John Pierson Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When movies start to matter beyond entertainment value, box office receipts and popcorn sales, is that a sign that the end of the world is nigh? We've been writing a lot lately about Michael Moore and the impact of his latest film, SICKO, Leonardo DiCaprio, who's been relentlessly promoting his environmental film, The 11th Hour. Last year, Al Gore generated a big splash (and cries of "Gore in 2008!") with his end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it slide show turned Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, which I first wrote about at Sundance in 2006, when Gore shocked me by showing up for the Q&A with a passion I'd never seen in the man before. Amy Berg's wrenching Deliver Us from Evil, which played last year at Toronto, brought the issue of the alleged cover-up of decades of sexual abuse committed by priest Oliver O'Grady by the Catholic Church to the forefront. Suddenly, it seems, documentary filmmaking isn't just about informing -- it's about affecting real social change.

Yeah, I know, this is light years old in internet time, but a couple days ago over on indieWIRE, John Pierson -- who, many moons ago, sold Michael Moore's groundbreaking documentary Roger & Me to Warner Brothers for the then-startling sum of $3 million or so -- published an open letter to Moore smacking him around for the controversy surrounding another doc, Manufacturing Dissent, directed by Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk --an unauthorized film about Moore and the making of Roger & Me.

Pierson, who teaches a class on producing a film at UT Austin (and who helmed exec-produced* a 2005 doc about himself called Reel Paradise, about the year he and his family spent living in a remote village in Fiji, where they operated a movie theater for the locals), takes Moore to task in his indieWIRE screed, telling the controversial director how angry and disappointed his producing students were when Pierson screened a working version of Manufacturing Dissent for them. They weren't upset with the quality of that film (which Jette Kernion reviewed for Cinematical during SXSW) -- rather, they were angry to learn from the film about some discrepancies in the way Moore presents the events that unfolded during the filming of Roger & Me -- which is, at UT Austin and many other film schools, a mainstay of the curriculum -- and what may or may not have actually happened.

• The thriller Cavite (above photo) plays at Dobie all week as part of the AFS@Dobie collaboration. John Pierson will attend tonight and Saturday night's screenings to discuss the distribution process; his producing class at UT helped secure distribution for Cavite. One student, Brian Clark, details the experience in this week's Austin Chronicle.
• Tickets are going fast for Saturday night's screenings of A Scanner Darkly at Alamo South Lamar with composer Graham Reynolds in attendance, performing excerpts from the soundtrack before the film. The early show is sold out (we splurged and bought tickets online in advance).
• The Paramount is focusing on musicals and comedies this week. You can see Guys and Dolls or a Mel Brooks double-feature of Young Frankenstein and 1968's The Producers on Saturday and Sunday. A Preston Sturges double on Monday and Wednesday features Hail, the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. And next Thursday and Friday, you can enjoy two Ernst Lubitsch films, The Shop Around the Corner and Ninotchka.