'Outrage': Kirby Dick kicks open Washington's closet door

Would a host of key members of the Washington political establishment be less hostile to gay rights if they came out of the closet and acknowledged being gay themselves?

That's the question at the heart of "Outrage," Kirby Dick's rabble-rousing new documentary that debuts tonight at New York's Tribeca Film Festival. (It opens  May 8 in L.A. and four other cities, including Washington.) Clearly pulling no punches, the film investigates the secret lives of closeted gay politicians, some of whom have spent years in office with only the skimpiest of scrutiny from the mainstream media. If nothing else, "Outrage" establishes Dick as a formidable force in the investigative documentary field, especially coming on the heels of his last doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which bashed the MPAA's impenetrable and often irrational film rating system.

I know what you're thinking. If you've seen the film, spill it already. So who does he out? Dick's targets include Florida's current  governor, Charlie Crist, who was viewed for a time as a front-runner to be John McCain's vice-presidential pick; David Dreier (R-San Dimas), who was once a leading candidate for the House majority leader post when the Republicans still controlled Congress; Ken Mehlman, George Bush's campaign manager during the 2004 election and former Republican National Committee chairman; former New York City mayor Ed Koch; the now-retired Idaho Sen. Larry Craig; Jim McCrery (R-La.), a ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee who retired last year; Ed Schrock (R-Va.), who retired in 2004; and -- gasp -- the prominent Fox News anchor Shepard Smith. 

It is pretty obvious from this list of names that the film's real issue is hypocrisy. With the exception of Koch, the outed politicians are all conservative Republicans who have repeatedly voted against gay rights legislation that would allow gay marriage, gay adoption or include gays among those protected in hate crimes laws. (Though he wasn't an elected official, Mehlman is included because he ran the Bush re-election campaign of 2004, which was propelled by a push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which was seen by many as a cynical effort to lure evangelical conservatives to the voting booths.) 

Dick's world view is best expressed in the film by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), one of the few gay congressmen who has voluntarily come out of the closet, who says: "There is a right to privacy, there's no right to hypocrisy." Dick makes a strong case that closeted gays are often the most enthusiastic opponents of gay rights legislation, in part to establish their bona fides in the straight world. He gives a wealth of screen time to Michael Rogers, a blogger who has been a leader in outing closeted gay politicians, using his wealth of contacts among gay congressional staffers and Washington journalists.

Like Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show," Dick has a wonderful eye for capturing telling moments of political sanctimony and posturing. He shows clips of Craig, on the Senate floor, extolling his wife's virtues on Valentine's Day, not long after he plays us an audio tape of Craig being interviewed by an undercover agent whom Craig had played footsie with in an airport men's room. After airing reports that Dreier had a longtime relationship with his male chief of staff -- a story first reported in 2004 by the L.A. Weekly -- Dick shows photos of various exotic vacation locales around the world that were visited by Dreier, noting that each time, Dreier's chief of staff would arrive at the same getaway spot a day later. 

Dick is especially hard on the mainstream media, who  he clearly believes have turned a blind eye to the hypocrisy issue, perhaps out of old-fashioned respect for privacy, perhaps -- as former RIAA Washington lobbyist Hilary Rosen contends in the film -- because straight journalists are squeamish about dealing with gay issues. To prove the point, Dick shows Bill Maher's original Nov. 8, 2006 interview with CNN's Larry King, where Maher refers to Ken Mehlman as a closeted gay man -- and then shows how CNN edited out the remark from later editions of the program. (Mehlman, who isn't interviewed in the doc, has publicly denied that he's gay.)

My only issue with the film is that in its fervor to open up every closet door, it doesn't always offer us the full story -- or ample justification for the outing process. The mainstream media has clearly been behind the curve in terms of reporting about closeted gay politicians and their anti-gay voting records. When Dreier, for example, lost a bid to join the GOP congressional leadership, it was widely reported by the mainstream media that his defeat came because he was viewed as being too moderate -- while many insiders actually believed he lost because the GOP thought giving the post to a closeted gay man was a potential political disaster. In the film, asked if he believed Dreier was passed over for being too moderate, Barney Frank quips: "Yes, in the sense that I marched in the moderate pride parade last summer and went to a moderate bar." The GOP clearly seemed more attuned to its potential PR debacles than the Washington media: The day after Maher outed Mehlman on CNN, Mehlman resigned as party chairman. Was that really just a coincidence?  

Still, I wish Dick had made time to interview some establishment Washington journalists so we could hear their justifications for remaining so silent on the issue. I'm also not entirely convinced that he has any good reason to out Fox News' Smith -- even if he works for a conservative news network whose commentators have often been critical of gay rights, he's a news anchor, not a strident opinionator, like Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly. But Dick doesn't pretend to be objective. He has a case to make and he makes it well, reminding us that it was closeted gay political figures who were usually the last ones to join the fight against AIDS or lend support to any gay anti-discrimination efforts. When the closet door is securely shut, it's awfully dark inside.

Photo of Congressman David Dreier, left,  and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger by Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times

Early on in "Toots," the new documentary about the legendary New York saloon keeper Toots Shor (it opens Friday here at the Downtown Independent Theater), we get to see Frank Sinatra recalling the night Toots asked him to come to dinner at his joint with some of Toots' pals. The other pals? Bing Crosby, Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth. As the four sultans of mid-century America made their way through the restaurant to a private table, the whole saloon spontaneously erupted with applause. If you were a celebrity in New York from 1940 through the early 1960s, the place to be was Toots Shor's, where you'd find sports icons, journalists, actors, mobsters or politicians, all lifting a glass in the same smoke-filled room.

Today's celebrity clubs and eateries are niche joints--the film crowd inhabits one spot, the musicians go somewhere else, the journalists (the ones that still have a job) have a different hangout. But Toots Shor's was a watering hole where everyone rubbed elbows. You'd see Joe DiMaggio at one table, Jackie Gleason at another, the likes of Frank Gifford or Mickey Mantle or Walter Cronkite across the room. On one night, Toots could be seen having a drink with Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, then heading across the room to hang out with mob boss Frank Costello. As the writer Pete Hamill says in the film: " 'Toot's' was a part of the imagination of people who had never even walked in there. They knew it existed the way they knew the Statue of Liberty existed."

Made by Kristi Jacobson, Toots' granddaughter, the documentary nicely captures a colorful period in American culture, a booze-fueled age where men cheerfully insulted each other, bet on the ponies and started drinking at lunch and often didn't stop till the sun came up. Toots kept everyone's glass filled to the brim. A giant of a man, he was famously gruff--he used to boast of receiving a letter from an out-of-towner who'd enjoyed the food, but advised that if he wanted to be successful "you'd better get rid of that fat slob of a headwaiter who spent most of his time insulting patrons."

Toots led by example. In the film, Jacobson's mother tells the story of the time Toots breezed into church one morning, determined to be there for her confirmation (Toots was Jewish, but his wife, a former showgirl affectionately known as Baby, brought the kids up Catholic). Toots had been out on the town all night, so he brought along his drinking buddy--John Wayne. Toots wasn't much of a businessman, blowing most of the dough he ever made, but if he ever had problems with creditors, he'd turn to his pal, Frank Costello, who'd manage to set things right. One of the more interesting revelations in the movie is that when Toots needed ready cash to open a second restaurant in 1960, he went to Jimmy Hoffa, who loaned him $7 million from the Teamsters union's pension fund.

The best part of the movie is the great gallery of characters Jacobson assembled to tell all the Toots anecdotes. The Teamsters tale comes courtesy of Gianni Russo. He looks so familiar, I said to Jacobson. Where have I seen him before? She laughed. "He played Carlo Rizzi in 'The Godfather.' " It made me wonder--how mobbed up was Toots? Keep reading:

 

 

For years, everyone has wanted a piece of LeBron James, who is right now--sorry, Kobe--perhaps the most popular basketball player on the planet. It's a testimony to LeBron's mega-stardom that a trio of Hollywood studios are in the midst of a bidding war over "More Than a Game," a riveting documentary about LeBron's Akron, Ohio high-school basketball team that ended up going from obscurity to being the No. 1 ranked team in the country. The film debuted to glowing reviews at the Toronto Film Festival last month, sparking interest from a variety of studios.

Three studios are in the thick of the action: Lionsgate, Overture and Sony (which would release the film through one of its subsidiary labels). The most aggressive offer is from Lionsgate, which has the pole position in the bidding because of its track record, both with documentaries (it released two of Michael Moore's biggest hits) and with urban audiences, having had great success shepherding the Tyler Perry film franchise. The biggest challenge for the studios, in terms of figuring out what kind of offer to make, has been in assessing the film's potential worth.

It's an intriguing equation. On the one hand, LeBron is a gigantic worldwide brand, with a slew of big corporations--led by Nike and Coke--who are all valuable potential promotion partners for the film. LeBron has also carved out several months of his schedule to promote the movie. The film also has Interscope Records chief Jimmy Iovine on board as an executive producer, offering the tantalizing prospect of extra marketing muscle via a soundtrack album loaded up with a host of Iovine's hip-hop artists.

On the other hand, it's been a tricky proposition trying to figure out when the film should have a theatrical release. Ideally the film should come out during basketball season, when a studio could promote it with a radio and TV ad campaign. But LeBron is, well, otherwise occupied then, playing basketball himself. Lionsgate has pushed to release the film in late summer 2009, shortly before the season begins. The filmmakers seem eager for the film to come out in the fall of 2009, perhaps because LeBron has already committed to other promotional duties during the summer. Negotiations have also been slowed by the LeBron camp's desire to possibly carve out a post-theatrical window for a TV premiere for the film, presumably for a heavily promoted ESPN debut.

Still, I expect to see the film sell, perhaps as early as later this week. Having seen the film myself, it's clear that "More Than a Game" is more than just a documentary. Directed by Kristopher Belman, it's an uplifting story, almost a fable, about a close-knit group of kids who overcome adversity, survive a series of obstacles, show a lot of heart and are rewarded with a well-deserved triumph on the basketball court. It doesn't hurt that one of those Akron, Ohio kids is one of the most famous athletes in the world.

People have always said that if every documentary had Michael Moore as its publicist, we'd see a lot more money-making documentaries. "More Than a Game" is no slouch -- it has the NBA, Coke, Nike and Interscope as its promotional partners. I have a feeling that whoever ends up distributing this film isn't going to have any trouble getting our attention when it finally comes out.

Photo of LeBron James by Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Bill Maher has never made any secret of his aversion to religion. I'm no therapist, but you have to wonder if it had something to do with Maher being raised in his father's Irish-Catholic faith, not discovering until he was practically a teenager that his mother was Jewish. On the other hand, like so many comics, maybe he was just under the spell of George Carlin, who was no fan of religion either.

I've gotten a deluge of reaction to my last post about my recent interview with Maher, whose "Religulous" documentary--due in October--is something of a sustained attack on all sorts of religious extremism (the above clip -- an exclusive scene from the movie that you can only watch here -- shows Maher in a lively if somewhat lopsided debate with Jesus; well, an actor playing Jesus at a Florida theme park). In the movie, Maher debates a host of zealots, including a minister who claims the ability to help gay men go straight.

I found it a little suspicious that Maher confronted all sorts of people in the film, but never lost an argument.  Wasn't the deck stacked? "I'm not going to lie--the deck was stacked," Maher said. "Let's face it, when it comes to religion, there is no convincing argument. If you believe in the Bible in a way where you think you can live to be 900 years old and turn your wife into a pillar of salt, you're going to lose any logical debate. Your story just falls apart."

Maher spends a lot of time in the film overseas, particularly in Holland, an especially tolerant country that, because of an influx of Muslim extremists, has been caught up in a struggle over how to react to religious intolerance. What did Maher learn there?

"That if it can happen in Holland, it could happen in America too. The lesson is--don't be afraid to exert the superiority of Western civilization, at least when it comes to free speech, equality of the sexes and freedom of the press. Those are things we have that they don't have in Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Iran. And in my view, if we have it, and they don't, then we're a better place. That's not prejudice. That's just reality." 

In Bill Maher's new documentary, "Religulous," the film's protagonist--Maher himself--feels the same way about the film's subject matter at the beginning as at the end: In other words, he thinks religion is a big crock of spit. You know irreverence is the order of the day when Maher, reacting to a smooth-talking black preacher's boast that he got a great deal on his $2,000 suits, drolly observes, "I find it interesting that you're a Christian, you used to be a Muslim but you buy all your clothes like a Jew."

"Religulous" doesn't open until Oct. 3, but after seeing the movie I couldn't wait to grill Maher about how he managed to get so many deeply religious figures to actually talk to him, since it's obvious to anyone whose ever watched Maher's act (on "Politically Incorrect" or HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" or in a comedy club) that he wasn't much of a believer. In many ways, the film is a comic bookend to Sam Harris' "The End of Faith," a humorless best seller that views religion as a bastion of superstition and moral hypocrisy. Although Maher embraces Harris' belief that religion is a destructive force that has brought great pain and suffering into the world--at one point he calls it a neurological disorder--Maher is always searching for the humor in every situation. A longtime acolyte of George Carlin, when Maher confronts a religious zealot or hustler, he prefers mocking over scolding.

Rolling his eyes, often full of derision, Maher gets in his licks with everyone, from a guy playing Jesus at a Holy Land theme park in Orlando to Muslims at a gay bar in Amsterdam to a rabbi who advocates the dissolution of Israel (he wears a card with the slogan "A Jew Not a Zionist"). As everything from "The Gong Show" to "Borat" has proved, real people and situations are often undeniably funnier than anything scripted by the best comic minds. In Holland, Maher is in the midst of questioning a somber Muslim cleric when he's interrupted by the cleric's cellphone, whose ring tone is Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir."

So how did Maher manage to get all these people to actually talk to him? Since "Religulous" was directed by Larry Charles, who also did "Borat," I suspected that subterfuge and trickery were involved. I was not far wrong. Here's how Maher pulled it off:

As you can see from my photo, when you have one of those "conversations with" at a film festival--as I did the other night with HBO documentary maven Sheila Nevins at the L.A. Film Festival--it's not a totally intimate affair, since you're sitting on stage in front of a few hundred people, all staring up your nose. Still, you couldn't ask for a better subject than Nevins, who is a fascinating character. First off, she's has been responsible for some of the best documentaries of the past 15 years, from "When the Levees Broke" to "Taxi to the Dark Side" to "Born Into Brothels" to the recent "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired."

Secondly, she puts her money where her mouth is. In the green room, before we did our thing, an indie film exec came over to greet her and handed her a $100 bill. He was paying off a bet: Sheila had predicted box-office failure for "Young@Heart," a feel-good doc that has barely made a dent in its theatrical run, grossing $3.5 million after 10 or so weeks in release. Nevins wasn't bashing the movie--she simply thought no one would go to a theater to see a film about old people and she was right. (She refused the money, by the way, telling her pal to give it to charity.)

But she's also fascinating, as I learned from our "conversation," because she's a woman of a certain age--i.e., a woman who came of age in the pre-feminist movement era of show business, when it was apparently OK for a big-shot network anchor to feel her up right in the office, as she recounted (in a considerably more ribald fashion) during our onstage conversation. I often ask people who work in entertainment who their mentors were. Nevins says she didn't have one, since there were almost no female TV executives on board when she started her career.

It's hard to take notes when you're up in front of a big audience, but here are a few highlights from our conversation:

If you love documentaries as much as I do, you might want to visit the L.A. Film Festival Thursday evening to hear HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins expound on the art of documentary filmmaking. Nobody--not even Michael Moore--has done more to shape the course of docs over the past two decades than Nevins, whose films have won 19 Academy Awards, 20 prime-time Emmys and 28 Peabody Awards. Her most recent hot-button doc was "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," which debuted on HBO earlier this month as part of a summer-long series of Monday-night doc showings on the channel. (To learn more, here's a recent column I did on the subject.)

I mention all this because the event, held at 6 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, is billed as "A Conversation With Sheila Nevins." And since the LAFF apparently couldn't get a media big shot like Charlie Rose to host, they asked me. I've got a few questions of my own to ask Nevins, but if we have any doc fans (or detractors) out there, I'd love to hear what questions you'd suggest asking Nevins. So don't be shy--fire away. We'll try to make it a lively evening. (The Italian Cultural Institute, by the way, is at 1023 Hilgard Ave., in Westwood Village.)   

Most of my family is from the South, starting with my grandmother, who spent 93 years living in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. She had a pretty simple rule about politicians, saying, "I'd be happy to vote for a Republican, if I could ever find a good one." Apparently she was one of the few Southerners resistant to the wily political charms of Lee Atwater, who did more than any political strategist of his generation to help the GOP gain a decades-long stranglehold on the South. Atwater is dead, but his malevolent spirit roars back to life in the new documentary "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," which debuted Sunday night at the L.A. Film Festival. (It plays again Friday at 1:45 p.m. at the Landmark.) Directed by Stefan Forbes, it offers a compelling portrait of one of the great con men of modern American politics. The movie isn't a knee-jerk lefty hit job. In fact, it shows that Atwater was a runaway success not just because he was a devious political operator, but because, in the words of one liberal reporter Forbes interviewed, the sass-talking, guitar-playing Atwater "was the most fun man I ever met."

For anyone who wants to understand why Barack Obama's campaign already has a Fight the Smears website up, debunking scurrilous political rumors, Atwater's political odyssey offers a telling instructional in the black arts of campaign dirty tricks. A protege of Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, one of Atwater's first triumphs came at the expense of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina state senator who was expected to be easily reelected until Atwater (working for Turnipseed's rival) started telling reporters that Turnipseed as a young man had "been hooked up to jumper cables."

That was just the beginning. Atwater helped pioneer the use of push polls, hiring operatives to pose as telephone survey questioners. He defeated a South Carolina Democrat named Max Heller by having his henchmen phone voters, ask a few routine questions, then wonder, "Would you vote for a Jew who didn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" A popular mayor until then, Heller was a goner, especially after Atwater nudged a third-party candidate into the race who kept bringing up the issue at campaign events.

But how did Atwater graduate from local Dixie devilment to the national stage, where he ended up running George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and serving as chairman of the Republican National Party? 

      In my column today about HBO's impressive new summer-long documentary series, I talked with Marina Zenovich, the director of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,'' the provocative doc that launched the series Monday night--and is airing all week on HBO. It will be theaters next month. (Go here to watch HBO's trailer for the film.) Even though the documentary focuses on the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering in the case, Zenovich did a slew of interviews with Polanski's old showbiz cronies, including Jeff Berg, his longtime agent; "Chinatown" producer Robert Evans and "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne.

       So why didn't they make it into the movie? Zenovich says Towne had "all sorts of amazing things to say," but his tales "just didn't work" in the structure of the film. It was a little harder to get to Evans, althogh he eventually agreed to talk. But by the time Zenovich arrived for the interview session, he'd forgotten all about the interview. "He didn't remember who I was,'' she recalls. "At first, he said he wouldn't answer any of my questions. I played along by taking my piece of paper with all my questions and very theatrically tearing it up and throwing it away. That seemed to satisfy him. After that, he was happy to tell all his great stories. With Evans, it felt like you were at a Roman Polanski roast."

     Her best behind-the-scenes interview story involves Sue Mengers, who was the queen of Hollywood agents during Polanski's heyday, and Steven Soderbergh, who was one of Zenovich's producers on the documentary. 

   by Patrick Goldstein   

Sheila Nevins vividly recalls her first reaction to "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's new documentary about the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker that debuted on HBO Monday night. Fifteen minutes into the film, Nevins' heart was pounding.

   "It's always a good sign when my heart is beating fast when I'm watching something," says Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films. "I kept thinking--that man is so interesting. Marina took something that was an old story and made it into what you always want from a documentary--something vibrant, vital and necessary."

      With its line-up of high-profile series behind schedule because of the writer's strike, HBO has found a new way to make a programming spash--it has launched a summer-long weekly series entirely devoted to documentaries. The network is airing a new documentary every Monday night through August 25th, embracing a wide range of subjects, including profiles of self-destructive artists, drug trafffickers, Baghdad teenagers, Hollywood madams and stolen children in China.

   The subject matter is often sensational, which is just the way Nevins likes it. She touts documentaries the way Oprah promotes books. With HBO's deep pockets and reservoir of 35 million-plus subscribers, Nevins is easily the most powerful woman in Documentaryland, her films having earned dozens of Emmy and Peabody awards as well as 19 Academy Awards during her three-decade long tenure at HBO. Her often confounding combination of high and low-brow tastes have long been hotly debated in doc circles, but she remains an unapologetic believer that documentaries should be viewer friendly.

"We've launched this series to spotlight how HBO has helped created a new kind of documentary,'' she told me Friday. "The good news is that docus"--her preferred word for the form--"are no longer a dirty word. They don't have to be exposes about famine and pestilence or a cerebral look at something you'd find on the front page of the New York Times. They can be about real people who are stuck in some kind of extraordinary predicament."

  The new series reflects Nevin's catholic tastes. One of the most gripping films is "The Recruiter," airing July 28th, which focuses on a military recruiter as he sells high-schoolers in a Louisiana town on the merits of joining the Army at the height of the war in Iraq. However, that film is preceded, on July 21, by "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," a warts-and-all portrait of the infamous Hollywood madam.

    It's a sign of Nevins' impatience with convention that when things weren't going well on the documentary--Fleiss had stopped speaking to filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato--Nevins stepped in and did the interviews herself. "I simply wasn't going to let that film die," she explains. "Fenton and Randy know how much I respect them. But Heidi is temperamental, and I think she just needed a woman to talk to her."

  Nevins sees the episode as typical of the angst that grows out of the documentary process. "She walked away," she says of Fleiss. "But doesn't everyone walk away when they're revealing who they really are?"

  It's telling that Nevins views the series' two most controversial subjects--Fleiss and Polanski--in much the same light, as people in the sexual spotlight who got a bad rap. "I'm sure Marina will be criticized for being a woman, making a film about a man who had sex with an under-age girl," she says. "But there's so much more to what happened to Polanski than that. It's an endlessly complex story."

  The documentary, which airs on HBO throughout the week, works so well because it goes beyond the ample drama in Polanski's stranger-than-fiction life. The focus is on the legal wrangling that ensued after Polanski was arrested for having sex with Samantha Geimer, then 13, in 1977. The film takes the form of a legal thriller, with Polanski, a man used to creating his own reality through his films, ensnared in the web of a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who appears far more concerned with his own image than legal impartiality. Zenovich intersperses the documentary footage with clips of Polanski acting his in movies, which serves to illustrate her theme: "All along I saw this as Roman Polanski stuck in a Roman Polanski movie, but directed by the judge."

  Zenovich says that when she first approached Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, he tried to steer her away. "He said, 'Everyone knows the story,' she recalls. "And I said, 'No, you know the story. But it has a great understory. We all know Polanski fled the country, but I was interested in why he fled."

  Polanski never agreed to talk, though Zenovich did have lunch with him in Paris after she'd finished the film. She found a revealing interview Polanski did with Clive James in 1984 that sets the tone for the picture. Polanski, the world-weary European fatalist, admits liking young women, saying "I think most of men do too," prompting James to reply: "But the question turns on how young, doesn't it?"

Zenovich's film ultimately turns on an unsettling twist. Polanski had become a star in the 1960s as the roguiesh bad-boy creator of such dark, twisted films as "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," yet that same image was used against him after his actions transformed him from bad-boy artist to villainous predator. Some will say Zenovich is too sympathetic to him, or at least too non-judgemental. She says "my opinion of him went back and forth, but he's still the most interesting character in the film."

  "Wanted and Desired" will have a theatrical release in July from Think FIlms. But it's a sign of the times that Zenovich opted for an HBO debut. Although enthusiasm for documentaries has never been greater, if you're not Michael Moore or Al Gore, finding a sizeable theatrical audience for your film has never been more problematic. Even after receiving generous media attention, Errol Morris' ``Standard Operating Procedure'' barely did $165,000 after a month in theatrical release--the kind of business a throwaway Hollywood comedy does in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon.

     Nevins believes the happiest home for a good documentary is in the living room in front of a big flat-screen TV tuned to HBO. "We're entering an on-demand universe," she says. "We do great box office with our docus. It's just that our box office is in your home where you don't have to drive, pay money for gas, find a place to park or buy popcorn. For years, I've had people come into my office, desperate to sit in an empty theater and watch their documentary play on the big screen. I think what we have to offer is better."

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesday in Calendar. Email questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

'Toots': The man who knew every celebrity in America

Early on in "Toots," the new documentary about the legendary New York saloon keeper Toots Shor (it opens Friday here at the Downtown Independent Theater), we get to see Frank Sinatra recalling the night Toots asked him to come to dinner at his joint with some of Toots' pals. The other pals? Bing Crosby, Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth. As the four sultans of mid-century America made their way through the restaurant to a private table, the whole saloon spontaneously erupted with applause. If you were a celebrity in New York from 1940 through the early 1960s, the place to be was Toots Shor's, where you'd find sports icons, journalists, actors, mobsters or politicians, all lifting a glass in the same smoke-filled room.

Today's celebrity clubs and eateries are niche joints--the film crowd inhabits one spot, the musicians go somewhere else, the journalists (the ones that still have a job) have a different hangout. But Toots Shor's was a watering hole where everyone rubbed elbows. You'd see Joe DiMaggio at one table, Jackie Gleason at another, the likes of Frank Gifford or Mickey Mantle or Walter Cronkite across the room. On one night, Toots could be seen having a drink with Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, then heading across the room to hang out with mob boss Frank Costello. As the writer Pete Hamill says in the film: " 'Toot's' was a part of the imagination of people who had never even walked in there. They knew it existed the way they knew the Statue of Liberty existed."

Made by Kristi Jacobson, Toots' granddaughter, the documentary nicely captures a colorful period in American culture, a booze-fueled age where men cheerfully insulted each other, bet on the ponies and started drinking at lunch and often didn't stop till the sun came up. Toots kept everyone's glass filled to the brim. A giant of a man, he was famously gruff--he used to boast of receiving a letter from an out-of-towner who'd enjoyed the food, but advised that if he wanted to be successful "you'd better get rid of that fat slob of a headwaiter who spent most of his time insulting patrons."

Toots led by example. In the film, Jacobson's mother tells the story of the time Toots breezed into church one morning, determined to be there for her confirmation (Toots was Jewish, but his wife, a former showgirl affectionately known as Baby, brought the kids up Catholic). Toots had been out on the town all night, so he brought along his drinking buddy--John Wayne. Toots wasn't much of a businessman, blowing most of the dough he ever made, but if he ever had problems with creditors, he'd turn to his pal, Frank Costello, who'd manage to set things right. One of the more interesting revelations in the movie is that when Toots needed ready cash to open a second restaurant in 1960, he went to Jimmy Hoffa, who loaned him $7 million from the Teamsters union's pension fund.

The best part of the movie is the great gallery of characters Jacobson assembled to tell all the Toots anecdotes. The Teamsters tale comes courtesy of Gianni Russo. He looks so familiar, I said to Jacobson. Where have I seen him before? She laughed. "He played Carlo Rizzi in 'The Godfather.' " It made me wonder--how mobbed up was Toots? Keep reading:

 

 

For years, everyone has wanted a piece of LeBron James, who is right now--sorry, Kobe--perhaps the most popular basketball player on the planet. It's a testimony to LeBron's mega-stardom that a trio of Hollywood studios are in the midst of a bidding war over "More Than a Game," a riveting documentary about LeBron's Akron, Ohio high-school basketball team that ended up going from obscurity to being the No. 1 ranked team in the country. The film debuted to glowing reviews at the Toronto Film Festival last month, sparking interest from a variety of studios.

Three studios are in the thick of the action: Lionsgate, Overture and Sony (which would release the film through one of its subsidiary labels). The most aggressive offer is from Lionsgate, which has the pole position in the bidding because of its track record, both with documentaries (it released two of Michael Moore's biggest hits) and with urban audiences, having had great success shepherding the Tyler Perry film franchise. The biggest challenge for the studios, in terms of figuring out what kind of offer to make, has been in assessing the film's potential worth.

It's an intriguing equation. On the one hand, LeBron is a gigantic worldwide brand, with a slew of big corporations--led by Nike and Coke--who are all valuable potential promotion partners for the film. LeBron has also carved out several months of his schedule to promote the movie. The film also has Interscope Records chief Jimmy Iovine on board as an executive producer, offering the tantalizing prospect of extra marketing muscle via a soundtrack album loaded up with a host of Iovine's hip-hop artists.

On the other hand, it's been a tricky proposition trying to figure out when the film should have a theatrical release. Ideally the film should come out during basketball season, when a studio could promote it with a radio and TV ad campaign. But LeBron is, well, otherwise occupied then, playing basketball himself. Lionsgate has pushed to release the film in late summer 2009, shortly before the season begins. The filmmakers seem eager for the film to come out in the fall of 2009, perhaps because LeBron has already committed to other promotional duties during the summer. Negotiations have also been slowed by the LeBron camp's desire to possibly carve out a post-theatrical window for a TV premiere for the film, presumably for a heavily promoted ESPN debut.

Still, I expect to see the film sell, perhaps as early as later this week. Having seen the film myself, it's clear that "More Than a Game" is more than just a documentary. Directed by Kristopher Belman, it's an uplifting story, almost a fable, about a close-knit group of kids who overcome adversity, survive a series of obstacles, show a lot of heart and are rewarded with a well-deserved triumph on the basketball court. It doesn't hurt that one of those Akron, Ohio kids is one of the most famous athletes in the world.

People have always said that if every documentary had Michael Moore as its publicist, we'd see a lot more money-making documentaries. "More Than a Game" is no slouch -- it has the NBA, Coke, Nike and Interscope as its promotional partners. I have a feeling that whoever ends up distributing this film isn't going to have any trouble getting our attention when it finally comes out.

Photo of LeBron James by Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Bill Maher has never made any secret of his aversion to religion. I'm no therapist, but you have to wonder if it had something to do with Maher being raised in his father's Irish-Catholic faith, not discovering until he was practically a teenager that his mother was Jewish. On the other hand, like so many comics, maybe he was just under the spell of George Carlin, who was no fan of religion either.

I've gotten a deluge of reaction to my last post about my recent interview with Maher, whose "Religulous" documentary--due in October--is something of a sustained attack on all sorts of religious extremism (the above clip -- an exclusive scene from the movie that you can only watch here -- shows Maher in a lively if somewhat lopsided debate with Jesus; well, an actor playing Jesus at a Florida theme park). In the movie, Maher debates a host of zealots, including a minister who claims the ability to help gay men go straight.

I found it a little suspicious that Maher confronted all sorts of people in the film, but never lost an argument.  Wasn't the deck stacked? "I'm not going to lie--the deck was stacked," Maher said. "Let's face it, when it comes to religion, there is no convincing argument. If you believe in the Bible in a way where you think you can live to be 900 years old and turn your wife into a pillar of salt, you're going to lose any logical debate. Your story just falls apart."

Maher spends a lot of time in the film overseas, particularly in Holland, an especially tolerant country that, because of an influx of Muslim extremists, has been caught up in a struggle over how to react to religious intolerance. What did Maher learn there?

"That if it can happen in Holland, it could happen in America too. The lesson is--don't be afraid to exert the superiority of Western civilization, at least when it comes to free speech, equality of the sexes and freedom of the press. Those are things we have that they don't have in Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Iran. And in my view, if we have it, and they don't, then we're a better place. That's not prejudice. That's just reality." 

In Bill Maher's new documentary, "Religulous," the film's protagonist--Maher himself--feels the same way about the film's subject matter at the beginning as at the end: In other words, he thinks religion is a big crock of spit. You know irreverence is the order of the day when Maher, reacting to a smooth-talking black preacher's boast that he got a great deal on his $2,000 suits, drolly observes, "I find it interesting that you're a Christian, you used to be a Muslim but you buy all your clothes like a Jew."

"Religulous" doesn't open until Oct. 3, but after seeing the movie I couldn't wait to grill Maher about how he managed to get so many deeply religious figures to actually talk to him, since it's obvious to anyone whose ever watched Maher's act (on "Politically Incorrect" or HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" or in a comedy club) that he wasn't much of a believer. In many ways, the film is a comic bookend to Sam Harris' "The End of Faith," a humorless best seller that views religion as a bastion of superstition and moral hypocrisy. Although Maher embraces Harris' belief that religion is a destructive force that has brought great pain and suffering into the world--at one point he calls it a neurological disorder--Maher is always searching for the humor in every situation. A longtime acolyte of George Carlin, when Maher confronts a religious zealot or hustler, he prefers mocking over scolding.

Rolling his eyes, often full of derision, Maher gets in his licks with everyone, from a guy playing Jesus at a Holy Land theme park in Orlando to Muslims at a gay bar in Amsterdam to a rabbi who advocates the dissolution of Israel (he wears a card with the slogan "A Jew Not a Zionist"). As everything from "The Gong Show" to "Borat" has proved, real people and situations are often undeniably funnier than anything scripted by the best comic minds. In Holland, Maher is in the midst of questioning a somber Muslim cleric when he's interrupted by the cleric's cellphone, whose ring tone is Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir."

So how did Maher manage to get all these people to actually talk to him? Since "Religulous" was directed by Larry Charles, who also did "Borat," I suspected that subterfuge and trickery were involved. I was not far wrong. Here's how Maher pulled it off:

As you can see from my photo, when you have one of those "conversations with" at a film festival--as I did the other night with HBO documentary maven Sheila Nevins at the L.A. Film Festival--it's not a totally intimate affair, since you're sitting on stage in front of a few hundred people, all staring up your nose. Still, you couldn't ask for a better subject than Nevins, who is a fascinating character. First off, she's has been responsible for some of the best documentaries of the past 15 years, from "When the Levees Broke" to "Taxi to the Dark Side" to "Born Into Brothels" to the recent "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired."

Secondly, she puts her money where her mouth is. In the green room, before we did our thing, an indie film exec came over to greet her and handed her a $100 bill. He was paying off a bet: Sheila had predicted box-office failure for "Young@Heart," a feel-good doc that has barely made a dent in its theatrical run, grossing $3.5 million after 10 or so weeks in release. Nevins wasn't bashing the movie--she simply thought no one would go to a theater to see a film about old people and she was right. (She refused the money, by the way, telling her pal to give it to charity.)

But she's also fascinating, as I learned from our "conversation," because she's a woman of a certain age--i.e., a woman who came of age in the pre-feminist movement era of show business, when it was apparently OK for a big-shot network anchor to feel her up right in the office, as she recounted (in a considerably more ribald fashion) during our onstage conversation. I often ask people who work in entertainment who their mentors were. Nevins says she didn't have one, since there were almost no female TV executives on board when she started her career.

It's hard to take notes when you're up in front of a big audience, but here are a few highlights from our conversation:

If you love documentaries as much as I do, you might want to visit the L.A. Film Festival Thursday evening to hear HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins expound on the art of documentary filmmaking. Nobody--not even Michael Moore--has done more to shape the course of docs over the past two decades than Nevins, whose films have won 19 Academy Awards, 20 prime-time Emmys and 28 Peabody Awards. Her most recent hot-button doc was "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," which debuted on HBO earlier this month as part of a summer-long series of Monday-night doc showings on the channel. (To learn more, here's a recent column I did on the subject.)

I mention all this because the event, held at 6 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, is billed as "A Conversation With Sheila Nevins." And since the LAFF apparently couldn't get a media big shot like Charlie Rose to host, they asked me. I've got a few questions of my own to ask Nevins, but if we have any doc fans (or detractors) out there, I'd love to hear what questions you'd suggest asking Nevins. So don't be shy--fire away. We'll try to make it a lively evening. (The Italian Cultural Institute, by the way, is at 1023 Hilgard Ave., in Westwood Village.)   

Most of my family is from the South, starting with my grandmother, who spent 93 years living in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. She had a pretty simple rule about politicians, saying, "I'd be happy to vote for a Republican, if I could ever find a good one." Apparently she was one of the few Southerners resistant to the wily political charms of Lee Atwater, who did more than any political strategist of his generation to help the GOP gain a decades-long stranglehold on the South. Atwater is dead, but his malevolent spirit roars back to life in the new documentary "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," which debuted Sunday night at the L.A. Film Festival. (It plays again Friday at 1:45 p.m. at the Landmark.) Directed by Stefan Forbes, it offers a compelling portrait of one of the great con men of modern American politics. The movie isn't a knee-jerk lefty hit job. In fact, it shows that Atwater was a runaway success not just because he was a devious political operator, but because, in the words of one liberal reporter Forbes interviewed, the sass-talking, guitar-playing Atwater "was the most fun man I ever met."

For anyone who wants to understand why Barack Obama's campaign already has a Fight the Smears website up, debunking scurrilous political rumors, Atwater's political odyssey offers a telling instructional in the black arts of campaign dirty tricks. A protege of Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, one of Atwater's first triumphs came at the expense of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina state senator who was expected to be easily reelected until Atwater (working for Turnipseed's rival) started telling reporters that Turnipseed as a young man had "been hooked up to jumper cables."

That was just the beginning. Atwater helped pioneer the use of push polls, hiring operatives to pose as telephone survey questioners. He defeated a South Carolina Democrat named Max Heller by having his henchmen phone voters, ask a few routine questions, then wonder, "Would you vote for a Jew who didn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" A popular mayor until then, Heller was a goner, especially after Atwater nudged a third-party candidate into the race who kept bringing up the issue at campaign events.

But how did Atwater graduate from local Dixie devilment to the national stage, where he ended up running George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and serving as chairman of the Republican National Party? 

      In my column today about HBO's impressive new summer-long documentary series, I talked with Marina Zenovich, the director of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,'' the provocative doc that launched the series Monday night--and is airing all week on HBO. It will be theaters next month. (Go here to watch HBO's trailer for the film.) Even though the documentary focuses on the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering in the case, Zenovich did a slew of interviews with Polanski's old showbiz cronies, including Jeff Berg, his longtime agent; "Chinatown" producer Robert Evans and "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne.

       So why didn't they make it into the movie? Zenovich says Towne had "all sorts of amazing things to say," but his tales "just didn't work" in the structure of the film. It was a little harder to get to Evans, althogh he eventually agreed to talk. But by the time Zenovich arrived for the interview session, he'd forgotten all about the interview. "He didn't remember who I was,'' she recalls. "At first, he said he wouldn't answer any of my questions. I played along by taking my piece of paper with all my questions and very theatrically tearing it up and throwing it away. That seemed to satisfy him. After that, he was happy to tell all his great stories. With Evans, it felt like you were at a Roman Polanski roast."

     Her best behind-the-scenes interview story involves Sue Mengers, who was the queen of Hollywood agents during Polanski's heyday, and Steven Soderbergh, who was one of Zenovich's producers on the documentary. 

   by Patrick Goldstein   

Sheila Nevins vividly recalls her first reaction to "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's new documentary about the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker that debuted on HBO Monday night. Fifteen minutes into the film, Nevins' heart was pounding.

   "It's always a good sign when my heart is beating fast when I'm watching something," says Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films. "I kept thinking--that man is so interesting. Marina took something that was an old story and made it into what you always want from a documentary--something vibrant, vital and necessary."

      With its line-up of high-profile series behind schedule because of the writer's strike, HBO has found a new way to make a programming spash--it has launched a summer-long weekly series entirely devoted to documentaries. The network is airing a new documentary every Monday night through August 25th, embracing a wide range of subjects, including profiles of self-destructive artists, drug trafffickers, Baghdad teenagers, Hollywood madams and stolen children in China.

   The subject matter is often sensational, which is just the way Nevins likes it. She touts documentaries the way Oprah promotes books. With HBO's deep pockets and reservoir of 35 million-plus subscribers, Nevins is easily the most powerful woman in Documentaryland, her films having earned dozens of Emmy and Peabody awards as well as 19 Academy Awards during her three-decade long tenure at HBO. Her often confounding combination of high and low-brow tastes have long been hotly debated in doc circles, but she remains an unapologetic believer that documentaries should be viewer friendly.

"We've launched this series to spotlight how HBO has helped created a new kind of documentary,'' she told me Friday. "The good news is that docus"--her preferred word for the form--"are no longer a dirty word. They don't have to be exposes about famine and pestilence or a cerebral look at something you'd find on the front page of the New York Times. They can be about real people who are stuck in some kind of extraordinary predicament."

  The new series reflects Nevin's catholic tastes. One of the most gripping films is "The Recruiter," airing July 28th, which focuses on a military recruiter as he sells high-schoolers in a Louisiana town on the merits of joining the Army at the height of the war in Iraq. However, that film is preceded, on July 21, by "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," a warts-and-all portrait of the infamous Hollywood madam.

    It's a sign of Nevins' impatience with convention that when things weren't going well on the documentary--Fleiss had stopped speaking to filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato--Nevins stepped in and did the interviews herself. "I simply wasn't going to let that film die," she explains. "Fenton and Randy know how much I respect them. But Heidi is temperamental, and I think she just needed a woman to talk to her."

  Nevins sees the episode as typical of the angst that grows out of the documentary process. "She walked away," she says of Fleiss. "But doesn't everyone walk away when they're revealing who they really are?"

  It's telling that Nevins views the series' two most controversial subjects--Fleiss and Polanski--in much the same light, as people in the sexual spotlight who got a bad rap. "I'm sure Marina will be criticized for being a woman, making a film about a man who had sex with an under-age girl," she says. "But there's so much more to what happened to Polanski than that. It's an endlessly complex story."

  The documentary, which airs on HBO throughout the week, works so well because it goes beyond the ample drama in Polanski's stranger-than-fiction life. The focus is on the legal wrangling that ensued after Polanski was arrested for having sex with Samantha Geimer, then 13, in 1977. The film takes the form of a legal thriller, with Polanski, a man used to creating his own reality through his films, ensnared in the web of a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who appears far more concerned with his own image than legal impartiality. Zenovich intersperses the documentary footage with clips of Polanski acting his in movies, which serves to illustrate her theme: "All along I saw this as Roman Polanski stuck in a Roman Polanski movie, but directed by the judge."

  Zenovich says that when she first approached Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, he tried to steer her away. "He said, 'Everyone knows the story,' she recalls. "And I said, 'No, you know the story. But it has a great understory. We all know Polanski fled the country, but I was interested in why he fled."

  Polanski never agreed to talk, though Zenovich did have lunch with him in Paris after she'd finished the film. She found a revealing interview Polanski did with Clive James in 1984 that sets the tone for the picture. Polanski, the world-weary European fatalist, admits liking young women, saying "I think most of men do too," prompting James to reply: "But the question turns on how young, doesn't it?"

Zenovich's film ultimately turns on an unsettling twist. Polanski had become a star in the 1960s as the roguiesh bad-boy creator of such dark, twisted films as "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," yet that same image was used against him after his actions transformed him from bad-boy artist to villainous predator. Some will say Zenovich is too sympathetic to him, or at least too non-judgemental. She says "my opinion of him went back and forth, but he's still the most interesting character in the film."

  "Wanted and Desired" will have a theatrical release in July from Think FIlms. But it's a sign of the times that Zenovich opted for an HBO debut. Although enthusiasm for documentaries has never been greater, if you're not Michael Moore or Al Gore, finding a sizeable theatrical audience for your film has never been more problematic. Even after receiving generous media attention, Errol Morris' ``Standard Operating Procedure'' barely did $165,000 after a month in theatrical release--the kind of business a throwaway Hollywood comedy does in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon.

     Nevins believes the happiest home for a good documentary is in the living room in front of a big flat-screen TV tuned to HBO. "We're entering an on-demand universe," she says. "We do great box office with our docus. It's just that our box office is in your home where you don't have to drive, pay money for gas, find a place to park or buy popcorn. For years, I've had people come into my office, desperate to sit in an empty theater and watch their documentary play on the big screen. I think what we have to offer is better."

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesday in Calendar. Email questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

Why Hollywood is fighting over LeBron James

For years, everyone has wanted a piece of LeBron James, who is right now--sorry, Kobe--perhaps the most popular basketball player on the planet. It's a testimony to LeBron's mega-stardom that a trio of Hollywood studios are in the midst of a bidding war over "More Than a Game," a riveting documentary about LeBron's Akron, Ohio high-school basketball team that ended up going from obscurity to being the No. 1 ranked team in the country. The film debuted to glowing reviews at the Toronto Film Festival last month, sparking interest from a variety of studios.

Three studios are in the thick of the action: Lionsgate, Overture and Sony (which would release the film through one of its subsidiary labels). The most aggressive offer is from Lionsgate, which has the pole position in the bidding because of its track record, both with documentaries (it released two of Michael Moore's biggest hits) and with urban audiences, having had great success shepherding the Tyler Perry film franchise. The biggest challenge for the studios, in terms of figuring out what kind of offer to make, has been in assessing the film's potential worth.

It's an intriguing equation. On the one hand, LeBron is a gigantic worldwide brand, with a slew of big corporations--led by Nike and Coke--who are all valuable potential promotion partners for the film. LeBron has also carved out several months of his schedule to promote the movie. The film also has Interscope Records chief Jimmy Iovine on board as an executive producer, offering the tantalizing prospect of extra marketing muscle via a soundtrack album loaded up with a host of Iovine's hip-hop artists.

On the other hand, it's been a tricky proposition trying to figure out when the film should have a theatrical release. Ideally the film should come out during basketball season, when a studio could promote it with a radio and TV ad campaign. But LeBron is, well, otherwise occupied then, playing basketball himself. Lionsgate has pushed to release the film in late summer 2009, shortly before the season begins. The filmmakers seem eager for the film to come out in the fall of 2009, perhaps because LeBron has already committed to other promotional duties during the summer. Negotiations have also been slowed by the LeBron camp's desire to possibly carve out a post-theatrical window for a TV premiere for the film, presumably for a heavily promoted ESPN debut.

Still, I expect to see the film sell, perhaps as early as later this week. Having seen the film myself, it's clear that "More Than a Game" is more than just a documentary. Directed by Kristopher Belman, it's an uplifting story, almost a fable, about a close-knit group of kids who overcome adversity, survive a series of obstacles, show a lot of heart and are rewarded with a well-deserved triumph on the basketball court. It doesn't hurt that one of those Akron, Ohio kids is one of the most famous athletes in the world.

People have always said that if every documentary had Michael Moore as its publicist, we'd see a lot more money-making documentaries. "More Than a Game" is no slouch -- it has the NBA, Coke, Nike and Interscope as its promotional partners. I have a feeling that whoever ends up distributing this film isn't going to have any trouble getting our attention when it finally comes out.

Photo of LeBron James by Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Bill Maher has never made any secret of his aversion to religion. I'm no therapist, but you have to wonder if it had something to do with Maher being raised in his father's Irish-Catholic faith, not discovering until he was practically a teenager that his mother was Jewish. On the other hand, like so many comics, maybe he was just under the spell of George Carlin, who was no fan of religion either.

I've gotten a deluge of reaction to my last post about my recent interview with Maher, whose "Religulous" documentary--due in October--is something of a sustained attack on all sorts of religious extremism (the above clip -- an exclusive scene from the movie that you can only watch here -- shows Maher in a lively if somewhat lopsided debate with Jesus; well, an actor playing Jesus at a Florida theme park). In the movie, Maher debates a host of zealots, including a minister who claims the ability to help gay men go straight.

I found it a little suspicious that Maher confronted all sorts of people in the film, but never lost an argument.  Wasn't the deck stacked? "I'm not going to lie--the deck was stacked," Maher said. "Let's face it, when it comes to religion, there is no convincing argument. If you believe in the Bible in a way where you think you can live to be 900 years old and turn your wife into a pillar of salt, you're going to lose any logical debate. Your story just falls apart."

Maher spends a lot of time in the film overseas, particularly in Holland, an especially tolerant country that, because of an influx of Muslim extremists, has been caught up in a struggle over how to react to religious intolerance. What did Maher learn there?

"That if it can happen in Holland, it could happen in America too. The lesson is--don't be afraid to exert the superiority of Western civilization, at least when it comes to free speech, equality of the sexes and freedom of the press. Those are things we have that they don't have in Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Iran. And in my view, if we have it, and they don't, then we're a better place. That's not prejudice. That's just reality." 

In Bill Maher's new documentary, "Religulous," the film's protagonist--Maher himself--feels the same way about the film's subject matter at the beginning as at the end: In other words, he thinks religion is a big crock of spit. You know irreverence is the order of the day when Maher, reacting to a smooth-talking black preacher's boast that he got a great deal on his $2,000 suits, drolly observes, "I find it interesting that you're a Christian, you used to be a Muslim but you buy all your clothes like a Jew."

"Religulous" doesn't open until Oct. 3, but after seeing the movie I couldn't wait to grill Maher about how he managed to get so many deeply religious figures to actually talk to him, since it's obvious to anyone whose ever watched Maher's act (on "Politically Incorrect" or HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" or in a comedy club) that he wasn't much of a believer. In many ways, the film is a comic bookend to Sam Harris' "The End of Faith," a humorless best seller that views religion as a bastion of superstition and moral hypocrisy. Although Maher embraces Harris' belief that religion is a destructive force that has brought great pain and suffering into the world--at one point he calls it a neurological disorder--Maher is always searching for the humor in every situation. A longtime acolyte of George Carlin, when Maher confronts a religious zealot or hustler, he prefers mocking over scolding.

Rolling his eyes, often full of derision, Maher gets in his licks with everyone, from a guy playing Jesus at a Holy Land theme park in Orlando to Muslims at a gay bar in Amsterdam to a rabbi who advocates the dissolution of Israel (he wears a card with the slogan "A Jew Not a Zionist"). As everything from "The Gong Show" to "Borat" has proved, real people and situations are often undeniably funnier than anything scripted by the best comic minds. In Holland, Maher is in the midst of questioning a somber Muslim cleric when he's interrupted by the cleric's cellphone, whose ring tone is Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir."

So how did Maher manage to get all these people to actually talk to him? Since "Religulous" was directed by Larry Charles, who also did "Borat," I suspected that subterfuge and trickery were involved. I was not far wrong. Here's how Maher pulled it off:

As you can see from my photo, when you have one of those "conversations with" at a film festival--as I did the other night with HBO documentary maven Sheila Nevins at the L.A. Film Festival--it's not a totally intimate affair, since you're sitting on stage in front of a few hundred people, all staring up your nose. Still, you couldn't ask for a better subject than Nevins, who is a fascinating character. First off, she's has been responsible for some of the best documentaries of the past 15 years, from "When the Levees Broke" to "Taxi to the Dark Side" to "Born Into Brothels" to the recent "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired."

Secondly, she puts her money where her mouth is. In the green room, before we did our thing, an indie film exec came over to greet her and handed her a $100 bill. He was paying off a bet: Sheila had predicted box-office failure for "Young@Heart," a feel-good doc that has barely made a dent in its theatrical run, grossing $3.5 million after 10 or so weeks in release. Nevins wasn't bashing the movie--she simply thought no one would go to a theater to see a film about old people and she was right. (She refused the money, by the way, telling her pal to give it to charity.)

But she's also fascinating, as I learned from our "conversation," because she's a woman of a certain age--i.e., a woman who came of age in the pre-feminist movement era of show business, when it was apparently OK for a big-shot network anchor to feel her up right in the office, as she recounted (in a considerably more ribald fashion) during our onstage conversation. I often ask people who work in entertainment who their mentors were. Nevins says she didn't have one, since there were almost no female TV executives on board when she started her career.

It's hard to take notes when you're up in front of a big audience, but here are a few highlights from our conversation:

If you love documentaries as much as I do, you might want to visit the L.A. Film Festival Thursday evening to hear HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins expound on the art of documentary filmmaking. Nobody--not even Michael Moore--has done more to shape the course of docs over the past two decades than Nevins, whose films have won 19 Academy Awards, 20 prime-time Emmys and 28 Peabody Awards. Her most recent hot-button doc was "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," which debuted on HBO earlier this month as part of a summer-long series of Monday-night doc showings on the channel. (To learn more, here's a recent column I did on the subject.)

I mention all this because the event, held at 6 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, is billed as "A Conversation With Sheila Nevins." And since the LAFF apparently couldn't get a media big shot like Charlie Rose to host, they asked me. I've got a few questions of my own to ask Nevins, but if we have any doc fans (or detractors) out there, I'd love to hear what questions you'd suggest asking Nevins. So don't be shy--fire away. We'll try to make it a lively evening. (The Italian Cultural Institute, by the way, is at 1023 Hilgard Ave., in Westwood Village.)   

Most of my family is from the South, starting with my grandmother, who spent 93 years living in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. She had a pretty simple rule about politicians, saying, "I'd be happy to vote for a Republican, if I could ever find a good one." Apparently she was one of the few Southerners resistant to the wily political charms of Lee Atwater, who did more than any political strategist of his generation to help the GOP gain a decades-long stranglehold on the South. Atwater is dead, but his malevolent spirit roars back to life in the new documentary "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," which debuted Sunday night at the L.A. Film Festival. (It plays again Friday at 1:45 p.m. at the Landmark.) Directed by Stefan Forbes, it offers a compelling portrait of one of the great con men of modern American politics. The movie isn't a knee-jerk lefty hit job. In fact, it shows that Atwater was a runaway success not just because he was a devious political operator, but because, in the words of one liberal reporter Forbes interviewed, the sass-talking, guitar-playing Atwater "was the most fun man I ever met."

For anyone who wants to understand why Barack Obama's campaign already has a Fight the Smears website up, debunking scurrilous political rumors, Atwater's political odyssey offers a telling instructional in the black arts of campaign dirty tricks. A protege of Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, one of Atwater's first triumphs came at the expense of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina state senator who was expected to be easily reelected until Atwater (working for Turnipseed's rival) started telling reporters that Turnipseed as a young man had "been hooked up to jumper cables."

That was just the beginning. Atwater helped pioneer the use of push polls, hiring operatives to pose as telephone survey questioners. He defeated a South Carolina Democrat named Max Heller by having his henchmen phone voters, ask a few routine questions, then wonder, "Would you vote for a Jew who didn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" A popular mayor until then, Heller was a goner, especially after Atwater nudged a third-party candidate into the race who kept bringing up the issue at campaign events.

But how did Atwater graduate from local Dixie devilment to the national stage, where he ended up running George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and serving as chairman of the Republican National Party? 

      In my column today about HBO's impressive new summer-long documentary series, I talked with Marina Zenovich, the director of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,'' the provocative doc that launched the series Monday night--and is airing all week on HBO. It will be theaters next month. (Go here to watch HBO's trailer for the film.) Even though the documentary focuses on the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering in the case, Zenovich did a slew of interviews with Polanski's old showbiz cronies, including Jeff Berg, his longtime agent; "Chinatown" producer Robert Evans and "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne.

       So why didn't they make it into the movie? Zenovich says Towne had "all sorts of amazing things to say," but his tales "just didn't work" in the structure of the film. It was a little harder to get to Evans, althogh he eventually agreed to talk. But by the time Zenovich arrived for the interview session, he'd forgotten all about the interview. "He didn't remember who I was,'' she recalls. "At first, he said he wouldn't answer any of my questions. I played along by taking my piece of paper with all my questions and very theatrically tearing it up and throwing it away. That seemed to satisfy him. After that, he was happy to tell all his great stories. With Evans, it felt like you were at a Roman Polanski roast."

     Her best behind-the-scenes interview story involves Sue Mengers, who was the queen of Hollywood agents during Polanski's heyday, and Steven Soderbergh, who was one of Zenovich's producers on the documentary. 

   by Patrick Goldstein   

Sheila Nevins vividly recalls her first reaction to "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's new documentary about the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker that debuted on HBO Monday night. Fifteen minutes into the film, Nevins' heart was pounding.

   "It's always a good sign when my heart is beating fast when I'm watching something," says Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films. "I kept thinking--that man is so interesting. Marina took something that was an old story and made it into what you always want from a documentary--something vibrant, vital and necessary."

      With its line-up of high-profile series behind schedule because of the writer's strike, HBO has found a new way to make a programming spash--it has launched a summer-long weekly series entirely devoted to documentaries. The network is airing a new documentary every Monday night through August 25th, embracing a wide range of subjects, including profiles of self-destructive artists, drug trafffickers, Baghdad teenagers, Hollywood madams and stolen children in China.

   The subject matter is often sensational, which is just the way Nevins likes it. She touts documentaries the way Oprah promotes books. With HBO's deep pockets and reservoir of 35 million-plus subscribers, Nevins is easily the most powerful woman in Documentaryland, her films having earned dozens of Emmy and Peabody awards as well as 19 Academy Awards during her three-decade long tenure at HBO. Her often confounding combination of high and low-brow tastes have long been hotly debated in doc circles, but she remains an unapologetic believer that documentaries should be viewer friendly.

"We've launched this series to spotlight how HBO has helped created a new kind of documentary,'' she told me Friday. "The good news is that docus"--her preferred word for the form--"are no longer a dirty word. They don't have to be exposes about famine and pestilence or a cerebral look at something you'd find on the front page of the New York Times. They can be about real people who are stuck in some kind of extraordinary predicament."

  The new series reflects Nevin's catholic tastes. One of the most gripping films is "The Recruiter," airing July 28th, which focuses on a military recruiter as he sells high-schoolers in a Louisiana town on the merits of joining the Army at the height of the war in Iraq. However, that film is preceded, on July 21, by "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," a warts-and-all portrait of the infamous Hollywood madam.

    It's a sign of Nevins' impatience with convention that when things weren't going well on the documentary--Fleiss had stopped speaking to filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato--Nevins stepped in and did the interviews herself. "I simply wasn't going to let that film die," she explains. "Fenton and Randy know how much I respect them. But Heidi is temperamental, and I think she just needed a woman to talk to her."

  Nevins sees the episode as typical of the angst that grows out of the documentary process. "She walked away," she says of Fleiss. "But doesn't everyone walk away when they're revealing who they really are?"

  It's telling that Nevins views the series' two most controversial subjects--Fleiss and Polanski--in much the same light, as people in the sexual spotlight who got a bad rap. "I'm sure Marina will be criticized for being a woman, making a film about a man who had sex with an under-age girl," she says. "But there's so much more to what happened to Polanski than that. It's an endlessly complex story."

  The documentary, which airs on HBO throughout the week, works so well because it goes beyond the ample drama in Polanski's stranger-than-fiction life. The focus is on the legal wrangling that ensued after Polanski was arrested for having sex with Samantha Geimer, then 13, in 1977. The film takes the form of a legal thriller, with Polanski, a man used to creating his own reality through his films, ensnared in the web of a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who appears far more concerned with his own image than legal impartiality. Zenovich intersperses the documentary footage with clips of Polanski acting his in movies, which serves to illustrate her theme: "All along I saw this as Roman Polanski stuck in a Roman Polanski movie, but directed by the judge."

  Zenovich says that when she first approached Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, he tried to steer her away. "He said, 'Everyone knows the story,' she recalls. "And I said, 'No, you know the story. But it has a great understory. We all know Polanski fled the country, but I was interested in why he fled."

  Polanski never agreed to talk, though Zenovich did have lunch with him in Paris after she'd finished the film. She found a revealing interview Polanski did with Clive James in 1984 that sets the tone for the picture. Polanski, the world-weary European fatalist, admits liking young women, saying "I think most of men do too," prompting James to reply: "But the question turns on how young, doesn't it?"

Zenovich's film ultimately turns on an unsettling twist. Polanski had become a star in the 1960s as the roguiesh bad-boy creator of such dark, twisted films as "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," yet that same image was used against him after his actions transformed him from bad-boy artist to villainous predator. Some will say Zenovich is too sympathetic to him, or at least too non-judgemental. She says "my opinion of him went back and forth, but he's still the most interesting character in the film."

  "Wanted and Desired" will have a theatrical release in July from Think FIlms. But it's a sign of the times that Zenovich opted for an HBO debut. Although enthusiasm for documentaries has never been greater, if you're not Michael Moore or Al Gore, finding a sizeable theatrical audience for your film has never been more problematic. Even after receiving generous media attention, Errol Morris' ``Standard Operating Procedure'' barely did $165,000 after a month in theatrical release--the kind of business a throwaway Hollywood comedy does in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon.

     Nevins believes the happiest home for a good documentary is in the living room in front of a big flat-screen TV tuned to HBO. "We're entering an on-demand universe," she says. "We do great box office with our docus. It's just that our box office is in your home where you don't have to drive, pay money for gas, find a place to park or buy popcorn. For years, I've had people come into my office, desperate to sit in an empty theater and watch their documentary play on the big screen. I think what we have to offer is better."

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesday in Calendar. Email questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

Bill Maher argues with Jesus: Exclusive new clip from 'Religulous'

Bill Maher has never made any secret of his aversion to religion. I'm no therapist, but you have to wonder if it had something to do with Maher being raised in his father's Irish-Catholic faith, not discovering until he was practically a teenager that his mother was Jewish. On the other hand, like so many comics, maybe he was just under the spell of George Carlin, who was no fan of religion either.

I've gotten a deluge of reaction to my last post about my recent interview with Maher, whose "Religulous" documentary--due in October--is something of a sustained attack on all sorts of religious extremism (the above clip -- an exclusive scene from the movie that you can only watch here -- shows Maher in a lively if somewhat lopsided debate with Jesus; well, an actor playing Jesus at a Florida theme park). In the movie, Maher debates a host of zealots, including a minister who claims the ability to help gay men go straight.

I found it a little suspicious that Maher confronted all sorts of people in the film, but never lost an argument.  Wasn't the deck stacked? "I'm not going to lie--the deck was stacked," Maher said. "Let's face it, when it comes to religion, there is no convincing argument. If you believe in the Bible in a way where you think you can live to be 900 years old and turn your wife into a pillar of salt, you're going to lose any logical debate. Your story just falls apart."

Maher spends a lot of time in the film overseas, particularly in Holland, an especially tolerant country that, because of an influx of Muslim extremists, has been caught up in a struggle over how to react to religious intolerance. What did Maher learn there?

"That if it can happen in Holland, it could happen in America too. The lesson is--don't be afraid to exert the superiority of Western civilization, at least when it comes to free speech, equality of the sexes and freedom of the press. Those are things we have that they don't have in Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Iran. And in my view, if we have it, and they don't, then we're a better place. That's not prejudice. That's just reality." 

In Bill Maher's new documentary, "Religulous," the film's protagonist--Maher himself--feels the same way about the film's subject matter at the beginning as at the end: In other words, he thinks religion is a big crock of spit. You know irreverence is the order of the day when Maher, reacting to a smooth-talking black preacher's boast that he got a great deal on his $2,000 suits, drolly observes, "I find it interesting that you're a Christian, you used to be a Muslim but you buy all your clothes like a Jew."

"Religulous" doesn't open until Oct. 3, but after seeing the movie I couldn't wait to grill Maher about how he managed to get so many deeply religious figures to actually talk to him, since it's obvious to anyone whose ever watched Maher's act (on "Politically Incorrect" or HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" or in a comedy club) that he wasn't much of a believer. In many ways, the film is a comic bookend to Sam Harris' "The End of Faith," a humorless best seller that views religion as a bastion of superstition and moral hypocrisy. Although Maher embraces Harris' belief that religion is a destructive force that has brought great pain and suffering into the world--at one point he calls it a neurological disorder--Maher is always searching for the humor in every situation. A longtime acolyte of George Carlin, when Maher confronts a religious zealot or hustler, he prefers mocking over scolding.

Rolling his eyes, often full of derision, Maher gets in his licks with everyone, from a guy playing Jesus at a Holy Land theme park in Orlando to Muslims at a gay bar in Amsterdam to a rabbi who advocates the dissolution of Israel (he wears a card with the slogan "A Jew Not a Zionist"). As everything from "The Gong Show" to "Borat" has proved, real people and situations are often undeniably funnier than anything scripted by the best comic minds. In Holland, Maher is in the midst of questioning a somber Muslim cleric when he's interrupted by the cleric's cellphone, whose ring tone is Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir."

So how did Maher manage to get all these people to actually talk to him? Since "Religulous" was directed by Larry Charles, who also did "Borat," I suspected that subterfuge and trickery were involved. I was not far wrong. Here's how Maher pulled it off:

As you can see from my photo, when you have one of those "conversations with" at a film festival--as I did the other night with HBO documentary maven Sheila Nevins at the L.A. Film Festival--it's not a totally intimate affair, since you're sitting on stage in front of a few hundred people, all staring up your nose. Still, you couldn't ask for a better subject than Nevins, who is a fascinating character. First off, she's has been responsible for some of the best documentaries of the past 15 years, from "When the Levees Broke" to "Taxi to the Dark Side" to "Born Into Brothels" to the recent "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired."

Secondly, she puts her money where her mouth is. In the green room, before we did our thing, an indie film exec came over to greet her and handed her a $100 bill. He was paying off a bet: Sheila had predicted box-office failure for "Young@Heart," a feel-good doc that has barely made a dent in its theatrical run, grossing $3.5 million after 10 or so weeks in release. Nevins wasn't bashing the movie--she simply thought no one would go to a theater to see a film about old people and she was right. (She refused the money, by the way, telling her pal to give it to charity.)

But she's also fascinating, as I learned from our "conversation," because she's a woman of a certain age--i.e., a woman who came of age in the pre-feminist movement era of show business, when it was apparently OK for a big-shot network anchor to feel her up right in the office, as she recounted (in a considerably more ribald fashion) during our onstage conversation. I often ask people who work in entertainment who their mentors were. Nevins says she didn't have one, since there were almost no female TV executives on board when she started her career.

It's hard to take notes when you're up in front of a big audience, but here are a few highlights from our conversation:

If you love documentaries as much as I do, you might want to visit the L.A. Film Festival Thursday evening to hear HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins expound on the art of documentary filmmaking. Nobody--not even Michael Moore--has done more to shape the course of docs over the past two decades than Nevins, whose films have won 19 Academy Awards, 20 prime-time Emmys and 28 Peabody Awards. Her most recent hot-button doc was "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," which debuted on HBO earlier this month as part of a summer-long series of Monday-night doc showings on the channel. (To learn more, here's a recent column I did on the subject.)

I mention all this because the event, held at 6 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, is billed as "A Conversation With Sheila Nevins." And since the LAFF apparently couldn't get a media big shot like Charlie Rose to host, they asked me. I've got a few questions of my own to ask Nevins, but if we have any doc fans (or detractors) out there, I'd love to hear what questions you'd suggest asking Nevins. So don't be shy--fire away. We'll try to make it a lively evening. (The Italian Cultural Institute, by the way, is at 1023 Hilgard Ave., in Westwood Village.)   

Most of my family is from the South, starting with my grandmother, who spent 93 years living in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. She had a pretty simple rule about politicians, saying, "I'd be happy to vote for a Republican, if I could ever find a good one." Apparently she was one of the few Southerners resistant to the wily political charms of Lee Atwater, who did more than any political strategist of his generation to help the GOP gain a decades-long stranglehold on the South. Atwater is dead, but his malevolent spirit roars back to life in the new documentary "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," which debuted Sunday night at the L.A. Film Festival. (It plays again Friday at 1:45 p.m. at the Landmark.) Directed by Stefan Forbes, it offers a compelling portrait of one of the great con men of modern American politics. The movie isn't a knee-jerk lefty hit job. In fact, it shows that Atwater was a runaway success not just because he was a devious political operator, but because, in the words of one liberal reporter Forbes interviewed, the sass-talking, guitar-playing Atwater "was the most fun man I ever met."

For anyone who wants to understand why Barack Obama's campaign already has a Fight the Smears website up, debunking scurrilous political rumors, Atwater's political odyssey offers a telling instructional in the black arts of campaign dirty tricks. A protege of Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, one of Atwater's first triumphs came at the expense of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina state senator who was expected to be easily reelected until Atwater (working for Turnipseed's rival) started telling reporters that Turnipseed as a young man had "been hooked up to jumper cables."

That was just the beginning. Atwater helped pioneer the use of push polls, hiring operatives to pose as telephone survey questioners. He defeated a South Carolina Democrat named Max Heller by having his henchmen phone voters, ask a few routine questions, then wonder, "Would you vote for a Jew who didn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" A popular mayor until then, Heller was a goner, especially after Atwater nudged a third-party candidate into the race who kept bringing up the issue at campaign events.

But how did Atwater graduate from local Dixie devilment to the national stage, where he ended up running George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and serving as chairman of the Republican National Party? 

      In my column today about HBO's impressive new summer-long documentary series, I talked with Marina Zenovich, the director of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,'' the provocative doc that launched the series Monday night--and is airing all week on HBO. It will be theaters next month. (Go here to watch HBO's trailer for the film.) Even though the documentary focuses on the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering in the case, Zenovich did a slew of interviews with Polanski's old showbiz cronies, including Jeff Berg, his longtime agent; "Chinatown" producer Robert Evans and "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne.

       So why didn't they make it into the movie? Zenovich says Towne had "all sorts of amazing things to say," but his tales "just didn't work" in the structure of the film. It was a little harder to get to Evans, althogh he eventually agreed to talk. But by the time Zenovich arrived for the interview session, he'd forgotten all about the interview. "He didn't remember who I was,'' she recalls. "At first, he said he wouldn't answer any of my questions. I played along by taking my piece of paper with all my questions and very theatrically tearing it up and throwing it away. That seemed to satisfy him. After that, he was happy to tell all his great stories. With Evans, it felt like you were at a Roman Polanski roast."

     Her best behind-the-scenes interview story involves Sue Mengers, who was the queen of Hollywood agents during Polanski's heyday, and Steven Soderbergh, who was one of Zenovich's producers on the documentary. 

   by Patrick Goldstein   

Sheila Nevins vividly recalls her first reaction to "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's new documentary about the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker that debuted on HBO Monday night. Fifteen minutes into the film, Nevins' heart was pounding.

   "It's always a good sign when my heart is beating fast when I'm watching something," says Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films. "I kept thinking--that man is so interesting. Marina took something that was an old story and made it into what you always want from a documentary--something vibrant, vital and necessary."

      With its line-up of high-profile series behind schedule because of the writer's strike, HBO has found a new way to make a programming spash--it has launched a summer-long weekly series entirely devoted to documentaries. The network is airing a new documentary every Monday night through August 25th, embracing a wide range of subjects, including profiles of self-destructive artists, drug trafffickers, Baghdad teenagers, Hollywood madams and stolen children in China.

   The subject matter is often sensational, which is just the way Nevins likes it. She touts documentaries the way Oprah promotes books. With HBO's deep pockets and reservoir of 35 million-plus subscribers, Nevins is easily the most powerful woman in Documentaryland, her films having earned dozens of Emmy and Peabody awards as well as 19 Academy Awards during her three-decade long tenure at HBO. Her often confounding combination of high and low-brow tastes have long been hotly debated in doc circles, but she remains an unapologetic believer that documentaries should be viewer friendly.

"We've launched this series to spotlight how HBO has helped created a new kind of documentary,'' she told me Friday. "The good news is that docus"--her preferred word for the form--"are no longer a dirty word. They don't have to be exposes about famine and pestilence or a cerebral look at something you'd find on the front page of the New York Times. They can be about real people who are stuck in some kind of extraordinary predicament."

  The new series reflects Nevin's catholic tastes. One of the most gripping films is "The Recruiter," airing July 28th, which focuses on a military recruiter as he sells high-schoolers in a Louisiana town on the merits of joining the Army at the height of the war in Iraq. However, that film is preceded, on July 21, by "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," a warts-and-all portrait of the infamous Hollywood madam.

    It's a sign of Nevins' impatience with convention that when things weren't going well on the documentary--Fleiss had stopped speaking to filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato--Nevins stepped in and did the interviews herself. "I simply wasn't going to let that film die," she explains. "Fenton and Randy know how much I respect them. But Heidi is temperamental, and I think she just needed a woman to talk to her."

  Nevins sees the episode as typical of the angst that grows out of the documentary process. "She walked away," she says of Fleiss. "But doesn't everyone walk away when they're revealing who they really are?"

  It's telling that Nevins views the series' two most controversial subjects--Fleiss and Polanski--in much the same light, as people in the sexual spotlight who got a bad rap. "I'm sure Marina will be criticized for being a woman, making a film about a man who had sex with an under-age girl," she says. "But there's so much more to what happened to Polanski than that. It's an endlessly complex story."

  The documentary, which airs on HBO throughout the week, works so well because it goes beyond the ample drama in Polanski's stranger-than-fiction life. The focus is on the legal wrangling that ensued after Polanski was arrested for having sex with Samantha Geimer, then 13, in 1977. The film takes the form of a legal thriller, with Polanski, a man used to creating his own reality through his films, ensnared in the web of a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who appears far more concerned with his own image than legal impartiality. Zenovich intersperses the documentary footage with clips of Polanski acting his in movies, which serves to illustrate her theme: "All along I saw this as Roman Polanski stuck in a Roman Polanski movie, but directed by the judge."

  Zenovich says that when she first approached Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, he tried to steer her away. "He said, 'Everyone knows the story,' she recalls. "And I said, 'No, you know the story. But it has a great understory. We all know Polanski fled the country, but I was interested in why he fled."

  Polanski never agreed to talk, though Zenovich did have lunch with him in Paris after she'd finished the film. She found a revealing interview Polanski did with Clive James in 1984 that sets the tone for the picture. Polanski, the world-weary European fatalist, admits liking young women, saying "I think most of men do too," prompting James to reply: "But the question turns on how young, doesn't it?"

Zenovich's film ultimately turns on an unsettling twist. Polanski had become a star in the 1960s as the roguiesh bad-boy creator of such dark, twisted films as "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," yet that same image was used against him after his actions transformed him from bad-boy artist to villainous predator. Some will say Zenovich is too sympathetic to him, or at least too non-judgemental. She says "my opinion of him went back and forth, but he's still the most interesting character in the film."

  "Wanted and Desired" will have a theatrical release in July from Think FIlms. But it's a sign of the times that Zenovich opted for an HBO debut. Although enthusiasm for documentaries has never been greater, if you're not Michael Moore or Al Gore, finding a sizeable theatrical audience for your film has never been more problematic. Even after receiving generous media attention, Errol Morris' ``Standard Operating Procedure'' barely did $165,000 after a month in theatrical release--the kind of business a throwaway Hollywood comedy does in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon.

     Nevins believes the happiest home for a good documentary is in the living room in front of a big flat-screen TV tuned to HBO. "We're entering an on-demand universe," she says. "We do great box office with our docus. It's just that our box office is in your home where you don't have to drive, pay money for gas, find a place to park or buy popcorn. For years, I've had people come into my office, desperate to sit in an empty theater and watch their documentary play on the big screen. I think what we have to offer is better."

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesday in Calendar. Email questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

Bill Maher hates your (fill in the blank) religion

In Bill Maher's new documentary, "Religulous," the film's protagonist--Maher himself--feels the same way about the film's subject matter at the beginning as at the end: In other words, he thinks religion is a big crock of spit. You know irreverence is the order of the day when Maher, reacting to a smooth-talking black preacher's boast that he got a great deal on his $2,000 suits, drolly observes, "I find it interesting that you're a Christian, you used to be a Muslim but you buy all your clothes like a Jew."

"Religulous" doesn't open until Oct. 3, but after seeing the movie I couldn't wait to grill Maher about how he managed to get so many deeply religious figures to actually talk to him, since it's obvious to anyone whose ever watched Maher's act (on "Politically Incorrect" or HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" or in a comedy club) that he wasn't much of a believer. In many ways, the film is a comic bookend to Sam Harris' "The End of Faith," a humorless best seller that views religion as a bastion of superstition and moral hypocrisy. Although Maher embraces Harris' belief that religion is a destructive force that has brought great pain and suffering into the world--at one point he calls it a neurological disorder--Maher is always searching for the humor in every situation. A longtime acolyte of George Carlin, when Maher confronts a religious zealot or hustler, he prefers mocking over scolding.

Rolling his eyes, often full of derision, Maher gets in his licks with everyone, from a guy playing Jesus at a Holy Land theme park in Orlando to Muslims at a gay bar in Amsterdam to a rabbi who advocates the dissolution of Israel (he wears a card with the slogan "A Jew Not a Zionist"). As everything from "The Gong Show" to "Borat" has proved, real people and situations are often undeniably funnier than anything scripted by the best comic minds. In Holland, Maher is in the midst of questioning a somber Muslim cleric when he's interrupted by the cleric's cellphone, whose ring tone is Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir."

So how did Maher manage to get all these people to actually talk to him? Since "Religulous" was directed by Larry Charles, who also did "Borat," I suspected that subterfuge and trickery were involved. I was not far wrong. Here's how Maher pulled it off:

As you can see from my photo, when you have one of those "conversations with" at a film festival--as I did the other night with HBO documentary maven Sheila Nevins at the L.A. Film Festival--it's not a totally intimate affair, since you're sitting on stage in front of a few hundred people, all staring up your nose. Still, you couldn't ask for a better subject than Nevins, who is a fascinating character. First off, she's has been responsible for some of the best documentaries of the past 15 years, from "When the Levees Broke" to "Taxi to the Dark Side" to "Born Into Brothels" to the recent "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired."

Secondly, she puts her money where her mouth is. In the green room, before we did our thing, an indie film exec came over to greet her and handed her a $100 bill. He was paying off a bet: Sheila had predicted box-office failure for "Young@Heart," a feel-good doc that has barely made a dent in its theatrical run, grossing $3.5 million after 10 or so weeks in release. Nevins wasn't bashing the movie--she simply thought no one would go to a theater to see a film about old people and she was right. (She refused the money, by the way, telling her pal to give it to charity.)

But she's also fascinating, as I learned from our "conversation," because she's a woman of a certain age--i.e., a woman who came of age in the pre-feminist movement era of show business, when it was apparently OK for a big-shot network anchor to feel her up right in the office, as she recounted (in a considerably more ribald fashion) during our onstage conversation. I often ask people who work in entertainment who their mentors were. Nevins says she didn't have one, since there were almost no female TV executives on board when she started her career.

It's hard to take notes when you're up in front of a big audience, but here are a few highlights from our conversation:

If you love documentaries as much as I do, you might want to visit the L.A. Film Festival Thursday evening to hear HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins expound on the art of documentary filmmaking. Nobody--not even Michael Moore--has done more to shape the course of docs over the past two decades than Nevins, whose films have won 19 Academy Awards, 20 prime-time Emmys and 28 Peabody Awards. Her most recent hot-button doc was "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," which debuted on HBO earlier this month as part of a summer-long series of Monday-night doc showings on the channel. (To learn more, here's a recent column I did on the subject.)

I mention all this because the event, held at 6 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, is billed as "A Conversation With Sheila Nevins." And since the LAFF apparently couldn't get a media big shot like Charlie Rose to host, they asked me. I've got a few questions of my own to ask Nevins, but if we have any doc fans (or detractors) out there, I'd love to hear what questions you'd suggest asking Nevins. So don't be shy--fire away. We'll try to make it a lively evening. (The Italian Cultural Institute, by the way, is at 1023 Hilgard Ave., in Westwood Village.)   

Most of my family is from the South, starting with my grandmother, who spent 93 years living in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. She had a pretty simple rule about politicians, saying, "I'd be happy to vote for a Republican, if I could ever find a good one." Apparently she was one of the few Southerners resistant to the wily political charms of Lee Atwater, who did more than any political strategist of his generation to help the GOP gain a decades-long stranglehold on the South. Atwater is dead, but his malevolent spirit roars back to life in the new documentary "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," which debuted Sunday night at the L.A. Film Festival. (It plays again Friday at 1:45 p.m. at the Landmark.) Directed by Stefan Forbes, it offers a compelling portrait of one of the great con men of modern American politics. The movie isn't a knee-jerk lefty hit job. In fact, it shows that Atwater was a runaway success not just because he was a devious political operator, but because, in the words of one liberal reporter Forbes interviewed, the sass-talking, guitar-playing Atwater "was the most fun man I ever met."

For anyone who wants to understand why Barack Obama's campaign already has a Fight the Smears website up, debunking scurrilous political rumors, Atwater's political odyssey offers a telling instructional in the black arts of campaign dirty tricks. A protege of Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, one of Atwater's first triumphs came at the expense of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina state senator who was expected to be easily reelected until Atwater (working for Turnipseed's rival) started telling reporters that Turnipseed as a young man had "been hooked up to jumper cables."

That was just the beginning. Atwater helped pioneer the use of push polls, hiring operatives to pose as telephone survey questioners. He defeated a South Carolina Democrat named Max Heller by having his henchmen phone voters, ask a few routine questions, then wonder, "Would you vote for a Jew who didn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" A popular mayor until then, Heller was a goner, especially after Atwater nudged a third-party candidate into the race who kept bringing up the issue at campaign events.

But how did Atwater graduate from local Dixie devilment to the national stage, where he ended up running George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and serving as chairman of the Republican National Party? 

      In my column today about HBO's impressive new summer-long documentary series, I talked with Marina Zenovich, the director of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,'' the provocative doc that launched the series Monday night--and is airing all week on HBO. It will be theaters next month. (Go here to watch HBO's trailer for the film.) Even though the documentary focuses on the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering in the case, Zenovich did a slew of interviews with Polanski's old showbiz cronies, including Jeff Berg, his longtime agent; "Chinatown" producer Robert Evans and "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne.

       So why didn't they make it into the movie? Zenovich says Towne had "all sorts of amazing things to say," but his tales "just didn't work" in the structure of the film. It was a little harder to get to Evans, althogh he eventually agreed to talk. But by the time Zenovich arrived for the interview session, he'd forgotten all about the interview. "He didn't remember who I was,'' she recalls. "At first, he said he wouldn't answer any of my questions. I played along by taking my piece of paper with all my questions and very theatrically tearing it up and throwing it away. That seemed to satisfy him. After that, he was happy to tell all his great stories. With Evans, it felt like you were at a Roman Polanski roast."

     Her best behind-the-scenes interview story involves Sue Mengers, who was the queen of Hollywood agents during Polanski's heyday, and Steven Soderbergh, who was one of Zenovich's producers on the documentary. 

   by Patrick Goldstein   

Sheila Nevins vividly recalls her first reaction to "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's new documentary about the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker that debuted on HBO Monday night. Fifteen minutes into the film, Nevins' heart was pounding.

   "It's always a good sign when my heart is beating fast when I'm watching something," says Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films. "I kept thinking--that man is so interesting. Marina took something that was an old story and made it into what you always want from a documentary--something vibrant, vital and necessary."

      With its line-up of high-profile series behind schedule because of the writer's strike, HBO has found a new way to make a programming spash--it has launched a summer-long weekly series entirely devoted to documentaries. The network is airing a new documentary every Monday night through August 25th, embracing a wide range of subjects, including profiles of self-destructive artists, drug trafffickers, Baghdad teenagers, Hollywood madams and stolen children in China.

   The subject matter is often sensational, which is just the way Nevins likes it. She touts documentaries the way Oprah promotes books. With HBO's deep pockets and reservoir of 35 million-plus subscribers, Nevins is easily the most powerful woman in Documentaryland, her films having earned dozens of Emmy and Peabody awards as well as 19 Academy Awards during her three-decade long tenure at HBO. Her often confounding combination of high and low-brow tastes have long been hotly debated in doc circles, but she remains an unapologetic believer that documentaries should be viewer friendly.

"We've launched this series to spotlight how HBO has helped created a new kind of documentary,'' she told me Friday. "The good news is that docus"--her preferred word for the form--"are no longer a dirty word. They don't have to be exposes about famine and pestilence or a cerebral look at something you'd find on the front page of the New York Times. They can be about real people who are stuck in some kind of extraordinary predicament."

  The new series reflects Nevin's catholic tastes. One of the most gripping films is "The Recruiter," airing July 28th, which focuses on a military recruiter as he sells high-schoolers in a Louisiana town on the merits of joining the Army at the height of the war in Iraq. However, that film is preceded, on July 21, by "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," a warts-and-all portrait of the infamous Hollywood madam.

    It's a sign of Nevins' impatience with convention that when things weren't going well on the documentary--Fleiss had stopped speaking to filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato--Nevins stepped in and did the interviews herself. "I simply wasn't going to let that film die," she explains. "Fenton and Randy know how much I respect them. But Heidi is temperamental, and I think she just needed a woman to talk to her."

  Nevins sees the episode as typical of the angst that grows out of the documentary process. "She walked away," she says of Fleiss. "But doesn't everyone walk away when they're revealing who they really are?"

  It's telling that Nevins views the series' two most controversial subjects--Fleiss and Polanski--in much the same light, as people in the sexual spotlight who got a bad rap. "I'm sure Marina will be criticized for being a woman, making a film about a man who had sex with an under-age girl," she says. "But there's so much more to what happened to Polanski than that. It's an endlessly complex story."

  The documentary, which airs on HBO throughout the week, works so well because it goes beyond the ample drama in Polanski's stranger-than-fiction life. The focus is on the legal wrangling that ensued after Polanski was arrested for having sex with Samantha Geimer, then 13, in 1977. The film takes the form of a legal thriller, with Polanski, a man used to creating his own reality through his films, ensnared in the web of a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who appears far more concerned with his own image than legal impartiality. Zenovich intersperses the documentary footage with clips of Polanski acting his in movies, which serves to illustrate her theme: "All along I saw this as Roman Polanski stuck in a Roman Polanski movie, but directed by the judge."

  Zenovich says that when she first approached Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, he tried to steer her away. "He said, 'Everyone knows the story,' she recalls. "And I said, 'No, you know the story. But it has a great understory. We all know Polanski fled the country, but I was interested in why he fled."

  Polanski never agreed to talk, though Zenovich did have lunch with him in Paris after she'd finished the film. She found a revealing interview Polanski did with Clive James in 1984 that sets the tone for the picture. Polanski, the world-weary European fatalist, admits liking young women, saying "I think most of men do too," prompting James to reply: "But the question turns on how young, doesn't it?"

Zenovich's film ultimately turns on an unsettling twist. Polanski had become a star in the 1960s as the roguiesh bad-boy creator of such dark, twisted films as "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," yet that same image was used against him after his actions transformed him from bad-boy artist to villainous predator. Some will say Zenovich is too sympathetic to him, or at least too non-judgemental. She says "my opinion of him went back and forth, but he's still the most interesting character in the film."

  "Wanted and Desired" will have a theatrical release in July from Think FIlms. But it's a sign of the times that Zenovich opted for an HBO debut. Although enthusiasm for documentaries has never been greater, if you're not Michael Moore or Al Gore, finding a sizeable theatrical audience for your film has never been more problematic. Even after receiving generous media attention, Errol Morris' ``Standard Operating Procedure'' barely did $165,000 after a month in theatrical release--the kind of business a throwaway Hollywood comedy does in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon.

     Nevins believes the happiest home for a good documentary is in the living room in front of a big flat-screen TV tuned to HBO. "We're entering an on-demand universe," she says. "We do great box office with our docus. It's just that our box office is in your home where you don't have to drive, pay money for gas, find a place to park or buy popcorn. For years, I've had people come into my office, desperate to sit in an empty theater and watch their documentary play on the big screen. I think what we have to offer is better."

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesday in Calendar. Email questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

My hot date with Sheila Nevins

As you can see from my photo, when you have one of those "conversations with" at a film festival--as I did the other night with HBO documentary maven Sheila Nevins at the L.A. Film Festival--it's not a totally intimate affair, since you're sitting on stage in front of a few hundred people, all staring up your nose. Still, you couldn't ask for a better subject than Nevins, who is a fascinating character. First off, she's has been responsible for some of the best documentaries of the past 15 years, from "When the Levees Broke" to "Taxi to the Dark Side" to "Born Into Brothels" to the recent "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired."

Secondly, she puts her money where her mouth is. In the green room, before we did our thing, an indie film exec came over to greet her and handed her a $100 bill. He was paying off a bet: Sheila had predicted box-office failure for "Young@Heart," a feel-good doc that has barely made a dent in its theatrical run, grossing $3.5 million after 10 or so weeks in release. Nevins wasn't bashing the movie--she simply thought no one would go to a theater to see a film about old people and she was right. (She refused the money, by the way, telling her pal to give it to charity.)

But she's also fascinating, as I learned from our "conversation," because she's a woman of a certain age--i.e., a woman who came of age in the pre-feminist movement era of show business, when it was apparently OK for a big-shot network anchor to feel her up right in the office, as she recounted (in a considerably more ribald fashion) during our onstage conversation. I often ask people who work in entertainment who their mentors were. Nevins says she didn't have one, since there were almost no female TV executives on board when she started her career.

It's hard to take notes when you're up in front of a big audience, but here are a few highlights from our conversation:

If you love documentaries as much as I do, you might want to visit the L.A. Film Festival Thursday evening to hear HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins expound on the art of documentary filmmaking. Nobody--not even Michael Moore--has done more to shape the course of docs over the past two decades than Nevins, whose films have won 19 Academy Awards, 20 prime-time Emmys and 28 Peabody Awards. Her most recent hot-button doc was "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," which debuted on HBO earlier this month as part of a summer-long series of Monday-night doc showings on the channel. (To learn more, here's a recent column I did on the subject.)

I mention all this because the event, held at 6 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, is billed as "A Conversation With Sheila Nevins." And since the LAFF apparently couldn't get a media big shot like Charlie Rose to host, they asked me. I've got a few questions of my own to ask Nevins, but if we have any doc fans (or detractors) out there, I'd love to hear what questions you'd suggest asking Nevins. So don't be shy--fire away. We'll try to make it a lively evening. (The Italian Cultural Institute, by the way, is at 1023 Hilgard Ave., in Westwood Village.)   

Most of my family is from the South, starting with my grandmother, who spent 93 years living in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. She had a pretty simple rule about politicians, saying, "I'd be happy to vote for a Republican, if I could ever find a good one." Apparently she was one of the few Southerners resistant to the wily political charms of Lee Atwater, who did more than any political strategist of his generation to help the GOP gain a decades-long stranglehold on the South. Atwater is dead, but his malevolent spirit roars back to life in the new documentary "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," which debuted Sunday night at the L.A. Film Festival. (It plays again Friday at 1:45 p.m. at the Landmark.) Directed by Stefan Forbes, it offers a compelling portrait of one of the great con men of modern American politics. The movie isn't a knee-jerk lefty hit job. In fact, it shows that Atwater was a runaway success not just because he was a devious political operator, but because, in the words of one liberal reporter Forbes interviewed, the sass-talking, guitar-playing Atwater "was the most fun man I ever met."

For anyone who wants to understand why Barack Obama's campaign already has a Fight the Smears website up, debunking scurrilous political rumors, Atwater's political odyssey offers a telling instructional in the black arts of campaign dirty tricks. A protege of Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, one of Atwater's first triumphs came at the expense of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina state senator who was expected to be easily reelected until Atwater (working for Turnipseed's rival) started telling reporters that Turnipseed as a young man had "been hooked up to jumper cables."

That was just the beginning. Atwater helped pioneer the use of push polls, hiring operatives to pose as telephone survey questioners. He defeated a South Carolina Democrat named Max Heller by having his henchmen phone voters, ask a few routine questions, then wonder, "Would you vote for a Jew who didn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" A popular mayor until then, Heller was a goner, especially after Atwater nudged a third-party candidate into the race who kept bringing up the issue at campaign events.

But how did Atwater graduate from local Dixie devilment to the national stage, where he ended up running George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and serving as chairman of the Republican National Party? 

      In my column today about HBO's impressive new summer-long documentary series, I talked with Marina Zenovich, the director of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,'' the provocative doc that launched the series Monday night--and is airing all week on HBO. It will be theaters next month. (Go here to watch HBO's trailer for the film.) Even though the documentary focuses on the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering in the case, Zenovich did a slew of interviews with Polanski's old showbiz cronies, including Jeff Berg, his longtime agent; "Chinatown" producer Robert Evans and "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne.

       So why didn't they make it into the movie? Zenovich says Towne had "all sorts of amazing things to say," but his tales "just didn't work" in the structure of the film. It was a little harder to get to Evans, althogh he eventually agreed to talk. But by the time Zenovich arrived for the interview session, he'd forgotten all about the interview. "He didn't remember who I was,'' she recalls. "At first, he said he wouldn't answer any of my questions. I played along by taking my piece of paper with all my questions and very theatrically tearing it up and throwing it away. That seemed to satisfy him. After that, he was happy to tell all his great stories. With Evans, it felt like you were at a Roman Polanski roast."

     Her best behind-the-scenes interview story involves Sue Mengers, who was the queen of Hollywood agents during Polanski's heyday, and Steven Soderbergh, who was one of Zenovich's producers on the documentary. 

   by Patrick Goldstein   

Sheila Nevins vividly recalls her first reaction to "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's new documentary about the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker that debuted on HBO Monday night. Fifteen minutes into the film, Nevins' heart was pounding.

   "It's always a good sign when my heart is beating fast when I'm watching something," says Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films. "I kept thinking--that man is so interesting. Marina took something that was an old story and made it into what you always want from a documentary--something vibrant, vital and necessary."

      With its line-up of high-profile series behind schedule because of the writer's strike, HBO has found a new way to make a programming spash--it has launched a summer-long weekly series entirely devoted to documentaries. The network is airing a new documentary every Monday night through August 25th, embracing a wide range of subjects, including profiles of self-destructive artists, drug trafffickers, Baghdad teenagers, Hollywood madams and stolen children in China.

   The subject matter is often sensational, which is just the way Nevins likes it. She touts documentaries the way Oprah promotes books. With HBO's deep pockets and reservoir of 35 million-plus subscribers, Nevins is easily the most powerful woman in Documentaryland, her films having earned dozens of Emmy and Peabody awards as well as 19 Academy Awards during her three-decade long tenure at HBO. Her often confounding combination of high and low-brow tastes have long been hotly debated in doc circles, but she remains an unapologetic believer that documentaries should be viewer friendly.

"We've launched this series to spotlight how HBO has helped created a new kind of documentary,'' she told me Friday. "The good news is that docus"--her preferred word for the form--"are no longer a dirty word. They don't have to be exposes about famine and pestilence or a cerebral look at something you'd find on the front page of the New York Times. They can be about real people who are stuck in some kind of extraordinary predicament."

  The new series reflects Nevin's catholic tastes. One of the most gripping films is "The Recruiter," airing July 28th, which focuses on a military recruiter as he sells high-schoolers in a Louisiana town on the merits of joining the Army at the height of the war in Iraq. However, that film is preceded, on July 21, by "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," a warts-and-all portrait of the infamous Hollywood madam.

    It's a sign of Nevins' impatience with convention that when things weren't going well on the documentary--Fleiss had stopped speaking to filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato--Nevins stepped in and did the interviews herself. "I simply wasn't going to let that film die," she explains. "Fenton and Randy know how much I respect them. But Heidi is temperamental, and I think she just needed a woman to talk to her."

  Nevins sees the episode as typical of the angst that grows out of the documentary process. "She walked away," she says of Fleiss. "But doesn't everyone walk away when they're revealing who they really are?"

  It's telling that Nevins views the series' two most controversial subjects--Fleiss and Polanski--in much the same light, as people in the sexual spotlight who got a bad rap. "I'm sure Marina will be criticized for being a woman, making a film about a man who had sex with an under-age girl," she says. "But there's so much more to what happened to Polanski than that. It's an endlessly complex story."

  The documentary, which airs on HBO throughout the week, works so well because it goes beyond the ample drama in Polanski's stranger-than-fiction life. The focus is on the legal wrangling that ensued after Polanski was arrested for having sex with Samantha Geimer, then 13, in 1977. The film takes the form of a legal thriller, with Polanski, a man used to creating his own reality through his films, ensnared in the web of a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who appears far more concerned with his own image than legal impartiality. Zenovich intersperses the documentary footage with clips of Polanski acting his in movies, which serves to illustrate her theme: "All along I saw this as Roman Polanski stuck in a Roman Polanski movie, but directed by the judge."

  Zenovich says that when she first approached Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, he tried to steer her away. "He said, 'Everyone knows the story,' she recalls. "And I said, 'No, you know the story. But it has a great understory. We all know Polanski fled the country, but I was interested in why he fled."

  Polanski never agreed to talk, though Zenovich did have lunch with him in Paris after she'd finished the film. She found a revealing interview Polanski did with Clive James in 1984 that sets the tone for the picture. Polanski, the world-weary European fatalist, admits liking young women, saying "I think most of men do too," prompting James to reply: "But the question turns on how young, doesn't it?"

Zenovich's film ultimately turns on an unsettling twist. Polanski had become a star in the 1960s as the roguiesh bad-boy creator of such dark, twisted films as "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," yet that same image was used against him after his actions transformed him from bad-boy artist to villainous predator. Some will say Zenovich is too sympathetic to him, or at least too non-judgemental. She says "my opinion of him went back and forth, but he's still the most interesting character in the film."

  "Wanted and Desired" will have a theatrical release in July from Think FIlms. But it's a sign of the times that Zenovich opted for an HBO debut. Although enthusiasm for documentaries has never been greater, if you're not Michael Moore or Al Gore, finding a sizeable theatrical audience for your film has never been more problematic. Even after receiving generous media attention, Errol Morris' ``Standard Operating Procedure'' barely did $165,000 after a month in theatrical release--the kind of business a throwaway Hollywood comedy does in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon.

     Nevins believes the happiest home for a good documentary is in the living room in front of a big flat-screen TV tuned to HBO. "We're entering an on-demand universe," she says. "We do great box office with our docus. It's just that our box office is in your home where you don't have to drive, pay money for gas, find a place to park or buy popcorn. For years, I've had people come into my office, desperate to sit in an empty theater and watch their documentary play on the big screen. I think what we have to offer is better."

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesday in Calendar. Email questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

Sheila Nevins alert!

If you love documentaries as much as I do, you might want to visit the L.A. Film Festival Thursday evening to hear HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins expound on the art of documentary filmmaking. Nobody--not even Michael Moore--has done more to shape the course of docs over the past two decades than Nevins, whose films have won 19 Academy Awards, 20 prime-time Emmys and 28 Peabody Awards. Her most recent hot-button doc was "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," which debuted on HBO earlier this month as part of a summer-long series of Monday-night doc showings on the channel. (To learn more, here's a recent column I did on the subject.)

I mention all this because the event, held at 6 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, is billed as "A Conversation With Sheila Nevins." And since the LAFF apparently couldn't get a media big shot like Charlie Rose to host, they asked me. I've got a few questions of my own to ask Nevins, but if we have any doc fans (or detractors) out there, I'd love to hear what questions you'd suggest asking Nevins. So don't be shy--fire away. We'll try to make it a lively evening. (The Italian Cultural Institute, by the way, is at 1023 Hilgard Ave., in Westwood Village.)   

Most of my family is from the South, starting with my grandmother, who spent 93 years living in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. She had a pretty simple rule about politicians, saying, "I'd be happy to vote for a Republican, if I could ever find a good one." Apparently she was one of the few Southerners resistant to the wily political charms of Lee Atwater, who did more than any political strategist of his generation to help the GOP gain a decades-long stranglehold on the South. Atwater is dead, but his malevolent spirit roars back to life in the new documentary "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," which debuted Sunday night at the L.A. Film Festival. (It plays again Friday at 1:45 p.m. at the Landmark.) Directed by Stefan Forbes, it offers a compelling portrait of one of the great con men of modern American politics. The movie isn't a knee-jerk lefty hit job. In fact, it shows that Atwater was a runaway success not just because he was a devious political operator, but because, in the words of one liberal reporter Forbes interviewed, the sass-talking, guitar-playing Atwater "was the most fun man I ever met."

For anyone who wants to understand why Barack Obama's campaign already has a Fight the Smears website up, debunking scurrilous political rumors, Atwater's political odyssey offers a telling instructional in the black arts of campaign dirty tricks. A protege of Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, one of Atwater's first triumphs came at the expense of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina state senator who was expected to be easily reelected until Atwater (working for Turnipseed's rival) started telling reporters that Turnipseed as a young man had "been hooked up to jumper cables."

That was just the beginning. Atwater helped pioneer the use of push polls, hiring operatives to pose as telephone survey questioners. He defeated a South Carolina Democrat named Max Heller by having his henchmen phone voters, ask a few routine questions, then wonder, "Would you vote for a Jew who didn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" A popular mayor until then, Heller was a goner, especially after Atwater nudged a third-party candidate into the race who kept bringing up the issue at campaign events.

But how did Atwater graduate from local Dixie devilment to the national stage, where he ended up running George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and serving as chairman of the Republican National Party? 

      In my column today about HBO's impressive new summer-long documentary series, I talked with Marina Zenovich, the director of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,'' the provocative doc that launched the series Monday night--and is airing all week on HBO. It will be theaters next month. (Go here to watch HBO's trailer for the film.) Even though the documentary focuses on the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering in the case, Zenovich did a slew of interviews with Polanski's old showbiz cronies, including Jeff Berg, his longtime agent; "Chinatown" producer Robert Evans and "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne.

       So why didn't they make it into the movie? Zenovich says Towne had "all sorts of amazing things to say," but his tales "just didn't work" in the structure of the film. It was a little harder to get to Evans, althogh he eventually agreed to talk. But by the time Zenovich arrived for the interview session, he'd forgotten all about the interview. "He didn't remember who I was,'' she recalls. "At first, he said he wouldn't answer any of my questions. I played along by taking my piece of paper with all my questions and very theatrically tearing it up and throwing it away. That seemed to satisfy him. After that, he was happy to tell all his great stories. With Evans, it felt like you were at a Roman Polanski roast."

     Her best behind-the-scenes interview story involves Sue Mengers, who was the queen of Hollywood agents during Polanski's heyday, and Steven Soderbergh, who was one of Zenovich's producers on the documentary. 

   by Patrick Goldstein   

Sheila Nevins vividly recalls her first reaction to "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's new documentary about the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker that debuted on HBO Monday night. Fifteen minutes into the film, Nevins' heart was pounding.

   "It's always a good sign when my heart is beating fast when I'm watching something," says Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films. "I kept thinking--that man is so interesting. Marina took something that was an old story and made it into what you always want from a documentary--something vibrant, vital and necessary."

      With its line-up of high-profile series behind schedule because of the writer's strike, HBO has found a new way to make a programming spash--it has launched a summer-long weekly series entirely devoted to documentaries. The network is airing a new documentary every Monday night through August 25th, embracing a wide range of subjects, including profiles of self-destructive artists, drug trafffickers, Baghdad teenagers, Hollywood madams and stolen children in China.

   The subject matter is often sensational, which is just the way Nevins likes it. She touts documentaries the way Oprah promotes books. With HBO's deep pockets and reservoir of 35 million-plus subscribers, Nevins is easily the most powerful woman in Documentaryland, her films having earned dozens of Emmy and Peabody awards as well as 19 Academy Awards during her three-decade long tenure at HBO. Her often confounding combination of high and low-brow tastes have long been hotly debated in doc circles, but she remains an unapologetic believer that documentaries should be viewer friendly.

"We've launched this series to spotlight how HBO has helped created a new kind of documentary,'' she told me Friday. "The good news is that docus"--her preferred word for the form--"are no longer a dirty word. They don't have to be exposes about famine and pestilence or a cerebral look at something you'd find on the front page of the New York Times. They can be about real people who are stuck in some kind of extraordinary predicament."

  The new series reflects Nevin's catholic tastes. One of the most gripping films is "The Recruiter," airing July 28th, which focuses on a military recruiter as he sells high-schoolers in a Louisiana town on the merits of joining the Army at the height of the war in Iraq. However, that film is preceded, on July 21, by "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," a warts-and-all portrait of the infamous Hollywood madam.

    It's a sign of Nevins' impatience with convention that when things weren't going well on the documentary--Fleiss had stopped speaking to filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato--Nevins stepped in and did the interviews herself. "I simply wasn't going to let that film die," she explains. "Fenton and Randy know how much I respect them. But Heidi is temperamental, and I think she just needed a woman to talk to her."

  Nevins sees the episode as typical of the angst that grows out of the documentary process. "She walked away," she says of Fleiss. "But doesn't everyone walk away when they're revealing who they really are?"

  It's telling that Nevins views the series' two most controversial subjects--Fleiss and Polanski--in much the same light, as people in the sexual spotlight who got a bad rap. "I'm sure Marina will be criticized for being a woman, making a film about a man who had sex with an under-age girl," she says. "But there's so much more to what happened to Polanski than that. It's an endlessly complex story."

  The documentary, which airs on HBO throughout the week, works so well because it goes beyond the ample drama in Polanski's stranger-than-fiction life. The focus is on the legal wrangling that ensued after Polanski was arrested for having sex with Samantha Geimer, then 13, in 1977. The film takes the form of a legal thriller, with Polanski, a man used to creating his own reality through his films, ensnared in the web of a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who appears far more concerned with his own image than legal impartiality. Zenovich intersperses the documentary footage with clips of Polanski acting his in movies, which serves to illustrate her theme: "All along I saw this as Roman Polanski stuck in a Roman Polanski movie, but directed by the judge."

  Zenovich says that when she first approached Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, he tried to steer her away. "He said, 'Everyone knows the story,' she recalls. "And I said, 'No, you know the story. But it has a great understory. We all know Polanski fled the country, but I was interested in why he fled."

  Polanski never agreed to talk, though Zenovich did have lunch with him in Paris after she'd finished the film. She found a revealing interview Polanski did with Clive James in 1984 that sets the tone for the picture. Polanski, the world-weary European fatalist, admits liking young women, saying "I think most of men do too," prompting James to reply: "But the question turns on how young, doesn't it?"

Zenovich's film ultimately turns on an unsettling twist. Polanski had become a star in the 1960s as the roguiesh bad-boy creator of such dark, twisted films as "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," yet that same image was used against him after his actions transformed him from bad-boy artist to villainous predator. Some will say Zenovich is too sympathetic to him, or at least too non-judgemental. She says "my opinion of him went back and forth, but he's still the most interesting character in the film."

  "Wanted and Desired" will have a theatrical release in July from Think FIlms. But it's a sign of the times that Zenovich opted for an HBO debut. Although enthusiasm for documentaries has never been greater, if you're not Michael Moore or Al Gore, finding a sizeable theatrical audience for your film has never been more problematic. Even after receiving generous media attention, Errol Morris' ``Standard Operating Procedure'' barely did $165,000 after a month in theatrical release--the kind of business a throwaway Hollywood comedy does in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon.

     Nevins believes the happiest home for a good documentary is in the living room in front of a big flat-screen TV tuned to HBO. "We're entering an on-demand universe," she says. "We do great box office with our docus. It's just that our box office is in your home where you don't have to drive, pay money for gas, find a place to park or buy popcorn. For years, I've had people come into my office, desperate to sit in an empty theater and watch their documentary play on the big screen. I think what we have to offer is better."

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesday in Calendar. Email questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

The real Darth Vader of American politics

Most of my family is from the South, starting with my grandmother, who spent 93 years living in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. She had a pretty simple rule about politicians, saying, "I'd be happy to vote for a Republican, if I could ever find a good one." Apparently she was one of the few Southerners resistant to the wily political charms of Lee Atwater, who did more than any political strategist of his generation to help the GOP gain a decades-long stranglehold on the South. Atwater is dead, but his malevolent spirit roars back to life in the new documentary "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," which debuted Sunday night at the L.A. Film Festival. (It plays again Friday at 1:45 p.m. at the Landmark.) Directed by Stefan Forbes, it offers a compelling portrait of one of the great con men of modern American politics. The movie isn't a knee-jerk lefty hit job. In fact, it shows that Atwater was a runaway success not just because he was a devious political operator, but because, in the words of one liberal reporter Forbes interviewed, the sass-talking, guitar-playing Atwater "was the most fun man I ever met."

For anyone who wants to understand why Barack Obama's campaign already has a Fight the Smears website up, debunking scurrilous political rumors, Atwater's political odyssey offers a telling instructional in the black arts of campaign dirty tricks. A protege of Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, one of Atwater's first triumphs came at the expense of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina state senator who was expected to be easily reelected until Atwater (working for Turnipseed's rival) started telling reporters that Turnipseed as a young man had "been hooked up to jumper cables."

That was just the beginning. Atwater helped pioneer the use of push polls, hiring operatives to pose as telephone survey questioners. He defeated a South Carolina Democrat named Max Heller by having his henchmen phone voters, ask a few routine questions, then wonder, "Would you vote for a Jew who didn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" A popular mayor until then, Heller was a goner, especially after Atwater nudged a third-party candidate into the race who kept bringing up the issue at campaign events.

But how did Atwater graduate from local Dixie devilment to the national stage, where he ended up running George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and serving as chairman of the Republican National Party? 

      In my column today about HBO's impressive new summer-long documentary series, I talked with Marina Zenovich, the director of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,'' the provocative doc that launched the series Monday night--and is airing all week on HBO. It will be theaters next month. (Go here to watch HBO's trailer for the film.) Even though the documentary focuses on the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering in the case, Zenovich did a slew of interviews with Polanski's old showbiz cronies, including Jeff Berg, his longtime agent; "Chinatown" producer Robert Evans and "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne.

       So why didn't they make it into the movie? Zenovich says Towne had "all sorts of amazing things to say," but his tales "just didn't work" in the structure of the film. It was a little harder to get to Evans, althogh he eventually agreed to talk. But by the time Zenovich arrived for the interview session, he'd forgotten all about the interview. "He didn't remember who I was,'' she recalls. "At first, he said he wouldn't answer any of my questions. I played along by taking my piece of paper with all my questions and very theatrically tearing it up and throwing it away. That seemed to satisfy him. After that, he was happy to tell all his great stories. With Evans, it felt like you were at a Roman Polanski roast."

     Her best behind-the-scenes interview story involves Sue Mengers, who was the queen of Hollywood agents during Polanski's heyday, and Steven Soderbergh, who was one of Zenovich's producers on the documentary. 

   by Patrick Goldstein   

Sheila Nevins vividly recalls her first reaction to "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's new documentary about the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker that debuted on HBO Monday night. Fifteen minutes into the film, Nevins' heart was pounding.

   "It's always a good sign when my heart is beating fast when I'm watching something," says Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films. "I kept thinking--that man is so interesting. Marina took something that was an old story and made it into what you always want from a documentary--something vibrant, vital and necessary."

      With its line-up of high-profile series behind schedule because of the writer's strike, HBO has found a new way to make a programming spash--it has launched a summer-long weekly series entirely devoted to documentaries. The network is airing a new documentary every Monday night through August 25th, embracing a wide range of subjects, including profiles of self-destructive artists, drug trafffickers, Baghdad teenagers, Hollywood madams and stolen children in China.

   The subject matter is often sensational, which is just the way Nevins likes it. She touts documentaries the way Oprah promotes books. With HBO's deep pockets and reservoir of 35 million-plus subscribers, Nevins is easily the most powerful woman in Documentaryland, her films having earned dozens of Emmy and Peabody awards as well as 19 Academy Awards during her three-decade long tenure at HBO. Her often confounding combination of high and low-brow tastes have long been hotly debated in doc circles, but she remains an unapologetic believer that documentaries should be viewer friendly.

"We've launched this series to spotlight how HBO has helped created a new kind of documentary,'' she told me Friday. "The good news is that docus"--her preferred word for the form--"are no longer a dirty word. They don't have to be exposes about famine and pestilence or a cerebral look at something you'd find on the front page of the New York Times. They can be about real people who are stuck in some kind of extraordinary predicament."

  The new series reflects Nevin's catholic tastes. One of the most gripping films is "The Recruiter," airing July 28th, which focuses on a military recruiter as he sells high-schoolers in a Louisiana town on the merits of joining the Army at the height of the war in Iraq. However, that film is preceded, on July 21, by "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," a warts-and-all portrait of the infamous Hollywood madam.

    It's a sign of Nevins' impatience with convention that when things weren't going well on the documentary--Fleiss had stopped speaking to filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato--Nevins stepped in and did the interviews herself. "I simply wasn't going to let that film die," she explains. "Fenton and Randy know how much I respect them. But Heidi is temperamental, and I think she just needed a woman to talk to her."

  Nevins sees the episode as typical of the angst that grows out of the documentary process. "She walked away," she says of Fleiss. "But doesn't everyone walk away when they're revealing who they really are?"

  It's telling that Nevins views the series' two most controversial subjects--Fleiss and Polanski--in much the same light, as people in the sexual spotlight who got a bad rap. "I'm sure Marina will be criticized for being a woman, making a film about a man who had sex with an under-age girl," she says. "But there's so much more to what happened to Polanski than that. It's an endlessly complex story."

  The documentary, which airs on HBO throughout the week, works so well because it goes beyond the ample drama in Polanski's stranger-than-fiction life. The focus is on the legal wrangling that ensued after Polanski was arrested for having sex with Samantha Geimer, then 13, in 1977. The film takes the form of a legal thriller, with Polanski, a man used to creating his own reality through his films, ensnared in the web of a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who appears far more concerned with his own image than legal impartiality. Zenovich intersperses the documentary footage with clips of Polanski acting his in movies, which serves to illustrate her theme: "All along I saw this as Roman Polanski stuck in a Roman Polanski movie, but directed by the judge."

  Zenovich says that when she first approached Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, he tried to steer her away. "He said, 'Everyone knows the story,' she recalls. "And I said, 'No, you know the story. But it has a great understory. We all know Polanski fled the country, but I was interested in why he fled."

  Polanski never agreed to talk, though Zenovich did have lunch with him in Paris after she'd finished the film. She found a revealing interview Polanski did with Clive James in 1984 that sets the tone for the picture. Polanski, the world-weary European fatalist, admits liking young women, saying "I think most of men do too," prompting James to reply: "But the question turns on how young, doesn't it?"

Zenovich's film ultimately turns on an unsettling twist. Polanski had become a star in the 1960s as the roguiesh bad-boy creator of such dark, twisted films as "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," yet that same image was used against him after his actions transformed him from bad-boy artist to villainous predator. Some will say Zenovich is too sympathetic to him, or at least too non-judgemental. She says "my opinion of him went back and forth, but he's still the most interesting character in the film."

  "Wanted and Desired" will have a theatrical release in July from Think FIlms. But it's a sign of the times that Zenovich opted for an HBO debut. Although enthusiasm for documentaries has never been greater, if you're not Michael Moore or Al Gore, finding a sizeable theatrical audience for your film has never been more problematic. Even after receiving generous media attention, Errol Morris' ``Standard Operating Procedure'' barely did $165,000 after a month in theatrical release--the kind of business a throwaway Hollywood comedy does in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon.

     Nevins believes the happiest home for a good documentary is in the living room in front of a big flat-screen TV tuned to HBO. "We're entering an on-demand universe," she says. "We do great box office with our docus. It's just that our box office is in your home where you don't have to drive, pay money for gas, find a place to park or buy popcorn. For years, I've had people come into my office, desperate to sit in an empty theater and watch their documentary play on the big screen. I think what we have to offer is better."

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesday in Calendar. Email questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

Roman Polanski: The Hollywood connection

      In my column today about HBO's impressive new summer-long documentary series, I talked with Marina Zenovich, the director of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,'' the provocative doc that launched the series Monday night--and is airing all week on HBO. It will be theaters next month. (Go here to watch HBO's trailer for the film.) Even though the documentary focuses on the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering in the case, Zenovich did a slew of interviews with Polanski's old showbiz cronies, including Jeff Berg, his longtime agent; "Chinatown" producer Robert Evans and "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne.

       So why didn't they make it into the movie? Zenovich says Towne had "all sorts of amazing things to say," but his tales "just didn't work" in the structure of the film. It was a little harder to get to Evans, althogh he eventually agreed to talk. But by the time Zenovich arrived for the interview session, he'd forgotten all about the interview. "He didn't remember who I was,'' she recalls. "At first, he said he wouldn't answer any of my questions. I played along by taking my piece of paper with all my questions and very theatrically tearing it up and throwing it away. That seemed to satisfy him. After that, he was happy to tell all his great stories. With Evans, it felt like you were at a Roman Polanski roast."

     Her best behind-the-scenes interview story involves Sue Mengers, who was the queen of Hollywood agents during Polanski's heyday, and Steven Soderbergh, who was one of Zenovich's producers on the documentary. 

   by Patrick Goldstein   

Sheila Nevins vividly recalls her first reaction to "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's new documentary about the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker that debuted on HBO Monday night. Fifteen minutes into the film, Nevins' heart was pounding.

   "It's always a good sign when my heart is beating fast when I'm watching something," says Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films. "I kept thinking--that man is so interesting. Marina took something that was an old story and made it into what you always want from a documentary--something vibrant, vital and necessary."

      With its line-up of high-profile series behind schedule because of the writer's strike, HBO has found a new way to make a programming spash--it has launched a summer-long weekly series entirely devoted to documentaries. The network is airing a new documentary every Monday night through August 25th, embracing a wide range of subjects, including profiles of self-destructive artists, drug trafffickers, Baghdad teenagers, Hollywood madams and stolen children in China.

   The subject matter is often sensational, which is just the way Nevins likes it. She touts documentaries the way Oprah promotes books. With HBO's deep pockets and reservoir of 35 million-plus subscribers, Nevins is easily the most powerful woman in Documentaryland, her films having earned dozens of Emmy and Peabody awards as well as 19 Academy Awards during her three-decade long tenure at HBO. Her often confounding combination of high and low-brow tastes have long been hotly debated in doc circles, but she remains an unapologetic believer that documentaries should be viewer friendly.

"We've launched this series to spotlight how HBO has helped created a new kind of documentary,'' she told me Friday. "The good news is that docus"--her preferred word for the form--"are no longer a dirty word. They don't have to be exposes about famine and pestilence or a cerebral look at something you'd find on the front page of the New York Times. They can be about real people who are stuck in some kind of extraordinary predicament."

  The new series reflects Nevin's catholic tastes. One of the most gripping films is "The Recruiter," airing July 28th, which focuses on a military recruiter as he sells high-schoolers in a Louisiana town on the merits of joining the Army at the height of the war in Iraq. However, that film is preceded, on July 21, by "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," a warts-and-all portrait of the infamous Hollywood madam.

    It's a sign of Nevins' impatience with convention that when things weren't going well on the documentary--Fleiss had stopped speaking to filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato--Nevins stepped in and did the interviews herself. "I simply wasn't going to let that film die," she explains. "Fenton and Randy know how much I respect them. But Heidi is temperamental, and I think she just needed a woman to talk to her."

  Nevins sees the episode as typical of the angst that grows out of the documentary process. "She walked away," she says of Fleiss. "But doesn't everyone walk away when they're revealing who they really are?"

  It's telling that Nevins views the series' two most controversial subjects--Fleiss and Polanski--in much the same light, as people in the sexual spotlight who got a bad rap. "I'm sure Marina will be criticized for being a woman, making a film about a man who had sex with an under-age girl," she says. "But there's so much more to what happened to Polanski than that. It's an endlessly complex story."

  The documentary, which airs on HBO throughout the week, works so well because it goes beyond the ample drama in Polanski's stranger-than-fiction life. The focus is on the legal wrangling that ensued after Polanski was arrested for having sex with Samantha Geimer, then 13, in 1977. The film takes the form of a legal thriller, with Polanski, a man used to creating his own reality through his films, ensnared in the web of a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who appears far more concerned with his own image than legal impartiality. Zenovich intersperses the documentary footage with clips of Polanski acting his in movies, which serves to illustrate her theme: "All along I saw this as Roman Polanski stuck in a Roman Polanski movie, but directed by the judge."

  Zenovich says that when she first approached Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, he tried to steer her away. "He said, 'Everyone knows the story,' she recalls. "And I said, 'No, you know the story. But it has a great understory. We all know Polanski fled the country, but I was interested in why he fled."

  Polanski never agreed to talk, though Zenovich did have lunch with him in Paris after she'd finished the film. She found a revealing interview Polanski did with Clive James in 1984 that sets the tone for the picture. Polanski, the world-weary European fatalist, admits liking young women, saying "I think most of men do too," prompting James to reply: "But the question turns on how young, doesn't it?"

Zenovich's film ultimately turns on an unsettling twist. Polanski had become a star in the 1960s as the roguiesh bad-boy creator of such dark, twisted films as "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," yet that same image was used against him after his actions transformed him from bad-boy artist to villainous predator. Some will say Zenovich is too sympathetic to him, or at least too non-judgemental. She says "my opinion of him went back and forth, but he's still the most interesting character in the film."

  "Wanted and Desired" will have a theatrical release in July from Think FIlms. But it's a sign of the times that Zenovich opted for an HBO debut. Although enthusiasm for documentaries has never been greater, if you're not Michael Moore or Al Gore, finding a sizeable theatrical audience for your film has never been more problematic. Even after receiving generous media attention, Errol Morris' ``Standard Operating Procedure'' barely did $165,000 after a month in theatrical release--the kind of business a throwaway Hollywood comedy does in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon.

     Nevins believes the happiest home for a good documentary is in the living room in front of a big flat-screen TV tuned to HBO. "We're entering an on-demand universe," she says. "We do great box office with our docus. It's just that our box office is in your home where you don't have to drive, pay money for gas, find a place to park or buy popcorn. For years, I've had people come into my office, desperate to sit in an empty theater and watch their documentary play on the big screen. I think what we have to offer is better."

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesday in Calendar. Email questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

Documentary heaven at HBO

   by Patrick Goldstein   

Sheila Nevins vividly recalls her first reaction to "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's new documentary about the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker that debuted on HBO Monday night. Fifteen minutes into the film, Nevins' heart was pounding.

   "It's always a good sign when my heart is beating fast when I'm watching something," says Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films. "I kept thinking--that man is so interesting. Marina took something that was an old story and made it into what you always want from a documentary--something vibrant, vital and necessary."

      With its line-up of high-profile series behind schedule because of the writer's strike, HBO has found a new way to make a programming spash--it has launched a summer-long weekly series entirely devoted to documentaries. The network is airing a new documentary every Monday night through August 25th, embracing a wide range of subjects, including profiles of self-destructive artists, drug trafffickers, Baghdad teenagers, Hollywood madams and stolen children in China.

   The subject matter is often sensational, which is just the way Nevins likes it. She touts documentaries the way Oprah promotes books. With HBO's deep pockets and reservoir of 35 million-plus subscribers, Nevins is easily the most powerful woman in Documentaryland, her films having earned dozens of Emmy and Peabody awards as well as 19 Academy Awards during her three-decade long tenure at HBO. Her often confounding combination of high and low-brow tastes have long been hotly debated in doc circles, but she remains an unapologetic believer that documentaries should be viewer friendly.

"We've launched this series to spotlight how HBO has helped created a new kind of documentary,'' she told me Friday. "The good news is that docus"--her preferred word for the form--"are no longer a dirty word. They don't have to be exposes about famine and pestilence or a cerebral look at something you'd find on the front page of the New York Times. They can be about real people who are stuck in some kind of extraordinary predicament."

  The new series reflects Nevin's catholic tastes. One of the most gripping films is "The Recruiter," airing July 28th, which focuses on a military recruiter as he sells high-schoolers in a Louisiana town on the merits of joining the Army at the height of the war in Iraq. However, that film is preceded, on July 21, by "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," a warts-and-all portrait of the infamous Hollywood madam.

    It's a sign of Nevins' impatience with convention that when things weren't going well on the documentary--Fleiss had stopped speaking to filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato--Nevins stepped in and did the interviews herself. "I simply wasn't going to let that film die," she explains. "Fenton and Randy know how much I respect them. But Heidi is temperamental, and I think she just needed a woman to talk to her."

  Nevins sees the episode as typical of the angst that grows out of the documentary process. "She walked away," she says of Fleiss. "But doesn't everyone walk away when they're revealing who they really are?"

  It's telling that Nevins views the series' two most controversial subjects--Fleiss and Polanski--in much the same light, as people in the sexual spotlight who got a bad rap. "I'm sure Marina will be criticized for being a woman, making a film about a man who had sex with an under-age girl," she says. "But there's so much more to what happened to Polanski than that. It's an endlessly complex story."

  The documentary, which airs on HBO throughout the week, works so well because it goes beyond the ample drama in Polanski's stranger-than-fiction life. The focus is on the legal wrangling that ensued after Polanski was arrested for having sex with Samantha Geimer, then 13, in 1977. The film takes the form of a legal thriller, with Polanski, a man used to creating his own reality through his films, ensnared in the web of a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who appears far more concerned with his own image than legal impartiality. Zenovich intersperses the documentary footage with clips of Polanski acting his in movies, which serves to illustrate her theme: "All along I saw this as Roman Polanski stuck in a Roman Polanski movie, but directed by the judge."

  Zenovich says that when she first approached Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, he tried to steer her away. "He said, 'Everyone knows the story,' she recalls. "And I said, 'No, you know the story. But it has a great understory. We all know Polanski fled the country, but I was interested in why he fled."

  Polanski never agreed to talk, though Zenovich did have lunch with him in Paris after she'd finished the film. She found a revealing interview Polanski did with Clive James in 1984 that sets the tone for the picture. Polanski, the world-weary European fatalist, admits liking young women, saying "I think most of men do too," prompting James to reply: "But the question turns on how young, doesn't it?"

Zenovich's film ultimately turns on an unsettling twist. Polanski had become a star in the 1960s as the roguiesh bad-boy creator of such dark, twisted films as "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," yet that same image was used against him after his actions transformed him from bad-boy artist to villainous predator. Some will say Zenovich is too sympathetic to him, or at least too non-judgemental. She says "my opinion of him went back and forth, but he's still the most interesting character in the film."

  "Wanted and Desired" will have a theatrical release in July from Think FIlms. But it's a sign of the times that Zenovich opted for an HBO debut. Although enthusiasm for documentaries has never been greater, if you're not Michael Moore or Al Gore, finding a sizeable theatrical audience for your film has never been more problematic. Even after receiving generous media attention, Errol Morris' ``Standard Operating Procedure'' barely did $165,000 after a month in theatrical release--the kind of business a throwaway Hollywood comedy does in St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon.

     Nevins believes the happiest home for a good documentary is in the living room in front of a big flat-screen TV tuned to HBO. "We're entering an on-demand universe," she says. "We do great box office with our docus. It's just that our box office is in your home where you don't have to drive, pay money for gas, find a place to park or buy popcorn. For years, I've had people come into my office, desperate to sit in an empty theater and watch their documentary play on the big screen. I think what we have to offer is better."

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesday in Calendar. Email questions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.