Visual History Program
Excerpts Will Include:
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Robert Altman
Interviewed by
Lee Grant
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Garry Marshall
Interviewed by
Scott Marshall
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Arthur Hiller
Interviewed by
Ron Underwood
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Car Reiner
Interviewed by
Randal Kleiser
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Gil Cates
Interviewed by
Gil Cates, Jr.
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John Rich
Interviewed by
Jeremy Kagan
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Bill Duke
Interviewed by
Carl Weathers
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Joan Tewkesbury
Interviewed by
Katt Shea
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Sidney Lumet
Interviewed by
Marc Levin
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Jerry Ziesmer
Interviewed by
Yudi Bennett
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Created in 2000 by the Special Projects Committee, the Visual History Program is the next generation of the Guild’s Oral History Program begun during the early days of the committee with 55 audiotaped interviews. The Visual History Program takes advantage of the new, small-scale digital video recording technology, allowing users to hear not only the inflection in an interview subject’s voice, but to look at the subject’s face and experience his or her personality in ways that cannot be revealed by words on a printed page. The Program now contains more than 90 interviews exploring the art and craft of the director and the director’s team. The new online program is a prototype that will initially give users access to excepts from 10 of these interviews, with more to be added in successive months.
In their raw versions, the Visual History interviews last from three to eight hours, and cover close to 100 questions on 12 topics regarding relevant craft issues including: starting out; qualities and traits of a director; story development; collaborators and crew; pre-production; production; post-production; marketing and distribution; the best and worst about directing; and Guild involvement. DGA Special Projects Committee Chairman Jeremy Kagan drafted the questions, in consultation with Director Martin Scorsese. The interviews are digitized and catalogued by timecode by DGA Special Projects Department staff and graduate students from UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies, and made available for viewing via DVD and streaming video while the original master tapes are put into storage.
Although the online Visual History Program will initially offer excerpts of the interviews to DGA Members only, as the technology develops, the entire interviews will eventually be made available online to film schools, journalists and film historians, as well as the public at large.
“These detailed and fascinating interviews give an expanded insight into the directing process,” said Kagan in a recent issue of DGA Quarterly. “We are fortunate and grateful that so many of our members have generously given of their time and memories to create a visual-audio legacy that will be cherished by future generations.”
To access the DGA Visual History Program, after it launches on October 12, 2007, please log onto the DGA Members Only Website and click the Visual History Program link on the M/O homepage. If you have difficulty logging onto the M/O site, please contact Darrell Hope at the DGA Communications Dept. at (310) 289-2035 or e-mail him at darrellh@dga.org.
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