First part of Zenovich's two-part documentary on disgraced cyclist debuts on ESPN tonight When an admitted liar insists he's telling you the truth, what are you to believe? That's the conundrum director Marina Zenovich faced as she prepared to sit down with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong for her two-part documentary LANCE. Part 1 of the film debuts tonight on ESPN, occupying the time slot of ESPN's just completed megahit series The Last Dance, about Michael Jordan. Part 2 airs next Sunday night, May 31. "Someone said to me, 'What is it like to interview someone who is known to lie so much?'" Zenovich tells Nonfictionfilm.com. "It's kind of like I went in knowing that but I always try to see the best in people and assume they're going to tell me the truth. So am I a sucker because of that? I don't think so." If you're looking for fascinating characters to try to understand, Lance Armstrong is a great one. Armstrong became adept at lying while rising to the top ranks of international cycling. He won the Tour de France so many times people began calling it the Tour de Lance. Suspicious minds insisted no one could win that many Tours without doping, much less someone like Armstrong who had survived stage 4 testicular cancer. But against every allegation of cheating Armstrong pushed back ferociously. It wasn't until seven years after he won his last Tour de France in 2005 that Armstrong's history of taking performance enhancing drugs was exposed by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour titles, and in 2013 he publicly admitted doping. "Nobody dopes and is honest,” Armstrong tells Zenovich in the documentary. “You’re not. The only way you can dope and be honest is if nobody ever asks you, which is not realistic. The second somebody asks you, you lie. It might be one lie because you answer it once. Or in my case it might be 10,000 lies because you answer it 10,000 times.” Zenovich says the Lance Armstrong she encountered was candid. And yet... "I love how direct he is, but you know he doesn't show all his cards," she acknowledges. "So that's what made it challenging and interesting and fun." Zenovich amassed many hours of vérité footage documenting Armstrong's life today, more than five years after he almost instantaneously went from being one of the most admired humans on the planet to one of the most reviled. Originally, the director intended the vérité material to drive the film, but in edit she found that didn't work. The final version is, perhaps inevitably, built very much around the eight lengthy interviews Zenovich did with the cyclist. It's not all that compelling to watch Armstrong, now 48, jog in the snow. We want to see him face an interviewer, or even better, an inquisitor. "To me, Lance was very alpha, incredibly intelligent, quick, nimble, just like a shark but in a good way--he was a perfect interview subject," Zenovich insists. "Personally, he's fun. He's engaged. He's very funny--this is all unrelated to what he did. This is my experience of him because he didn't do anything to me other than let me interrogate him." Armstrong is very practiced at disclosing what he wants to about his doping activities. The most telling moments in Zenovich's "interrogation" tend to come in stray comments or random anecdotes. For instance, Armstrong describes going to a restaurant not long after his public unmasking, and enduring verbal abuse from patrons who shouted "fuck you" at him. He says he left the restaurant but surreptitiously arranged to pay the tab of his abusers. Noble, perhaps? Armstrong proving he was "the bigger man"? I actually see paying the bill as Lance's way of saying "fuck you" back. Like, "You dicks may feel like you can taunt me but I'm still rich. Stuff it." It's a kind of power move. Sharing the story also has the benefit of making him look like a victim and that he honorably took the moral high road. Advantage, Armstrong! Armstrong also reveals a simmering hatred for those who crossed him and exposed his doping, including Floyd Landis, the cyclist who won the Tour de France in 2006, the year after Armstrong's last Tour victory, but lost his title after he was exposed for doping. Armstrong seems to go out of his way to disparage Landis, telling the director Floyd is a "piece of shit." "Is that what you think?" Zenovich inquires. Armstrong replies, "That's what I know." Take that, Floyd! Armstrong also seems to gloat at having negotiated a settlement to a $100 million lawsuit filed against him by the US Postal Service, his sponsor when he was winning his string of Tour titles. He ended up paying only $5 million to make the suit go away, and the look on his face as he recounts that to Zenovich indicates he feels he came out the victor. Lance, eternal competitor! As for Armstrong's defense for having doped, Lance says he was only going along with a corrupt system. Everybody did it, he says. And others in the cycling world that Zenovich spoke to agreed the only way to be a competitive rider at that time was to dope. If you didn't, you were a road apple.
"Based on the interviews I did, not just with Lance but like at that crème de la crème level, you had to dope at that time," Zenovich comments before noting, "Lance took it to a new level." Several other major filmmakers, including Alex Gibney, have made Lance Armstrong documentaries in recent years. Zenovich sees utility in doing a fresh one because, in her view, Armstrong isn't the same man he was. "It's been a long time since he was stripped of his titles and I think he's processed a lot," Zenovich observes. "I can't speak for him, but I think he's processed a lot, but it still hurts." LANCE offers an intriguing glimpse at what has driven Armstrong to succeed at all costs from the time he was a teenage triathlete. Some of that motivation clearly came from an abusive stepfather. ("He beat the shit out of me," Armstrong tells Zenovich). The key to Armstrong, possibly, is rage. He talks in LANCE of the necessity "to get your hate on." And that may be why he still refuses to give any ground to his detractors. Resentment, anger and a measure of self-pity seem to be what propels him forward. It wasn't about about the bike after all.
Film by Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan chronicles Bruce Franks Jr. who went from 'battle rapper' to Missouri state legislator
Not all superheroes wear capes.
Take Bruce Franks Jr., for instance. He earned the nickname 'St. Louis Superman' from his constituents in Missouri where he represented the 78th district in the state legislature. His gift is not leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, but overcoming obstacles in inspiring fashion. The story of how Franks survived childhood trauma to become adept at battle rap -- a kind of performance art in which rival rappers engage in poetic combat -- then became a civil rights activist and later an elected official is told in the short documentary St. Louis Superman, directed by Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan. The film, which earned an Oscar nomination earlier this year, debuts tonight on the MTV networks, simulcast on MTV, VH1 and MTV2. He just has this presence that's magnetic.
"I don't know if I've ever met a human being quite as remarkable as Bruce, who just contains the sheer amount of talent but also this life force, like this energy where just greatness seems to surround him," Khan tells Nonfictionfilm.com. "Someone was telling me the other day they watched the trailer and they were, 'Oh, my God, that guy is amazing.' It's this magnetism. He's like a movie star or the greatest hip-hop performers. He just has this presence that's magnetic."
The film project originated three years ago as an assignment from Al Jazeera Witness and producer Poh Si Teng to explore themes related to the upcoming 2018 midterm election. But when the filmmakers became acquainted with Franks they realized they were onto something with broader dimensions. "Smriti read this story about Bruce Franks, Jr., and she pitched it to Poh and I, and we were like, that is a story that has legs," Khan recalls. "There's something timeless about Bruce's story. There's the depth to it that's not going to be dated when whoever is the president." When Franks was a boy his older brother, just nine years old, was killed in a gunfight when he was used as a human shield by an assailant. Years later, when unrest broke out in Ferguson, Missouri after a white police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, Franks was there to protest alongside many others. "We were in Ferguson for 400 days. We lasted over a year," Franks tells me. "When the cameras left, when all the media left, we were still there and marching in the streets, because after Michael Brown was killed, somebody was killed by the police every month for the next year and a half. And so we have plenty of reasons to be out there in the fight and protest." He ran for office, won election, and somehow found a way to work with the overwhelmingly white and conservative legislature to make meaningful progress on issues, including an attempt to reframe gun violence as a public health matter.
"We've learned so much [from Franks]," Mundhra observes. "It's hard to even summarize how much, but certainly I think there was just a boldness to everything that Bruce does. I used to sit quietly and politely in the face of any kind of injustice, whether it's sort of day to day stuff or something much bigger. And I've definitely learned personally to speak up more and not worry so much about disrupting the status quo when something doesn't feel right."
Franks attended the Academy Awards in February with Mundhra and Khan. The day he learned the film had earned an Oscar nomination was one to remember. “We were all watching [the nomination announcement], and you would’ve thought I had trampolines on the bottom of my feet. I was just bouncing around the room yelling at the top of my lungs,” Franks recalls. “I just started crying. So it was a whole bunch of mixed emotions. I didn’t think it would feel the way it felt, but it felt amazing.”
Michael Moore Announces Cancellation of 2020 Traverse City Film Festival Over Coronavirus Crisis5/11/2020 TCFF founder makes plans for summer 2021 festival, 'With hope in my heart' Saying he tends to "sit up and listen when Mother Nature decides to give us a wake-up call," Michael Moore announced the cancellation of the 2020 edition of his Traverse City Film Festival as a result of the novel coronavirus. "I’m very, very sorry to announce that we cannot come together this summer to participate in our 16th Traverse City Film Festival," Moore, TCFF's founder and president, wrote on the festival's website Monday. "We doubt that the Governor’s order closing our theaters and the festival will be lifted any time soon — and we agree it shouldn’t." In his announcement he added a dig on President Trump. "We’ve waited as long as we can, hoping against hope that this pandemic would disappear like a miracle someone once promised," he noted. "I do fear what this pandemic portends for the future. Of course, it’s nothing we all can’t pull together and beat back — and then work to create an even better world than the one we had before." We’ve waited as long as we can, hoping against hope that this pandemic would disappear like a miracle someone once promised. Moore, who celebrated the 15th anniversary of the festival last summer, promised TCFF would be back next year and even set aside the dates -- July 27 to August 1, 2021. "I can guarantee you, with hope in my heart, it will be unlike any other film festival we’ve had," Moore wrote. A press release from the festival added, "It is hoped that much of what was being planned for this year’s fest will be transferred to next summer." TCFF operates two theaters year round in Traverse City -- the State and the Bijou by the Bay. After Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on March 16 ordered theaters across the state close to prevent the spread of COVID-19, all TCFF staff were furloughed, according to the festival. “We want to assure our community that we will work with medical professionals to open our theaters when we are allowed to do so and will follow all safety and sanitation measures, including reconfiguring our ticketing and seating to conform to the social distancing protocols," Moore commented. "First and foremost, we will work together to keep our community safe.” The festival did not minimize the financial threat facing TCFF in light of the 2020 cancellation. "Like any other theater, TCFF relies on ticket sales for its income. Every month that the theaters are closed, TCFF faces staggering losses and mounting debts," the festival stated. ”'We have cut back everywhere we can,' said TCFF Managing Director Susan Fisher. 'Even with the theaters closed there are still the bare bones monthly costs in the thousands just to maintain the buildings, equipment, and organization. The loss of year-round theater revenue and the significant loss of proceeds from this summer’s now-canceled film festival leave us in a precarious financial position.'” Moore said the festival has not embarked on a fundraising campaign, "understanding that a lot of people made priority to give to health care organizations." That said, donations are being accepted (click here) and a concerted fundraising effort is likely to follow. 'We’re working up a 'Reboot and Re-Open' plan that we’ll present to you shortly," Moore said. Related: |
AuthorMatthew Carey is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. His work has appeared on Deadline.com, CNN, CNN.com, TheWrap.com, NBCNews.com and in Documentary magazine. |