Academy’s Latest Film Stir-Fry

Funny . . . but Alan and Susan Raymond, filmmakers for 20 years, never thought of themselves as unknown or obscure, even by Hollywood terms, yet those words were used by some media and film figures when nominations for Academy Awards in the documentary feature category were announced recently.

The husband-wife team who made “Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House” has been in the trenches since making the watershed documentary “An American Family” in 1973, the first of two about the Loud family of Santa Barbara. Their films win prizes at almost every festival they enter. And the first time they entered the big one, the Academy Awards, they got a nod.

Yet some dare call them unknown.

Funny . . . Venice filmmakers Vince DiPersio and William Guttentag never thought of themselves as unknowns, certainly not at ABC News and HBO where their credited work appears. They’ve earned previous Academy Award nominations along with one for this year’s documentary feature “Death on the Job.” Ditto for Lawrence Hott and Diane Garey, filmmakers since the early ‘80s, both second-time nominees for an Oscar, this time for their documentary, “Wild by Law,” and both members of the acclaimed film consortium that includes “Civil War’s” Ken Burns. And ditto for Irving Saraf of San Francisco’s Light-Saraf Films, a filmmaker for 17 years and a former 10-year executive with the Saul Zaentz organization whose “In the Shadow of the Stars” last month received an academy nomination.

Unknown? Obscure?

It’s been that kind of month for the Academy Awards folks, with more post-facto passions generated over who and what were left out than who and what got in.

Barbra Streisand. Not.

Madonna, Robert Redford, Michael Apted, Eleanor Coppola, Jennie Livingston, Errol Morris. Not.

While the Streisand matter tells us something about smear and loathing in Hollywood, there is something more than sour grapes and bad apples in the continuing stir-fry over the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the way its documentary category is managed. Among the recent, libel-free charges:

* The academy shuns commercially successful documentaries.

* The academy procedure is out of touch, flawed and outmoded.

* The academy rewards unknowns.

The complaints about the way the academy nominates documentary makers are much more than losers weeping. This year, certain documentaries attracted stronger than usual box-office business, led by the Madonna film, “Truth or Dare.” But more dollars might have been realized with a blessing from the academy. Nominations for any of the three films handled by Miramax Films, for example, could have meant unrealized new wealth--more tickets sold for the still-running “Paris Is Burning,” which so far has grossed a surprising $4 million; more video sales for Madonna’s feature, and more to brag about when Robert Redford’s “Incident at Oglala” is released this May.

It’s not an industry surprise that some of those leading the charge against the academy nominations came from the Miramax Films corner, including its former executive Mark Lipsky, now a public relations counselor, who had guided the release of “Paris Is Burning” through Miramax’s Prestige arm and who called this year’s nominations “the biggest scandal of the Oscars.”

The current hassle may not be so much art versus commerce as much as whose art, whose commerce?

This week Miramax officials, in a letter to academy executive director Bruce Davis, called for certain changes in the documentary category:

* Get rid of the “negative connotations” of the documentary name and call the category best nonfiction film.

* Enlarge the number of judges from 60 to 200.

* Judge films on technique as well as subject.

* Send films made for television to the television academy.

Answers of another sort might come Saturday night when the Directors Guild of America hands out an award to one of four nominated films in the Documentary/Actuality category, for the first time open to non-DGA members and to feature filmmakers along with TV directors. The academy-nominated “Doing Time” by the Raymonds will be judged again along with the academy rejectee “Hearts of Darkness” by Eleanor Coppola, Fax Bahr, and George Hickenlooper. Also in contention are Peter Gelb’s “Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia” and Barbara Kopple’s 1991 Academy Award winner, “American Dream,” which interestingly enough, Miramax will release to theaters this month.

On the same night, another equally noted academy rejectee, Streisand, will again be up for an honor.

The ironic part of the documentary dust-off is that when the losers went to the rooftops with their complaints they grabbed most of the media’s attention, leaving the five winners at their moment of supreme cinematic ecstasy right where they could generally be found--behind their cameras and worrying where their next grant, license fee or loan would come from.

“It’s an apples and oranges issue--a phantom issue,” says Alan Raymond, referring to charges that the academy fails to recognize films with commercial box-office appeal. “Films qualify and get nominated on their own merit, not because they are a musical entertainment that used documentary techniques. Sure, we want large audiences to see our work, that’s why most of our work is for television. That’s where most of the major documentary work is being done now. Almost all of this year’s academy nominees had some connection with television. So did ‘Hearts of Darkness,’ which was backed by Showtime.

“We find many more people are dabbling in documentaries now. But just because you’re a celebrity or a movie star or related to one doesn’t give you special rights over other filmmakers. Competitions anywhere are contests of equals, judged by many people in a difficult process.”

The Raymonds, as they have for the past 20 years, finance, control, own and produce all of their documentaries, working out of their Berkshires Video Verite facility. Alan does the photography and editing, Susan the directing and interviewing. When it came to “Doing Time,” shot in five weeks at the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., Alan had to do all the inside work.

“We look for important subjects,” he says. “Issues. When you have 1 million Americans in prison, that becomes a topic for a documentary like ‘Doing Time.’ The United States leads the world in imprisoned populations. South Africa is second. The former Soviet Union is third.

“The joke among documentary makers is that you worry that you’ll never get your next film and then when you do you think it’s your last.”

The Raymonds do have their next film completed, on an inner-city elementary school in Philadelphia. Their impressive library of work, in addition to the two “American Family” films, includes the Peabody-winning “The Police Tapes” (forerunner of the film “Fort Apache, The Bronx” and the TV series “Hill Street Blues”). They also have a music documentary to their credit, “Elvis ‘56,” which has sold 300,000 videos.

The one-hour “Doing Time” was their toughest film to make. They say they were physically threatened by inmates during the filmmaking and by federal prison officials afterward who, the Raymonds note, strongly hinted that their tax reports would be audited if demands to view the film before public screenings were not met.

“We must have done something right,” Alan Raymond says.

A sense of doing right seems to run through documentary nominees, for without a serious, topical subject, underwriters are hard to find. Guttentag and DiPersio, whose Half-Court Pictures Ltd. made the nominated “Death on the Job,” produce free-lance news features for ABC, including a special report for Peter Jennings on Chile that will be broadcast this spring, in addition to HBO documentary features. Guttentag has had three of his films nominated for Academy Awards, two through Half-Court.

DiPersio calls the current flap over the nominations “a tempest in a teapot. It’s one thing to question the process,” he says. “It’s a bitch to say, ‘Who are these people?’ ”

Only one of the nominees might qualify for “unknown” status. That’s Hana Kohav Beller, whose first and only documentary received an academy nomination. “The Restless Conscience” is a study of anti-Nazi resistance from 1933 to 1944. The German-born filmmaker spent nine years on the work, gaining her first grant only two years ago, enabling her to complete the project and to have it shown in a number of theaters in the United States, Germany and Israel.

This weekend and the next two, going right through the March 30 Academy Award ceremonies, the five nominated films will be shown at various times at the Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica.

When the academy’s documentary committee does its work, it uses a rating scale of 4 through 10 with 4 the basement.

You might want to rate them yourself. You know, judge or dare.