The Production Manager - Making Waves

While I’m have a little time between jobs I’m using it to brush up on my technical skills. There’s not a lot of call for production managers to be able to hoist up a camera and be able to shoot but the way budgets are going that may not be far off.       

So I went online and found a great little evening course in downtown Manhattan (dctvny.org in case you’re interested). I was the only TV professional in our small class but I was infinitely the least active. What I mean by this was that the other people on the course were all using the class to learn skills for documentary making and my god were these interesting topics they were working on. One was documenting the stories of people involved in the civil rights movement in New York; another was interviewing Hollywood bigwigs for her new website; an American Idol for film makers (www.moviehatch.com). Another girl had just completed a film (Making Waves, Saving Lies) about a school in Kenya that teaches women rape and AIDS awareness – look out for it screening in NYC.

What struck me was how simply these people were going about and filming these stories without fuss or budgets or network approval. Sure, they’re not broadcasting on television but the stories are still out there being seen and heard.

This is something that’s really running around my mind at the moment, why there aren’t more interesting documentaries shown on television outside of HBO & Showtime. I was having dinner with a friend last night and she said that people in the states don’t want to be depressed, they want to be entertained.

Is that true folks? Is there no real documentary out there because people don’t want them or are people interested in hearing stories from the world around them? I’d love to know your thoughts on this…

Tags: Movie Bloggers, Television, Actor, Movie Blog, Movie