Yance Ford, a producer for PBS’s documentary series P.O.V., has a long consideration of Tuesday night’s Cinema Eye Honors at the P.O.V. blog. Though Ford has much praise for the project as a whole, she takes umbrage with one portion of Thom Powers’ opening remarks, and it happens to be one section of the evening that irked me, as well. Over to Yance:
I know Thom Powers to be a thoughtful, passionate programmer and a great filmmaker in his own right. But his opening remarks included a remark that I found troubling.He said that “distributors don’t get it, critics don’t get it and the general public doesn’t get it. We wanted to fill [this auditorium] with people who get it.” I’ll be the first to agree that independent documentary does not get the recognition it deserves, but I don’t think that the problem is the fact that the general public doesn’t “get it.” The problem is that the general public doesn’t get to see it.
Ford goes on to make the case that “as long as the documentary community prioritizes theatrical release and festival runs over broadcast, the public will continue to miss a large and dynamic body of work,” which could be construed as being a bit self-serving coming from the producer of a broadcast documentary program. But I think she’s right to point out that “the general public” hardly deserves blame for not supporting films that get little to no publicity, which are reviewed in only a fraction of publications. The average moviegoer would have to do a good deal of detective work to know that 80% of the films nominated for a Cinema Eye even existed. Isn’t that why the Cinema Eyes exist in the first place?
Whether intentionally or not (and I would assume probably not), Powers is basically making the same argument that Lou Lumenick made in the most hateable quote in that Hollywood Reporter story that everyone’s mad about: the New York Post critic claimed that it’s not his responsibility to review smaller films because “The only complaints we’ve gotten (on not running some reviews) are from publicists and distributors…Not a single one from readers.” In no other market sector would the consumer be blamed for not demanding a product that they didn’t know was available.
Check out this creeptastic quote from Lou Lumenick, lamenting Juno‘s failure to win the New York Film Critics Circle’s vote for Best Screenplay:
I do regret that erstwhile stripper Diablo Cody will not be joining us for the awards on January 6. She sure had my vote.
Gross, right? If the guy really thinks Juno was the best screenplay of the year, he’s entitled to that (wrong) opinion, but then what does it matter that Cody is an “erstwhile stripper”? As it stands, it reads like Cody got Lumenick’s vote not because she wrote the best screenplay, but because she’s more likely than the Coen Brothers to do something sexy at the awards ceremony (and/or, Lumenick is more likely to enjoy fantasizing about it). At best, it’s a stab at Friar’s Club-caliber comedy that does nothing to dispel the notion that these critics circles are too old, white and male for their own good.
As if it wasn’t gross enough to think that Juno’s critical success could be the product of a bunch of journalists wanting to hang out with a sometime stripper, and all the “once a sex worker, permanently a whore ie: maybe she’ll get naked during our interview” bullshit that entails, it’s almost worse to think that these dudes are, like, patting themselves on the back for spreading the urban legend about The Stripper Who Actually Had a Brain. And this is, remember, all in service of a movie that was essentially made for young girls. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of vomiting to do before the HFPA takes this line of thinking to its inevitable conclusion.
