Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

Among the Oscar nominees who needn’t lose any sleep worrying about being groped by Isaak Mizrahi on national television Sunday night are the finalists in such low-profile categories as Best Short Documentary, Best Short Animated Film and Best Live-Action Short Film. Indeed, unless a parcel of penguins waddles down the red carpet, it’s unlikely that any of the candidates for Best Feature Documentary will attract the attention of Ryan Seacrest, Joan Rivers, George Pennacchio or whoever it is that’s taking Army Archerd’s place on the reviewing stand this year.

Absent the threat of a bombastic acceptance speech – such as the one uncorked by Michael Moore, three years ago – it’s difficult to imagine any microphone-wielding hack bothering to chat with any of this year’s nominees in the nether-categories. If it were up to the pooh-bahs at ABC, they’d be forced to use the service entrance.

If anyone is going to upset the apple cart on the red carpet, it’s likely to be a free spirit like Mark Zupan, who, since the release of Murderball, has become the country’s most recognizable quadriplegic athlete. When the heavily tattooed Austinian was made aware of the gridlock associated with the annual convergence of A-list celebrities, smarmy studio executives, power-crazed publicists and academy functionaries, a magnificent smile lit up his face.

Suddenly, he envisioned himself wheeling recklessly through the throng, eyes fixed on the derrières of some of the world’s most esteemed actors, and generally having the time of his life.

“I’m really looking forward to the red carpet,” enthused Zupan, who’s a civil engineer when he isn’t on the road promoting the movie in its theatrical and DVD form.

Like everyone else in Hollywood, he assumes the statuette will go to March of the Penguins, so he’s expecting to wait out the inevitable announcement at the bar. And, why not? Nominees in the documentary and short-film categories know the odds of making a repeat appearance are slim-to-none, so the savvy ones find ways to get bombed, at least.

Indeed, this year, more notoriety was visited on a documentary that wasn’t nominated, but very well could have been. Unknown White Male, which made the nominating committee’s short list, caused a momentary stir last month when reporters – salivating at thought of exposing a fraud before he could repent on Oprah -- began questioning the veracity of a story they thought was too good to be true. The film chronicled one amnesia sufferer’s struggle to re-connect with his former self, and, failing that, forge a personality within which he’s comfortable.

“If I was going to make this story up, I wouldn’t have started by exploiting the death of his mother,” argued director Rupert Murray, citing one possible explanation for his subject’s amnesia.

Now that Unknown White Male has entered limited release, the tempest apparently has sloshed its way out of the teapot. Like the scenarios described in so many other contemporary documentaries – especially those in this year’s final grouping – the drama could easily be translated for exploitation by Hollywood studios.

Who would be surprised if someone turned The March of the Penguins or The Parrots of Telegraph Hill into a Saturday-morning cartoon show? The ecological disaster caused by the giant Nile perch introduced into Lake Victoria, as described in Darwin’s Nightmare, would make a terrific Corman-esque horror flick, as would Grizzly Man; the hard-ball machine politics documented in Street Fight are right out of Medium Cool and All the King’s Men; and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room could serve as a sequel to Wall Street or The Insider. Given television’s current embrace of dance – when celebrities are involved, at least – why not give Rize, Mad Hot Ballroom and Favela Rising a spin?

Any one of these would trump seeing John Travolta channel Devine in a re-make of the Broadway re-make of John Waters’ Hairspray. Anyone who wants to re-visit a sanitized version of that wonderful rock ’n’ roll comedy need only jump in their cars and drive to Las Vegas, where Harvey Fierstein is doing a hilarious interpretation of Edna Turnblad.

Hollywood has already made overtures to Murray and Murderball co-director Dana Adam Shapiro, concerning adaptations of their documentaries. Neither has bothered to take out a lease on a new Ferrari just yet, however, recalling that plans for a Spike Lee version of Hoop Dreams never materialized, and Lords of Dogtown recently laid an egg.

Zupan, on the other hand, appears to have been able to extend his 15 minute of fame, which included appearances on Larry King Live, Regis & Kelly, The Late Show With Jay Leno and The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. Perhaps, he felt more at home in the company of Steve-O, Johnny Knoxville and teammates Andy Cohn and Scott Hogsett, in the video, “Jackass Presents Murderball.”

“There’s no way I understood the power of documentaries before this,” said Zupan, who’d just wheeled from CAA headquarters to the Le Meridien, with a stop for a take-out sandwich at Subway, somewhere along the way. “People recognize me on the street – even at the Oscar luncheon – and, several times, I’ve been thanked for participating in the film. When I’m not promoting the movie, I’m speaking at schools about our sport and the Paralympics experience.”

Nevertheless, on the morning nominations were announced, Zupan and Shapiro were far from overwhelmed with phone calls from journalists – “maybe four,” allows the director -- asking how they found out their film had made the cut, how they felt about the honor and which designer’s clothes they were going to wear at the ceremony. Not that they’re complaining, mind you. To paraphrase Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby, sometimes reporters ask the dumbest things.

“Some are passionate about the subject, especially those writing for publications read by ‘quads’ and other people with disabilities,” said Zupan, finishing off his sandwich at a table inside the hotel’s swank cocktail lounge. “Others are just looking for a story. One reporter, who hadn’t seen the movie, asked, ‘So, you play on electric wheelchairs?’”

Marshall Curry, director of Street Fight received a few congratulatory calls, as well. In hindsight, though, the whole business of being short-listed and nominated remains something of a blur. At lunch, the day after an academy screening for the movie, his surprise over being selected was still palpable.

“Tom Hayden told me after the screening that he was in Newark 20 years ago, campaigning for then-Councilman Sharpe James, in the mayoral race,” said Curry, whose cameras so annoyed the incumbent mayor that he assumed the director was working for his opponent. “He said, ‘Back then, we considered him a reformer.’ I was really pleased that he liked the film.”

You can’t buy endorsements like that, even in Hollywood.

Candidates in the major categories often begin their strategizing as soon as the ink dries on the contracts for their next project. “Consideration” ads are mandated as part of the deal, and the business of creating buzz begins upon the completion of the first “exclusive” video press release sent to ET.

Publicity typically is limited to a few newspaper articles, longer pieces in guild magazines, festival buzz (Sundance, especially) and screenings followed by Q&As. If a film has already been picked up for distribution theatrically – or will make its big splash on PBS or premium cable -- the financial decisions are made elsewhere. If not, even the most meager of campaigns would be deemed prohibitively expensive.

Curry was rewarded this week with a lengthy piece in the Los Angeles Times, even if it came about two weeks after it would do him any good at the academy’s ballot box. It has been re-released in select cities, including at Santa Monica’s Laemmle Monica. Don’t bother looking for stray academy screeners, though, as Best Documentary is one of the few categories in which some semblance of economic sanity still can be found.

Only Darwin’s Nightmare has yet to receive much exposure, beyond the festival circuit. Outside of the Sundance and IFC channels, and festivals devoted to the art of making short films, non-fiction shorts almost never are seen by mainstream audiences.

For the record, this year’s class is comprised of The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club, The Mushroom Club, God Sleeps in Rwanda, and A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin. I can only vouch for the first two, which were very good, indeed.

Last month, Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International announced a partnership to bring the nominated live-action and animated short films to arthouses around the country. Afterward, they will become available through HDNet, Magnolia's home-entertainment division and ShortsTV, for mobile phones.

Of the animated shorts, I’ve only seen Badgered, a very clever cartoon about sleep deprivation in the animal kingdom, which was made by Scottish film student Sharon Colman. The others are The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, 9 and One Man Band.

This year's live-action short films can be purchased, at $1.99 per, on Apple's iTunes Music Store. They are Ulrike Grote's Ausreisser (The Runaway), Runar Runarsson's The Last Farm, Rob Pearlstein's Our Time Is Up, Martin McDonagh's Six Shooter and Sean Ellis' Cashback, a sexy and funny study of boredom in the workplace, which also is available, for free ).

Next year at this time, don’t be surprised if most of the nominated films – short and long -- are made available for download ahead of the ceremony.

March 5 , 2006

- Gary Dretzka

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