Eva Mendes:
David Krumholtz:
Andre Braugher:
Live!
Synopsis
A multiple Academy Award®-winning documentarian, writer- director Bill Guttentag enters the fiction world with this compelling dark satire. Struggling to find a major hit, television executive Katy (Eva Mendes) comes up with a revolutionary concept for a reality show: Live!, a program where contestants play Russian Roulette-with a loaded gun. While developing the show, documentary filmmaker Rex (David Krumholtz) records every step of Katy's struggle to get it on the air. As she continually challenges the demands of the FCC, her network and the show's advertisers, Katy's chances seem dire. But she perseveres, putting her career on the line, and eventually enlists Rex to do the background segments on the contestants, who include a young, struggling writer (Rob Brown); an extreme sports star (Eric Lively); a man trying to save his family's farm (Jeffrey Dean Morgan); an aspiring actress (Katie Cassidy); a former supermodel turned performance artist (Monet Mazur); and a young immigrant determined to help his family (Jay Hernandez). As the airdate approaches, Katy's attempt at "reinventing the wheel" of television invites controversy, political debate and, she hopes, the most audacious television event ever. Eva Mendes could easily have made Katy another two-dimensional high-powered female stereotype- one we have seen many times. Instead, she carries the weight of the character, balancing Katy's stubborn determination and need to make her mark on the media world with an underlying vulnerability. Guttentag uses the documentary style to full effect, striking a nerve with the show's outrageous concept: as crazy as it sounds, Live! may not be far from where television programming is headed.
---David Kwok+About The Director
BILL GUTTENTAG has made documentary films for HBO, ABC and CBS, among others. He won an Oscar® for the documentary Twin Towers (2003). It was his second Academy Award®; the first was in 1989 for You Don't Have to Die, a film he made for HBO. He has received three additional Oscar® nominations, as well as two Emmy Awards. His HBO films include Memphis PD: War on the Streets and the Academy Award®-nominated Crack USA. Previously Guttentag directed Assassinated: The Last Days of Kennedy and King, The Cocaine War, and 5 American Handguns - 5 American Kids. He created and executive-produced (with Dick Wolf) the NBC series Law & Order: Crime & Punishment. Last year, with Dan Sturman, he wrote and directed Nanking, a theatrical documentary film on the Rape of Nanking that premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. He also teaches a course at Stanford University.
+Director Statement
As someone who makes documentary films, I am intrigued with the relationship between the subjects of a documentary and the filmmaker. By filming Live! in a documentary style, I was exploring the nature of this relationship where the subject and filmmaker are initially wary of each other, later attempt to influence the other, and ultimately need each other. It shows what happens when the subject of the film manages to seduce the filmmaker into their world, and how that impacts a film and the (so-called) truth of any documentary film. Additionally, in shooting the film in this documentary fashion, I hoped to make Live! seem extremely real so that the audience is pulled into the reality of the film that the filmmaker is making, and thus the entire movie. I also wanted to comment on the current state of American television. This is the most powerful medium ever invented - the power to reach the globe simultaneously and do an enormous amount of good, but the power has been squandered. Live! is, of course, a satire but how much? In the United States recent polls say nearly 70% of the public would watch televised executions, and 21% would pay to watch them. Russian roulette is not on American television. Yet.
