Details, trailer, previews and reviews here.
My first film Atomic Cover-up, which received its world premiere in March at the Cinequest Film Festival, streamed from Rio de Janiero for ten days in late-May via the 10th annual International Uranium Film Festival. It was awarded one of the two top prizes there and was easily the most watched offering (almost 1400 viewers). Now it has earned another award, as runner-up for Best U.S. Documentary at the Venice Shorts Festival.
Update, June 9: It has also been selected for the Venezia Film Festival, Italy, with five days of online screenings through June…
Details, early acclaim, and trailer, below.
My acclaimed first film Atomic Cover-up, which received its world premiere in March, streamed from Rio de Janiero for ten days, May 20–30, via the 10th annual International Uranium Film Festival. It’s 53 minutes long and follows a brief intro by Rod Lurie, director of last year’s hit movie, The Outpost. Update, May 31: It just won one of the two top prizes there and it was easily the most watched offering (almost 1400 viewers). Next: it has also been selected for the Venezia Shorts Film Festival, Italy, and the Venice Film Festival in…
Early acclaim for new documentary, now streaming free for all via festival in Rio after world premiere. “It is the visual equivalent of John Hersey’s classic 1946 New Yorker article and Hiroshima book,” one reviewer writes.
The documentary that I wrote and directed, Atomic Cover-up, received its world premiere in late-March at the Cinequest Film Festival, to extraordinary notices (see below). Then: The 10th annual International Uranium Film Festival in Rio de Janiero, from May 20 to 30, provided its Latin American premiere. Update: It just won one of the two top prizes there and it was easily the most…
Since meeting The Boss in Sing Sing Prison
Forty-eight years ago this month I got a phone call at my office at the legendary Crawdaddy, where I served as #2 editor for nearly the entire 1970s, that would change my life, for several years, anyway. It was from a fast-talking dude named Mike Appel, inviting me to catch his top (and only) act in a press event/concert upstate, the following day, December 7, 1972, in notorious…Sing Sing Prison. The act was a total unknown whose debut album had not yet been released, by the name of Bruce Springsteen, the latest…
A close encounter at their “Saturday Night Fever” peak.
by Greg Mitchell
With a surprising number of people (myself included) watching and enjoying the new Bee Gees documentary airing this month over HBO, I thought I would depart from my usual obsessions to take a lighter look back at my encounter with the group — at the height of their “Stayin’ Alive” popularity back in 1978….
After serving as the number two editor at the legendary rock/culture magazine Crawdaddy starting in early 1971, I had left in the summer of 1977 to work at another New York-based publication(which failed), and then turned to…
WHEN BATTLES AND bruised feelings over controversial reviews and articles emerge, it’s useful to remember that what’s being graded is merely a strip of celluloid, rarely the private life and politics of a film director. Yet there was a time when directors themselves were graded politically, and if they received a ‘’restricted’’ rating they faced, quite possibly, the end of their careers in Hollywood.
The new David Fincher movie Mank focuses on writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, with his younger brother Joe popping in an out. The movie invents a principled stand for Herman — see my New York Times article…
The new David Fincher movie, Mank, just now streaming on Netflix, has brought new attention to muckraking author Upton Sinclair — and only partly because he is (briefly) portayed by Bill Nye, “the Science Guy.” The film shows how Sinclair’s left-wing run for governor of California in 1934 inspired MGM’s Irving Thalberg and newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst to take drastic actions to stop him. This in turn — this is the fictional part — inspired Herman Mankiewicz to write Citizen Kane, with the title character based on Hearst.
In the new David Fincher movie on Netflix, Mank, newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) is a key character. His actions in helping to defeat Upton Sinclair in his 1934 race for governor of California helps inspire Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) to write the screenplay for Citizen Kane and base the title character on Hearst. Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) also plays a crucial role. I wrote about all of this, and much more, in my award-winning book on the wild and influential Sinclair race and the backlash it produced, The Campaign of the Century. …
After 75 Years: Only Three Movies
Seventy-five years ago this autumn, Hollywood set in motion its first big-budget movie drama about the making, and use, of the atomic bomb, even as the ruins of Nagasaki were still smoldering. Almost immediately a competing project emerged. Yet today, seventy-five years since the first atomic bomb exploded over the center of the city of Hiroshima, a total of only three movie dramas about this epochal event have emerged from a Hollywood studio. There has not been single one since 1989.
In the same period, Hollywood has produced numerous movies centering on D-Day and…
Greg Mitchell
Author of “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood — and America — Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” and 11 previous books, including “The Tunnels.”
