Film/Doc Impact
nisbetmc | November 4, 2009
The faculty here at American University's School of Communication include several of the country's leading environmental filmmakers with their work coordinated through the Center for Environmental Filmmaking. One of our faculty Larry Engel worked on the recent PBS NOW film "Waterworld" which documents how climate change is impacting Bangladesh. The film describes the human health effects that climate change is already causing in this developing country of more than 200 rivers and frequent storm surges. You can read a transcript and/or watch the film at the embed above.
You will also want to…
nisbetmc | August 20, 2009Over the summer, a few stories have appeared speculating about a new "twitter effect" on movie box office success. The technology is thought to speed-up and amplify the traditional word-of-mouth influence. For example, the less than anticipated opening weekend for Bruno is believed to be partially attributable to movie-goers leaving the film (sometimes early) and twittering a negative review.
Now it appears movie studios are attempting to turn the twitter effect in their favor. From today's Washington Post:
Studios are trying to gauge the impact of an avalanche of tweets and how it affects…
nisbetmc | June 16, 2009
Over the past decade, issues such as fast food and obesity, organics and pesticides, genetic engineering, and factory farming have each captured their share of attention from engaged citizens and advocacy groups. Focusing events, such as the 2008 factory farming ballot initiative in California or the 2000 Starlink GM corn episode have generated spikes in news coverage. Popular books such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, and Pollan's NY Times article "Farmer in Chief" have reinforced concerns among an attentive public and generated reactions from…
nisbetmc | June 2, 2009
At the AFI Silver Theater on July 29 watch Spencer Tracy argue in defense of evolution.
For readers in the DC area, on July 29 at 7pm, the NIH Office of Science Education and the American Film Institute are teaming up to sponsor a screening of Inherit the Wind as part of their summer film series "Science in the Cinema."
Following the film, I have been invited to make a few remarks on the evolution debate as it plays out in contemporary culture and the enduring themes from the classic movie. The event and film series is designed to facilitate active audience participation and debate, so I…
nisbetmc | October 24, 2008
Following on the heels of Expelled and Obsession, a film warning of radical
Islam, there's more signs that the Right has discovered documentary film as a strategic communication tool to shape policy and mobilize their base.
Newt Gingrich in TV news appearances is promoting his new film on America's energy problem (trailer above). From the description for the film, hosted with his wife:
Citizens United Productions brings you our latest groundbreaking documentary, WE HAVE THE POWER. Today, America is under assault from key oil producing states - some of which are radical regimes whose energy…
nisbetmc | October 19, 2008
In a two hour special, PBS Frontline tackles what the award winning series calls the most important issue of our time. (Promo above.) The special program airs Tuesday night in most US markets, check your local listings.
"I have reported on the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the rise of Al Qaeda, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," says producer Martin Smith. "But nothing matches climate change in scope and severity."
From the press release:
The world needs to dramatically cut the carbon emissions responsible for wreaking havoc on the planet's climate, according to Dr.…
nisbetmc | October 1, 2008
Bill Maher's mockumentary Religulous opens in theaters on Friday. Judging by Maher's media interviews, it's more of the same type of sophomoric ridicule that has been so self-defeating to the atheist movement and that I have written about at this blog and in recent articles. Watch the trailer of the film, directed by the high minded genius who brought us Borat.
As this NY Times review describes, Maher chooses the easiest of targets to interview in his film, such as an amusement park Jesus. In the process, Maher makes fun of fundamentalist religion while seldom addressing the moderate…
nisbetmc | August 27, 2008There's an anti-Obama documentary in release and don't underestimate its potential impact. McCain needs something to intensify his base and research shows that political documentaries--whether Fahrenheit 9/11 or Inconvenient Truth--are fairly good at mobilizing supporters and the already committed.
Not surprisingly, the anti-Obama film (which I won't link to) is getting a fair amount of buzz in the conservative media including the Washington Times which ran a story on Monday. Below is the analysis I provided for the story:
Matthew Nisbet, an assistant professor at American University's…
nisbetmc | July 23, 2008
Director Randy Olson's Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy has already shaped the agenda and framed the discussion among scientists and the science media, a key impact of a successful documentary film.
I haven't had a chance to weigh in yet on the blog debate that has been raging over Sizzle. Needless to say, it's already one of the most talked about science-related documentaries of the year, even though very few people have actually even seen it. I will be writing a column about the film for Skeptical Inquirer Online, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, here's something that will likely interest…
nisbetmc | June 19, 2008
The box-office troubles of docs such as "Bigger, Faster, Stronger" is in contrast to Expelled's impact.
The LA Times runs a story this week on the downturn in box office fortunes for the documentary film genre. The inability of well crafted docs about front burner issues such as Iraq or steroids to reach audiences and to catalyze policy debate makes the impact of Expelled (see column) that much more troubling and suprising.
As the LA Times reports:
Critically acclaimed films about provocative subjects struggle to make money all the time, but rarely have so many lauded documentaries…
nisbetmc | June 14, 2008
In The Happening, "Marky" Mark Wahlberg plays a science teacher who tells his students that evolution is just a theory.
Over at IO9, an influential science fiction and science blog, there's detailed speculation that M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening offers viewers strong pro-intelligent design themes.
If you listen to this Science Friday interview, you will see that Shyamalan is not the most sophisticated guy when it comes to science. After all, he is the devoutly Christian director who made his break though with a film about a kid who sees dead people (The Sixth Sense) and then later…
nisbetmc | May 20, 2008
When Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006, Gallup polling showed that less than a majority of Americans had a favorable view of Al Gore. Yet just following his Nobel Prize win at the end of 2007, Gallup polling showed that this favorability rating had jumped to 58%. Call it the "Nobel bounce."
A recently released Pew survey shows that Gore's approval rating continues to hover just over the majority mark at 53%. Notably, in Pew tracking, as shown above, Gore has gained 11% in the "very favorable" category among Dems and 19% in the "very favorable" category among the college educated.…
nisbetmc | May 12, 2008
Since Earth Day, a number of polls have been released confirming that public opinion on climate change has changed very little over the past two years or since the premiere of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Conventional wisdom pegged Gore's film and media campaign as changing the nature of the debate in the public's mind, but unfortunately this interpretation doesn't hold up to the data. Americans already concerned about the issue have grown more intense in their feelings, while many others continue to disregard the problem.
The latest evidence is this Pew survey, that details the lingering…
nisbetmc | April 28, 2008Dallas Morning News runs this profile of Premise Media CEO A. Logan Craft. The feature spotlights the results of theater exit data collected by Premise and sheds additional light on the range of impacts I discussed earlier today.
Just like with polls released by political candidates or advocacy groups, these figures are to be interpreted with caution. But of interest from the article is that Premise is looking at the theater run as at least a six week experiment, with this past weekend being a big test. (The film earned another $1.4 million.) Also, given the selective nature of the audience…
nisbetmc | April 28, 2008
Two weeks ago, as Expelled premiered in more than a 1,000 theaters across the country, I went with several friends and graduate students for an early Friday evening screening at the Regal Cinema located in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, DC. The medium sized theater was about 80% full. In attendance was what appeared to be the typical urban professional crowd for the surrounding arts and entertainment district, an audience on a Sunday that is more likely to read the New York Times at a coffee house than to attend church.
As I watched the film, I noticed how effectively Expelled…
nisbetmc | April 22, 2008Few details are provided, but in a buzz-generating interview, here is what The Sun (UK) reports:
"The former US Vice President said: 'I will make a sequel to the 2006 documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' and despite earths 'rising fever', I am hopeful for a happy ending".
nisbetmc | April 8, 2008When producers release a documentary about a public affairs topic, especially in the case of a propaganda film like Expelled, they create several natural advantages over the typical news coverage that follows a policy debate.
First, in the lead up to the release of the film, the documentary generates coverage at softer news beats such as film reviews, the lifestyle pages, and in the case I detail below, the show business beat. In these contexts, the claims of the film are featured without context or absent a counter-argument.
Readers of these news zones are likely to be less familiar with…
nisbetmc | April 8, 2008As I have mentioned here before, one of the studies I am working on evaluates the impact of documentary film across audiences, news coverage, and policy contexts. I have written short introductions or columns on this topic in the past with a focus on Inconvenient Truth. While searching around for additional data, I ran across this survey report from Kaiser on the impact of Michael Moore's SICKO.
If the potential impact of Michael Moore's documentary "Sicko" were dependent solely on those who have actually seen the film, the result might be a passionate but narrow conversation among the 4%…
nisbetmc | March 25, 2008
Speculation mounts as to whether Gore will endorse either Obama or Clinton in the Democratic Primary race. My suggestion would be that he stay out of election politics in 2008, except to try to raise the profile of climate change in a non-partisan way.
As I describe in this column and in several public radio interviews, public opinion is little changed today from the time of the release of Inconvenient Truth, despite the massive publicity success of the film and the sharp increase in news coverage of climate change. The reason is that Gore's success has been a double edged sword. Attention…
nisbetmc | March 7, 2008In its latest issue, Time magazine runs a feature on the impacts of social issue dramas such as Blood Diamond and documentaries such as Inconvenient Truth. It's an area where I am conducting ongoing research evaluating the impacts of such movies across audiences, news coverage, and the policy agenda. I was interviewed for background on the story and I am quoted in the article. For more on this topic, see this report I co-authored last year for the Ford Foundation and Center for Social Media.