At the Kansas City Star’s TV Barn blog, Aaron Barnhart examines MSNBC’s strategy of devoting as much as a third of their schedule to “documentary” programming. Barnhart takes issue with the channel’s use of the word “documentary” to encompass content as disparate as, on one hand, Witness to Jonestown (an original production of the newish MSNBC Films combining new interviews with ample footage from NBC’s archives) and Dear Zachary (which MSNBC Films acquired in partnership with Oscilloscope straight from the festival circuit); and on the other, the schlocky stuff that makes up the bulk of their “Doc Blocks,” like the Lockup series of Dateline-style exposes set inside various North American prisons, and the COPS knock-off Caught on Camera.
Amazingly, when Barnhart went to Michael Rubin, who programs all of this stuff for the network, and asked, “What’s the deal?” Rubin basically went on the defensive. Not only did he call Lockup specifically “a jewel,” but he insisted that MSNBC’s viewers make no distinctions between high-brow and low-blow non-fiction content. As he puts it:
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The most talked about film at Slamdance this year was Kurt Kuenne’s Dear Zachary, a devastating account of the filmmakers’ admiration and grief for his murdered friend Andrew Bagby, who was almost certainly murdered by his girlfriend Dr. Shirley Turner, who later fled to Newfoundland before she could be brought to trial and remains in custody of their child, born months after Andrew was slain. In a Sunday Los Angeles Times article Kuenne, formerly a Filmmaker Magazine “25 New Face in Independent Film” and currently doing the festival rounds with his short Slow, expressed his hopes that the film, which opens in New York this Friday, can influence Canadians (who recently elected a new parliament) to change their extradition laws in hopes of catching Turner.
We caught up with Kuenne to discuss more trivial matters: his great affection for Wall-E, feeling over analysis as a guide to filmmaking and finding inspiration in children’s books.
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Universal Studios is building a ride in its theme parks in Singapore and Los Angeles, based on Michael Bay’s Transformers. The attraction is expected to “use 3-D HD footage with special effects, robotics and track to place humans in the middle of a war between the friendly Autobots and evil Decepticons, who can turn into cars, trucks, planes and other vehicles.” Yay, war!- Meanwhile, Universal the studio is planning to sell genre division Rogue Pictures to Relativity Media for $150 million. Rogue has been moderately successful producing low-budget hits like The Strangers, to which a sequel is in development; Relativity will get the development slate as well as the library, although Univeral will agree to distribute all Rogue films through 2013.
MSNBC Films, the documentary unit announced by NBC/Universal’s news channel in June, has firmed up plans for their first two releases. The festival circuit acquisition Dear Zachary will premiere at Tribeca Cinemas on October 29 before rolling out to at least four markets, and in-house production Witness to Jonestown will premiere on the channel November 9. Being that two NBC employees died covering the events at Jonestown, this may be the closest thing to a personal project that a cable network could make.
