Trembling
Before Video Filmmaker Sandi DuBowski on making his first
DVD
Reprinted with
permission from FILMMAKER: The Magazine of Independent Film
I
remember the marks on my hands from lugging the 35mm print of Trembling
Before G-d on the plane to our world premiere at Sundance in 2001.
Heaving five reels into the overhead compartment, I hoped they wouldn’t
tumble onto some unsuspecting distributor’s head. So how amazing
two years later to hold the DVD of the film in the palm of my hand!
When people used to ask, “Where can I see your film?”
I had to e-mail them about an upcoming screening in Brooklyn, Los
Angeles or London. Now the film is instantaneously accessible through
Amazon.com, Blockbuster, Barnes & Noble, Netflix, Borders, Virgin
Records and Tower Records. This little disc is how the film will exist
throughout eternity… or at least until the next technological
advance.
When I began the process of creating the Trembling Before G-d
DVD with New Yorker Films, I had no idea it would unfold into a four-month,
round-the-clock effort resulting in three hours of special features,
nine new movies and the rebirth of a short I made with my 88-year-old
grandmother — the production of which would require two editors,
30 interns, multiple graphic designers, a substantial budget, archival
negotiation, music licensing, complicated subtitling in Spanish, Hebrew
and Yiddish, and constant re-working of design and packaging.
When I began Trembling in 1994 no one had really heard of
DVD. But in 2003, according to Adams Media Research, one billion DVDs
shipped in the U.S. alone. Cynthia Rhea, senior vice president of
marketing for HBO Home Video, calls DVD an “overnight sensation.”
It’s a “big deal,” she continues, “because
the medium is crossing over from logical-sounding places like bookstores
to gas stations and convenience stores, selling to impulse buyers
at an attractive margin.” While VHS has been predominantly a
rental format, Rhea says that DVDs’ slim packaging, larger box
cover, special features, durability, and picture and sound quality
make it very attractive for consumers.
Filmmakers need to grasp the rapidly shifting home video industry
for two key reasons: the DVD medium can extend and expand the artistic
life of a film; and the revenue it generates can wipe away the debt
incurred by a theatrical release. (For many independent filmmakers
— particularly documentary makers — who finance their
films through television sales, home video is often one of the rights
they can retain and use to create real profit for themselves.)
As in all things independent, however, to maximize both revenue and
the medium’s creative potential, filmmakers must be prepared
to play an active role in the development and production of their
DVDs. Following are observations, stories and advice gleaned from
my six-month plunge into the world of DVD production, with some added
opinions from industry experts and other filmmakers.
Extending the Story: At the
Q&A’s following screenings of Trembling before G-d, people
would ask, “What happened to the people in the film? Did the
community see the film? What did they think?”
DVDs offer an incredible opportunity to document not just the making
of the film but also its subsequent movement in the world. Particularly
for filmmakers whose films have catalyzed social change or stirred
controversy, DVD can extend the meanings of their films in ways previously
unimaginable. For me, there were such extraordinary changes in the
lives of my subjects following my film’s production that at
one point I thought of filming a sequel — until I realized the
DVD was just that. So I created a 40-minute featurette, Trembling
on the Road, about the film’s journey around the world,
mixing footage from Brooklyn, Jerusalem, London, Mexico, Sundance,
Ohio and beyond with updates on the lives of the film’s subjects.
I put out a special call on the Internet soliciting stories for the
DVD. Among those who came forward was Shoshana, a Hasidic married
woman who saw the film and for the first time learned of the existence
of lesbians. She came out and a few weeks ago left her husband and
moved out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We filmed her story in Brooklyn’s
Hasidic neighborhood just before her life flipped 180 degrees. Orthodox
people who in the film were closeted come out to their families in
the DVD. In the film, Michelle is 250 pounds. In the DVD, she drops
half her weight and talks about the film’s profound effect on
her life.
The HBO Home Video release of Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing
the Friedmans similarly extends the stories of its film’s
controversial characters. The DVD adds footage of Jesse Friedman just
after being released from jail and attempting to adjust to life on
parole, find a supportive girlfriend and overturn his conviction.
Says Jarecki, “DVD is a very powerful medium in that it can
take people who want to know more as deep as they want to go.”
For some, the aftereffects pictured in the DVD can be a source of
viewer power. Take a look at The Debut (Columbia TriStar
Home Video), the first Filipino-American feature. The DVD offers filmmakers
a truly inspiring video manifesto on the movie’s successful
grass-roots distribution. And Fire (New Yorker Films) features
a striking short about opposition to this groundbreaking lesbian film,
with scenes of Hindu nationalist mobs smashing the Indian theaters
in which it originally screened.
And some DVDs add to their character’s stories with just the
simplest archival gestures. Aimee and Jaguar (Zeitgeist Video),
is a World War II love story between Felice, a Jewish woman and resistance
fighter, and Lilly, a Nazi officer’s wife. The DVD features
photographs of the real-life versions of the film’s characters
taken on the day of Felice’s arrest by the Gestapo and also
excerpts from Felice’s subsequent letters written during her
concentration camp internment. Devastating.
Audience Feedback: In addition
to documenting the communities that form around films, filmmakers
can help create them through the ROM part of the DVD or through linked
Web sites with resources, glossaries, message boards and chat rooms.
As Trembling before G-d generated enormous response through
the Internet, I worked with a title designer to weave in art-directed
excerpts from e-mail reactions to the film in Trembling on the
Road. For the Capturing the Friedmans DVD, Jarecki filmed
audience members and his film’s own subjects reacting at various
screenings, speaking out against what they considered slanted truth
in the film. DVD and continuously updated Web sites are allowing films’
meanings to be constantly rewritten, creating a new feedback loop
among film, the Web and fans.
DVD as Fundraising Tool: DVDs
are also an excellent, glossy gift for funders and can be powerful
dynamic tools in generating initial and further outreach support.
After the Steven Spielberg Righteous Persons Foundation, the Nathan
Cummings Foundation, The Creative Capital Foundation and the Shefa
Fund, among others, awarded us funding to launch an Orthodox education
project with the film, we trained 11 facilitators in Jerusalem who
have since held screenings and led dialogues for 2,000 principals,
teachers, school counselors and therapists across the nation, breaking
the taboo on discussing the issue of homosexuality in the country’s
Orthodox school system. We created a 15-minute piece, Petach Lev:
The Trembling Israeli Education Project, for the DVD about the
experience and are now using it to seek renewed funding for our educational
efforts around our 2004 Israeli television broadcast, which will hopefully
have a toll-free number at the end where one can order the DVD.
DVD as Master Class: The “making
of” has become a staple of DVD creation. Criterion, whose DVDs
usually contain beautifully crafted appreciations of Hollywood and
European arthouse classics, is the acknowledged master of this mini
art form. Each disc is a virtual master class, prompting film critic
Elvis Mitchell to joke that DVDs will one day eliminate the need for
film schools!
Says Peter Becker, president of the Criterion Collection, “The
goal for a film on DVD should not be a blow-the-doors-off, all-you-can-find,
all-you-can-eat edition. [Instead] a DVD should create the right context
[for the viewer] to appreciate a film and make connections within
the filmmaker’s body of work, his or her influences and then
to other forms of art and human expression.”
But not every DVD package is as illuminating as Criterion’s,
nor are all filmmakers as entrancing as Martin Scorsese is when he
discusses the craft and technique of Taxi Driver. Some director’s
commentaries are actually quite disappointing, filled with awkward
pauses and silences, floating egos and thoughts rushed to the timing
of a particular scene unfolding on the screen.
Steve Savage, president and founder of Docurama, a video company specializing
in documentary DVD releases, discusses how Robert Drew, the pioneer
of cinéma vérité, got to a point in the middle
of recording the commentary for Primary (Docurama/New Video)
when he interrupted, “I don’t want to speak over my perfectly
fine film!”
Edet Belzberg, director of the Academy Award–nominated Children
Underground, experienced a similar moment when recording her
Docurama DVD director’s voiceover: “After five minutes
I stopped and said that I didn’t feel right about it…What
are you supposed to say over a 10-year-old girl screaming? How I edited
that scene didn’t seem so relevant.” Docurama put a text
page on the DVD instead.
With Trembling, I too felt queasy speaking over the subjects
of my film, so I decided to film a 20-minute on-camera “interview
with the director” instead.
For others, involving a collaborator from the creative team in the
commentary gives it that added spark. On the DVD of Dogtown and Z-Boys
(Columbia TriStar), for instance, director Stacy Peralta and editor
Paul Crowder ricochet back and forth on how they crafted a documentary
that defied gravity with killer style.
Enriching the “Making of…”: Just
as director’s commentaries can wrap one’s eye differently
around film images, well-planned “making of” documentaries
can also transcend studio EPK fodder. If your film’s production
contains any sort of unusual element, make sure to document this during
filming. As examples, check out Russian Ark (Wellspring)
and Winged Migration (Columbia TriStar). Russian Ark’s
In One Breath is a standout short, covering 36 hours in the Hermitage
Museum in which the filmmakers chronicle the epic sweep of Russian
history in a single take. As the crew steps through a doorway, you
literally watch the set being dismantled behind them. Fraught with
fading light, dead batteries, and a kilometer and a half to traverse,
this was tense drama. By far the most astonishing of the current DVD
“making of” extras is Winged Migration’s.
Watching a cinematographer poised at the edge of a two-seat paraglider
high above the Sahara or the Arctic with an acting troupe of birds
at arm’s length feels like witnessing a step into the void with
the Wright and Lumiere brothers.
To ensure that they have dynamic elements for their immortal DVD,
filmmakers should begin thinking of the disc on the first day of preproduction.
Studio films do this routinely as home video executives weigh in at
the first production meetings. For example, HBO/BBC’s new miniseries
Rome is of phenomenal scope and scale and already has a crew
filming the two-year process of building an epic set for the DVD.
For its previous World War II miniseries Band of Brothers,
HBO gave a camera to actor Ron Livingston and asked him to create
an hour-long video diary on the “actor’s boot camp.”
Independents may not have all the resources of an HBO, but there are
things that can be done to ensure solid DVD extras.
• Save deleted scenes.
• License for the DVD archival pieces that may not make it into
the film.
• Build into the budget a cinematographer who can shoot production
B-roll.
• Develop story lines even if they are just for the DVD and
Web site.
• Keep in mind multiple media while in production.
Filmmakers should free-associate and think of the DVD as a new art
form with playful elasticity. I had fun while making my DVD by gathering
footage I shot over six years and creating Mark: The Musical,
a short that imagines an MTV–produced Hasidic music video. The
DVD of Scratch (Palm Pictures) has a DIY lesson in turntablism
with DJ Z-Trip. The Style Wars 20th-anniversary two-disc
DVD (Plexifilm) erects a vintage shrine to its underground artist
subjects who bombed New York subways in the late 1970’s and
early 1980’s – the DVD pops with a graffiti artist “hall
of fame,” photo galleries, where-are-they-now interviews and
a 30-minute loop of subway-tagged art on the move.
License One’s Own Shorts: A
director’s previous shorts can gain a new life on DVD, adding
to the perceived value of the disc. Criterion released the DVD of
Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and included the three Cannes
prize-winning shorts that launched her reputation as an important
young filmmaker. I included on Trembling Before G-d my short
Tomboychik, a drag-themed tale made with my 88-year-old grandmother
when I was 22.
New Media on DVD: As the DVD
medium matures, newer filmmakers will be able to license new and nontraditional
forms of content to video companies. In a series of DVD releases,
ranging from its Directors Label series, featuring the work of Spike
Jonze, Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry, to its packaging of Matthew
Barney’s Cremaster films, Palm Pictures is creating
unclassifiable DVD fusions of music, video and art. David Koh, head
of acquisitions and production at Palm Pictures/Arthouse Films, says,
“It used to be that music and film people were different. But
now people are growing up on hybrid media. Film people do music videos,
and music video directors make features. Palm fuses a love for music
and film and, with DVD, embraces those aspects.” Directors Label
compiles music videos, advertising clips and short films, and one
of the company’s newest ventures — “ambient”
DVDs, mixing abstract shorts with new music for playback in hotels,
homes, lobbies and party spaces — suggests another kind of alternative
featurette that could be contained within independent film DVDs. With
regard to bonus materials in general, find out whether your distributor
plans to release your film on a DVD-5 or a DVD-9. The former typically
holds 133 minutes of playback video and the latter 240 minutes, so
judge your time accordingly.
Negotiating DVD Production Costs: With
my DVD, I was incredibly lucky to have a distributor, New Yorker Films,
that was willing to alter the way it had traditionally done business.
Our slow rollout across the U.S. and Canada, hiring of outreach coordinators
in more than a dozen cities, turning of cinemas into town halls and
engaging various communities in more than 700 events in theaters,
universities, conferences and synagogues helped Trembling
to gross $850,000 (with nontheatrical, more than $1.05 million). New
Yorker invested in the production costs of the DVD (editors, shooting,
tape stock, online, rights), which I was able to lower by securing
in-kind online studio time from City Lights Media Group and a fleet
of interns gathered from Craigslist.org. Such a strategy paid off
when chains such as Blockbuster, aware of the reach and press generated,
looked at the design and content of our deluxe two-disk DVD set and
stocked their stores with the film.
But in talking with various other distributors for this article, none
say they would have contractually guaranteed this kind of up-front
support; all say they handle DVD creation on a case-by-case basis.
As Fritz Friedman, senior vice president of worldwide publicity for
Columbia TriStar Home Video, comments, “Not all films can be
your children. Everyone has their favorites.” Indeed, while
some home video companies are investing in bonus features and director’s
cuts, others are economizing by dumping out bare-bones releases containing
only a film, its theatrical trailer and maybe some outdated bios lifted
from the press notes — and no consultation with the director/producers.
How then do filmmakers guarantee that their video vision makes it
to the DVD? The obvious answer is to build into a film’s production
or acquisition contract the responsibility for DVD creation, allocation
of costs and authoring of additional materials and projects. However,
this is easier said than done. Friedman suggests tying these terms
to some kind of box-office benchmark. If, for example, a film grosses
more than $1 million, a filmmaker can be entitled to having certain
expenses covered for the DVD.
Video Deliverables: Having
deliverables ready when a video deal if signed is another strategy
for building better DVDs. The larger video companies deal with a slew
of releases and aren’t staffed to track down and remaster deleted
scenes or sometimes to even commission director’s commentaries.
By having these elements ready and mastered to DigiBetas or D1s, the
filmmaker can induce a distributor into releasing a higher-quality
DVD.
One overlooked area by most filmmakers is multiple language transcripts.
When an international festival subtitles a film, obtain the translation
on paper and the disc with in and out time-code points for subtitling.
That way, one can plan ahead and have multiple languages for the DVD
and also sell the DLT (master digital linear tape) to different territories.
I had to scramble to get our Spanish subtitling from a festival in
Buenos Aires for our U.S. release only to discover that they no longer
had the disc with time codes. Do not forget that special features
also need to be subtitled.
My distributor wanted an anamorphic 16:9 version of the film, but
I had shot it on DV in 4:3. HBO Latin America, BBC and other broadcasters
also preferred a 16:9 Trembling. That meant we had to pan-and-scan
the entire film and then adjust each frame to compensate for the letterboxing.
Because we had subtitles and ID’s in English from Hebrew and
Yiddish, we had to relay all the subtitles or they would have been
warped from the pan-and-scan. Budget accordingly and ideally do this
early in the online of the film itself. (Visit www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/
for more information on this technical process.)
Remember to allow ample time for the creation of your DVD. DVDs involve
numerous steps after delivering your completed DigiBeta’s: authoring,
DVD-R, DLT, glass master, replication, check disc, live product and
packaging. On our DVD production, there was constant checking and
rechecking. Our online session creating three hours of new films plus
the complexities of a 16:9 version stretched for two weeks. Also,
a new panoramic photo of Jerusalem’s Western Wall for the DVD
packaging, Shlomo on Donahue archival footage and end-credit
music for Trembling on the Road necessitated unforeseen time
in negotiation and licensing agreements.
Press and Publicity: Although
the number of DVDs released to the marketplace have skyrocketed, theatrical
releases still garner much greater press coverage. The New York
Times, for example, has film reviews every day and DVD capsule
blurbs once a week and other major national publications are starting
to do more extensive coverage of DVD releases. To make long-lead magazine
press deadlines, DVDs must be completed months in advance of their
street dates. Film publicity firms such as mPRm now have specialty
divisions that target the home video market. mPRm helped us get two
feature stories in Video Store and one in Video Librarian,
key video trade publications not necessarily known to directors.
The key for any DVD, like any film, is distribution, and that means
either reaching the corporate chains to make block purchases for rental
and, even better, retail, or using the Internet to sell to individual
consumers. Steve Savage of Docurama, warns, “Because the barriers
to entry of making a DVD are being removed, many filmmakers find it
easy to make one and self-distribution is evolving. There are a lot
of missteps. There may be immediate sales from Amazon.com but directors
may jeopardize the long-term value of the film.
For Trembling, I created one special feature — More
with Rabbi Steve, about the struggle of the first openly gay
Orthodox rabbi to come out — that ties in with the subject’s
own book, Wrestling with God and Men. New Yorker and I are
forging a joint book-DVD marketing synergy with the author’s
publisher. There are many ways DVDs can be linked to existing networks,
companies and nonprofits to do larger-scale promotion.
DVDs have created an ongoing dialogue between director, film and audience
that spans multiple media. As Peter Becker of Criterion concludes,
“The way our DVD viewers are so extremely engaged I find heartening.
There was such a brief life span of film — it’s pretty
much gone. We are moving into a digital world little by little. In
geologic time it’s a blink. The 100-year-plus history of film
is nothing compared to painting and sculpture. There is a huge effort
to save this work, but DVDs are not just about restoring what is physically
lost but what would be lost practically. [Without DVDs,] all of this
art would fade into obscurity.”
The DVD box for Sandi DuBowksi's
Trembling Before G-d.
Photo: John Clifford/HBO/Fine Line
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