davis guggenheim Tagged Articles at Cinematical

From global warming to toasting a presidential candidate? Davis Guggenheim, who won an Academy Award for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, is reportedly working on a film about Senator Barack Obama that will be shown during the Democratic National Convention in late August, according to The Huffington Post.

Guggenheim was seen accompanying Obama during his visit to Butte, Montana, on Friday afternoon. Guggenheim said only that he was traveling with his son and doing some interviews, though a tipster told a reporter the film shoot was on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and the convention. An Obama staff member later told the New York Post that "elements of what [Guggenheim] is shooting may be used," but declined to be more specific.

The Huff Post article says that Davis Guggenheim's father, Charles Guggenheim, chronicled John F. Kennedy, though IMDb shows that Charles Guggenheim won an Academy Award for Robert Kennedy: Remembered, a live action short subject that was compiled from footage that Guggenheim had shot over the years.

An Inconvenient Truth didn't move me as it did many others, but it would be interesting to see if Guggenheim could make something that would liven up the convention broadcast. No word on whether Senator John McCain has recruited any Academy Award-winning documentary filmmakers, though Variety described him as "a major movie freak" back in January 2007; he picked John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate as his favorite political film.

If this summer movie season shows us anything, it's that Hollywood has gone sequel-crazy. These greedy studio executives keep demanding more explosions, more superheroes, more Power Point presentations about global warming! Wait...what was that last one? Yes folks, An Inconvenient Truth Part 2 is on the way. It doesn't mention whether former presidential candidate (and, many would argue, rightful winner) Al Gore will be involved again, but I would imagine he'd have to be. According to the Truth's director, Davis Guggenheim, "I'm meeting with Paramount next week to talk about a sequel to Inconvenient Truth. Too early to talk about details." Considering the extremely low-key nature of the original, it was churned out in a mere five months, and that quick turnaround could mean we'll see the sequel in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Guggenheim had been largely a television director before An Inconvenient Truth hit it big. He was behind the camera for episodes of great shows like Deadwood and The Shield. He branches out again for his new movie Gracie, which opens on June 1st. It's a scripted film, stars Dermot Mulroney and Elizabeth Shue, and is about a teenage girl who fights to give women the opportunity to play competitive soccer. Don't know if it will be as powerful a soccer film as the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Ladybugs, but we shall see. Truth won the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award earlier this year, and also picked up a win for Melissa Etheridge's incredibly average theme song. I thought the movie was very informative and entertaining enough, but I could have gone for a lot less scenes of Al Gore walking around to lame narration. There's still a lot to learn about the environment and where the world is headed, I'd be up for a sequel. I can hear the trailer now: "An Inconvenient Truth 2. The truth...just got a lot more inconvenient."

Political statements at the Oscars? What's the world coming to? Global Green USA has set up over thirty cars to shuttle environment-protecting celebrities to the Oscars this year, including Leo DiCaprio and Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth. (By the way, does anyone know if Gore is attending?) Global Green started their campaign to drive stars to the Oscars five years ago, as a stunt to raise awareness about alternative fuel cars and global warming solutions. Chief Executive Matt Petersen has gone on record as saying "this we year we really wanted to promote alternative fuels and different technologies that represent what's next."

One of the cars arriving at the red carpet this year will be a prototype of the Tesla Roadster, an electric car goes from 0 to 60 in four seconds. The green racer has already been purchased by over 330 celebrities including George Clooney, according to the Tesla Motors company. The story in The Age speculates that it may be Penelope Cruz who shows up on the red carpet in the coveted Roadster, although no one knows for sure. Production is set to begin later this year on the Roadster, with a base price of $92,000. A sedan model is also in the pipeline, that will cost somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000.

When was the last time a film won the Nobel Prize? More plausible, when was the last time a film led to someone's nomination for the Nobel Prize? The answer to the second question is ... today. Thanks to the documentary An Inconvenient Truth (and all his work to raise awareness of global warming), Al Gore is a contender for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, the winner of which is announced in October. Sure, he probably could have been nominated without the film, but it is obvious that the film did help. In fact, Boerge Brende, one of the two Norwegian Parliament members who nominated Gore, mentioned the movie in his statement to Reuters.

This is great news for Gore, who has just increased his post-Presidential-loss status another huge notch. It was good enough that An Inconvenient Truth did so well in theaters and then was nominated for an Academy Award. But who cares about winning an Oscar when there's a chance to get a million bucks and the prestige of being a Nobel Laureate? Well, Davis Guggenheim probably cares, as he is the one who directed the film, despite so many people referring to it as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Guggenheim isn't nominated for the Nobel Prize, only the Oscar, and worst case scenario is that because of the film's elevated acclaim in its association with the Nobel nomination, Academy voters will see no need to give the doc award to Truth.

"It must be nice to always know better, to always be the smartest one in the room."
"No. It's awful."

-- Peter Hackes and Holly Hunter, Broadcast News

For all of the talk about An Inconvenient Truth's ground-breaking nature -- a top-ten Box Office showing in its first week despite playing on less than 100 screens nationwide, a unique cinematic opportunity to have an ex-Vice President open up on film about his life and ideas, an unabashed attempt to try and change the direction of the planet's fate with mere storytelling and argument -- it also demonstrates one of the classic rules of indie filmmaking. If you want to get something on film fast, have the person you're filming practice, practice, practice. It works for adaptations of plays (like The Shape of Things or Melvin Goes to Dinner); it works for concert films (like The Last Waltz and Neil Young: Heart of Gold). There are no guarantees to success in filmmaking, but if your project involves pointing the camera at someone who's doing something they've done any number times before you've certainly narrowed down the number of things that might go terribly wrong.

And Al Gore has been talking -- and thinking -- about global warming for 30 years; recently, he's begun addressing crowds about the topic. Directed by high-end TV veteran Davis Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth takes Gore's road show and makes a movie out of it. In many ways, An Inconvenient Truth is like the documentary equivalent of adapting a musical like Phantom of the Opera or Hairspray into a film. And in many ways it is not, because when you make a film out of The Phantom of the Opera, there's not a flurry of punditry about if The Phantom is going to run for President again in 2008.