population. Papua New Guineans knew vaccines could prevent the devastating diseases they saw every day, and could not understand why anyone in Australia would dream of not immunising their child. Immunisation scepticism is very much a first-world problem.

Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance; their accomplishments are always magnified if they're pretty and diminished if they're not. Even worse, some girls get the message that they can get through life relying on just their looks, and then they never develop their minds. I wanted to keep Tamera away from that sort of influence. Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even when you work at it, you're working at being passive. I wanted Tamera to value herself in terms of what she could do, both with her mind and with her body, not in terms of how decorative she was. I didn't want her to be passive, and I'm pleased to say that she hasn't turned out that way.

As many Americans watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War in 1990 as watched the Super Bowl that year. And all Burns did—not to minimize it, because it’s such a feat—is take 130-year-old existing information and weave it into a (very) good story. Burns once described perhaps the most important part of his storytelling process—the music that accompanies images in his documentaries: I went into old hymnals and old song books and I had someone plunk them out on the piano. And whenever something hit me I’d go, “That one!” And then we’d go into a studio with a session musician and probably do thirty different recordings. Burns says that when writing a documentary script he will literally extend a sentence so that it lines up with a certain beat in the background music; he will cut a sentence to do the same. “Music is God,” he says. “It’s not just the icing on the cake. It’s the fudge, baked right in there.

Hey, TG,” Reid says, holding up a piece of toast. “You watch that new documentary on Dahmer?” “Dude, you know the rule,” Kirby says. “No talking about cannibalism while we eat.

President Obama: We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like. Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. So that’s not who we are. That’s not what America is about. Again, I’m sympathetic that Sony, as a private company, was worried about liabilities and this and that and the other. I wish they had spoken to me first. I would have told them, “Do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”…I think it says something interesting about North Korea that they decided to have the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie….I love Seth and I love James, but the notion that that was a threat to them, I think gives you some sense of the kind of regime we’re talking about here.

1. His back is full of knives. Notes are brittle around the blades. 2. He sleeps face down every night in a chalk outline of himself. 3. He has difficulties with metal detectors. 4. At birthday parties, someone might politely ask, may I borrow one of those knives to slice this chocolate cake? 5. He likes to stand with his back to walls. At restaurants, he likes the corner tables. 6. There is a detective who calls to ask him about the brittle notes. Also: a biographer, a woman who'd like to film a documentary, a curator of a museum, his mother. I can't read them, he says. They're on my back. 7. It would be a mistake for anyone to assume he wants the knives removed. 8. Most of the brittle notes are illegible. One of them, even, is written in French. 9. Every Halloween, he goes as a victim of a brutal stabbing. Once he tried going as a whale, but it was a hassle explaining away the knives. 10. He always wears the same bloody suit. 11. When he walks, he sounds like a tree still full of dead leaves holding on. 12. It is ok for children to count on his knives, but not to climb on them. 13. He saw his own shadow in a park. He moved his body to make the knives reach other people's shadows. He did it all evening. In the shadows, his knives looked like soft outstretched arms. 14. His back is running out of space. 15. On a trip to Paris, he fell in love and ended up staying for a few years. He got a job performing on the street with the country's best mimes. 16. The knives are what hold him together. It is the notes that are slowly killing him. 17. He is difficult to hold when he cries. 18. He will be very old when he dies and the Doctor will say, he was obviously stabbed, brutally and repeatedly. I'm sorry, the Doctor will say to a person in the room, but he's not going to make it.

Where is the Ark today? I believe it is in a warehouse in Washington, or so says the ending of a famous Indiana Jones documentary!

* Favorite documentary Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series inspired Adam to become a scientist, which is true for many of the top-tier scientists I’ve met and interviewed. [TF: Neil deGrasse Tyson has a revised version of Cosmos that is also spectacular.] “It was a really powerful, friendly way of being introduced to the complexities and wonders that were gripping to me as a kid. I watched it with my dad. It was great bonding for us. The way [Sagan] delivered it was just captivating, and it was really what sealed the deal for me that I wanted to be a scientist.” * Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would say to have no fear. I mean, you’ve got one chance here to do amazing things, and being afraid of being wrong or making a mistake or fumbling is just not how you do something of impact. You just have to be fearless.” As context, Adam said the following earlier in our conversation: “I want to do fundamental breakthroughs, if possible. If you have that mindset, if that’s how you challenge yourself, that that’s what you want to do with your life, with your small amount of time that you have here to make a difference, then the only way to do it is to do the type of research that other people would think of as risky or even foolhardy. That’s just part of the game.

I think that documentary means "real", that you have to meet these real people, and let them express what they feel about the subject. The more I met them, the more I could see I had nothing to make as a statement. They make the statement; they explain the subject better than anybody. So it's not like having an idea about a subject and "let's illustrate it." It's meeting real people and discovering with them what they express about the subject, building the subject through real people. So it is a documentary, but the shape that I gave to it - including the original score and the editing - is really for me a narrative film. Not that documentary is "not good" and narrative film is "good." But I really work as a filmmaker, I would say, to give a specific shape to that subject.

In Hollywood films and television documentaries, the battle lines are clearly drawn. Traditional public schools are bad; their supporters are apologists for the unions. Those who advocate for charter schools, virtual schooling, and “school choice” are reformers; their supporters insist they are championing the rights of minorities. They say they are leaders of the civil rights movement of our day. It is a compelling narrative, one that gives us easy villains and ready-made solutions. It appeals to values Americans have traditionally cherished—choice, freedom, optimism, and a latent distrust of government. There is only one problem with this narrative. It is wrong.

I read his rather prosaic-sounding name for the first time in that moment, but some years ago I vowed to stop using it. This is no symbolic abstinence on my part- his name has been said enough and ours forgotten, yada yada. I mean, sure, fine, that can be part of it, but who I want you to remember, every time I say The Defendant, not him but the twenty-two-year-old court reporter dressed for success in a pussy-bow blouse. She was the one who recorded him in the official transcripts not by his government name, like the licensed attorney on the case, but by the two most honest letter combinations her sensitive ear and flying fingers could produce: The Defendant. What people forget, or rather what the media decided muddied the narrative, is that although The Defendant would go on to represent himself at is murder trial, he was never a lawyer. Any Joe off the stree can fly pro se, litigate their own case, without graduating from law school or passing the bar. But it made for a more salable story if he was portrayed as someone who did not have to kill to get his kicks, who had prospects in his romantic life and his career. To this day, I revere that scrubbed-face court reporter, younger than me by only a year, because she is one of the sacred few who did her job without so much as a sliver of an agenda. The truth of what happened lies in those transcripts, where he is The Defendant and he is full of bullshit. On the Wanted poster I held in my hands that ding afternoon in Tina’s rental car, The Defendant peered back at me with black vacant eyes. They are scary eyes, don’t get me wrong, but what frightens me, what infuriates me, is that there isn’t anything exceptionally clever going on behind them. A series of national ineptitudes and a parsimonious attitude toward crimes against women created a kind of secret tunnel through which a college dropout with severe emotional disturbances moved with impunity for the better part of the seventies. Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts, and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that. The story is not that.

What would a director of a society-changing, award-winning documentary say.” Paige pasted on a brilliant, phony smile. “Fuck off.