EP. #55 – DOCUMENTARIES with Laurie Gwen Shapiro

**Dan Fisher** (0:04)
Before we begin, I wanted to remind you about Big Red Books located in beautiful downtown Nyack, New York. They are the sponsor of this show. Big Red Books has a wonderfully curated collection of the latest bestsellers and the classics in fiction and nonfiction, including Laurie Gwen Shapiro's The Aviator And The Showman, which is out now and already climbing the bestseller charts. If you don't live anywhere near Nyack, don't worry about it. Just go to bigredbooks.net to order books and audiobooks online. Richard Folco and his staff will ship your order promptly, and you can sleep better knowing that you hadn't given another penny to some humongous corporation and its billionaire owner. Supporting independent bookstores like Big Red Books is better. It just is.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:01)
Life is stranger than fiction sometimes.

**Dan Fisher** (1:26)
Welcome to Let's Talk Ten. I'm Dan Fisher. Those of us who love movies often use it as a way to forget about real life for a while. But some of us will also watch a movie to enter the real lives of other people and to explore the places and eras in which they live. Because we know that a good documentary is every bit as entertaining and emotionally captivating as anything that a Hollywood screenwriter could dream up.
My guest, Laurie Gwen Shapiro, is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and many other publications. She directed the independent spirit award-winning doc, Keep The River On Your Right, and earned an Emmy nomination for HBO's Finishing Heaven. Her first non-fiction book, The Stowaway, was a best seller. Her latest, The Aviator And The Showman, Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and The Marriage That Made An American Icon has been excerpted in The New Yorker, was named as a best book of the summer by CBS Sunday Morning, and just came out on July 15th to across-the-board rave reviews. Laurie also teaches in the Graduate Journalism Program at New York University. In our conversation, she and I both agree that documentaries, despite their serious reputations, can be, of all things, fun.

**Laurie Gwen Shapiro** (2:53)
I do believe in the power of a social issue doc, but I believe that documentaries don't have to change the world, that entertainment or a wild true story is just enough of a valid reason to make a film as to push the envelope on social progress.

**Dan Fisher** (3:13)
I think that that's actually one of the things that often will keep people away from voluntarily watching a documentary, is this idea that it's somehow supposed to be good for you or that it's like a lesson, like you're back in school somehow. And it's like, no, you know, a lot of these have fantastic stories and it's all true.

**Laurie Gwen Shapiro** (3:30)
Right, I mean, there's often those tagline, stranger than fiction. And that's really the kind of film that I'm drawn to. And the films that I have chosen, I think All Made May Say Wow, like that can't be true. I love documentaries that, you know, they can take us to dark places even with comedy. I mean, people are funny, even in the darkest hour, people can be funny. What I love are independent theatrical documentaries that often break the bank. I've known people who have been nominated for an Oscar. It's the only category where I know people nominated. They're all incredibly broke, but they're up there on the screen. I always laugh because I know how broke they are and they're living the life of glamour because documentaries will not make you rich. But sometimes you have to tell a story. And if you're an independent documentary maker, you have control. The films that I've been involved with, I've either been the director or the producer and I don't come from money. And it's just really raising money out, begging your friends to film, take a camera. Can you be the sound guy that day? You make the duck, you have to make.

**Dan Fisher** (4:55)
So would you mind if I start first?

**Laurie Gwen Shapiro** (4:58)
Absolutely, go right ahead.

**Dan Fisher** (4:59)
Now here's something that I don't know if I told you or not. I always start out by cheating. I put in a twofer at the very, very beginning. In this case, the first is Hearts of Darkness, A Filmmaker's Apocalypse by the directors Fax Bar, George Hickenlooper and Eleanor Coppola, made in 1991 And yeah, you know, I've worked in the film business since 1986 So of course, I'm always drawn to a good making of documentary, but I do like to see where things went wrong. And that's where you find the real drama. But to watch Francis Ford Coppola trying to realize his dream of making Apocalypse Now at times being literally suicidal because everything is going wrong over the course of a 235-day shoot. That's about four times the length of your average Hollywood feature shoot, replacing Harvey Keitel with Martin Sheen, who a few weeks into the production then suffers a heart attack and has to take time off for that, renting helicopters from the Philippine government.