Breaking the “rules” to win an Oscar for Short Docs
Watching the Oscars last night was a little more thrilling than usual, because this year I was friendly with several of the producers and directors behind the documentaries up for Awards for Best Documentary Short and for Best Documentary Feature. Along with so many others in the doc community, I’m super happy for everyone who was nominated – even those I don’t personally know – and even happier for the winners of each award. I’ve seen almost all of the films and they were all deserving, but the short I had not seen ended up winning in that category – Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405 by Frank Stiefel. I watched it first thing today – you can too here – and in researching it, I found out it breaks a lot of the “rules” we think we know about success in documentaries. As such, it’s an inspiring lesson for doc makers everywhere.
Here’s the broken rules:
1. You need to premiere at Sundance or Cannes (or Toronto, or Hot Docs, or…)
This film premiered at the Austin Film Festival, not one of the majors. Yes, it won some awards there, and also won two awards at another prestigious film festival – Full Frame – but take a look at its laurels: Florida, Julien Dubuque, Sedona, Hot Springs and DocUtah. All of these are good/great regional festivals, but none of them are thought of as being as prestigious as the “big” fests. Which proves you don’t need their stamp of approval to succeed either, and also that good films will get programmed by good festivals, and these “smaller” fests can also lead to success.
2. Don’t make your film available for free
Heaven is available for free on YouTube. It’s not on HBO, Netflix or some other big broadcaster. And it’s not behind some paywall, or even for sale. It’s free. Anyone could check it out prior to its awards, and it was still a success. Free doesn’t mean bad. And I bet its views will soar post-Oscars… which wouldn’t be possible if the filmmaker had waited for some big deal before making the film available online for free.
3. You need to premiere on, and have support from, a big distributor/broadcaster
To my knowledge, this isn’t on HBO, or POV or even TOPIC. There’s no deep pocketed broadcaster paying for its Academy campaign (which ain’t cheap to do) and it still won. I’m sure they hired publicists and spent a lot of money to get to the finish line, but this proves that anyone can do it, not just those with big/connected backers.
4. You need lots of viewers/followers
In fact, as of the morning after the Oscars, the film had only been viewed 152,000+ times since it was published by IndieWire on Jan 2,2018. Most people think that you need millions of views online to be a success. The film also had just around 280 followers on Facebook at the time of the Awards. Clearly, you don’t need to be a viral/online or broadcast success to win the biggest award in film.
5. Success goes to super-connected filmmakers, with agents and lots of experience
This is the filmmaker’s second film, and while he’s had some success, he’s by no means super-connected or experienced as a filmmaker. Ok, the filmmaker’s first film was picked up by HBO, which is a big deal, but as he explained to EW during the release of that film, he wasn’t super connected then either:
“There wasn’t much of a plan in making this film. I was going to give it to my kids and that was the end of the story. Only, at the end of the editing process I thought, “Man, this is pretty good. I wonder if it is good?” I submitted it to the International Documentary Association and they had a competition and chose it as one the films that year. From there, it took off. I retired from being an executive producer at [production company] Radical Media and traveled with the film to festivals around the world. Then HBO bought it. But there was no plan. I don’t have an agent. It hasn’t been flogged by anybody to anyone. I guess I should probably take it more seriously in terms of that.”
Yes, he probably should have taken it more seriously, but you can clearly stumble into success with a good film, and you don’t need to have that super agent, or be part of the “doc-mafia” (getting grants from all of the usual suspects) to succeed.
6. Shorts should be short – 20 minutes or less
Heaven is just under 40 minutes long. That’s a lifetime for a short. Anything longer than 7 minutes long is an eternity online (people don’t watch longer shorts online); and festival programmers can tell you that longer shorts are often harder to program – every minute counts when you’re programming a slot in a 90 minute program. But I’ve seen this rule broken many times – in fact, it seems that while fests and online viewers prefer shorter shorts, the Oscar often goes to longer ones. As Richard Brody points out in the New Yorker: “Every winner this century has run longer than a half hour; all but a handful are thirty-nine or forty minutes long. All five of this year’s Documentary Short Subjects run at least twenty-nine minutes; two run forty, and they aren’t really shorts but featurettes…” But the real lesson here is obvious- make the film the length it needs to be, not what’s dictated by the market. In fact, the director has said the film started as a feature, but it worked best when it became 40 minutes long.
7. Keep your title short
You can’t get much longer than Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405. People always tell you to keep your title short and sweet – memorable, and if possible low in the alphabet so it shows up alphabetically in online queues. Didn’t matter here.
8. Know your audience
I tell my clients all the time – think about your audience when making a film. And you hear that question all the time on grant panels, applications, pitch sessions, etc: Who is the audience? Well, here’s Frank’s thinking, from an interview w/ Deadline: “I never asked myself whether anybody else would be interested. I just kept plugging forward because I found her incredibly compelling and just went with that.” What this proves – focus on good stories and good storytelling first (ok, we all knew that, right?).
9. Success goes to the young
Frank Stiefel is 70 years old. And he didn’t start directing until he was in his Sixties. There’s lots of age-ranges in the doc world, with award winners from their teens to their 90s, but I think everyone thinks of award winners as the “hot, up & coming directors.” Furthermore, he says he couldn’t have made this film when he was younger. As he told No Film School: “I could not have made this film 10 years ago, and that has nothing to do with experience or with knowledge. I’m much more emotionally available today than I once was. I also don’t want anything today. I’m past the point of wanting a career out of this. I want nothing, actually. And so I went into it without an agenda and I remain without an agenda.”
He’s also in his second career – having worked in TV commercials first. His Oscar proves there’s always second-chances, new artistic directions, and that it’s never too late to begin an artistic career (and succeed). That should be an inspiration to lots of people. Even if you aren’t 70, don’t give up, don’t be afraid to change, and perhaps the best path to success is “not having an agenda at all.”
10. There are rules
We all know that each of these rules aren’t really rules at all, but this exception proves it – ignore the rules. There are none.
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To my mind, all of the nominated films succeeded, and they all have lessons for filmmakers and other artists. But I’m glad Frank won, just so I could learn these lessons from him, and finally see his film. His story, and the one he captured – Mindy Alper’s – are both inspiring, and they both taught me a few things.
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Note: After posting this, I learned that the film was also picked up for distribution by the awesome Grasshopper Films. So you can now also rent the film for educational or other screenings – while it remains free on YouTube – another set of rules broken, as you can do all of the above, and still get distribution.
Watch the film below:
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