Tag Archives: HBO

Non-fiction friction: HBO’s Cinema Verite

I cannot wait to see Cinema Verite, the latest from Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, a fiction film about the making of the seminal 1971 PBS documentary, An American Family, from directing team Alan and Susan Raymond.

Check out the trailer for Cinema Verite:

It’s another film to examine the line between fiction and reality, like their fantastic American Splendor which broke so many molds when it came out in 2003.

But we shouldn’t forget some of their documentary gems, like The Young and the Dead, their profile of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and its new owner who shakes up the business of death. This was one of the films at HBO when I first joined the documentary department. If you want to check out a short trailer made by the promo department for that summer when we had a weekly America Undercover slot, click here.

HBO meets my theatre department geekery

HBO has always dabbled in the odd (considering my dual past as an ex-HBO-er and an ex-Henson-er, my personal favorite has to be the bizarro children’s series Fraggle Rock), but even I was a little surprised they would traipse down the medieval fantasy lane.

With their adaptation of the literary series A Song of Ice and Fire, they must have been looking to lure in the audience made up of every single guy I knew in the Theater Department in college who spent Saturday nights playing Magic and stole styrofoam broadswords from the costume department to get their geek on at a Renaissance Faire (sexy waifs and men in long hair and leather playing life-sized chess, anyone? Huzzah!). I stand corrected, every single straight guy… the other half had better things to do.

HBO premieres Game of Thrones on April 17th… which means it will be pirated and subtitled into Spanish on April 18th.

Enjoy the previous trailer:

The latest is on the HBO site, where the geekery is already going wild  pondering the production’s loyalty to the book:

http://www.makinggameofthrones.com/production-diary/2011/3/13/fear-and-blood-preview.html