WBEZ | documentary

If you only had months to live, how would you spend them?

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 09:30:00 -0500

On May 20, 2013, Zach Sobiech died after a four-year battle with terminal osteosarcoma. While his name might not sound familiar, you may have heard his song "Clouds" after it went viral on YouTube earlier this year, or watched this video (over 9 million views to date) on the day of his passing.

After being told that he only had months to live, 18-year-old Zobiech decided to share his story with the world. First came the hit song, then a mini-documentary produced by none other than The Office star Rainn Wilson.

SoulPancake, a YouTube channel created by Wilson and featuring a revolving lineup of memorable characters (from Kid President to The Impression Guys), caught wind of "Clouds" and later teamed up with Sobiech for the groundbreaking online reality series "My Last Days."

Directed by filmmaker-actor Justin Baldoni, the 22-minute doc follows Sobiech and his family during his final months: a touching tribute to the Minnesota teen that manages to be charming, heartbreaking, inspiring and uplifting at the same time.

Wilson also recruited a long list of celebrity friends (including Bryan Cranston, Jenna Fischer and Jason Mraz) to lip-synch a music video to "Clouds," which Sobiech got to see just weeks before his death.

"I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting, and didn't really lose," said Zobiech, when asked what kind of legacy he would like to leave behind, "I want everyone to know, you don't have to find out you're dying to start living."

The delicate subject matter of a docuseries like "My Last Days" may not be the easiest to watch, but perhaps that is exactly why we should. Sobiech lived more in 18 years than most people do in a liftetime: a powerful reminder for all of us to be thankful for the little things and embrace every day as if it were our last.

"It's really simple, actually," Sobiech said about trying to make the world a better place. "Just make people happy."

Luckily for everyone who got the chance to know him, either in person or through his documentary, he succeeded in doing just that.

What do you think of this phenomenon? Would you film your last days to inspire others?

Leah Pickett writes about popular culture for WBEZ. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.

The Jon Ronson interview

Fri, 10 May 2013 08:01:00 -0500

Jon Ronson is one of those writers who embodies what creative nonfiction is all about by demonstrating just how strange and wonderful the world can be. A Welsh journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and nonfiction author, his books include Them: Adventures With Extremists, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry and most recently Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries. His book The Men Who Stare At Goats was turned into a movie starring George Clooney. You can learn a lot more about him here.

I saw that you have a standing reply on your website that you will not investigate people’s claims that they are victims of mind control. Aside from that, what personal information do your readers tend to volunteer to you most frequently?

That they are married to psychopaths. Or that they're worried they may be psychopaths. There is an adage in psychology that if you're worried you may be a psychopath that means you aren't one. Because psychopaths never worry about being psychopaths. They're FINE with it. Which makes me suspect that psychopathy is the most pleasant feeling of all the mental disorders.

Isn't it interesting that so many people share the exact same delusion - that they're being mind controlled by the CIA. When our brains go wrong they go wrong in uncannily similar ways. It shows that we aren't all individual snowflakes. My guess is that some of the people who believe they're mind control victims actually suffer from a rare disorder called Delusional Disorder. The symptoms include 'non-bizarre' delusions. That delusion is non-bizarre because some people over the years HAVE actually been mind controlled by the CIA.

Of the different cultures you’ve written about, what have been some that seemed most tempting to join up with, even if just in theory?

I had a good time writing the story Running Through Cornfields for my first book, Them, about Rachel Weaver, one of the survivors of Ruby Ridge. But that's just because I liked Idaho and Montana. The rivers and mountains. But I guess that's not a great reason to become a white separatist. Anyway, they'd never have me.

How can you tell which media are right for which subjects (what works well for radio, web, books, etc?)

Sometimes it's just whoever is interested in having me work with them at any particular time. I go in and out of favor with different people. For instance, British nonfiction TV has no interest in me at the moment. Sometimes the subject matter dictates it. I once made a documentary about the band The Shaggs that I knew had to be for the radio. There was no way I could do that story without getting to play their music. Here it is:

But the thing I'm always looking for is an adventure that might become a book. Whenever I do a documentary or a feature I'm always wondering if it could be a rabbit hole that takes me to a book.

I remember asking Christiane Kubrick - when I was making my film Stanley Kubrick's Boxes - what her husband was looking for during those ever lengthening gaps between films. She said, "The magical moment of falling in love with a story." I know that feeling well. Whenever I start a story I look for that magical moment of falling in love with it enough that it may become a book.

Who are some of your "favorite" criminals ("favorite" of course meaning compelling, not as in you’d want to move in with them).

I loved my adventures with David Icke and Alex Jones in Them, infiltrating Bohemian Grove with Alex. Not sure he counts as a criminal. Tony in The Psychopath Test. I liked him personally, and also he was mysterious. He claimed to have faked madness to escape a prison sentence and now he was stuck in a hospital for the criminally insane and nobody believed he was sane. I loved trying to work out if he was insane or not. It opened up such an interesting area about how we view and judge other people, how we read between lines, how morally corrosive it can be.

If you had to teach a ten-minute course on interviewing, what advice would you be sure to impart upon your students?

This could be terrible advice, but don't plan any questions in advance. That way you have to listen. You have to be a twig in the tidal wave of the conversation. But not preparing any questions doesn't mean don't do research. Do lots of research, just assimilate it, rather than plan and structure the interview. As I say, that might be the worst advice.

You immerse yourself so fully in the stories you write. What have been some scenarios where you were conducting research or interviews and then found yourself in a potentially unsafe environment?

The most recent time was writing The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones, which is in my new collection, Lost At Sea. He's the real life superhero I was patrolling with in Seattle. He took me to Belltown to break up a gang of armed crack dealers. They were, "What the f*ck are you doing coming here in your costumes? This is not fun and games to us. If you don't get off our block we're going to shoot you." And Phoenix said, "We're staying."

What are you reading right now?

Nothing. I'm watching Freaks and Geeks on Netflix. I think it's just about the best thing I ever saw. It breaks my heart that they only made one series. It makes me feel so helpless that I can't go back in time and fix it so they made more. It's like finding out someone died. Although I did notice one or two jumping the shark moments in the last episode or two - like James Franco liking Dungeons and Dragons. So maybe it was for the best that it died young and left a good looking corpse.

Do you stay in touch with anyone you write about?

I would like to stay in touch with everyone. I consider it a real honor and compliment if people want to stay in touch with me after I've written about them. Even if we massively disagree with each other politically, I always think we've been thought something intimate together when we've had some kind of encounter or adventure. They feel like family members.

What have been some of your most recent obsessions, even if they were only fleeting? (I for instance spent part of today googling Aleister Crowley and his ilk.)

Ha. Last few days I've looked at the disappearance of Maura Murray, workplace bullying and Amanda Palmer.

What’s a potential story topic you figured would be rich for material but turned out to be relatively banal, and then another where you stumbled upon a wormhole in an unexpected place?

The saddest example of a story that went nowhere was the months trying to write a book about the credit card industry. This was before the crash. I realized was that all these people who work in the credit industry – the list brokers, all these people who’ve got these devious tricks to keep us ensnared – are really important. But they are also incredibly boring. They couldn't light up the page for me. So I abandoned the book. And instead I went to Alaska to write my story Santa's Little Conspirators, that ended up in Lost at Sea, my new collection. That was about shenanigans in a Christmas theme town.

The opposite - a story I wasn't into but turned out to be extraordinary - was going to Hawaii to interview a soldier called Glenn Wheaton. He had been part of the US Military's remote viewing program. The psychic spies. I really didn't have any interest in them. The writer Jim Schnabel had already written a very intricate book about them called Remote Viewers. I felt like I was telling a story that was already known. It was really miserable for me. While I was interviewing him we got talking about the 'other stuff' they were doing. He said they were trying to become invisible and kill goats just by staring at them. So the wormhole opened up. And I ended up writing The Men Who Stare At Goats.

Factchecking your work must be thrilling and exhausting. Which stories of yours were the most difficult to clear before publishing?

I don't remember ever having much of a problem. I'm pretty assiduous when I'm gathering the stories. So fact checking is usually fine.

How does it feel to be the 348th person interviewed for Zulkey.com/WBEZ?
It feels good!

Environmental film festival returns to western suburbs

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 06:00:00 -0600

If the Oscars left you wanting for some environmental fare, a film festival in Chicago’s western suburbs has you covered. The second annual One Earth Film Festival this weekend in Oak Park, River Forest and Forest Park, as well as Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, will show 40 environmental films, including the award-winning documentaries Chasing Ice and Dying Green, as well as films produced by local students.

The festival is organized by Green Community Connections, a grassroots (though they call themselves a “deep-roots” group) environmental organization based in the western suburbs. (Full disclosure: A short film I co-produced showed during last year’s festival.)

Chasing Ice, which had only a limited run in Chicago last year, will be shown Saturday morning at 10:30 at the Lake Theater in Oak Park. The film focuses on photographer James Balog, whose assignments for Smithsonian, National Geographic and numerous other publications fostered his fascination with glaciers. As Balog’s work brought him face to face with the effects of climate change, he started the Extreme Ice Survey to document retreating glaciers through time-lapse photography.

Though not nominated for Best Documentary last weekend, Chasing Ice was up for Best Original Song. (“Before My Time” by J. Ralph predictably lost to Adele’s “Skyfall.”) In addition to its hypnotic visuals — the ice survey team watches a hunk of ice several times the size of Manhattan quake and crumble into the sea — Chasing Ice provides a human lens through which to view the often unwieldy issue of climate change. Rather than take a tired political tack, the film zeroes in on Balog’s own journey: his realization that the world is changing before his eyes, and his self-destructive obsession with helping stop it.

Other films deal with issues including the Great Lakes water supply, genetically modified food and fracking. Filmmaker Ellen Tripler will discuss her award-winning documentary Dying Green, about a doctor who promotes “natural” burials that do not use chemical preservatives or embalming fluid. Last Call at the Oasis, produced by the company behind An Inconvenient Truth, argues that a global water crisis will be the central issue of the 21^st century.

Download a full schedule for the One Earth Film Festival here.

Chris Bentley writes about the environment. Follow him on Twitter at @Cementley.

Local documentarians promote social change

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 05:00:00 -0600

Kartemquin Films has some big plans for 2013.

The Chicago-based independent film company has an impressive list of documentaries slated for the new year: stories that map the diverse breadth of the human condition.

Films in progress include Almost There (the portrait of a disabled artist obsessively documenting his own life), American Arab (in which Iraqi-American filmmaker and former Vocalo host Usama Alshaibi shares his personal experiences with racism in a post-9/11 world) and On Beauty (a chronicle of three physically atypical women and their plans to change society’s definition of of the word “beautiful.”)

If you haven't heard the name Kartemquin before, perhaps you remember two of the studio’s biggest success stories. In 1994, Hoop Dreams received the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to win every major critic's prize in the following year. This heartwarming tale of two inner-city basketball players became the highest grossing documentary at that time and one of the highest rated documentaries ever broadcast on PBS.

More recently, Kartemquin released The Interrupters: a stirring film about Chicago’s “violence interrupters” that won Best Documentary at the Independent Spirit Awards in 2011.

Director Steve James helmed both of these projects, and won a Director’s Guild of America Award for his work on Hoop Dreams. James’ next film in development with Kartemquin is Life Itself, based on Roger Ebert's memoir of the same name. Generation Food, a documentary about the innovative efforts and obstacles to fixing the global food crisis, is scheduled for 2014.

While Kartemquin is the documentary film giant in Chicago, other local filmmakers also deserve praise for their raw talent and tireless dedication to social change.

During Chicago Ideas Week last October, video journalist Jigar Mehta introduced the idea of "Crowdsourced Documentary Filmmaking" as the means for creating his latest project 18 Days in Egypt.

He and interaction designer Yasmin Elayet enabled participants to chronicle the Egyptian Revolution through their own voices: uploading real-life footage, tweets and Facebook status updates. This collaborative method not only inspires filmmakers to work together en tandem, but also encourages audiences to take a more active role in collectively re-examining their connections to the world and to each other.

For those wishing to get more involved in our city's thriving documentary film scene, Chicago Filmmakers is a great place to start. This 37-year-old media arts organization holds workshops, screenings and seminars to foster our ever-growing independent film community, and sponsors networking events for like-minded cinephiles as well.

The next filmmaker meet up is tonight from 7 to 9 p.m., with director Dinesh Sabu discussing his first feature-length documentary Unbroken Glass. If you want to learn more about the industry, connect with other filmmakers or find inspiration for your own work-in-progress, opportunities like this one should not be missed.

Follow Leah on Twitter @leahkpickett

'Eleanore & the Timekeeper' escape monotony of routine

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:34:00 -0600

In her documentary, Eleanore & the Timekeeper, Chicago filmmaker Daniele Wilmouth took on a very personal topic, her family. She followed her grandmother Eleanore as she struggled to move her developmentally disabled son, Ronnie, out of her home.

At 91, Eleanore could no longer safely care for herself and Ronnie.

To learn more about the film and the task of documenting such a personal tale, Eight Forty-Eight was joined by local filmmaker Daniele Wilmouth.

The film screens Friday night at Chicago Filmmakers in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood.

Music Button: John Scofield, "Simply Put", from the album A Moment's Peace, (Emarcy)

Documentary explores the future of urban space design

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:16:00 -0500

Municipal laws greatly impact how people interact in urban settings; but the physical layout and design of cities also affects that interaction. A new documentary examines the design of cities across the world. Urbanized begins its run Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. WBEZ's Jonathan Miller gave Eight Forty-Eight his review.

'Catching Hell': The Cubs, the curse and the foul ball that changed Steve Bartman's life

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:17:00 -0500

Few things in life are as powerful as a curse--at least when it came to the Chicago Cubs. The North Siders haven’t won a World Series in over 100 years - though they came pretty close in 2003. Things fell apart for the lovable losers in Game 6 of the National League pennant race against the Florida Marlins. Left fielder Moises Alou and Cubs fan Steve Bartman went for the same foul ball; only one of them caught hell for it. A new documentary detailing the incident airs on ESPN Tuesday at 7:00 p.m.. So Eight Forty-Eight asked around to see what people remembered about that night, including WBEZ's own Paul Friedman who was the Cubs PA announcer at the time.

Catching Hell airs Tuesday on ESPN at 7:00 p.m.

Music Button: Mocean Worker, "Do Like Ya Like", from the album Candygram for Mowo!, (Mowo! Inc.)

A correction has been made to this story.

Raymond Lambert puts all jokes aside to talk 'Phunny Business'

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:38:00 -0500

phunny-biz[1].mp3

For many, All Jokes Aside was, “The best comedy club you’ve never heard of.” Through the '90s, this South Loop venue provided early exposure for black comedians like Steve Harvey, Chris Rock and Jamie Foxx. But although many of those who played the venue subsequently shot to national fame, All Jokes Aside quietly closed after only eight years. Now, a new documentary – Phunny Business: A Black Comedy – tracks the emergence of the club and its significance as a showcase for black comedians in the city. To find out more Eight Forty-Eight was joined by the film’s co-producer and former owner of All Jokes Aside, Raymond Lambert.

Phunny Business: A Black Comedy screens Saturday, Aug 27th and Thursday, Sept 1st at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It’s part of the 17^th Annual Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video.

Big ship diary

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:20:00 -0500

The gravel in your driveway, the steel in your car, and the coal that produces electricity for your home may well have spent time on a Great Lakes freighter on its way to you. At the height of the steel industry, bulk ore ships were in bumper to bumper traffic on the Great Lakes. Shipping may seem an outdated mode of transportation, but it's still by far the most efficient way to transport bulk material. Each year, over 100 million tons of iron ore, coal, limestone and other products travel through the Great Lakes navigation system by boat.

Last November, radio producer Allison Swaim spent nine days aboard a bulk ore ship called the Calumet. It's a huge ship. At 630 feet, it's longer than two football fields and holds close to 20,000 tons of cargo. You'd need almost 1,000 semi-trucks to carry the same load.

Seventeen crew members live and work on the ship for a month at a time. It's a working boat, and the work never stops. When they're not loading or unloading thousands of tons of rocks into and out of the belly of the ship, they're headed full speed through the lake to the next dock. Then, both pick-up sized engines are at full throttle and the whole boat shakes and rattles.

Allison boarded the ship at a limestone quarry in Marblehead, Ohio, just west of Cleveland, and got off nine days later in South Chicago. This route took the Calumet from Lake Erie up the Detroit River, across Lake Huron, through the Straits of Mackinac, and back and forth across Lake Michigan.

Day 1: Marblehead, OH-- loaded limestone/dirt mix ("work dirt"-- used for construction)

Day 2: Marine City, MI-- unloaded half the dirt, Marysville, MI-- unloaded the rest of the dirt, Sarnia, Ontario-- stopped for gas at a fuel dock

Day 3: Meldrum Bay, Ontario-- loaded limestone

Day 4: Grand Haven, MI-- unloaded limestone at a power plant

Day 5: South Chicago, IL-- loaded coal at KCBX Coal Terminals, Inc.

Day 6: Green Bay, WI-- unloaded coal

Day 7: Port Inland, MI-- loaded limestone

Day 8: Grand Haven, MI-- unloaded limestone

Day 9: South Chicago, IL-- loaded coal

As part of Front and Center's series covering the Great Lakes region, Allison produced this audio documentary to tell the story of life on board a big ship on the lakes. See her slideshow, Not a cruiseship or visit Out-here.tumblr.com to see and hear more from the Calumet multimedia documentary project.

Comedian Steve Mazan battles cancer during years'-long quest to be on David Letterman

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:01:00 -0500

A death sentence no doubt provokes many reactions, and laughter is normally not one of them!

When comedian Steve Mazan was first diagnosed with cancer and told he could be dead in five years, he didn’t find it very funny. But eventually, inoperable liver cancer gave Mazan something better than a fit of the giggles – it gave him a reason to live. He had dreamed of being on The Late Show with David Letterman since he was a kid, but after his diagnosis, the quest was number one on his bucket list. How he lived the dream is chronicled in the new documentary Dying to do Letterman.

The film premieres in Chicago Friday, June 17, as part of the TBS Just For Laughs Chicago comedy fest. But first, Mazan stopped by Eight Forty-Eight to discuss his journey.

Spoiler-Edition Web Extra:
Did Steve Mazan ever achieve his dream of making it on The Late Show With David Letterman, or is he still in pursuit of it? To find out, listen to more of Alison Cuddy's conversation with Mazan.