Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Kurt Cobain About a Son  (2007)

On Sunday at True/False, filmmaker/blogger AJ Schnack screened the first thirty minutes of Convention, his verite-style film documenting the 2008 Democratic National Convention with an eye on the Denver locals (politicians, city administrators, journalists, protesters) who were in the mix. Shot by Schnack in collaboration with nearly a dozen documentarians (including the Oscar-nominated directors Laura Poitras and Julia Reichert, and Daniel Junge, who directed the Oscar-shortlisted They Killed Sister Dorothy), the film’s making-of process was almost as much of a serendipity-dependent feat of execution as the event captured on screen.

As his, uh, primary inspiration, Schnack cites Robert Drew’s Primary, a Direct Cinema landmark documenting the Wisconsin primary race between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The first American nonfiction picture filmed with sync sound, its IMDb profile reads today as a who’s-who of 60s documentary film: Drew as audio recordist, Albert Maysles and Ricky Leacock behind the camera and D.A. Pennebaker in the editing room. Time will tell if Convention’s slate of collaborators seems as starry 50 years on, but in the present it stands out as a film built out of and on top of connections made on the film festival circuit. If, in the context of the incestuous world of indie film, that hardly seems all that noteworthy, it is relevant that the production seems to have harnessed the scrappy, obsessive energy of that rather insular community and put it to the service of documenting an event that could potentially have meaning to a much larger segment of the population. After the screening, Schnack acknowledged that his choice to document the Democratic convention rather than the Republican one had a lot to do with access. “Had the Republicans been in Denver and the Democrats had been in Minneapolis, we would have still been in Denver, because I don’t really have friends in Minneapolis.” One of those friends in Denver is Britta Erickson, executive director of the Denver Film Festival (where Schnack’s last feature, Kurt Cobain: About a Son, won the jury prize) and Convention’s producer. Erickson greased the wheels to help the filmmakers gain access to local institutions like the Denver Post. In some sense, Erickson noted at Sunday’s event, the film’s rocky, cash-strapped and lightning-fast pre-production schedule (shooter Nathan Truesdale said he made the two hour drive from his home in Columbia to the St. Louis airport without knowing for sure if there’d be a ticket to Denver waiting there for him) actually led to a serendipitous accident of timing: she was tasked with opening doors for the production in July, shortly after the Convention’s fund raising committee hit their projected dollar goal. “In July, there was a lot of elation in town,” Erickson said. “So I didn’t have to do a whole lot of persuasion.”

Once the assorted filmmakers got into town, it was necessary that they jump straight into the pre-vetted fire without much guidance. Says Truesdell, who is editing the film with Schnack, “Once people landed, we basically just gave them a camera and a phone number, and they chased after [a subject] we had already talked to.” Schnack says, “The reason I wanted to have filmmakers, as opposed to just shooters, do this is because I knew they’d have to make decisions.” He employed a three-part process for choosing collaborators. “First, it was people I had been around and liked and thought it would fun to work with. Second, it was people who had shot their own films. I wanted people who were both directors as well as cinematographers. Third, it was who was available and wanted to jump on the plane.”

Early indications suggest the unconventional production process was, well, productive. “This is something I would like to do on a regular basis,” Schnack says, stressing the value of the trust and comradere he shared with the collaborating filmmakers. “We are lucky as filmmakers that we get to go to film festivals and drink and enjoy each other’s films and hang out, but the chance to work together is exceedingly rare. And omnibus films, you tend to go off on your own path. On this…on the final day at Invesco, Nate has the camera, I can’t get out on the field, I yell at him to shoot his heart out and he gets the most amazing shots of Obama on stage that I’ve ever seen. That’s why I wanted to make this film, to have that experience.”

There was one aspect of the experience that the film festival veterans weren’t prepared for. “Going to film festivals, you get these very secure badges,” Schnack pointed out. The badge that allowed admittance into the super-secure perimeter around the Convention “doesn’t have your name on it, doesn’t have your picture. It’s the most insecure thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Convention is still in post-production; the team plans to premiere on the festival circuit later this year.