Bookwars
Encyclopedia
BookWars is an award-winning documentary
produced by Camerado
, about the life and times of New York City
street booksellers. Made on an ultra-low budget in a jazzy, impressionistic style reminiscent of the films of Robert Frank
and poetry of the Beat Generation
, BookWars is the only first-person documentary made during then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
's controversial "Quality of Life" campaign, which sought to limit and control individuals engaged in informal economic activities on the streets of New York City.
BookWars was released in June 2000, winning the Best Documentary Award at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival
IndieWire and premiering theatrically at New York's Cinema Village http://www.cinemavillage.com/chc/cv/. Despite its minuscule budget (estimated at $10,000, prerelease) BookWars enjoyed numerous domestic and international TV sales and has to date generated revenue of several hundred thousand dollars.
The movie is currently available on DVD, VOD, VCD (Asia), digital download, theatrical film prints, and other formats.
which is told in an unconventional, narrative style. The film opens with the narrator (who is also the film's director) driving out West along a desert highway, relating to the audience his previous experiences as a streetside bookseller in New York City
. The entire documentary – including the central events involving his experiences among the street booksellers in New York – is thus "told" as a long conversation on a cross-country roadtrip out West.
The narrator describes his post-graduation years in New York, and how he ended up at one point virtually penniless. Driven by a desperate need to pay the rent, he resorts to wheeling his own books out to the street to try to sell them. He reveals that he was not only successful in making a significant amount of cash on that first day, but he has also met a variety of interesting and strange characters of the streets of New York – including other street booksellers.
A motley assortment of street booksellers on West 4th street, in Greenwich Village
, New York City, are first introduced. Among them: “Slick” Rick Sherman, a semi-professional magician; Al Mappo, so named because he only sells maps and atlases; Emil, who says only he "escaped”, though we do not know from where; and Pete Whitney: King of the booksellers, toad collector, and collage artist.
BookWars next introduces another group of street booksellers who hawk their trade on nearby 6th Avenue. Mainly black and minority individuals, they ply books and magazines in parallel fashion to the nearby West 4th street booksellers, who are primarily white. The booksellers on 6th Avenue suffer greater exposure to the law, with many claiming this to be due to racial profiling
.
Some of the significant personalities that are introduced on 6th Avenue include: Marvin, always wearing his trademark black hat; and Ron, from Jamaica – charismatic, streetwise and outspoken.
After the introduction of the primary characters (including the narrator bookseller himself), BookWars discusses, mainly through informal testimony, the various aspects of the street bookseller’s life in chapter-by-chapter fashion.
The tools and tricks of the street bookseller's trade are revealed: ways and techniques to maximize income; how to deal with difficult, and sometimes dangerous customers; where and how to get more books; how the booksellers have a right to distribute literature (commercially or otherwise) in public, as per the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
; and so on.
BookWars is structured as a “year in the life” style movie, although it was actually produced over several seasons, from 1995 to 1999. When Winter comes, and the streets are too snow-filled and cold to hawk books, the booksellers are shown in their various off-season modes and occupations. “Slick” Rick performs card and magic tricks at parties; Pete Whitney grooms cats for old ladies; and the narrator heads out to New Mexico to work on a Western
*.
(*Which was actually the movie The Desperate Trail IMDB)
Marv and Ron, however, continue to sell books throughout the winter on busy 6th Avenue, and the film follows them as they scour for books and pornographic magazines in the trash in Soho.
Finally, Spring comes, and the booksellers emerge from their off-season to sell books as usual for another season – or so they think. BookWars proceeds to reveal the street-level effects of then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s controversial “Quality of Life
” campaign, which sought to remove informal, unregistered entrepreneurs and other individuals from the streets of New York City.
The NYPD http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/home/home.shtml begins to enforce obscure technicalities which govern the uses and dimensions of the sidewalks, thereby making it more difficult to earn a livelihood. A new tax identification number requirement is introduced, creating bureaucratic obstacles, especially for those street booksellers who are marginal or virtually homeless. Nearby New York University
unlawfully places imposing, massive planters on the sidewalk in an attempt to drive the street booksellers away; and finally, especially on 6th Avenue where the majority of black street booksellers are active, the NYPD comes to haul away books.
The street booksellers resist and assemble to form an unlikely common front to protest against the actions of the city. Others, who have had their books confiscated, wait for hours at the police station to get them back. Still others, like Ron, rail against the futility of the city's efforts to stop New Yorkers from reading, because of their virtual addiction to books.
In the end, the street booksellers stand their ground against the Mayor, and are able to continue selling with minor adjustments to their way of life.
In the closing moments of BookWars, the narrator admits that after all the recent problems with the city, he has grown restless; he realizes that he wants to do something different, and wants to change his occupation at last. A single massive rainstorm is enough to convince him to give up his street bookselling activities.
He sells the last of his books off to his fellow street booksellers, and heads out West, on a cross-country road trip, with the audience in the passenger seat sharing the ride.
-winning New York-based documentary filmmaker Michel Negroponte, at Mr. Rosette’s sidewalk bookstand in 1995. Mr. Negroponte, who had previously directed numerous documentaries including Jupiter's Wifehttp://www.inbaseline.com/project.aspx?project_id=130310 and Space Coasthttp://www.inbaseline.com/project.aspx?project_id=69918, agreed to be a co-producer on the movie.
Mr. Rosette commenced to bring a video camera to the bookstand daily to document the sights and sounds of the city of New York as seen from the perspective of a sidewalk bookseller. Because this initial phase of shooting was funded completely out of pocket, BookWars was produced in a variety of film and video formats depending on whatever camera was available at the time. Formats included: Mini DV, Super 8 film, Regular 8 and Hi-8 video, and Super VHS. The aesthetic goals of immediacy and a natural, unobtrusive presence of the camera also demanded the use of small format film and video.
Initial shooting was financed by the sale of the various used and out-of-print books at the filmmaker's bookstand. As more books were sold, more film and video stock could be bought, and production would continue.
Following the initial stage of shooting in New York, the director drove from New York to New Mexico
where he had edited an earlier movie at a colleague's Albuquerque-based production studio. In New Mexico in 1996, the first assembly of the movie, called The Book Wars, was edited on a tape-to-tape analogue system; that rough assembly was screened for the first time in on Super Bowl Sunday
as part of an exhibition produced by Basement Films http://www.basementfilms.org of Albuquerque.
Given that desktop editing solutions were not widely used or available at the time - and were expensive to rent - the filmmaker next drove out to Los Angeles
with the assembly edit in hand, in order to attempt to secure access to one of the two primary nonlinear systems available at the time – an Avid
or Media 100
system.
While the filmmaker sought post-production equipment in Los Angeles, a San Francisco- based production company, S.A.I.D. Communications, viewed the assembly edit of BookWars and agreed to provide additional editing and production in order to complete the picture. Mr. Rosette subsequently departed Los Angeles for San Francisco, and commenced to work on editing the documentary there fulltime.
There was no up-front money to continue editing and still no funding, so the director worked a variety of jobs to sustain himself and production of the movie, working as a freelance film editor, voice-over artist, and an assortment of temporary and odd jobs.
A rough cut of BookWars was finally achieved in 1998. However, additional material was required to create a coherent feature edit. S.A.I.D Communications provided a camera on loan, and the director headed back to New York to spend time once again with his fellow booksellers to continue documenting their lives.
After this second stage of shooting in New York was complete, in 1998, the director returned to San Francisco to include the additional essential sequences in the final edit. While the filmmaker was away, however, S.A.I.D. had already commenced postproduction on another documentary called Live Nude Girls Unite, and the BookWars team had to defer to their the stripper-activist production colleagues.
The filmmaker had by now spent nearly three years in San Francisco, endeavoring to complete BookWars without having received any grants or external funding. A grant administrator from The Pacific Pioneer Fund explained that, while he considered BookWars to be a worthy and compelling project, he felt that the filmmaker “would have to be a genius to pull it off” (funding was denied).
At the same time, Beat writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti
of City Lights Bookstore
viewed the cut of BookWars, and applauded it as being “Anarchistic”.
Delays continued and post production paused while an online editing system in the San Francisco area was sought, unsuccessfully. Finally, co-producer Michel Negroponte contacted the filmmaker regarding an editing station that had become available in New York City; payment to the machine’s owners at Copacetic Pictures could be deferred until the movie was completed and sold.
The filmmaker thus drove back to New York to complete the final edit of the documentary. During this time, German-French broadcasting group Arte/ZDF
received the nearly-completed cut of the BookWars and committed to purchasing the hour-long broadcast version for airing, while providing an advance to enable completion of the final edit, mix, narration, and postproduction of the program. Shortly after announcing this key initial TV sale, The Playboy Foundation
and the Experimental TV Center subsequently awarded modest postproduction grants.
The work in progress of BookWars screened at the Independent Feature Project’s Independent Feature Film Market, while the nearly complete fine cut of BookWars screened at the New Filmmakers, New York series at Anthology Film Archives
in the Spring of 2000.
Several months later, the final theatrical version of Bookwars was completed. The movie had its world premiere at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival
, where it won the Best Documentary Award. Though the filmmaker was subsequently banned from the festival venue (Anthology Film Archives) due to over-zealous guerilla promotional activities, the BookWars nonetheless soon enjoyed a New York theatrical premiere at the Cinema Village Cinema Village Website, and went on to screen theatrically and air at numerous international and domestic channels and venues.
In total, production of BookWars had taken five years and 20,000 miles of driving across the USA to complete.
Primary influences in the making of the movie were the Beat classic film, Pull my Daisy
and other street-level compositions by filmmaker Robert Frank
and various works from the New American Cinema. The narration style was adopted from 1930-40’s American gangster and film noir
movies, and some Western
genre elements were included as well – particularly in the conceptual story component of a “man heading out West to start anew”.
BookWars veers stylistically from straight or journalistic documentaries through its use of creative devices. Slow motion is often employed, the narration is non-standard, the movie follows a distinct narrative structure, and dream sequences are utilized. Often, the subjects of the documentary take over as camera operators and record themselves and their surroundings at will.
Original soundtrack elements were provided by swamp-blues practitioner, Little Muddy http://www.littlemuddy.com, while pre-recorded compositions by legendary Jazz players, Willis Jackson and Jack McDuff
were licensed from the 32 Jazz http://www.allaboutjazz.com/articles/a0999_01.htm label.
(Japan), SVT (Sweden) Sveriges Television
, PBS, (US), Metrochannels (US) MSG Metro Channels
, Book Television (Canada), Arte/ZDF Arte
(France and Germany), The Florida Film Festival
, The Kansas City Film Jubilee http://kcjubilee.org, Facets http://www.facets.org/, the Museum of Modern Art
(New York) http://www.moma.org, the Danish National Film Institute http://www.dfi.dk/, Brotfabrik (Berlin) http://www.exberliner.net/culture/brotfabrik, the 911 Media Arts Center
http://www.911media.org in Seattle, amongst others.
The feature version also pioneered internet releases when they were still uncommon (in 2001), streaming on a pay per view basis on the Cinemapop media portal.
. The movie was also nominated for an IFP Gotham Award.
Ultimately, most of the street booksellers appearing in the movie – as well as those not appearing - welcomed it as an agreeable depiction of their lives, and several street booksellers to this day continue to keep copies of the film on their sidewalk bookstands as a grass-roots, participatory distribution mechanism.
Documentary
A documentary is a creative work of non-fiction, including:* Documentary film, including television* Radio documentary* Documentary photographyRelated terms include:...
produced by Camerado
Camerado
Camerado is a commercial film, video and multimedia production group that produces independent, multicultural-themed films, videos, and media events with a prosocial agenda....
, about the life and times of New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
street booksellers. Made on an ultra-low budget in a jazzy, impressionistic style reminiscent of the films of Robert Frank
Robert Frank
Robert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American...
and poetry of the Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
, BookWars is the only first-person documentary made during then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
Rudy Giuliani
Rudolph William Louis "Rudy" Giuliani KBE is an American lawyer, businessman, and politician from New York. He served as Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001....
's controversial "Quality of Life" campaign, which sought to limit and control individuals engaged in informal economic activities on the streets of New York City.
BookWars was released in June 2000, winning the Best Documentary Award at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival
New York Underground Film Festival
Founded in 1994 by filmmakers Todd Phillips and Andrew Gurland, the New York Underground Film Festival was an annual event that occurred each March at Anthology Film Archives in New York City from 1994 through 2008...
IndieWire and premiering theatrically at New York's Cinema Village http://www.cinemavillage.com/chc/cv/. Despite its minuscule budget (estimated at $10,000, prerelease) BookWars enjoyed numerous domestic and international TV sales and has to date generated revenue of several hundred thousand dollars.
The movie is currently available on DVD, VOD, VCD (Asia), digital download, theatrical film prints, and other formats.
Synopsis
" BookWars is: The gritty, untamed world of street booksellers, exposed in a remarkable feature film that chronicles their lives and loves and their unique perspectives on life. Shot entirely on location by fellow street bookseller and filmmaker Jason Rosette, and produced by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Michel Negroponte, BookWars explores the other side of the book tables that line the streets of New York City’s Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, 6th avenue, and elsewhere in New York City." – New Filmmakers, New YorkPlot
BookWars is a creative documentaryDocumentary
A documentary is a creative work of non-fiction, including:* Documentary film, including television* Radio documentary* Documentary photographyRelated terms include:...
which is told in an unconventional, narrative style. The film opens with the narrator (who is also the film's director) driving out West along a desert highway, relating to the audience his previous experiences as a streetside bookseller in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. The entire documentary – including the central events involving his experiences among the street booksellers in New York – is thus "told" as a long conversation on a cross-country roadtrip out West.
The narrator describes his post-graduation years in New York, and how he ended up at one point virtually penniless. Driven by a desperate need to pay the rent, he resorts to wheeling his own books out to the street to try to sell them. He reveals that he was not only successful in making a significant amount of cash on that first day, but he has also met a variety of interesting and strange characters of the streets of New York – including other street booksellers.
A motley assortment of street booksellers on West 4th street, in Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
, New York City, are first introduced. Among them: “Slick” Rick Sherman, a semi-professional magician; Al Mappo, so named because he only sells maps and atlases; Emil, who says only he "escaped”, though we do not know from where; and Pete Whitney: King of the booksellers, toad collector, and collage artist.
BookWars next introduces another group of street booksellers who hawk their trade on nearby 6th Avenue. Mainly black and minority individuals, they ply books and magazines in parallel fashion to the nearby West 4th street booksellers, who are primarily white. The booksellers on 6th Avenue suffer greater exposure to the law, with many claiming this to be due to racial profiling
Racial profiling
Racial profiling refers to the use of an individual’s race or ethnicity by law enforcement personnel as a key factor in deciding whether to engage in enforcement...
.
Some of the significant personalities that are introduced on 6th Avenue include: Marvin, always wearing his trademark black hat; and Ron, from Jamaica – charismatic, streetwise and outspoken.
After the introduction of the primary characters (including the narrator bookseller himself), BookWars discusses, mainly through informal testimony, the various aspects of the street bookseller’s life in chapter-by-chapter fashion.
The tools and tricks of the street bookseller's trade are revealed: ways and techniques to maximize income; how to deal with difficult, and sometimes dangerous customers; where and how to get more books; how the booksellers have a right to distribute literature (commercially or otherwise) in public, as per the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
; and so on.
BookWars is structured as a “year in the life” style movie, although it was actually produced over several seasons, from 1995 to 1999. When Winter comes, and the streets are too snow-filled and cold to hawk books, the booksellers are shown in their various off-season modes and occupations. “Slick” Rick performs card and magic tricks at parties; Pete Whitney grooms cats for old ladies; and the narrator heads out to New Mexico to work on a Western
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...
*.
(*Which was actually the movie The Desperate Trail IMDB)
Marv and Ron, however, continue to sell books throughout the winter on busy 6th Avenue, and the film follows them as they scour for books and pornographic magazines in the trash in Soho.
Finally, Spring comes, and the booksellers emerge from their off-season to sell books as usual for another season – or so they think. BookWars proceeds to reveal the street-level effects of then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s controversial “Quality of Life
Quality of Life
Quality of Life is a 2004 drama film, telling the fictional story of two graffiti writers in the Mission District of San Francisco.Directed by Benjamin Morgan, Quality of Life stars Lane Garrison, Brian Burnam, Luis Saguar and Mackenzie Firgens. Morgan co-wrote the screenplay with Burnam, who is a...
” campaign, which sought to remove informal, unregistered entrepreneurs and other individuals from the streets of New York City.
The NYPD http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/home/home.shtml begins to enforce obscure technicalities which govern the uses and dimensions of the sidewalks, thereby making it more difficult to earn a livelihood. A new tax identification number requirement is introduced, creating bureaucratic obstacles, especially for those street booksellers who are marginal or virtually homeless. Nearby New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
unlawfully places imposing, massive planters on the sidewalk in an attempt to drive the street booksellers away; and finally, especially on 6th Avenue where the majority of black street booksellers are active, the NYPD comes to haul away books.
The street booksellers resist and assemble to form an unlikely common front to protest against the actions of the city. Others, who have had their books confiscated, wait for hours at the police station to get them back. Still others, like Ron, rail against the futility of the city's efforts to stop New Yorkers from reading, because of their virtual addiction to books.
In the end, the street booksellers stand their ground against the Mayor, and are able to continue selling with minor adjustments to their way of life.
In the closing moments of BookWars, the narrator admits that after all the recent problems with the city, he has grown restless; he realizes that he wants to do something different, and wants to change his occupation at last. A single massive rainstorm is enough to convince him to give up his street bookselling activities.
He sells the last of his books off to his fellow street booksellers, and heads out West, on a cross-country road trip, with the audience in the passenger seat sharing the ride.
Production
The concept for BookWars was developed after a chance meeting between filmmaker Jason Rosette—who had been selling used and out of print books at a streetside bookstand to generate cash between film production and editing jobs—and Emmy AwardEmmy Award
An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...
-winning New York-based documentary filmmaker Michel Negroponte, at Mr. Rosette’s sidewalk bookstand in 1995. Mr. Negroponte, who had previously directed numerous documentaries including Jupiter's Wifehttp://www.inbaseline.com/project.aspx?project_id=130310 and Space Coasthttp://www.inbaseline.com/project.aspx?project_id=69918, agreed to be a co-producer on the movie.
Mr. Rosette commenced to bring a video camera to the bookstand daily to document the sights and sounds of the city of New York as seen from the perspective of a sidewalk bookseller. Because this initial phase of shooting was funded completely out of pocket, BookWars was produced in a variety of film and video formats depending on whatever camera was available at the time. Formats included: Mini DV, Super 8 film, Regular 8 and Hi-8 video, and Super VHS. The aesthetic goals of immediacy and a natural, unobtrusive presence of the camera also demanded the use of small format film and video.
Initial shooting was financed by the sale of the various used and out-of-print books at the filmmaker's bookstand. As more books were sold, more film and video stock could be bought, and production would continue.
Following the initial stage of shooting in New York, the director drove from New York to New Mexico
New Mexico
New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
where he had edited an earlier movie at a colleague's Albuquerque-based production studio. In New Mexico in 1996, the first assembly of the movie, called The Book Wars, was edited on a tape-to-tape analogue system; that rough assembly was screened for the first time in on Super Bowl Sunday
Super Bowl Sunday
Super Bowl Sunday, sometimes referred to as Super Sunday, is the Sunday on which the Super Bowl is played. Typically occurring in late January or early February, it is considered a de facto national holiday in the United States. On Super Bowl Sunday many people gather to watch the Super Bowl...
as part of an exhibition produced by Basement Films http://www.basementfilms.org of Albuquerque.
Given that desktop editing solutions were not widely used or available at the time - and were expensive to rent - the filmmaker next drove out to Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
with the assembly edit in hand, in order to attempt to secure access to one of the two primary nonlinear systems available at the time – an Avid
AVID
AVID stands for:* Advancement Via Individual Determination, a college-readiness system designed to increase the number of students who enroll in four-year colleges in the U.S....
or Media 100
Media 100
Media 100 is a manufacturer of video editing software and non-linear editing systems designed for professional cutting and editing. The editing systems are currently all based on OEM AJA Kona boards, with the exception of the Software-only Producer and Producer Suite, and run exclusively on Macs...
system.
While the filmmaker sought post-production equipment in Los Angeles, a San Francisco- based production company, S.A.I.D. Communications, viewed the assembly edit of BookWars and agreed to provide additional editing and production in order to complete the picture. Mr. Rosette subsequently departed Los Angeles for San Francisco, and commenced to work on editing the documentary there fulltime.
There was no up-front money to continue editing and still no funding, so the director worked a variety of jobs to sustain himself and production of the movie, working as a freelance film editor, voice-over artist, and an assortment of temporary and odd jobs.
A rough cut of BookWars was finally achieved in 1998. However, additional material was required to create a coherent feature edit. S.A.I.D Communications provided a camera on loan, and the director headed back to New York to spend time once again with his fellow booksellers to continue documenting their lives.
After this second stage of shooting in New York was complete, in 1998, the director returned to San Francisco to include the additional essential sequences in the final edit. While the filmmaker was away, however, S.A.I.D. had already commenced postproduction on another documentary called Live Nude Girls Unite, and the BookWars team had to defer to their the stripper-activist production colleagues.
The filmmaker had by now spent nearly three years in San Francisco, endeavoring to complete BookWars without having received any grants or external funding. A grant administrator from The Pacific Pioneer Fund explained that, while he considered BookWars to be a worthy and compelling project, he felt that the filmmaker “would have to be a genius to pull it off” (funding was denied).
At the same time, Beat writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
of City Lights Bookstore
City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence...
viewed the cut of BookWars, and applauded it as being “Anarchistic”.
Delays continued and post production paused while an online editing system in the San Francisco area was sought, unsuccessfully. Finally, co-producer Michel Negroponte contacted the filmmaker regarding an editing station that had become available in New York City; payment to the machine’s owners at Copacetic Pictures could be deferred until the movie was completed and sold.
The filmmaker thus drove back to New York to complete the final edit of the documentary. During this time, German-French broadcasting group Arte/ZDF
ZDF
Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen , ZDF, is a public-service German television broadcaster based in Mainz . It is run as an independent non-profit institution, which was founded by the German federal states . The ZDF is financed by television licence fees called GEZ and advertising revenues...
received the nearly-completed cut of the BookWars and committed to purchasing the hour-long broadcast version for airing, while providing an advance to enable completion of the final edit, mix, narration, and postproduction of the program. Shortly after announcing this key initial TV sale, The Playboy Foundation
Playboy Foundation
The Playboy Foundation is a corporate-giving organization that provides grants to non-profit groups involved in fighting censorship and researching human sexuality. It gives grants and in-kind contributions, such as advertising space in the Playboy magazine to organizations concerned with US First...
and the Experimental TV Center subsequently awarded modest postproduction grants.
The work in progress of BookWars screened at the Independent Feature Project’s Independent Feature Film Market, while the nearly complete fine cut of BookWars screened at the New Filmmakers, New York series at Anthology Film Archives
Anthology Film Archives
__notoc__Anthology Film Archives is a film archive and theater located at 32 Second Avenue on the corner of East Second Street in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City devoted to the preservation and exhibition of experimental film. It is the only non-profit organization of its...
in the Spring of 2000.
Several months later, the final theatrical version of Bookwars was completed. The movie had its world premiere at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival
New York Underground Film Festival
Founded in 1994 by filmmakers Todd Phillips and Andrew Gurland, the New York Underground Film Festival was an annual event that occurred each March at Anthology Film Archives in New York City from 1994 through 2008...
, where it won the Best Documentary Award. Though the filmmaker was subsequently banned from the festival venue (Anthology Film Archives) due to over-zealous guerilla promotional activities, the BookWars nonetheless soon enjoyed a New York theatrical premiere at the Cinema Village Cinema Village Website, and went on to screen theatrically and air at numerous international and domestic channels and venues.
In total, production of BookWars had taken five years and 20,000 miles of driving across the USA to complete.
Influences and approach
There are no formal interviews in BookWars although the booksellers at times speak informally to the filmmaker. There are no subtitles or title cards within the film itself either, except for the opening titles and credits. Rather, the narrator's voiceover is designed to take over this role while conveying a more intimate, personal quality to the story.Primary influences in the making of the movie were the Beat classic film, Pull my Daisy
Pull My Daisy
Pull My Daisy is a short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration...
and other street-level compositions by filmmaker Robert Frank
Robert Frank
Robert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American...
and various works from the New American Cinema. The narration style was adopted from 1930-40’s American gangster and film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
movies, and some Western
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...
genre elements were included as well – particularly in the conceptual story component of a “man heading out West to start anew”.
BookWars veers stylistically from straight or journalistic documentaries through its use of creative devices. Slow motion is often employed, the narration is non-standard, the movie follows a distinct narrative structure, and dream sequences are utilized. Often, the subjects of the documentary take over as camera operators and record themselves and their surroundings at will.
Original soundtrack elements were provided by swamp-blues practitioner, Little Muddy http://www.littlemuddy.com, while pre-recorded compositions by legendary Jazz players, Willis Jackson and Jack McDuff
Jack McDuff
"Brother" Jack McDuff was an American jazz organist and organ trio bandleader who was most prominent during the hard bop and soul jazz era of the 1960s, often performing with an organ trio.-Career:...
were licensed from the 32 Jazz http://www.allaboutjazz.com/articles/a0999_01.htm label.
Festivals and broadcasts
BookWars has screened at festivals, theatrical venues, and broadcast outlets including: NHKNHK
NHK is Japan's national public broadcasting organization. NHK, which has always identified itself to its audiences by the English pronunciation of its initials, is a publicly owned corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee....
(Japan), SVT (Sweden) Sveriges Television
Sveriges Television
Sveriges Television AB , Sweden's Television, is a national television broadcaster based in Sweden, funded by a compulsory fee to be paid by all television owners...
, PBS, (US), Metrochannels (US) MSG Metro Channels
MSG Metro Channels
MSG Metro Channels were a series of local-minded New York City cable networks which launched in 1998 and folded in late 2005. Owned by Rainbow Media, the Metro networks were founded as a spinoff of the MSG Sports networks. The network was originally split into three separate channels, MSG Metro...
, Book Television (Canada), Arte/ZDF Arte
Arte
Arte is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...
(France and Germany), The Florida Film Festival
Florida Film Festival
The Florida Film Festival, produced by Enzian Theater in Maitland, Florida, is an annual international film festival. Showcasing the best American independent and foreign films, the festival has become one of the most respected regional film events in the United States.-Overview:The Festival...
, The Kansas City Film Jubilee http://kcjubilee.org, Facets http://www.facets.org/, the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
(New York) http://www.moma.org, the Danish National Film Institute http://www.dfi.dk/, Brotfabrik (Berlin) http://www.exberliner.net/culture/brotfabrik, the 911 Media Arts Center
911 Media Arts Center
911 Media Arts Center is a non-profit media arts and access center located in Seattle, Washington. 911 Media Arts Center was incorporated on August 14, 1984 to support the expressive use of media tools through training, equipment and access grants. The organization also provides a forum and venue...
http://www.911media.org in Seattle, amongst others.
The feature version also pioneered internet releases when they were still uncommon (in 2001), streaming on a pay per view basis on the Cinemapop media portal.
Awards
BookWars received the Best Documentary Award upon its world premiere at the 2000 New York Underground Film FestivalNew York Underground Film Festival
Founded in 1994 by filmmakers Todd Phillips and Andrew Gurland, the New York Underground Film Festival was an annual event that occurred each March at Anthology Film Archives in New York City from 1994 through 2008...
. The movie was also nominated for an IFP Gotham Award.
Reception
BookWars garnered generally positive reviews, starting with its first review by New York Film Critics Circle reviewer Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press http://www.nypress.com/print-article-1251-print.html. The film was met with hostility, however, by the participant of another unaffiliated street bookseller book project, who claimed that the director of BookWars had manipulated the (mainly black & minority) 6th avenue booksellers in order to film them getting drunk – an allegation which proved not to be true. Nonetheless, a New York Times review http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/09/movies/film-review-selling-books-on-the-street-in-a-quality-of-life-town.html by critic Elvis Mitchell soon followed which was not supportive of the film. Numerous other positive reviews followed, however, which cast doubt on some motivations behind the early critiques of BookWars.Ultimately, most of the street booksellers appearing in the movie – as well as those not appearing - welcomed it as an agreeable depiction of their lives, and several street booksellers to this day continue to keep copies of the film on their sidewalk bookstands as a grass-roots, participatory distribution mechanism.
External links
- BookWars Official Site
- Production Company Camerado (film)
- BookWars DVDDVDA DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
with limited public performance rights Amazon - BookWars VODVODVOD may stand for:*Velocity of detonation, the speed of a shock wave through a detonated explosive*Veno-occlusive disease, a complication of bone marrow transplantation*Versant Object Database, a database management system...
at iTunes iTunes Store - Interview with BookWars director Jason Rosette Filmmaker Magazine
- Interview with BookWars director Jason Rosette The Independent Magazine
- Coverage of BookWars at the 2000 New York Underground Film FestivalNew York Underground Film FestivalFounded in 1994 by filmmakers Todd Phillips and Andrew Gurland, the New York Underground Film Festival was an annual event that occurred each March at Anthology Film Archives in New York City from 1994 through 2008...
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