There's been a burst of press and stories, if not exactly outrage, about "Outrage," Kirby Dick's new documentary about closeted politicians.

We caught the film at its Tribeca Film Festival world premiere on Friday, and the director who gave us the surprisingly intense and revealing "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" doesn't quite deliver the same explosive revelations here, though it's still a well-told and compelling vehicle for Dick's main argument against closeted politicians who don't support gay rights. As Rich Tafel, a former Mark Foley staffer, offers, in a characteristically notable if not eye-popping moment, D.C. is "one of  the most gay places but also one of the most closeted."

Dick was careful, both in the film and at the Q&A, to say he's not endorsing outing for outing's sake. His goal in exposing closeted politicians is to change their politics, because it's the fact that they're in the closet, he says, that makes them vote so vehemently against gay rights in the first place (to deflect attention from their own sexuality, among other things).

Some of the men who get the attention — and they are men; there are no closeted lesbians featured — are  former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey (present at the screening, and lauded in the movie for his decision to come out), Barney Frank (also lauded, and with some of the best lines), Idaho senator Larry Craig (lampooned repeatedly for what Dick charges is hypocrisy), California congressman David Dreier (criticized directly, if not as directly as Craig), former New York mayor Ed Koch (ditto, with one especially tough charge) and Florida governor Charlie Crist (who gets a good chunk of the airtime, presumably because, of the entire lot, he's currently the most important political player, with a potential 2012 presidential run in the cards).

There's no direct evidence of Crist's homosexuality, but Dick lands a minor coup when an ex-girlfriend, Kelly Heyniger, tells Dick's film crew that "I think I should just keep my mouth shut….call me in ten years and I'll tell you a story."

The other coup centers on Koch, who Dick charges threatened an alleged former lover, Richard Nathan, if he talked about their relationship, and essentially ran Nathan out of New York.

But by and large this is a documentary that brings together the issue more than it does offer shatteringly new reporting about it; it's in the spirit of Robert Greenwald's "Outfoxed" — you basically knew the M.O., now you just get to see it up close.

Dick also wonders about, and shows subjects criticizing, the mainstream media's under-coverage of the subject, which he suggests is motivated either by a) discomfort or b) misplaced sensitivity — though one could reasonably argue that some in the media might simply responding to the message of the gay rights movement desire that people are judged irrespective of sexuality.

Whatever the reason, Dick is right to point out that this is a topic that doesn't get much mainstream media attention. Now, at least, it will get mainstream film reviews.

The word today that MSNBC will use “Dear Zachary” as a springboard to increase involvement in feature-length documentaries was welcome news for a category that’s been harassed by some tough times at the box office, and almost as many news stories belaboring same.

So what really is the state of the documentary? From the movies we caught at the Silverdocs festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, this past weekend, not as shabby as the doomer stories would suggest. There’s a more innovative and interesting group of filmmakers out there than ever, even if the market has yet to demonstrate the Spurlockian and Penguin-ish vigor of 2004. Sure, some of the movies can be a little rough around the edges. But anyone bemoaning the state of American filmmaking as cookie-cutter and studio-compliant, beset by the same foreign competition as cars and computers (damn you, Romania), would have been heartened by a trip to this quiet middle-class suburb on the Edgar Allan Poe side of the D.C.-Maryland border.

A couple of the movies have been on the fest circuit, and a few more will open in the coming months. Here’s our take on a few of them — including “Zachary” – as well as some of the premieres.

“Man on Wire:” — There’s really no better testament to quixotic whimsy than James Marsh’s look at Philippe Petit’s walk across the twin towers in the mid-1970’s, a film that Magnolia releases next month. Marsh’s Erroll Morris-esque use of re-enactment may trouble some purists, but quirkiness and persistence of vision, the sheer _Frenchness_ of it, is more than just charming — it’s inspiring.

“Holy Land Hardball” — Is it “Hoop Dreams” or an Alex Gibney-style look at the shortsightedness of institutional who say they have it all under control? A little of both, as directors Brett Rapkin and Erik Kesten capture moments of striking grandiosity and stunning cluelessness in the bid to bring America’s pastime to Israel. The lesson: If you want to bring baseball to a country that’s never had it, maybe make sure they have dirt for a pitching mound first.

“The Garden” — One of the buzzed-about titles we didn’t get to see, in part because our first reaction was: Community garden in South Central? Just another tale that’s a triumph of the spirit, or at least of the chrysanthemums. But people who have seen it report back on a twisty tale of civic neglect, community power and, of course, botany.

“American Teen” — Nanette Burstein’s take on a group of disparate high-school seniors at an Indiana school shows that you can portray both types and individuated characters at the same time. The movie is interested in people more than storylines, though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t embrace the natural dramatic calendar of a school year (graduation, prom, basketball season). It’s a thinking man’s “Laguna Beach,” though Vantage’s marketing is very “Breakfast Club,” minus the Simple Minds theme song. (You know you remember.)

“Dear Zachary” — Painting concentric circles around the story of an elderly couple who lost their 28-year-old son after a psychologically disturbed ex-girlfriend allegedly murdered him — while pregnant with his child — Kurt Kuenne makes a movie for the ages. If this was five years ago, when dark docs were more commercially fashionable, it would be as successful as “Capturing the Fredmans.” As it is, it’s still a really solid movie that hopefully a few million people will watch on TV and a few more in theaters. “Zachary” is an indictment of a (Canadian) legal system, a portrait of a lost friend  and a minutely detailed study of determination in the face of great pain, with a shocking event at the center. The rapid cuts sometimes seem to put effect over substance, but no matter — the movie’s power derives from intensely traumatic events happening in real-time to one very real family.

What documentaries should do, in other words.

How many people can claim that they helped to change the world? An Inconvenient Truth’s producer Lawrence Bender can.

John Anderson has written a NYT story about the documentary Manufacturing Dissent, coming up at South By Southwest, which dissects Michael Moore’s brand of POV filmmaking.

Yes, filmmaker James Cameron is promoting his upcoming Jesus tomb documentary. But he’s not a self-serving wack-job. He considers himself a scientist and a pragmatist, and he’s quite sharp. If he has scientific evidence of who’s buried in those tombs, I’d take him seriously. Meanwhile he’s already prepping the upcoming Avatar in New Zealand.

It was a good day for Little Miss Sunshine and Half Nelson at Saturday’s Independent Spirit Awards. Little Miss Sunshine won four and Half Nelson won two awards. Here are ten things I learned at the big tent by the Santa Monica beach today:

1. Academy Awards producer Laura Ziskin will allow all five producers to come onstage to accept the Oscar, Fox Searchlight confirmed today. When Little Miss Sunshine won the best feature award Saturday afternoon, the three producers who had been given the green light by the Academy graciously allowed the two who weren’t, Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger, to say their thanks first. Michael Arndt also won for best first screenplay, Alan Arkin won for best supporting actor and Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton won for directing. “We were dead in the studio system,” said Dayton. “Thankfully people in the independent world stuck with us. We’re grateful to our five producers—”All five,” chimed in Faris—for sticking with us.”

2. Several people said they were relieved to hear that Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin wasn’t in the tent, because host Sarah Silverman, wearing a short school girl outfit, was fairly X-rated—she started out comparing the Indie Spirits to the Adult Film Awards and performed one skit about fucking her favorite bag of cheese. At the IFC Party afterwards at Shutters on the Beach, John Waters praised her: “She did a good job.” As far as I was concerned he got the biggest laugh of the night when he came out wearing a chain like Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan and said, “never waste a good prop. I wouldn’t mind if Samuel L. Jackson chained me to a radiator.” (He presented best screenplay to Jason Reitman for Thank You For Smoking.)

3. I’m going to lose my office Oscar pool. The consensus seemed to be that The Lives of Others would beat Pan’s Labyrinth for Best Foreign Film. Everyone agrees that Pan should win art direction and makeup. On the Oscar ballot, the Best Score category doesn’t show the name of the composer. Babel could win, but if people remember that Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla won last year for Brokeback Mountain, it could also go to Alexandre Desplat for The Queen. I went to a lunch on Friday at the French consulate for Desplat, an articulate man who also composed the excellent score for The Painted Veil. He’s moving on to score a studio fantasy, The Golden Compass.

4. Even Dreamgirls writer-director Bill Condon, who’s working on staging the three songs for Dreamgirls at the Oscars, is worried that they may have cancelled each other out. If everyone knew that the Beyonce Knowles song was Listen, they might vote for it, but it’s not clear on the Oscar ballot. Which means that all these people who’ve been telling me they voted for Melissa Etheridge for An Inconvenient Truth may have voted for the winner.

5. Michelle Williams has spunk! Nominated for a Best Actress Indie Spirit Award for the micro-budget Land of Plenty, Williams admitted that many people criticized her for flipping the bird from their vacation hotel balcony at the paparazzi who were harassing her and Heath Ledger. She said that she and Ledger tend to walk around with sulky scowls when the photogs lurk so that the pictures won’t get published. “They’re looking for photos that make us look like we’re living the happy life,” she said.

Also with her share of spunk is Williams’ fellow nominee, Amber Tamblyn (Stephanie Daley), who is clearly someone who stands up for herself. The two young women lost to veteran Frances McDormand for Friends with Money.

6. The LAT Calendar section is in a big fight with the Metro section, which ran a tough investigative piece Saturday by Paul Pringle, who does not cover the film beat, about Film Independent, which puts on the big Indie Spirits party every year. According to LAT critic Kenneth Turan, the story, which suggested that the organization doesn’t plow back enough of its revenues into programs and services, was not shown to the Calendar editors, who are furious. The story revealed that Film Independent president Dawn Hudson earns $265,000 a year, more than her counterparts at the American Film Institute and The American Cinematheque, which did set some tongues wagging inside the Spirits tent. However Hudson is a popular figure in the indie film community who has worked long and hard to support indie film. Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard said that he thought someone with a right-wing agenda was going after indie cinema with this piece. The news story manipulated statistics and a nonprofit effectiveness measuring stick to strange effect.

For one thing, the carpet being walked today by doc filmmakers such as A.J. Schnack and stars Sally Kellerman and Nev Campbell, who were participating in a Robert Altman tribute, was blue, not red. The 600 plus outlets covering the event ranged from the KABC, Reelz, Canal Plus and the IFC Channel to the New York Daily News, Elle.com, The TV Guide Channel and BBC News. Was it a bad thing that indie films were being promoted around the world?

The people attending this event included “the best of the best of indie filmmakers in Hollywood,” said Silverman. “If a bomb went off,” she added, “there’d be nobody left to make a doc about it.” Many of the filmmakers during the awards show went out of their way to thank Film Independent for supporting indie film. “Many of us feel this Spirit Award is the highest honor in America today and never more than today,” said Little Miss Sunshine producer Ron Yerxa.

7. Jack Lechner, the lyricist for the song spoofs that were the highlight of the event, is slowly getting close to mounting a musical in New York. Minnie Driver performed a country take-off on Pan’s Labyrinth. Loretta Devine really scored with “Beauty Is Deceased,” about The Dead Girl. Taylor Dane kicked up her heels country style with “Screwed Up Family,” about Little Miss Sunshine, to the tune of “We Are Family.” Rosario Dawson delivered “The Crack-Head Teacher Man,” off Half Nelson.

8. David Lynch is just as strange as we think he is. To promote his digital micro-budget movie Inland Empire, Laura Dern reminded as she accepted Lynch’s Special Distinction Award from Dennis Hopper, Lynch set himself up on Hollywood Boulevard with a megaphone and a cow on a leash. Hopper described working on a Lynch movie as “surreal.” After a good take on Blue Velvet, Lynch would say: “Solid gold! Peachy keen! Let’s do one more!”

9. Robert Altman liked to torture his actors, but they loved him anyway. When he didn’t like a take, Robert Downey, Jr. recalled, he said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” And when he was pleased, he said, “That was absolutely adequate, let’s move on.” Film Independent established a new ensemble acting award named after Altman.

10. As usual, German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck cut to the chase when he advised up-and-coming filmmakers, while accepting his award for best foreign film for The Lives of Others, “Follow your own voice. Don’t make a film by committee. There’s a simple way to get that done: downscale the budget. When you work on a small budget the people you are working with are not in it for the money. They’re fine with being exploited as long as you’re exploiting yourself.”

Guillermo Navarro, accepting the best cinematography prize for Pan’s Labyrinth, praised director Guillermo del Toro for “being incredibly stubborn,” he said. “This movie was in the hands of the filmmakers, and that’s what made all the difference.”

Here’s the deal about Al Gore accepting the The Inconvenient Truth Oscar. The Academy lets the docs bring up two people onstage to accept the award, and one has to be the director. So the filmmakers get to choose who that second person will be, whether it’s a producer like Lawrence Bender or not. He tells Premiere the thinking behind the Oscar acceptance strategy.

The word “filmanthropy” comes from AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis, who put his own money into the horrifying Sundance doc Nanking. (He used the word in my Sundance piece.) It applies to what Participant’s Jeff Skoll did with Al Gore’s global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, or Charles Ferguson’s fierce attack on the Bush administration’s Iraq War policy, No End in Sight. Chris Lee assembles the elements of this new philanthropic activist filmmaking trend in today’s long front-page LAT story.

[Posted by Cynthia Littleton]
You might think members of the Gore clan were running for office in Hollywood these days. Al Gore was in town Sunday to be a presenter at the Grammy Awards, where Melissa Etheridge’s “I Need to Wake Up” was nominated for best song from a movie or TV show, while daughter Kristin Gore was busy collecting a trophy for her work on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” at the WGA Awards, held simultaneously at the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City and at the Hudson Theatre in New York. The younger Gore, who has worked as a staff writer on Fox’s “Futurama,” among other credits, was part of a large team that won for the May 2006 episode of “SNL,” hosted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, that featured a guest appearance by Al Gore, who was a good enough sport to take part in a few sketches. Kristin Gore was one of two writers from the New York-based sketch comedy series who were on hand for the Century Plaza ceremony. “I had no idea that this week of sleep deprivation would lead to this kind of hardware,” she giggled in accepting the award. Backstage, she fielded the inevitable questions about her father’s intentions in ‘08. “No those rumors aren’t true,” she said, joking that it’s fallen to her to “try to get him work.” And no, her father isn’t completely besotted with the trappings of filmdom. “He keeps saying he’s old enough to know that the red carpet is just a rug.” Next up for Kristin Gore is finishing the screenplay adaptation of her first novel, “Sammy’s Hill,” about a young woman’s adventures in Washington, which David O. Russell is attached to direct for Sony Pictures. And then there’s novel No. 2, “Sammy’s House,” which is due out in July.

When and if An Inconvenient Truth wins the best feature documentary Oscar, two people are allowed to go up onstage, including the director, and only one is supposed to speak. According to director Davis Guggenheim, if the movie wins, he will go up with Al Gore—who will give the acceptance speech. Paramount Vantage chief John Lesher reminds that Academy rules dictate that only those who have seen all five docus can vote, so nothing is assured. But I have a hunch that those few hundred Academy members will want Gore to give that speech to that HUGE global audience.

You have to hand it to hard-working AP scribe Dave Germain: he had the first Oscar noms story up this morning. Like Gregg, Nicole and me, he’s been covering Sundance and now has to do a day of Oscar reporting. I’ve already spoken to happy nominee Mark Wahlberg this morning—”now my parents can call me a professional actor,” he said. “I’m so fortunate.”

Here’s the complete list of nominations

Even with eight nominations, Dreamgirls’ showing is a disappointment for Paramount/Dreamworks, even if Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy and a host of technical nods went their way. Not scoring best picture, director or writer is a huge blow and a surprise, although enthusiasm for the film was lagging with its boxoffice. Finally, even though Bill Condon mounted a smart and great-looking movie with many strong performances, somehow Dreamgirls failed to rouse big emotions. I suspect the original material is the underlying issue here. It’s hard to imagine a better movie being made from that musical.

The happy camper this morning–along with the folks behind Babel, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine and Borat, which nabbed a surprise adapted screenplay nomination, is Clint Eastwood, whose Letters from Iwo Jima pushed Dreamgirls out of the best picture race. Interestingly, while Eastwood was nominated for directing Letters, the film did not get any acting nods, so it has to be considered a weak best picture contender. Letters had a total of four nominations, while its competitors Babel had seven, Little Miss Sunshine had four (though not directing, United 93’s Paul Greengrass sqeaked in there), The Departed had five, and The Queen had six.

In the end, the move to put Letters out at year’s end paid off handsomely, as Eastwood’s star power and critics’ raves turned what might have been a difficult-to-watch foreign language war film into a must-see. Eastwood knows what he’s doing, and the Warners Oscar strategy that was criticized for pushing Blood Diamond over The Departed paid off for both. The actors branch gave DiCaprio his due for his meaty Blood Diamond performance rather than The Departed. (He must have gotten many votes for both films, and wound up not losing altogether.) Djimon Hounsou was also rewarded for his powerfully moving Blood Diamond role.

While it might seem that Sony Pictures Classics would be crying over Volver being shut out of the foreign language final five, truth is, the Best Actress nomination for Penelope Cruz will generate more boxoffice as the film goes into wider release on 700 screens, the most for any Pedro Almodovar film, says SPC’s Michael Barker. Their Lives of Others is a strong candidate for the win—although Pan’s Labyrinth, which scored six nominations today, will also get some traction there and may have been more widely seen. The trick with the foreign films is that only the Oscar voters who have seen all five films get to vote. So some of the films—like After the Wedding–that haven’t been widely seen gain a bizarre advantage.

Finally it’s a wide open race. But my money for best picture is on Little Miss Sunshine. WHY? It’s the little best picture that could. And it’s beloved.

[Posted by Nicole Sperling] It was an emotional Sunday morning at the Sundance Festival’s Holiday Cinemas in Park City. In its world premiere, the documentary “Autism Every Day,” from director Lauren Thierry, screened for a packed audience that included NBC Universal’s chairman and CEO Bob Wright and his wife Suzanne, who are executive producers on the film and co-founders of the Autism Speaks foundation. The two are also grandparents to an autistic boy. The film depicts a day in the life of eight families who are struggling with autistic children, illustrating both the financial and emotional toll this disease takes on families as well as the dedication and love these parents have for their children. At 44 minutes long the film will primarily be used for advocacy and outreach. You can watch a 12 minute clip of the movie at AutismSpeaks.org. .

[Posted by Anne Thompson] Here’s the full-length story in <a href="THR. And here’s my piece on the Sundance competition documentary “Nanking” (pictured above), produced by AOL visionary-turned-filmanthropist Ted Leonsis. As I was writing it yesterday, I started crying, and as I talked about it today on sunny Main Street with Sundance’s Documentary Film Program director Cara Mertes, I lost it again. (I’m also a little whacked from lack of sleep.)