How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary
By ROBERT S. BOYNTON
Published: July 11, 2004
The offices of Robert Greenwald Productions occupy a
slightly rundown, horseshoe-shaped building in Los
Angeles, just down the street from Culver Studios, the
legendary movie facility where ''Gone With the Wind''
and ''Citizen Kane'' were filmed. Back in the day, the
R.G.P. building, then a motel, was used by studio
executives for liaisons with starlets and mistresses.
Though no longer a Hollywood love nest, it still has a
whiff of the illicit about it -- and still operates in
the shadow of several corporate studios.
Robert Greenwald, a 58-year-old film producer and
director with a number of commercially respectable
B-list movies under his belt, has always tried to
imbue his work with a left-leaning political
sensibility. R.G.P. has been involved in the making of
some 50 movies, including ''Steal This Movie,'' a 2000
film based on the life of the radical activist (and
Greenwald's friend) Abbie Hoffman, and ''Crooked E,''
a satirical TV movie about Enron's collapse that CBS
broadcast last year. Greenwald is presumably the only
director in Hollywood to adorn his workspace with a
quotation from Walt Whitman's ''Leaves of Grass'':
''The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves
and horrify despots.''
One morning in late May, I visited Greenwald at his
studio to watch the making of his latest documentary,
''Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism,''
which will have its premiere this Tuesday at the New
School University in New York. Over the past couple of
years, Greenwald has developed a ''guerrilla'' method
of documentary filmmaking, creating timely political
films on short schedules and small budgets and then
promoting and selling them on DVD through partnerships
with grass-roots political organizations like
MoveOn.org. The process, in addition to being swift,
allows him to avoid the problems of risk-averse
studios and finicky distributors. His 2003 film
''Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War,'' a
documentary that was critical of the Bush
administration's drive to war, took only four and a
half months from conception to completion, coming out
on DVD last November as public doubts about the war
began to grow.
''Outfoxed'' has been made in secret. The film is an
obsessively researched expose of the ways in which Fox
News, as Greenwald sees it, distorts its coverage to
serve the conservative political agenda of its owner,
the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. It features
interviews with former Fox employees, leaked policy
memos written by Fox executives and extensive footage
from Fox News, which Greenwald is using without the
network's permission. The result is an unwavering
argument against Fox News that combines the leftist
partisan vigor of a Michael Moore film with the sober
tone and delivery of a PBS special. A large portion of
the film's $300,000 budget came in the form of
contributions in the range of $80,000 from both MoveOn
and the Center for American Progress, the liberal
policy organization founded by John Podesta, the
former chief of staff for Bill Clinton; Greenwald, who
is not looking to earn any money from the project,
provided the rest.
A week after its New School premiere, the film will be
shown throughout the country in hundreds of small
local screenings, arranged by MoveOn, where people
will be able to watch and discuss it. Though the
existence of ''Outfoxed'' has been quietly publicized,
its particular nature and content have been closely
guarded for fear, Greenwald says, that Fox would try
to stop the film's release by filing a
copyright-infringement lawsuit. Nobody has ever made a
critical documentary about a media company that uses
as much footage without permission as Greenwald has,
and the legal precedents governing the ''fair use'' of
such material, while theoretically strong, are not
well established in case law. He has retained the
services of several intellectual-property lawyers and
experts to help him navigate the ambiguous legal
terrain. (A Fox News representative, in response to
several phone calls, said that no one in the legal
department was available to comment on copyright
issues.)
If Greenwald is lucky, Fox will be gun-shy, having
earned nothing but public chiding when it brought a
trademark lawsuit last year against Al Franken, whose
book ''Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair
and Balanced Look at the Right'' ironically
appropriated Fox News's signature phrase ''fair and
balanced.'' (The judge dismissed the suit as ''wholly
without merit.'') But if Fox does sue, the fate of
Greenwald's film is uncertain. Dennis Reiff, an
insurance broker who has helped underwrite legally
sensitive documentaries like Michael Moore's
''Fahrenheit 9/11'' and Morgan Spurlock's ''Super Size
Me,'' says that typically ''even the mere threat of a
lawsuit can stop a documentary in its tracks.''
Greenwald is optimistic but guarded. ''I want to make
a great film,'' he says. ''But I'd like to do so
without losing my house and spending the rest of my
life in court.''
visitor to Greenwald's office could be forgiven for
thinking that he had stumbled across a dot-com
startup. It is a 24-hour-a-day operation, crammed with
computers, monitors, cables, digital recorders,
DVD-burners and high-bandwidth Internet lines. One
morning when I arrived, a group of bleary-eyed
filmmakers were finishing up their night's work and
putting on a fresh pot of coffee for the day-shift
editors, who were just trickling in.
''Outfoxed'' was made in an unusually collaborative
fashion. In January, Greenwald rigged up a dozen DVD
recorders and programmed them to record Fox News 24
hours a day, seven days a week, for about six months.
After scrutinizing the initial footage, Greenwald and
a team of researchers compiled a list of what they saw
as Fox's telltale themes and techniques: stories
questioning the patriotism of liberals; relentlessly
upbeat reports on Iraq; belligerent hosts who scream
at noncompliant guests. Greenwald planned for the
list's categories eventually to become organizing
sections of the film. As he envisioned it, the film
clips grouped by theme, together with voice-overs and
commentary, would lay bare Fox's tactics, frame by
frame.
Once the list of categories was complete, Greenwald
asked MoveOn to round up 10 volunteers, each of whom
was assigned a particular time slot during the day to
monitor Fox, so that the network's news stories or
commentaries were under observation virtually 24 hours
a day. When a MoveOn volunteer would spot an example
of footage that fit one of Greenwald's categories, he
would note the date and precise time and send the
information in an e-mail message to Greenwald, who had
an assistant code it and transfer it to a spreadsheet.
By May, Greenwald had received enough examples to
construct a rough outline of the film. He then hired
five editors -- politically passionate filmmakers who
can command up to $1,000 a day for TV commercials and
movie trailers but who accepted $150 a day for the
chance to work on the project. In the evenings, two
editors would consult Greenwald's spreadsheets and
locate the flagged footage in his vast library of Fox
News segments. During the day, the three other editors
worked simultaneously on separate parts of the movie,
stitching together a coherent narrative from the Fox
clips as well as interviews that Greenwald conducted
with former Fox employees (some of them disguised to
protect their identities) and commentators like the
former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite and the liberal
media critics Mark Crispin Miller and Eric Alterman.
At the end of each day, the editors posted their work
on a secure Web site for Greenwald's review.
It is not exactly earth-shattering, of course, to
learn that Fox is more conservative than other news
networks. What ''Outfoxed'' does is detail the
specific ways, both onscreen and behind the scenes, in
which the network's conservatism shapes its news and
opinion programs. The most stinging blow that
''Outfoxed'' delivers to Fox's ''fair and balanced''
claim comes in a segment of the film on the daily
memos apparently sent to the entire Fox news operation
by John Moody, Fox News's senior vice president for
news and editorial. The memos, which Greenwald says
were provided by two unnamed employees at the network,
set the agenda for how events will be covered. One
memo, thought to have been circulated at Fox in April,
instructs employees how to report on the increasing
number of American fatalities in Iraq: ''Do not fall
into the easy trap of mourning the loss of U.S.
lives,'' it reads. Another memo outlines the approach
to covering the United States military's siege on
Falluja: ''It won't be long before some people start
to decry the use of 'excessive force,''' it says. ''We
won't be among that group.'' A third, on the 9/11
Commission, is equally firm: ''The fact that former
Clinton and both former and current Bush
administration officials are testifying gives it a
certain tension, but this is not 'what did he know and
when did he know it' stuff,'' it cautions. ''Do not
turn this into Watergate.''
Greenwald is pleased with the finished product. ''I
wanted to use Fox's own words and images to show
exactly what they do,'' he says. ''Fox is a
Republican, not merely a conservative, network.''
The walls and bookshelves of Greenwald's office
testify to his longstanding passion for liberal and
left-wing causes: a photo of Coretta Scott King; a
''Free Leonard Peltier'' poster; books by Robert
McChesney, the left-leaning media critic. Greenwald
got hooked on making documentaries in 2000, when two
filmmakers, Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler, came to
him with hundreds of hours of film they had shot
during the Florida recount. With his help, they
produced ''Unprecedented,'' a 2002 documentary about
how the Bush campaign prevailed in that contest.
Last year, Greenwald followed up that effort with
''Uncovered,'' his critique of the Bush
administration's case for war in Iraq, which featured
interviews with former intelligence analysts, weapons
inspectors and Foreign Service officers. Once the film
wrapped, Greenwald turned the traditional distribution
model on its head. Rather than taking the
time-consuming route of entering film festivals or
courting theater distributors, he sold the DVD of
''Uncovered'' through the Web sites of various
left-liberal organizations: MoveOn, The Nation
magazine, the Center for American Progress and the
alternative-news Web sites AlterNet and BuzzFlash.
After about 23,000 orders in the first two days, the
courtyard of the R.G.P. building was filled with
stacks of DVD's waiting to be mailed out. When the
number of orders hit 100,000, Greenwald enlisted a
commercial distributor, which sold an additional
20,000 copies.
The populist MoveOn and the more centrist Center for
American Progress collaborated with Greenwald on
''Uncovered.'' Both sensed that film was becoming an
important medium for disseminating their anti-Bush,
antiwar messages -- different though the
organization's politics are -- and both provided
financial support and helped spread the word. Podesta
says that this kind of multimedia, multiorganization
project is an effective way of reaching a younger
demographic, which policy groups traditionally have
difficulty courting. ''Given the choice between
sponsoring a policy book that nobody reads and a
documentary that sells 100,000 copies and is seen all
over the country,'' he says, ''I'll opt for the
latter.'' In the first half of what Greenwald calls
his ''upstairs-downstairs'' distribution model,
Podesta saw to it that every member of the United
States Senate and House of Representatives was invited
to a screening of ''Uncovered''; the Center for
American Progress also sponsored additional screenings
at other elite institutions in Washington and
Cambridge, Mass.
Meanwhile, ''downstairs,'' MoveOn alerted its 2.2
million members to the film and sponsored about 2,600
''house parties'' on the night that ''Uncovered'' was
released. From Anchorage to Boston, people plugged
their ZIP code into MoveOn's Web site, located the
nearest party and watched and discussed the film with
a few dozen of their fellow citizens.
Lawrence Konner, a screenwriter and producer whose
production company, the Documentary Campaign, made
''Persons of Interest,'' a film about Muslim detainees
in the United States, says that ''Uncovered''
''demonstrated to the rest of us that there was a new
way of marketing a documentary.'' The film's
grass-roots success attracted a distributor, Cinema
Libre, which took it to Cannes and sold it all over
the world. A new version with additional material is
scheduled for theatrical release in the United States
on Aug. 13.
Greenwald's office is now a veritable
progressive-documentary incubator: future projects
include a brief film for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and
''Unconstitutional,'' a movie about post-9/11 civil
liberties violations that is supported by the A.C.L.U.
Some in the entertainment industry argue that the
collaboration between Greenwald and his political
partners promises a new paradigm -- one in which
Hollywood entertainers contribute their skills to a
political cause rather than just their cash and
left-leaning pieties. ''It used to be that the only
time political people came to Hollywood was to go to
parties and raise money,'' says Julie Bergman Sender,
who has produced films like ''G.I. Jane'' and made
short issue-advocacy films for political groups like
America Coming Together, the grass-roots organization
backed by George Soros. ''But now we're showing them
that we can do more than write checks.''
Jim Gilliam, a 26-year-old former dot-com executive
and a producer of ''Outfoxed,'' is enthusiastic about
the way Greenwald's projects meld grass-roots politics
with the culture of the Internet. He predicts a future
-- augured by events like MoveOn's competition for the
best 30-second anti-Bush advertisement -- in which
young political filmmakers will be as likely to wield
a camera phone as a digital camera. ''It won't be long
before people will be shooting and editing short
documentaries that they'll stream from their blogs,''
he says. If the Internet, as media critics like Jon
Katz have suggested, has resuscitated the fiery
journalistic spirit of Thomas Paine, guerrilla
documentaries offer to put that polemical attitude in
the director's chair.
wo weeks before production for ''Outfoxed'' had to
lock so that it would be ready for its July 13
premiere, the atmosphere at the meeting in Greenwald's
office was somewhat giddy, the staff burned out from
late nights and seven-day workweeks. Greenwald
lightened the mood by passing out ''Faux News
Channel'' T-shirts (''We Distort, You Comply'') that
were sent to him by someone who wants to distribute
''Outfoxed.'' Good news came over the speakerphone
from a woman clearing rights for the movie: Eric
Clapton had granted permission to use ''Layla'' at no
charge -- his generosity said to be inspired by his
dislike of Rupert Murdoch. (Don Henley, no stranger to
liberal causes, has granted permission for ''Dirty
Laundry'' to accompany a sequence in the film on the
birth of Fox News.)
''O.K., we have only 16 days, so what's left?''
Greenwald asked. It turned out to be a lot. Sound
editing, color correction, mixing. Video was still
being downloaded as the editors looked for material to
fill narrative gaps in the film; many segments were
still in rough shape. Then there was the fact that
several major news organizations were unexpectedly
refusing to license their clips. (Such licensing is
ordinarily pro forma.) CBS wouldn't sell Greenwald the
clip of Richard Clarke's appearance on ''60 Minutes,''
explaining that it didn't want to be associated with a
controversial documentary about Murdoch. WGBH, the
Boston PBS station, wouldn't let Greenwald use
excerpts from ''Frontline'' for fear of looking too
''political,'' it said.
Greenwald argues that this represents precisely the
kind of corporate control of public information that
he and his legal team want to challenge by
strengthening the right to fair use -- the legal
principle that allows you to use copyrighted material
without permission for purposes of commentary,
criticism or parody. Despite the principle's
self-evident logic -- consider the impossible position
of a critic forbidden to quote from the book he is
reviewing -- it is murky in practice, and nowhere more
so than in film. Part of the problem is that while a
fair-use claim might stand a good chance of prevailing
in court, as a practical matter the high costs of
litigation force most filmmakers to simply remove the
material in question.
The legal strategy for ''Outfoxed'' was still being
devised by Greenwald's legal team, which includes the
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and Chris
Sprigman, a fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for
Internet and Society. Lessig and Sprigman were
deciding whether it would be most advantageous to go
through the motions of asking Fox for permission
(which it would very likely refuse), to release the
film and wait to see whether Fox would sue or to ask a
judge to rule on their claims right away by issuing a
so-called declaratory judgment.
Glancing around the office, Greenwald took in the news
of the various permission setbacks and other loose
ends with a weary look. He made it clear to the staff
that they would all be working on Memorial Day, and
every day after that until June 21, when the film
locked. ''Let's just go out there and make the perfect
movie,'' he said as he sent the team back to their
editing docks, ''and we'll figure out what we'll
actually be able to use later on.''
Robert S. Boynton, director of the graduate magazine
journalism program at New York University, is writing
a book about American literary journalism.
