Interview with Brett Smith, Creator of 9/11 Movie ‘Hypothesis’
Brett Smith. Photo: Brett Smith
This is an exclusive Media Roots Radio interview with Utah based documentarian Brett Smith, conducted by Abby and Robbie Martin on February 23, 2011. In 2006, Brett’s love of films drew him into taking a film class where he was required to make a 15 minute short. That 15 minute short later turned into 40 minute documentary called Hypothesis.
Hypothesis is a documentary that follows physics professor Steven E. Jones during a pivotal time in his life. In 2005, Jones went public with a theory about 9/11 that was so controversial, it resulted in everything from hate mail, threats, and even bribery to try to end his research. Despite the outside pressures, Jones vowed to never give up on his pursuit of the truth.
Interview with Filmmaker Brett Smith, Creator of Hypothesis by Media Roots
The above timeline is interactive. Scroll through it to find out more about the show’s music…
‘The Cove’ Sent To Every Household In Japanese Fishing Village
MNN reports:
This time last year, producers of the “The Cove” were riding high after winning Best Documentary at the 2010 Academy Awards.
Directed by Louie Psihoyos and produced by Fisher Stevens and Paula DuPre Pesmen, the film shed dramatic light on the thousands of dolphins slaughtered each year in the Japanese fishing town of Taiji. “It has the breathless pace of a Bourne movie, but none of the comfort of fiction. This is documentary filmmaking at its most exciting and purposeful,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers in a review.
This past weekend, residents of Taiji were able to give their own verdicts after a local activist group, called People Concerned for the Ocean, delivered a Japanese-dubbed copy of the film to each home…
Oscar Winner Slams Wall Street In Acceptance Speech (Video)
Respect for Inside Job director Charles Ferguson for delaying the usual thanks to everyone he knows to say this:
“Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.”
A Quick Journey Through 1970s Apocalypticism
Paleofuture Blog, which look at predictions and visions of the future as previous generations imagined it, has a video feature examining the colorful weirdness of apocalyptic doom-and-gloom in the 1970s. In that decade, frightening documentaries such as Future Shock and The Late Great Planet Earth caught the zeitgeist by foretelling the fast-approaching destruction of humanity at the hands of overpopulation, dehumanizing technology, Communism, ancient prophecies, and natural devastation. Viewing these works today, they are a reminder that the world probably isn’t going to end, and we’ll make it through to tomorrow.
Major Energy Interests Linked To Attacks On ‘Gasland’ Film
I had a chance to attend a screening of Gasland last year. It is an eye-opening film which exposes the severe dangers fracking presents to the environment and the public. Naturally, any controversial documentary is bound to make a few enemies. MNN reports:
Josh Fox, the director of the Academy Award nominated documentary Gasland isn’t surprised at the recent reports that oil and natural gas front groups are behind campaigns aimed at discrediting him and his film.
On Thursday, Brendan DeMelle reported on Desmogblog.com and the Huffington Post that a memo had surfaced linking the group Energy in Depth with oil and natural gas interests. In recent months Energy in Depth has been at the center of criticism aimed at not only Gasland, but also reporters at ProPublica and the Associated Press following stories that reflected negatively on the hydraulic fracturing industry. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as it has become known, is a process where chemicals are injected deep into the ground at a high pressure to get to natural gas reserves.
Detroit Globalized
Being from the Lansing and Detroit, Michigan area, it’s so heartbreaking visiting my former home state now. The state feels empty; the GM Oldsmobile factories that I drove past all the time have been flattened. Sad.
Detroit Globalized is a documentary explaining the effects that globalization has had on Detroit, MI.
Cyberpunk on the Small Screen (Video)
Good day, Cybernauts. We’ve been enjoying this endearing flick for some time, but are just now getting around to posting about it.
Cyberpunk is a 60-minute documentary from 1990 that serves as a charming bookend to the William Gibson documentary No Maps for These Territories. While Gibson is featured prominently in this doc, it also expands out to illuminate an entire slice of the late ’80s/early ’90s culture that used to be featured in the late, great Mondo 2000 magazine.
Cyberpunk Review offers these insights:
Cyberpunk is a documentary that looks back at the 80s cyberpunk movement, and more specifically, how this has led to a trend in the “real” world where people were starting to refer to themselves as “cyberpunk.” The documentary sees “cyberpunks” as being synonymous with hackers. A number of writers, artists, musicians and scientists are interviewed to provide context to this movement. The guiding meme, as told by Gibson, is that information “wants” to be free. 60s counter-culture drug philosopher, Timothy Leary, provides a prediction that cyberpunks will “decentralize knowledge,” which will serve to remove power from those “in power” and bring it back to the masses. Many different potential technologies are discussed, including “smart drugs,” sentient machines, advanced prosthetics — all of which serve to give context to the idea of post-humanity and its imminent arrival on the world stage.
WikiRebels: The WikiLeaks Documentary (Video)
Could Swedish public service TV network SVT’s new documentary film about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have been released at a more timely moment? It’s bang up to date and for anyone intrigued by Assange and co., essential viewing. Thanks to tipster Ken V, who correctly describes the film as “thorough and very informative.”
Who’s Afraid Of ‘Gasland’?
Who could possibly want to squelch the anti-fracking movie Gasland? Hmmm, let me think …. while considering this story from SFGate (submitted by ‘Rainer’ – thanks!):
Actor Mark Ruffalo has been placed on a terror advisory list by U.S. officials after organizing screenings for a new documentary about natural gas drilling.
The “Zodiac” actor arranged showings for “GasLand” earlier this year and voiced his concerns about the practice in relation to the national water supplies…
The Rent Is Too Damn High – The Movie
The filmmakers of Damn!, the Jimmy McMillan movie, stopped by the disinformation offices this week to screen some of their footage. We’re believers, and so is Movieline:
Remember Jimmy McMillan? Of course you do! The New York state gubernatorial candidate from “The Rent is Too Damn High” party was all the rage back in late October, when his crazy debate antics led to viral videos, Saturday Night Live impersonations and the other accouterments that come with 15 minutes of fame. Like a documentary.
That’s right: McMillan and his aggressive facial hair are probably coming to a content delivery system near you. Thanks to 91 intrepid investors, filmmakers Aaron Fisher-Cohen and Kristian Almgren received just enough funding…
So You Think You Can Laugh? ‘Laughology’ Inspires First-Ever Laughter Championship
Contestants and their fans will converge in Montreal on October 27, 2010 for the first ever laughter competition — Le Grand Championnat de Rire de Montreal. Comedy contests are common, however this will be the world’s first televised laughing contest. The contest was inspired by my documentary Laughology, currently distributed by The Disinformation Company, in which I demonstrate that people can laugh spontaneously by using various “active laughter” techniques.
Contestants across Quebec will compete in diabolical laughter competitions, contagious laughter face-offs, and competitive laughter duels to see who will be crowned the “Best Laugher in Quebec.” The show is a pilot for an eventual international laughter competition to demonstrate that laughter could itself be a competitive sport.
The Championnat is a based on the revolutionary concept that because laughter is contagious: laughing makes people laugh. It involves games designed to produce natural contagious laughter. The whole event is also being filmed for Rire Extreme, a documentary for CANAL D. I got the idea for my documentary Laughology after meeting Doug Collins, an American who is said to have the most contagious laugh in the world:
I believe that because of Quebec’s tradition of Joie de Vivre and Quebec may have laughers who are as good or better than Collins. This summer Laughter contests where held at major Quebec festivals, including le Festival du Grand Rire in Quebec, The Western Festival of St. Tite and le Festival de Poutine du Drummonville. The winners of those contests have been invited to the Championnat which takes place at in Montreal in a special ring.
We really found some extraordinary laughers. I’m afraid to imagine what happens when we get them all in the same room. I hope that the idea of a laughter competition is to spread the positive, healthy emotions of laughter. And I’m trying to prove that laughter could be a competitive sport.
Contestants are coming from around Quebec however, we have left one spot open for one last great laugher. Auditions will be held on Oct 27th at Salla Rossa at 5 p.m. Please email hey@laughology.info. to be put on the list.
Waiting For Superman: Good Luck, Going to Public School, Kids Today! (Parents Take Notice.)
As a product of the public school system in the Great State of New York, this film is well overdue. Everyone, please watch this.
If you attended public school in any state in the U.S. I think you know what I mean.
And if you have kids, please, at least watch at least a minute into this trailer. You will realize the filmmaker’s intent.
The public school education system is BROKEN …. if you’re working within it, please speak out and join the effort to reform it. I knew something wasn’t right as a child in the system, but what the hell do kids really know? Time to make a change,
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward
Peter Joseph has created another sequel to the ever-popular Zeitgeist. Entitled Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, the movie will be released in 60+ countries and in 20+ languages starting January 15th 2011. Here’s the official description:
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, by director Peter Joseph, is a feature length documentary work which will present a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society. This subject matter will transcend the issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and move to relate the core, empirical “life ground” attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a “Resource-Based Economy”.
Lunch Line: The School Lunch Debate
LUNCH LINE reframes the school lunch debate through an examination of the program’s surprising past, present, and possible future.
Senators, Secretaries of Agriculture, entrepreneurs, and activists from all sides of the hunger and school lunch reform debates add top-down perspective to a bottom-up film about the American political process, its future health and welfare, and the realities of feeding more than 31 million children a day.
Pirate Radio Cranks Up the Volume for Documentary
Via Joe Nolan’s Insomnia:
Hello friends. This weekend I discovered an entertaining and eye-opening pirate radio documentary online: Pirate Radio USA.
Given the post-Clinton legalization of media monopolies, the subject of pirate radio has once again become a hot-button topic. Pirate radio broadcasters use homemade technologies to take over radio frequencies, broadcasting without licenses, outside of FCC rules and regulations.
Pirate radio has become a form of civil disobedience. The various subjects of the documentary fight directly against the corporate media by simply “stealing” FM bandwidth to broadcast their radical, rocking messages. Of course, the irony is that the airwaves above the United States are owned exclusively by the public.
How can you steal what you already own?
Joy Division Documentary Now Online
Last night I discovered a documentary about the band Joy Division. In a recent post about the post-punk chronicle Totally Wired, I mentioned the films 24-Hour Party People and Control. Both movies cover the rise and fall of Joy Division and their troubled leader Ian Curtis. While both films have their virtues, it seems the strange tale of Joy Division is best met head on, and this exhaustive doc does the trick.
(Joy Division cover the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray”.)
My Trip to Al-Qaeda: Q & A with Journalist Lawrence Wright
I didn’t see the theatrical adaption of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (which is the most informative book I have ever read about 9/11) so I am looking forward to checking about this documentary. From the Economist’s Prospero column:
Lawrence Wright spent five years conducting hundreds of interviews in at least ten countries in order to write “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11”. The book, a best-selling history about Islamic fundamentalism, weaves the stories of terrorists, intelligence officers and government officials in a remarkable narrative that helps to explain both the cult of Osama bin Laden and the flaws in American intelligence that let him get away with murder.
“When I finished my book,” Mr Wright said in an interview with Prospero, “I had countless people asking me ‘What were they like?’ and ‘How did it affect you?’” He ultimately answered these questions in his one-man play, “My Trip to al-Qaeda”, a gripping personal account of the people he met and what it all felt like. On September 7th HBO will premiere Alex Gibney’s elegant screen adaptation, which mixes theatrical footage with more photographs and videos to help tell Mr Wright’s story about the lure of radicalism in the Islamic world.
Psywar: The Real Battlefield is the Mind (Video)
Via American Pendulum:
Psywar: The Real Battlefield is the Mind explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the “elitist theory of democracy” and the relationship between war, propaganda and class.
Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Peter Phillips (“Project Censored”), John Stauber (“PR Watch”), Christopher Simpson (“The Science of Coercion”).
No “Home Sweet Home” Five Years After Katrina
Matt Pascarella and I encountered Patricia Thomas while she was breaking into a home at the Lafitte Housing Project in New Orleans. It was her own home. Nevertheless, if caught, she’d end up in the slammer. So would we. Matt was my producer for the film, Big Easy to Big Empty, and he encouraged my worst habits. I’d worked for the New Orleans Housing Authority years back and knew they wanted the poor black folk out of these pretty townhouses near the French Quarter. Katrina was an excuse for ethnic cleansing, American style. Matt and I skipped cuffs on this shoot, but were charged later by Homeland Security (see below). While I recorded the story of hidden evils on film, Matt gathered a story which no camera can capture. Here it is. — Greg Palast
Before There Was Oil, There Was Water: Harry Shearer’s ‘The Big Uneasy’ (Video)
Here’s Harry Shearer (of Spinal Tap and Simpsons fame) being interviewed by Michael Smerconish about his new documentary The Big Uneasy on Hardball with Chris Matthews below. Here’s a bit about the documentary:
Almost five years ago, a disaster struck New Orleans. The media said it was a natural disaster primarily affecting poor black people. On both counts, the media was wrong.
In The Big Uneasy, humorist and New Orleans resident Harry Shearer gets the inside story of a disaster that could have been prevented from the people who were there. As we approach the fifth anniversary of the flooding of New Orleans, Shearer speaks to the investigators who poked through the muck as the water receded and a whistleblower from the Army Corps of Engineers, revealing that some of the same flawed methods responsible for the levee failure during Katrina are being used to rebuild the system expected to protect the new New Orleans from future peril.
