Marsha McCreadie - Documentary Superstars: How Todays Filmmakers Are Reinventing the Form

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the staff at Lincoln Centers Billy Rose Theatre Collection for, as ever, their unfailing and gracious efforts in researching materials. Much appreciation to my students in our documentary film class at Fordham Universitys Lincoln Center Campus in the fall of 2006. Especially Adam Benic for his unflagging intellectual curiosity, which pushed at me in a good way, and Casey Michael McGarry for his fascination with the spiritual impact of movie music, both qualities that can get lost along the way in the professional or academic practice of film criticism.

And so came the inspiration for this book and a new group of students of sortsreadersfor the ideas germinated in that class.

Also, appreciation to the Faculty Technology Center at Fordham University, especially Jay Savage and Rien Chy, who untied some of the knots I got tangled up in when computers and the new technology sometimes seemed an obstacle, not an aid. The Authors Guild provided a loan to help me complete the manuscript by relieving some financial anxieties. And thanks to Nicole Potter-Talling, an acquisitions editor who took a chance on a new angle on film studies.

I am grateful for the help of Professor Jeff Jaeckle, whose paper on spoof films, Allow Myself to Introduce Myself (an Austin Powers line), led to his uncommonly generous sharing of references for critical theory on the spoof subgenre. Professor Emeritus Jim Welsh always communicates support and has been unusually creative in looking at genre, and film, in pioneering ways. The enterprising Ruth Benedict of Syracuse Universitys Office of Development was the first to connect me with a master documentary filmmaker, Al Maysles, a graduate of Syracuse.

Of course, I am most indebted to those documentary filmmakers who gave me their time and thoughts; especially those who straightened me out on a number of misconceptions I had about their own work, and the documentary form as well. Those gentle, if occasionally pointed, instructors were Albert Maysles, Henry Corra, Aviva Slesin, Mark Wexler, to mention just a few.

And a brief disclaimer. It is bound to come up that I did not treat or interview D.A. Pennebaker, a major documentary filmmaker living in New York City. I have no reason to offer, just as I have no good answer to give to those who might complain that their favorite filmmaker has not been given space. This has already come up a few times socially, as in, You mean you didnt talk to X? She/he started the whole thing. On the plus side, to me this just shows how incredibly important the doc form has become to our time, when people have such passionate opinions about it.

May, 2008

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