Taxi Drives from Discovery Side to HBO

The good news is that Discovery Channel has worked out a deal with HBO who will air, Anchorage International Film Festival (AIFF) feature documentary runner up, but Academy Award winning, Taxi to the Dark Side in September.

So my grim fear that Discovery Channel's link (through its Military Channel) to the Defense Department's America Supports You program that I discussed several days ago meant that their intent was to block it from being shown on television was wrong.

And in defense of AIFF judges, they chose a movie that had its own historical and Northern interest - The Prize of the Pole - about Robert Peary's grandson's quest to learn more about the Greenlanders that Perry took back to New York with him. Anchorage was an appropriate place for that movie to win an award as the movie examined how a Euro-American adventurer used Native peoples for his own glory with no apparent concern for the people whose lives he essentially destroyed. The legacy of similar ventures still plagues many Alaska Natives today.

Democracy v. Capitalism - Discovery Channel Takes Taxi to Dark Side

Anchorage folks had the opportunity to see this year's Academy Award winning feature documentary , Taxi to the Dark Side, before it was released to theaters. The Anchorage International Film Festival showed it here in December.

It was my choice for best documentary, but an arctic themed movie won that title here.

But while Taxi beat out Sicko for the Oscar Sunday night, it turns out director Alex Gibney has sold the broadcast rights to the Discovery Channel because they told him, “Look, we love this film. We’re going to give it a broad and very prominent airing.”

Now they are putting it on the shelf because it is "too controversial." Below is an excerpt from a Democracy Now interview (where you can get the whole interview) earlier this month:

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, it turns out that the Discovery Channel isn’t so interested in discovery. I mean, I heard that—I was told a little bit before my Academy Award nomination that they had no intention of airing the film, that new management had come in and they were about to go through a public offering, so it was probably too controversial for that. They didn’t want to cause any waves. It turns out, Discovery turns out to be the see-no-evil/hear-no-evil channel.

AMY GOODMAN: They bought the rights, though.

ALEX GIBNEY: They did.

AMY GOODMAN: So they own it.

ALEX GIBNEY: They own the rights for the next three years. They own the broadcast rights. It’s currently playing in theaters, where people can see it, but we had hoped that it would have a broad airing on television. And indeed, you know, one of the reasons I went with Discovery was because they had told me, “Look, we love this film. We’re going to give it a broad and very prominent airing.”

AMY GOODMAN: But if they still own the rights, can they just not air it for three years and keep you from airing it anywhere else?

ALEX GIBNEY: Yes, they can. That’s their right, because they paid for it. Now, we’re hoping that they’ll agree to sell it to somebody else, you know, maybe for a profit, if they need to do that. But I’m hoping at the very least that they’ll allow somebody else to take it on so it can be shown to the American people.

While this appears to be a strictly business decision -

"that new management had come in and they were about to go through a public offering, so it was probably too controversial for that. They didn’t want to cause any waves"

- there's a real possibility that Taxi never had a chance to get on the Discovery Channel, because Discovery also owns the Military Channel which joined with the Department of Defense program "America Supports You." From a news release dated October 10, 2007:

America Supports You recognizes and facilitates citizens’ support for our military men, women and families, and communicates that support to members of our Armed Forces at home and abroad. The Military Channel and America Supports You first worked together in support of the 2006 Freedom Walk in Washington, D.C. to mark the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 and honor veterans, past and present.

“We are so pleased that the Military Channel has joined the America Supports You team,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Allison Barber, architect of the America Supports You program. “With their capacity to reach large audiences on an ongoing basis, the Military Channel will help broaden national awareness about America Supports You and connect many more people to the ways they can support and serve the troops and their families.”

The Military Channel brings viewers compelling, real-world stories of heroism, military strategy, technological breakthroughs and turning points in history. The network takes viewers “behind the lines” to hear the personal stories of servicemen and women and offers in-depth explorations of military technology, battlefield strategy, aviation and history. As the only cable network devoted to military subjects, it also provides unique access to this world, allowing viewers to experience and understand a world full of human drama, courage, innovation and long-held traditions of the military. Visit the Military Channel online at www.military.discovery.com.

While I thought that Taxi did a good job of taking "viewers “behind the lines” to hear the personal stories of servicemen and women," somehow, I don't think Taxi to the Dark Side tells the story that the Defense Department wants large audiences to see.


The idea of wealthy people and organizations buying silence for ideas they don't like, or buying accolades as Exxon did with the Anchorage Concert Association last Saturday, is contrary to the free and open debate of ideas that our Constitution was intended to promote. In Confessions of an Economic Hitman we also heard about how the author was paid very well NOT to write a book about what he knew.

Thanks to Battlefield of a Peaceful Warrior for the link to this story. Peaceful Warrior also provides a link to the Discovery Channel to urge them to air the movie. (Beware, you have to fill out a lot of information first and it is really designed to get questions about their current shows. Trying to find other ways to contact Discovery proved difficult. The corporate website is impenetrable - its a very slick, but real-information-free site. You can read about the various corporate officers (26 listed, five women, none in program related positions). But there is no contact information at all. No business information.)

However, the America Supports You news release does give us phone numbers and email addresses for two Discovery Channel employees.

Contact:
Jill Bondurant
Discovery Communications, Inc.
(240) 662-2927
Jill_Bondurant@discovery.com or
Kate Hawken
(240) 662-2947
Kate_Hawken@discovery.com

The idea of buying a film or book of current political relevance and then locking it away so no one can see it (not quite the situation here since it is in theaters now) is clearly in conflict with the idea of free speech. One could say that Gibney didn't have to sell, or should have had a clause in the sale that gave him back the film if it didn't get airplay. But Gibney is a film maker, not a business man or an attorney. People who have great skill in one field, usually don't have the time or aptitude to develop skills in other areas. But given his film topics, he is politically savvy, but still got taken in here.

What would you do if you were offered $1 million for rights to your important political work? (I have no idea what Discover paid, the million is purely hypothetical.) Would you just take the money? Or would you stick by your principles?

I recall when a friend got hired by Alyeska Pipeline. They paid him way more money than he'd ever made before. But there was an expectation that they were buying his loyalty and silence too. How many people get that kind of job, then get subtly pressured into moving to a better neighborhood and living a spendier lifestyle? To the point where they are now just getting by, even at that much higher income?

That's when you become ethically susceptible - where the loss of your job jeopardizes your mortgage, your health insurance, your kids' college education, or even just the glitzier life style and the new 'friends' that come with it. If you buy into that, then they can get you to do things that compromise your basic values, compromise what you deep down know is right, to protect your new life style. If you've been coopted cleverly enough, you might actually believe it all.

Blogging Notes - What I learn from Sitemeter Data

A few observations about visitors to the site from Sitemeter.

• All hits from Thailand list Bangkok as the location. I know that people from Chiang Mai have been here, so I suspect everything gets routed through Bangkok.
• "Victor Lebow" and "famous people born 1908" (and variations thereof) continue to be Google search words that bring in a fair percentage of hits.
• Someone at Naussau Insurance Company got here googling "how often do pirates take over cruise ships" Hmmm, was that just idle curiousity or is something happening?
• "Taxi to the Dark Side" got a bump from winning the Oscar for best documentary
• "Maytag A207" gets a couple of hits a week, suggesting there are others trying to keep their old washing machines alive

[Later, and this one hurts: From Istanbul, Turkey "writing rejection letter to a person in need of charity"]

AIFF - Their Picks for Best Films, My Criteria

From the AIFF official blog:
Best Feature
The Clown and the Fuhrer

Best Short
Its a tie for first: Anonymous and Demain la Veille
Runner up: Dear Lemon Lima

Best Documentary
The Prize of the Pole

Best Short Documentary
Labeled


We were pretty close. My picks were

Clown and Führer
Anonymous
Taxi to the Dark Side (It wasn't clear, except for the shorts, which films were and weren't actually in competition for awards. If Taxi wasn't in competition, then the Prize or maybe Autism the Musical would have been my pick)
Labeled
I Have Seen the Future was my pick for animated, but that seems to have been rolled into shorts.


[December 28 - I just saw "A summer in the cage" and it would challenge the Prize of the Pole for the documentary award. It turns out that Taxi to the Dark Side was in the competition. I don't see how Prize beat it, and I think Summer in the Cage was a strong contender. Taxi wins on current political currency, but I think Cage was - cinematically a more interesting movie. Also, there were two other winners -

• Joseph Henry - Best Super Short

• La Flor Mas Grande Del Mundo - Best Animation

I haven't seen Joseph Henry, but I have since seen the La Flor. I still prefer I Have Seen the Future just for its technical innovativeness, though Flor does have more appealing content.
Based on Summer in the Cage I've added a new AIFF post.]

So what were my criteria? There are several factors.

• Technical Quality A continuum from.. shaky...no problems..very good..innovative. Some might have a combination of more than one of these which makes it harder to judge. Clearly Anonymous and I Have Seen the Future impressed me with their innovative technical styles.
  

• Content - There's a vague continuum from:
• Negative/disrespectful ...Boring...good story....originality...currency...impact
• I gave my only really negative review to The Dalai Lama's Cat because I thought it was a very negative and disrespectful portrayal. That doesn't mean a film can't be critical - I gave Taxi to the Dark Side lots of credit for being critical of the Defense Department's use of torture. But they provided lots of evidence. The Cat filmmakers began with what appears to be a bogus story about a cat, knew apparently little or nothing about the Dalai Lama or the Tibetan people, and then used Tibet, its people, and its holy shrines as the props for their ethnocentric humor. They used the Dalai Lama's name to sell their picture. It was simply rude and disrespectful to get a laugh and sell their movie. This is not about being politically correct. If you drop a kid on his head for laughs (which they did in the movie) that's not acceptable in my value system. Most depressing was how many people did laugh.
• Content is probably the most variable issue, since what interests me may not interest you. I thought Prize of the Pole and Taxi to the Dark Side both covered important social/political issues well, but that Taxi's was focused on a more current issue and had potentially more impact.
• Friends thought No Place Like Home was awful. I thought it had some editing problems, but there were a lot of things in there that I enjoyed.

• Use of Medium. Movies combine sight and sound and movement. The best movies are those that take advantage of the medium and tell their stories in ways that you couldn't tell it orally, in a book, etc.

• Whole Package. Even with weaknesses here and there, a film could pull it off by doing some things so well that the problems don't really matter. Autism the Musical seemed to use pretty basic video technology, but the story it told and how it told that story made it an excellent film. Just like parts of a face, individually, might be a little off, all together the face can be beautiful. So the same is true for the movie.

Anyway, those are the things, roughly, that go into my assessment of a good movie.

Blogging the AIFF

Blogging the film festival is totally different from blogging the trials. There are way too many movies for me to see them all. The venues are scattered around town - probably about five miles at the greatest distance (Out North to Bear Tooth) - which is ok with a car, but the schedule makes it a little tight if you want to go to another venue.

But what should one blog? Movie reviews? Sometimes I don't have that much to say, or it takes time to sort through. I thought showing preview like bits of the films, but it's hard to get the good parts and I have limited space on my camera's memory card. Show the people milling around and talking? In a lot of cases that wasn't happening that much, it was very dark, or I got into the conversation and forgot. I've tried to get people to talk about the films they saw, and that worked ok for some. You just have to get people who are comfortable talking to the camera.

So tonight is the Martini Matinee. This is for all events pass holders and $10 for others. You can see the list of shorts at the link. Maybe there will be lots of minglers and people willing to give their impressions of the festival and the films they've seen. I'll use a lower resolution so I'll have more space. I'm also restrained by a 5pm conference call I have. So I'll miss the 5:30 showing of Fat Stupid Rabbitwhich looks better than the title suggests. That leaves Taxi to the Dark Side, at 6pm, which I saw and which everyone should see, and Greetings from the Shore at 6:30 whose title sounds better than the description and would have me late for the Matinee. (I thought matinees were in the afternoon.) Depending on how long the call takes, maybe I'll just go late to the Rabbit and if it's good, try to see the beginning at the Vault - the film headquarters where all pass holders can watch all the films on their dvd players. Well you could if they were open more during the week.

But considering this is put together mainly by volunteers working off their love for movies, I'm not complaining. Just observing. So thanks for making all this happen here in the far north.

AIFF: A Taxi to the Dark Side

[March 2, 2008: Taxi didn't win the best doc at the Anchorage International Film Festival, but it did win the Academy Award. Gibney sold the broadcast rights to the Discovery Channel, but they decided not to show it. But they did sell it to HBO which plans to show it in September.]

I began this about 2pm Sunday but I didn’t have wifi access.

I still need to post on last night’s showing of Joe Strummer. I’m at OutNorth now where the power went out during a showing of Taxi to the Dark Side. We’d seen about 85 minutes of it so we had enough to be pretty incensed (about the content of the movie, not the power outage.)

"Taxi" discusses an Afghan villager who manages to save enough to buy a taxi. He hasn't had the taxi long when he disappears. It turns out he was arrested and imprisoned at American run Baghran prison. A reporter manages to find his family and is shown the documentation they were given with the body. Cause of death, marked by the American doctor, was "homicide."


The power has just come back on so Autism the Musical should be starting.



Many films (there were a bunch in the animation show) later:

The movie interviews guards who were at Baghran at the time of the death as well as senior military officials, journalists, and military attorneys. I try to be objective and even handed. I said to myself, “Well they could be taking things out of context, they could be slanting this” and they could. But they have interviewed enough people intimately involved in the Baghran and Abu Ghraib prisons and senior military personnel - people who would normally be thought of as pro-Bush Republicans - and what they say is consistent with other disturbing things I’m hearing.

The movie was disturbing in many ways, but I was totally sucked into it. Those who continue to deny that the Cheney administration has authorized - unofficially if not officially - torture have to be basing their beliefs on various ideological and/or emotional bases, not logic or reason. In any case, every American voter should see this movie. If it has serious holes, then go at it. But see the evidence that's out there and make your own conclusions.

The video includes the response to the film of audience member JM. I managed to get him in a shaft of sunlight in the powerless Out North.