Deadline featured in the New York Times

In Rare Union, Documentary Finds Itself on NBC

By BERNARD WEINRAUB

Published: July 29, 2004

LOS ANGELES, July 28 — Early this year a group of struggling documentary filmmakers who had just completed a film about capital punishment borrowed money from family and friends and used frequent flier miles to buy plane tickets to Park City, Utah, to enter the Sundance Film Festival.

Katy Chevigny, the co-director and co-producer of the film, "Deadline," said, "We tried to make the best film we could, but we actually didn't know if anybody would ever see the film outside of Sundance."

Ms. Chevigny and her colleagues don't have to worry.

In a highly unusual move for a broadcast network, NBC has purchased the two-hour documentary for an undisclosed price and will present it on Friday on "Dateline NBC." Although HBO and other cable networks buy documentaries at film festivals like Sundance, it is rare for a broadcast network like NBC to buy a documentary and present it in its entirety, because these networks have news units themselves. The filmmakers said that about 10 minutes of the documentary had been trimmed, mostly to make room for commercials.

What makes the current documentary perhaps even more unusual is that it was purchased at the behest of Robert Wright, now chairman and chief executive of NBC Universal.

For the full article please visit The New York Times. For more information about the film, please visit the Deadline website.

The Independent Features Big Mouth Productions!

March 2004

The Girl Team
Joining Forces to Do It Themselves
By Elizabeth Angell

While there are alarmingly few women helming movies these days, there are more and more behind the scenes. The role of producer is one that seems increasingly open to the industry�s women and here, The Independent profiles female production teams who are changing the industry, one little movie at a time.

Big Mouth Productions
Katy Chevigny and Dallas Brennan

Katy Chevigny and Dallas Brennan sit at desks only six feet apart in their loft-like office space at Big Mouth Productions on 14th Street in New York City. They are separated by a large bookcase laden with the usual small-office paraphernalia: haphazard piles of books and tapes, folders, and binders labeled by hand. They have little privacy and though, as partners, they run Big Mouth, their corner of office real estate is not particularly awe-inspiring. Chevigny, thirty-five, and Brennan, thirty-one, could be any harried young women at the helm of a fledgling business.

But it is this very arrangement�the office, the desks, the trappings of entrepreneurship�that makes Big Mouth such an unusual engine for documentary production. �A lot of people make documentaries out of their living rooms,� says Brennan. �It�s more feasible financially, but the burnout factor is much higher. They make one or two films and then they can�t face it again.�

Chevigny and Brennan work hard to carry the overhead of an office and staff because they want to be more than just independent producers who work project to project. �We wanted a certain continuity of staff across time and films,� says Chevigny, who founded Big Mouth with her friend and college classmate Julia Pimsleur in 1997. She had begun her career as a social worker, and then moved on to film production in Chicago. At Big Mouth, she and Pimsleur produced a series of social issue documentaries together. When Pimsleur left two years ago, Brennan became a senior producer. Big Mouth�s sixth film, Deadline, premiered earlier this year at Sundance.

Big Mouth�s longevity is a sure sign of success, but Chevigny and Brennan still struggle to find funding for their films. �It doesn�t necessarily get easier,� says Brennan. �You don�t have too many laurels to rest on. Of course, we also don�t have to ask ourselves �did we sell out?�� Adds Chevigny, �The moral high ground is definitely ours.�

They do see signs that the market for documentaries�especially serious-minded ones�may be changing. 2003 was a big year for documentaries, and distributors are much more interested in the medium. When Chevigny and Brennan sent out the press release for Deadline�s Sundance premiere, they were flooded with phone calls from agents and publicists. That had never happened before. �They must think they will be able to make money on documentaries,� says Chevigny.

Despite their still-chronic lack of funds�for now a fact of life for all documentary producers�the Big Mouth strategy must be working. Chevigny and Brennan don�t appear burnt out. They�ll still fill in as boom operators or craft services on a shoot, and they�ll spend weeks traveling with their film. They often find themselves doubling up in inexpensive hotel rooms on the road. That, says Chevigny, may be the biggest difference between Big Mouth�s partners and their male counterparts: �Controlling for all other factors, guys in our level in the business are not as willing to share a bed.�

To read the full article, please visit the AIVF website

top