Woody Allen

So I just watched the Woody Allen Documentary and man is it a good one. I think that my taste in movies comes from my dad. He's the one that started me on a healthy diet of Woody Allen and Mel Brooks when I was young. I think this documentary is proof making something worth watching sometimes is as simple as having a great subject.

Happy 4th!

I'm not the type to way flags just for the sake of waving flags. I have a natural aversion to store bought patriotism, but there are things that I believe should always be heralded. One of those things is the sacrifice young men and women chose to make to keep the rest of us safe. Thank you for your protection, so that the rest of us might enjoy our freedom.

John Ford The Documentarian

Most people know at least one John Ford movie.  Even if you don't know that you know a John Ford movie you do. He's the director of classic westerns like The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Stagecoach, and other classics like The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and my dad's favorite The Quiet Man. During World War II though, John Ford helped the United States Navy complete a series of short documentaries about the war.  Perhaps the most famous one is "The Battle of Midway", which I've included below. Watch it. Its very good. The New York Times said: "For 18 tingling and harshly realistic minutes the spectator is plunged into the front line amid the thunder of exploding bombs, the angry whine of fighter planes locked in combat and the relentless bark of anti-aircraft guns  aboard surface vessels."

Research

So there was a problem when I decided to make this movie.  I had never thought about how to make a documentary before. Most of my work was music videos.  I knew how to make rappers from Tampa and Atlanta look cool, but I had no idea what was the history and ideology of making documentaries.  Luckily, I have UCF's Lisa Mills as a faculty advisor. She's an award winning filmmaker and big thinker on the subject of what is documentary filmmaking? This is a link to her latest movie...
https://vimeo.com/27645118
She pointed me in the direction of some research that over the next weeks and months I read...and read...and read...until I felt like a had a pretty good handle on things.   Other people must have felt that way too, because they asked me to teach a class on the history of documentary film production. Forgive me if some of the things I post in the future are alittle to film theory and not enough specifically related to the movie.  Please comment, or send me an email, if you'd like to know why I posted something or if the connection isn't clear, I'll be happy to explain further,  and honestly it does me the huge favor of helping me see when I need to crystalize my information.

In the beginning...

I don't know how many of you are interested in this, but its part of the movie so I thought I would include it.  When I got into grad school I was hell bent on proving that I could make a micro-budget comicbook movie based on a comic that I was working on with a friend. A great many people said that it was crazy, so I decided to move on to another idea.  I took about two weeks just thinking and trying to come up with something else. Nothing seemed as interesting to me as investigating the idea of what heros are, and why we treat them the way we do, which a comicbook movie is the perfect vehicle to use to explore that question. My mom pushed me pretty hard to come to the dinner that they were having for the ship that my dad was on when he was in the Navy, the USS Randolph.  So I asked my friend and cinematographer Brian Macaione to go with me for the day to St. Augustine and see what there was to see.  That day we recorded about 6 hours of footage.  I was deeply moved by the stories that were shared with us, and I was completely engrossed by what I heard. Sometime on the long ride back, I realized that this movie about the men of the USS Randolph could be what I had always intended the comicbook movie to be. These were actual heros.  People that had won the war in the pacific and been a breathing part of history. To me that is who they are, but to themselves and to each other, they are a much more humble thing. And that lack of hubris, is what I believe makes their story so interesting.

Another Sad Statistic:

With in the next 6 years we expect to lose 90% of our Vietnam War era veterans.*

*this statistic comes from the same study conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2008.

Sad statistic:

Within the next five years we are expected to lose 98% of our surviving World War II veterans.*

According to a study conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2008