The Barometer Online

Issue date: 2/6/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Cory Reed Screenwriter and filmmaker Bill Guttentag presents his documentaries in LaSells Stewart Center Thursday evening. Guttentag has two Academy Awards, the most recent for his documentary short "Twin Towers."

Bill Gutentag, a well-known Academy Award winning filmmaker, spoke last night at LaSells Stewart Center about how he's worked to make things "real" in the film industry.

Gutentag has been involved in a variety of roles from teaching at Stanford, to screenwriting, to producing and most recently has written a novel, "Boulevard," which will be published at the end of this year.

"I believe that the 'real' has a kind of power that we, as the audience, can connect to the screen," Gutentag said.

To further demonstrate, Gutentag showed a variety of his work in film clips.

One of these film clips included a piece from his documentary titled "Nanking," of which there was a screening at 5:30 p.m. just before the lecture.

"Nanking" is a film that portrays actors reading from letters that Gutentag discovered about their experiences during the infamous "rape of Nanking" by the Japanese military in 1937.

The foreigners who stayed during that time saved an estimated 250,000 lives.

"What's important in Asia should be important here," Gutentag said about this 70-year-old event that few have even heard about.

To also portray the "real" in other aspects, Gutentag showed a clip of when he was the executive producer of "Crime and Punishment," an NBC series that ran from 2002 to 2004.

He explained that there is a 390:1 ratio for filming, meaning of the 390 minutes they film, the audience sees about one minute.

"It's really a brutal business," Gutentag said, as for the past 20 years he has tried to give voice to people's stories that haven't been told.

Other than describing his films, Gutentag also described some of the recent trends in the film industry.

He discussed things such as why there are so many reality TV shows. Gutentag explained that, generally, these shows are cheaper to produce and grow quickly in popularity.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools