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CAM COMES TO LIFE: |
You are here: Home > News > CAM COMES TO LIFE: |
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CAM COMES TO LIFE: |
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Soon, in fact during the month of April, Citizens Alternative Media will have its launch, and for those of us behind the curtain there will be a celebration and a sigh of relief. What seemed like a good concept three years ago seems even more necessary today. I'd like to present a little history of how this idea came into my shaggy head.
Russ and daughter Mali 1990 - Getting ready to leave to fish in Alaska.
It was December 2006, and I was in Helsinki, Finland, hanging out with my buddy Hannes Vartiainen. At that time, Hannes was a production manager and line producer for Kinotar Productions, one of the top five production houses in Finland for documentaries and feature films.
He and I were working on a prospectus for a modest doc that would compare and contrast the social services ( health care, education, social security, unemployment benefits and welfare ) of the United States and Finland. We had in mind examining the costs and benefits by looking at the mini-economies of three sets of families of similar economic strata in the two societies. Basically, we would examine what they paid in taxes and insurances, and what they got in return.
As an American, I wanted to look at Finland as a role model for national health care. I was further motivated by the fact that the Economist magazine had ranked Finland's government as the "least corrupt" in the world for five straight years.
Hannes wanted to look at the effects of privatization in the US, to get a handle on arguments that were becoming more common in Finland, which advocated a move away from Scandinavian Socialism.
Our doc idea was meeting with encouraging support from everyone that we spoke with. The idea of a Finnish - US co-production began to gel, and when I left Helsinki to fly back to Seattle, it seemed that we might get a development grant of around 10,000 euros from the Finnish Film Foundation, if matching US funds were found. With this positive outlook for developing our idea, I began to seek production funding for my half ($136,000) of the modest 205,000 euro budget.
I wrote grant applications. I sent copies of my prospectus to commissioning editors for public broadcasting. I asked associates with more contacts than I to help, or come on board as producers, No one was interested. After months of work, I was finally taken aside by an acquaintance and brought home to reality. Here is what she told me:
- A pre-buy of a documentary for viewing on US television by a first-time producer, no matter who they have on board to help out, was not going to happen;
- An "in the can" doc might get picked up for TV if it matched a strand an affiliate aired;
- Mikey Moore's SICKO was due out late May to early June and no one would ever commit to anything till they saw how it did;
- All the granting agencies I had applied to were suffering from the political and economic times (more about that in a minute).
Her advice to me was "If you feel really passionate about it, just go make it."
Well, I had some cash that I had planned to use for contingencies (around $20,000)
and Hannes and I did shoot some trailer material while I was in Finland. One day I got on SKYPE to talk to my man.
It turns out that the European system of financing smaller projects like ours could only be done in a system of pre-buys. Getting it "in the can" privately might be how some TV docs get made and then acquired in the USA, but not in Europe. Using my own money for the US side of the production would not fly with the Finnish Film Foundation. I needed a commitment of institutional dollars.
By this time, I was getting pretty discouraged. I was a first-timer for something of this scale, but I had spent lots of time behind a camera and was using FCP to edit video and could write scripts and proposals. I had a great DP lined up, and an award-winning editor and a friend, who had single-handedly produced more than one famous indy / cult feature, was on board to mentor and produce. I had received grants to work on film and doc projects in the past, and what's more, our idea was great!
And most important of all was the fact that this subject was of vital importance to every one in the US and most of Europe.
I had not been watching TV much, but a friend said that I should see this show about a father and son who build choppers. He said that I would like it, because it was a documentary. "Real verte" he said. I watched it. And I watched something about people who build Hot Rods. And I watched a show about the lives of Really Big Dinosaurs. And it seemed to me that some TV programing had become very, very dumb.
Not long after I sobered up over this situation, I spent time on the web looking at resources and networking sites for US-based documentaries. There was not much happening then. I went to the Washington State Arts Commission website, an organization that had granted me $15,000 for media work. They were virtually nonexistent, with a small fraction of the budget that they had worked with five short years before.
This is when I started realizing just how few docs about important social issues were getting out for people to view. I realized that the successes of a small hand full of documentarians ( thank you all for your ice-breaking work Mr. Moore, Mr. Spurlock and Mr. Morris etc ) with hugely profitable theatrical releases proved that at least half of America wanted to hear more from the unrepresented liberal side of the equation.
I happened upon a great doc that no one will see unless they search: Robert Kane Pappas' Orwell Turns In His Grave (2004). This doc exposed the corruption of the FCC , the consolidation of the media by corporations with ultra-conservative profit-motivated agendas, and the failure of said media to serve the interests of the citizens of the US, and the principles of Democracy.
So, a synthesis of all of the above, coupled with a burning desire to save the world (and eat everything on my plate) led to the concept of CAMgrants.org.
Simply put, we want to build an organization that lets ordinary citizens decide what they want to support, and let them put their money where their mouths are (even if only a dollar at a time). We want the merits of the IDEA to carry more weight than the marketplace.
As CAM grows in numbers two things will happen: we will attract ever better proposals, and those proposals will be better able to gain funding, because they have an established audience who has already chosen to support them.
Thanks and Good Luck
CAM Director, RUSS LEVINE
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