In the ramp-up to the election and the release of Oliver Stone's George W. Bush biopic, Hulu is streaming the Bush doc Crawford.

It's not like Errol Morris's Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure, for all its merits, is going to go flying off the shelves when Sony releases the DVD on October 14th, even if the doc did win the Silver Bear Grand Jury Audience Award at Berlin. So how do you promote a serious doc about relative truth, photography and torture?

Well, I've never seen this one before: Physicians for Human Rights and Participant Media, which backed the film, are setting up a simultaneous digital screening at 27 medical schools around the country on October 6 (7 PM EST). The medical schools range from Albert Einstein U, Boston U to Brown Medical School and the U of Utah. The screening will be followed by a Q & A with the filmmaker and Farnoosh Hashemian, MPH, author of PHR’s Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of US Torture and Its Impact.

James D. Stern's L.A.-based Endgame Entertainment is on a roll.

As expected, Stern sold North American and Australian rights to his showbiz documentary Every Little Step to Sony Pictures Classics. The deal was in final stages Monday after the film won raves from auds and critics at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Endgame funded and produced Every Little Step, a behind-the-scenes look at auditions for a revival of the Broadway classic. Filming started back in 2005 as the show auditioned some 1,700 actors/singer/dancers hoping to land a slot on the 2006 Chorus Line. The pic blends audition footage with vintage material from the original 1975 production. The moving doc plays like a reality-TV show crammed with winners and losers as talented hoofers put themselves on the line. It’s a likely awards contender for best doc.

Stern and Adam Del Deo both produced and directed. The team also made docs So Goes the Nation and The Year of the Yao. Stern also produced shobiz productions The Producers, Hairspray, Stomp and Legally Blonde.

Endgame's other Toronto pics were Brothers Bloom, starrng Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz, which Summit acquired in December 2007, and Stephen Elliot's romantic comedy Easy Virtue, based on the Noel Coward play, starring Jessica Biel, Colin Firth, Ben Barnes and Kristin Scott Thomas, which is also expected to sell. Endgame has also co-financed past releases I'm Not There, Hotel Rwanda and White Noise.

William Morris Independent repped Every Little Step in the sale. The agency's New York Theatre department was involved in early discussions on the project because they repped the attorney and the estate of A Chorus Line creator Michael Bennett, who died in 1987. William Morris Independent's Rena Ronson sold the Japanese rights to the film to Shochiku early on, and took the project to Endgame, which put up the lion's share of the budget.

[Sharon Swart contributed to this report]

Finally my fave film in Sundance is opening. I know you've seen a lot of Hurricane Katrina docs. Trouble the Water, which won the documentary grand jury prize, is rough around the edges. It's not a question of how well it was executed technically, or the quality of the writing and direction. What distinguishes this is the unexpected, lightning in a bottle aspect of this seemingly unremarkable 9th Ward marginal woman, Kimberly Roberts, who had no idea she was capable of being a hero until Katrina revealed to her and the folks around her who she really was. I get choked up thinking about it.

Here's the story I did in Sundance, and a video interview with filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin:

Here's the NYT review and Richard Corliss in Time.

And the trailer:

Shooting started Monday in Denver on Mayor, George Hickenlooper's documentary feature and pilot. "It's a real-life Spin City focusing on the day-to-day life of a mayor running a major American city under the incredible pressure of having a star-studded political convention descend upon his domain," Hixkenlooper states. "In this case the Mayor is Denver's John Hickenlooper (yes, a close relative) who Time Magazine named in 2006 as one of the five most important and progressive mayors in the nation. We just came from an inside meeting with the Governor, Senator, Congressmen. A lot of interesting information about how Colorado, which is hosting the convention, may ironically turn out to be this year's big swing state, like Florida was in 2000 and Ohio in 2004."

Thus Hickenlooper (Hearts of Darkness, Factory Girl), who is returning to his doc roots, is getting unusual access to the mayor as he deals with the challenge of keeping Denver in order as it hosts the Democratic National Convention. How will John Hickenlooper hold it all together under the spotlight? Monday night the director is filming Barack Obama at the Colorado Governor's mansion, where he will first meet Mayor Hickenlooper.

R.J. Cutler (The War Room) produces with Donald Zuckerman (Mayor of the Sunset Strip).

Other doc filmmakers are descending on Denver.

Hickenlooper is also prepping Bagman, a feature about Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, the two infamous Washington lobbyist scallywags who brought down Majority Leader Tom DeLay in the biggest scandal to hit the Capital since Watergate. Hickenlooper is hoping for a January start date. Matt Dillon is attached as Abramoff. "It's about American democracy for sale," Hickenlooper says. "Plays like 'GoodFellas' in Washington. The script also explores an aspect of Abramoff that no one really knows about -- that he was connected to (not responsible for) a murder. And this is a man who had no problems getting into the Oval Office to see George W. Bush or Karl Rove! Incredible!"

Prolific filmmaker Alex Gibney, who won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, is also working on a doc about imprisoned lobbyist Abramoff.

The IDA will showcase 19 features and four shorts for Oscar consideration during DocuWeek at the Arclight in LA August 22-28, and in NYC as well.

Films directed by Terence Davies, Scott Hicks, Ellen Kuras and Stacy Peralta are in the lineup. 25 films featured in DocuWeek have been nominated for an Academy Award; six films have won Oscars, including the 2008 feature Docu winner Taxi to the Dark Side. A complete schedule is available at the IDA website.

[posted by Josh Marks]

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth (Freeheld) and Pulitzer Prize finalist author Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) are teaming up to take on teachers salaries in an upcoming feature-length documentary that promises to do for wage inequality in the educational system what Michael Moore did for our broken health care system in Sicko.

Film -- based on the New York Times bestselling book, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers – will tell the stories of struggling teachers, backed by commentary from policy experts and sobering statistics. For instance, according to the website the duo have set up, theteachersalaryproject.org, half of all teachers must hold down second jobs as they try to make ends meet on an average starting salary of $31,753.

With a presidential election on the horizon and the perception among some that American education is lagging behind the rest of the world, this documentary seems as timely as ever.

[Posted by Peter Debruge]

Anyone out there in the habit of watching movies or TV shows online? I've been slow to embrace the process, mainly because the titles provided through iTunes and elsewhere have been ones that would be better served by the largest possible screen. But my man Matt Dentler, who recently left his SXSW film festival gig to work for Cinetic Media, has engineered a deal that gives me hope: Watch Hoop Dreams for free on Hulu.

Now, here's a movie everyone should see, the same landmark documentary Roger Ebert named best film of the '90s. I remember being a bit disappointed when Criterion polished it up for DVD a few years back, since the film was originally shot on video and couldn't possibly meet the company's usual standard of visual quality -- the advantage here is that unlike other blockbusters you might attempt to watch online, Hoop Dreams doesn't suffer tremendously from the streaming video downgrade. But if those other more popular pics are more your style, check out Hulu's library -- they're adding a new film that can be viewed for free online every day this summer.

Is American Teen a brilliantly accurate doc that catches you up in the intense hormonal drama of five high school students on the verge of leaving small town Warsaw, Indiana for college? Or is it a manipulatively fake reality-TV-style doc that alters fact to preserve dramatic narrative drive? Nanette Burstein, who just had a baby in New York City, wasn't at the Arclight Wednesday night to defend her position. (Paramount Vantage opens the film July 25.)

It was up to four of the five kids who dominate the film--who have all completed their sophomore years in college--to take up the slack. As far as The Princess, The Jock, The Heartthrob and The Geek were concerned, Burstein got them right, even if she left thousands of feet of film on the cutting room floor. She started filming some 15 kids and didn't know what the main stories would be until she had been filming for several months. Burstein spent a full ten months prowling the halls, covering the teens like a blanket--full crews for big ball games, just herself and a small camera for parties and intimate scenes at home. The kids clearly trusted and liked her. And revealed themselves, warts and all.

The camera catches hunky football star Mitch watching admiringly as the director's favorite, pretty oddball would-be filmmaker Hannah--performs with a band. He then asks her out, and eventually breaks up with her via text message when she doesn't fit in with all his jock friends. Hannah comes out a lot better than Megan, who reveals a nasty streak that even her mother identifies as suppressed anger. And Burstein picks out many selfish, embarrassing moments for the parents as well.

The kids didn't see the film until the night before its Sundance premiere last January. And they were taken aback at first. But the movie has opened up their lives to such a degree that there's no looking back. They're on the road for a promo tour, and all agreed that there was no way they'd rather be having a dull summer in Warsaw than ordering creme brulee and capuccino at the Arclight Cafe. At the Q & A after the movie, they all admitted they'd be open to acting careers, and definitely do not want to go home again after college.

Documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and blogger A.J. Schnack strikes back at John Horn's recent death to docs piece in the LAT.

The dispute over the HBO doc, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, continues as director Marina Zenovich, who was asked by HB0 to rewrite the film's final "card" on the eve of its first broadcast June 9, tweaked the card again for its Saturday, June 14 airing. The question remains what the final card will read for its theatrical release by ThinkFilm on July 11th.

Finally, after all these years, it's still a case of he said, she said, as Zenovich makes tweaks and tries to keep her film's dramatic punch. And Polanski himself stays in limbo. (He finally saw the film in Paris just before he arrived in Cannes, where he lunched with Zenovich before the fest's closing night ceremony.)

The problem Monday was that the person talking was a Los Angeles Superior Court judge. HBO decided to back off the film's assertion that Judge Larry Paul Flider in 1997 demanded that any court hearing with Polanski be televised, should the exiled director return to the U.S. That's because right before the doc was due to air, L.A. court officials called the assertion "a complete fabrication." So Zenovich reworded the ending to say that the judge demanded an open court hearing.

Now the card refers to a dispute over what happened, stating: "the judge insisted the hearing be held on the record in superior court."

On Wednesday, in response to Monday's L.A. Superior Court statement and an L.A. Times story, former deputy district attorney Roger Gunson and Polanski's attorney Douglas Dalton, who are interviewed in Wanted and Desired, made a statement in support of the film's version of events--and talked to each other for the first time in a decade. "It is our shared view that Monday's false and reprehensible statement by the Los Angeles Superior Court continues their inappropriate handling of the Polanski case," they said.

(The full statement is on the jump; here's my prior story, Polanski Doc Wanted and Desired Changed for HBO. )

Doc filmmaker Marina Zenovich was struck when she read a 2002 article in the LA Times about whether director Roman Polanski would be able to return to the US if he were nominated for an Oscar for The Pianist. Of course he won--and watched the show from his bedroom in Paris. After Zenovich learned more about why Polanski was forced to flee the country rather than turn up for his trial for seducing a minor, she embarked on the long journey to get Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired made.

Patrick Goldstein writes about Zenovich's doc, which has earned rave reviews since its January debut in Sundance, where HBO acquired the film; it also fared well at Cannes. The movie aired on HBO Monday night after a brief run in NY and LA for Oscar consideration. Financially beleaguered distrib ThinkFilm is scheduled to release the film theatrically in July.

A sidebar explores why Zenovich was forced to amend the ending of her movie, an issue also addressed by Slate's Kim Masters. (See UPDATE below.)

Last year at Cannes, Shootout's Peter Bart and Peter Guber conducted a rare Polanski video interview-- Zenovich did not do fresh on-camera interviews with him for the doc, and he did not participate in its promotion. (He turned up in Cannes this May just for the closing night ceremony.) When Bart and Guber asked him last year how he felt about returning to L.A., he responded, "I have black memories of that time. People forget that when I was in my 30s I suffered a tremendous loss and tragedy."

More recently, Bart and Guber interviewed director Marina Zenovich on Shootout: "What mattered to me was what happened to him after he committed the crime," she told them. "So many people think they know what happened that night, why he fled the country. I was interested in getting the facts straight."

UPDATE: Here's a response to Monday's L.A. Superior Court statement and the L.A. Times story from former deputy district attorney Roger Gunson and Polanski's attorney Douglas Dalton, who are interviewed in Wanted and Desired:

June 11, 2008 In 1997, Douglas Dalton, attorney for Roman Polanski, and Roger Gunson, prosecutor on the Polanski case, met with Judge Larry Paul Fidler in his chambers to discuss the Polanski case. Mr. Gunson and Mr. Dalton advised Judge Fidler of Judge Rittenband's conduct in handling the case that is accurately captured in the documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. At the meeting, Judge Fidler advised Mr. Dalton that if Mr. Polanski returned to Los Angeles, that he, Judge Fidler, would allow Mr. Polanski to be booked and immediately released on bail, require Mr. Polanski to meet with the probation department, order a probation report, conduct a hearing, and terminate probation without Mr. Polanski having to serve any additional time in custody. That there was a deal worked out between Judge Fidler and Mr. Dalton was reported in the New York Daily News as early as October 1, 1997. One of the issues raised by Mr. Dalton during the meeting was the question of media coverage. All understood that any proceedings would be open to the public as required by law. During the meeting, Mr. Dalton pressed Judge Fidler for a resolution of the case that would allow for minimal news media. Mr. Dalton recalled that Judge Fidler would require television coverage at the proposed hearing due to the controversy. Mr. Gunson recalls television coverage discussed at the meeting. Mr. Dalton told documentary director Marina Zenovich of this requirement. It is our shared view that Monday's false and reprehensible statement by the Los Angeles Superior Court continues their inappropriate handling of the Polanski case. Roger Gunson Douglas Dalton

Religulous has always seemed potentially hilarious to me: Bill Maher takes a doc crew around the world to talk about religion. He starts out promisingly by entering a church and saying, "Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been 40 years since my last confession."

Here's the trailer:

Peter Bart reports that Bryan Singer and Tom Cruise have begun the long-planned reshoots on Valkyrie. Here's the trailer:

Director Roman Polanski is a frequent visitor to Cannes: he famously walked out of the Chacun Son Cinema press conference last year in a huff when a journalist asked a question that he didn't like. But he's staying in Paris this year, even though he has a doc about him here, partly because he hasn't seen Marina Zenovich's doc on the justice that he did or did not receive in the U.S. before his exile, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

The director has given Polanski, who lives in Paris, many opportunities to see the film about his 1977 rape trial. But he told her that he'd rather that Zenovich do the talking in Cannes and be the spokesperson for the film. He just may not be ready to deal with revisiting his painful ordeal.

Here's my ABC.com review of Standard Operating Procedure, about the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the photos that were taken there and what they do and do not reveal. And here's the HD trailer.

ThinkFilm has nabbed Marina Zenovich's doc, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a hit at Sundance, for theatrical release after its June 9 HBO launch. The doc-friendly distrib acquired theatrical and homevideo rights. The movie will play at Cannes.

One of the surprises in the Cannes program line-up was a special presidential jury screening of Alison Thompson's The Third Wave. Of course the jury prexy this year is Sean Penn, who asked the Cannes fest to unspool the film.

I called up Penn's reps and got the following comment from him: "The Third Wave is truly a must-see for ourselves, our children and everyone we know, for anyone who has two good legs and a dollar in their pocket. It inspires the very best in us, just when we need that most. It comes as close to answering our purpose in life as any film in recent memory."

The film was shot after the 2004 Asian tsunami disaster by four indie volunteers who flew to Sri Lanka to see if they could help. They rented a van, filled it with supplies, and drove along the coast, stumbling onto Peraliya, a tribal village that was totally devastated by a 40-foot tsunami wave, leaving more than 2500 people dead.

The movie documents the strange year-long odyssey of these four volunteers as they set up a first aid station and took charge of a refugee camp of over three thousand people. The villagers slowly turned against them when the world's donated tsunami money never showed up. But they persevered, and helped to rebuild the village.

The Third Wave is being sold at the fest by Cinetic Media's John Sloss.

The director's statement is on the jump:

Keep a Child Alive, a charity organization that sends food and medicine to AIDS patients in Africa, is debuting South African filmmaker Earle Sabastian's documentary Alicia in Africa:Journey to the Motherland, chronicling a month-long trip by Alicia Keys to South Africa, Kenya and Uganda to visit communities affected by HIV and AIDs. The film is available online for free, streaming at the official site and myspace and downloading at SpiralFrog.

Keys will also screen the Alicia in Africa trailer before each concert on her American tour, which kicked off April 19 in Virginia. Here is Keys' mission statement:

“Everyone who visits Africa is changed by the experience, but not everyone can afford to go to Africa. Come with me on my journey and learn as I learn. Let’s start a virus to stop a virus– send the film to everyone you know. Let’s change this nightmare into our generation’s greatest success story.”

Here's the trailer:

Friday night I interviewed Errol Morris at the Apple Store in Santa Monica. The guy is nothing if not charming, even when talking about such a dead-serious, ugly topic as Abu Ghraib.

Even so, Morris's 9th documentary, his first in cinemascope, Standard Operating Procedure (April 25), which took him the usual three or so years to make, is quite beautiful. When Morris interrogates his subjects in the Interrotron--a gizmo that projects the interviewer and subject to each other and creates a remarkable intimacy--he picks up certain key images that he then films as cinematic reenactments. But they're more like slo-mo poetry.

When letter-writer and Abu Ghraib "specialist" Sabrina Harmon (profiled in this New Yorker article) penned hand-written letters home in 2003 to her wife about a 16-year-old kid who was crawling with giant-size Iraqi ants in his cell, of course Morris had to shoot that.

The shot of an exploding helicopter --an image from a bad dream of Harman's--came from outttakes Sony gave him from Charlie's Angels. And Morris couldn't resist filling a shot of the prison with shredded paper, to illustrate the vast cover-up that went on after the scandal broke. Morris gets reverent when he talks about the high-tech digital camera that shoots so fast that he could shoot the water drops pouring down from a shower.

Mostly though, he shows the photos--the ones that got these "bad apples"-turned-scapegoats into so much trouble. Lynndie England, the diminutive 20-year-old private who held a crawling detainee by a tie-down strap, is surprisingly articulate, now, about what happened. (She has a baby, too.) "People said I dragged him, but I never did," she says in the film. "I'm a 95-pound woman, I'm dominating him. He [she's referring to her then 34-year-old boyfriend and photographer, private Charles Graner] wouldn't have had me standing there if the camera wasn't there." She was the last person Morris interviewed. He had to wait for her to get out of prison. "I liked her," he says.

"When you join the military it's a man's world," she tells him in the film. "You have to be equal to a man or be controlled by a man. You're going to have to be strong to step up to them. I was blinded by being in love with a man."

The person who knocked me out (who Morris interviewed for seventeen hours) is ex-Brigadier Army General Janis Karpinski. She was given the daunting assignment to run Iraq's prisons, including Abu Ghraib. Her competence and anger are palpable. And she was demoted--informed by a reporter ten days before she was relieved of her command in the mail--- in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. "We discipline ourselves," she said. "We're Americans. We know right from wrong. The fear of the truth silenced people."

When asked at the Apple Store Q & A how he makes up his mind which of his many projects to make, Morris replied, I do what someone will pay me to do. (In the case of Standard Operating Procedure, Participant and Sony Pictures Classics.) Next up: a comedy. Morris has had enough of two war movies in a row. (He won the Oscar for Fog of War.) He wants to lighten up a bit and be funny with the fiction film The End of Everything, which includes his ramblings on a volcano, Laura Bush, a wingless bird, and Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell. Participant may back him again.

UPDATE: The NYT's Frank Rich thinks no one will go to see SOP, no matter how upbeat the reviews, while the Village Voice's Anthony Kaufman says that comedy is the new way to approach Iraq..

[Photo of Sabrina Harmon by Nubar Alexanian, whose set photos from Errol Morris's movies are included in the handsome coffee table book Nonfiction]

Martin Scorsese has always used Rolling Stones songs in his films, so it made sense he would jump with both feet into the Stones concert documentary Shine A Light. This story goes back through Scorsese's oeuvre, Stones chapter and verse. UPDATE: Time's Richard Corliss explores Scorsese's love affair with docs and rock docs.

I particularly like this David Edelstein Shine a Light review. Edelstein also reviews Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, a movie I liked with reservations. She's a gifted, sensitive and compelling director; the movie is impeccably cast with some of the most riveting young actors working today. I cried at the tragedy of the trap these characters are in. UPDATE: Norman Lear reviews Stop-Loss.

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, who jumps for joy that the movie tanked, must not have seen it. Stop-Loss is 100 % on the side of the soldiers, even if it is critical of the government's "Stop-Loss" policies. (Mark Cuban and O'Reilly are having an ongoing battle over Iraq movies.)

But on one level O'Reilly has a point. As producer Jim Jacks (The Mummy) keeps saying, many of these Iraq movies are about victims, when audiences want active heroes, a competent military they can root for and believe in, even if our Iraq policy is a disaster. Peter Berg's The Kingdom was heading in that direction, but it was a complex FBI mystery thriller set in an unfocused past and it failed to resonate with people.

One of these Middle East movies will eventually hit the zeitgeist right. Most of them are victims of bad timing, really. While an ugly movie like Redacted was never going to find a following, most of these filmmakers were telling stories audiences just weren't ready to hear. It will be interesting to see what happens to Berg's upcoming Marcus Luttrell Navy Seal Afghanistan