Berliner, Alan

Fritz Scholz is a Professor at the University of Greifswald, Germany. Following studies of chemistry at Humboldt University, Berlin, he obtained a Dr. rer. nat. and a Dr. sc. nat. (habil-itation) from that University. In 1987 and 1989, he worked with Alan Bond in Australia. His main interest is in electrochemistry and electroanalysis. He has published more than 300 scientific papers, and he is editor and coauthor of the book Electroanalytical Methods (Springer, 2002, 2005, 2010, and Russian Edition A BINOM, 2006), coauthor of the book Electro-... 

We re surrounded by subjects that offer potential for documentary storytelling. Current events may trigger ideas, or an afternoon spent browsing the shelves at a local library or bookstore. Some filmmakers find stories within their own families. Alan Berliner made Nobody s Business about his father, Oscar Deborah Hoffinan made Confessions of a Dutiful Daughter about her mother s battle with Alzheimer s. Even when you re very close to a subject, however, you ll need to take an impartial view as you determine whether or not it would make a film that audiences will want to see. This is also tme when you adapt documentaries from printed sources a story may read well on paper, but not play as well on screen. In making the series Cadillac Desert, drawn from Marc Reisner s book of the same name, producer Jon Else chose three of the roughly 40 stories in Reisner s book Else and his team then conducted their own research and determined the best way to tell those stories on film. 

Some films contrive situations that then unfold on screen, becoming observational. For example, Alan Berliner invited a dozen other people named "Alan Berliner" to dinner at his New York City apartment, and included footage of the event in his film. The Sweetest Sound. Perhaps you want to include a demonstration of some sort. For a science series called The Ring of Truth, I was involved in arranging a sequence in which we drove a yellow rental tmck 183 miles due south and charted the path of Antares at the start and end of our journey, in... 

Research of every sort will be ongoing for most of the film s production, but there comes a point when the filmmaker has to decide that it s time to move to the next stage—production. This can be difficult There s always more to learn, and the more you learn, the more you want everybody to know what you ve found out. As Alan Berliner said about working on The Sweetest Sound (in the same interview that started this chapter), "one of the hardest things 1 had to do was let go of everything I knew—to accept that the film could not possibly contain everything 1 had learned about names."... 

Nobody s Business Produced, directed, and edited by Alan Berliner. 

Alan G. Goldsmith, Western European Division, to Charles E. Herring, commercial attache in Berlin, December 22, 1922 Donald L. Breed, assistant commercial attache in Berlin, to BFDC, March 13, 1923 Herring to Frederick Breithut, Paris, August 8, 1923 Concannon to Edgar M. Queeny, December 20, 1924, NARA, RG 151, 232 Dyes—Germany, box 1036. 

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