.

Teleprompter and the RedCam

Our “ProPrompter” package works with all high-end cameras such as the RedCam, the Sony F900, Arri Alexa, etc.

Note:  we can also supply such high end cameras as well.  Use on our Broadway green screen stages or at your location.  $595 for a ten-hour day with experienced operator, computer and software.

$695 for the Professional Gold Plate Teleprompter that fits high end Commercial Cameras.

$895 for Dual Screen Presidential Teleprompters ( like the slick ones used by Politicians and Presidents ).

Give us a call 212-219-1075 or 212-952-1800.

Teleprompter Coaching

Amanda is our top teleprompter coach.  She can help you give the best performance possible while you look natural and feel comfortable with the device.  You can talk to her and get a teleprompter rental from www.americanmovieco.com quite easily.

We also provide green screen stages, cameras, Tricasters, webstreaming and total video production and post productions services.  So, don’t hesitate to give us a call.

212-219-1075 and 212-952-1800

Professional prompter with operator: $495 per 10 hr. day with operator.

Fits on same tripod as the camera for “through the lens” viewing or on separate tripod just below lens.

Copy may be submitted by email, CD or thumb drive in a .txt or Microsoft Word format.

Contact Bill Milling 917.414.5489 | 212.952.1800

www.americanmovieco.com

You can rent an Interrotron today with a professional operator from American Movie Co for $695 per 10 hr day. Call Bill at 917.414.5489 or at 212.952.1800

American Movie Co. is located in lower Manhattan and serves the New York City and Tri-State areas.

Early career as a film-maker

Gates of Heaven was given a limited release in the spring of 1981. Critic Roger Ebert was and remains today a champion of the film, including it on his all-time top ten best films list. Morris returned to Vernon in 1979 and again in 1980, renting a house in town and conducting interviews with the town’s citizens. Vernon, FL premiered at the 1981 New York Film Festival. Newsweek called it, “a film as odd and mysterious as its subjects, and quite unforgettable.” The film, like Gates of Heaven, suffered from poor distribution. It was released on video in 1987, and DVD in 2005.

After finishing Vernon, FL, Morris tried unsuccessfully to get funding for a variety of projects. There was Road, a story about an interstate highway in Minnesota; a project about Robert Golka, the creator of laser-induced fireballs in Utah; and the story of Centralia, Pennsylvania, the coal town in which an “inextinguishable subterranean fire” ignited in 1962. He eventually got funding in 1983 to write a script about John and Jim Pardue, a pair of Missouri bank robbers who had killed their father and grandmother and robbed five banks. Morris’s pitch went, “The great bank-robbery sprees always take place at a time when something is going wrong in the country. Bonnie and Clyde were apolitical, but it’s impossible to imagine them without the Depression as a back-drop. The Pardue brothers were apolitical, but it’s impossible to imagine them without Vietnam.” Morris wanted Tom Waits and Mickey Rourke to play the brothers, and he wrote the script, but the project eventually failed. Morris worked on writing scripts for various other projects, including a pair of ill-fated Stephen King adaptations.

In 1984 he married Julia Sheehan, whom he had met in Wisconsin while researching Ed Gein and other serial killers. Morris would later recall an early conversation with Julia: “I was talking to a mass murderer but I was thinking of you,” he said, and instantly regretted it, afraid that it might not have sounded as affectionate as he had wished. But Julia was actually flattered: “I thought, really, that was one of the nicest things anyone ever said to me. It was hard to go out with other guys after that.”

In 1985, Morris became interested in Dr. James Grigson, a psychiatrist in Dallas. Under Texas law, the death penalty can only be issued if the jury is convinced that the defendant is not only guilty, but will commit further violent crimes in the future if he is not put to death. Grigson had spent 15 years testifying for such cases, and he almost invariably gave the same damning testimony, often saying that it is “one hundred per cent certain” that the defendant would kill again.^[3] This led to Grigson being nicknamed “Dr. Death”.^[4] Through Grigson, Morris would meet the subject of his next film, 36 year-old Randall Dale Adams.^[5]

Adams was serving a life sentence that had been commuted from a death sentence on a legal technicality for the 1976 murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer. Adams told Morris that he had been framed, and that David Harris, who was present at the time of the murder and was the principal witness for the prosecution, had in fact killed Wood. Morris began researching the case because it related to Dr. Grigson; he was at first unconvinced of Adams’s innocence. After reading the transcripts of the trial and meeting David Harris at a bar, however, Morris was no longer so sure.

At the time, Morris had been making a living as a private investigator for a well-known private detective agency that specialized in Wall Street cases. Bringing together his talents as an investigator and his obsessions with murder, narration and epistemology, Morris went to work on the case in earnest. Unedited interviews in which the prosecution’s witnesses systematically contradicted themselves were used as testimony in Adams’s 1986 habeas corpus hearing to determine if he would receive a new trial. David Harris famously confessed, in a roundabout manner, to killing Wood. Although Adams was finally found innocent after years of being processed by the legal system, the judge in the habeas corpus hearing officially stated that, “much could be said about those videotape interviews, but nothing that would have any bearing on the matter before this court.” Regardless, The Thin Blue Line, as Morris’s film would be called, was popularly accepted as the main force behind getting its subject, Randall Adams, out of prison.

According to a survey by The Washington Post, The Thin Blue Line made dozens of critics’ top ten lists for 1988, more than any other film that year. It won the documentary of the year award from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. Despite its widespread acclaim, it was not nominated for an Oscar, which created a small scandal regarding the nomination practices of the Academy. The Academy cited the film’s genre of “non-fiction”, arguing that it was not actually a documentary. The Thin Blue Line is to this day one of the most critically acclaimed documentaries ever made.

The Interrotron

The Interrotron is a device similar to a teleprompter: Errol and his subject each sit facing a camera. The image of each person’s face is then projected onto the lens of the other’s camera. Instead of looking at a blank lens, then, both Morris and his subject are looking directly at a human face. (Diagram) Morris believes that the machine encourages monologue in the interview process, while also encouraging the interviewees to “express themselves to camera”.^[6]

The name “Interrotron” was coined by Morris’s wife, who, according to Morris, “liked the name because it combined two important concepts — terror and interview.”^[7]

First Person

Morris used this process to film his critically acclaimed television show, First Person (2000). The show engaged a varied group of individuals from civil advocates to criminals.

Commercials

Although Morris has achieved fame as a documentary filmmaker, he is also an accomplished director of television commercials. In 2002, Morris directed a series of television ads for Apple Computer as part of a popular “Switch” campaign. The commercials featured ex-Windows users discussing their various bad experiences that motivated their own personal switches to Macintosh. One commercial in the series, starring a high-school friend of his son Hamilton Morris, named Ellen Feiss, became an Internet fad. Morris has directed hundreds of commercials for various companies and products, including Adidas, AIG, Cisco Systems, Citibank, Kimberly-Clark’s Depend brand, Levi’s, Miller High Life, Nike, PBS, The Quaker Oats Company, Southern Comfort, EA Sports, Toyota and Volkswagen. Many of these commercials are available on his website.

In 2002, Morris was commissioned to make a short film for the 75th Academy Awards. He was hired based on his advertising resume, not his career as a director of feature-length documentaries. Those interviewed ranged from Laura Bush to Iggy Pop to Kenneth Arrow to Morris’s 15 year old son Hamilton Morris . Morris was nominated for an Emmy for this short film. He considered editing this footage into a feature length film, focusing specifically on Donald Trump discussing Citizen Kane (This segment was later released on the second issue of Wholphin). Morris went on to make a second short for the 79th Academy Awards in 2007, this time interviewing the various nominees and asking them about their Oscar experiences.

In July 2004, Morris directed another series of commercials in the style of the “Switch” ads. This campaign featured Republicans who voted for Bush in the 2000 election giving their personal reasons for voting for Kerry in 2004. Upon completing more than 50 commercials, Morris had difficulty getting them on the air. Eventually the liberal advocacy group MoveOn PAC paid to air a few of the commercials. Morris eventually wrote an editorial for the New York Times discussing the commercials and Kerry’s losing campaign.

In the fall of 2004, Morris also directed a series of noteworthy commercials for Sharp Electronics. The commercials enigmatically depicted various scenes from what appeared to be a short narrative that climaxed with a car crashing into a swimming pool. Each commercial showed a slightly different perspective on the events, and each ended with a cryptic weblink. The weblink was to a fake webpage advertising a prize offered to anyone who could discover the secret location of some valuable urns. It was in fact an alternate reality game. The original commercials can be found on Morris’s website.

Filmography

• Gates of Heaven (1978)
• Vernon, Florida (1981)
• The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• The Dark Wind (1991)
• A Brief History of Time (1991)
• Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997)
• Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
• The Fog of War (2003)
• Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

Awards

• Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival for Standard Operating Procedure
• Academy Award for Documentary Feature The Fog of War (2004)
• Best Documentary of the Year awards for The Fog of War (2003): the National Board of Review, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics, and the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics.
• 2002 International Documentary Association list of the 20 all-time best documentaries: The Thin Blue Line (#2), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (#14)
• Emmy for Best Commercial for PBS commercial “Photobooth” (2001)
• In December 2001, the United States’ National Film Preservation Foundation announced that Morris’s The Thin Blue Line would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, bringing the total at the time to 325.
• MacArthur Fellowship (1989)
• Washington Post Best Film of the Year for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics Best Documentary for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• Golden Horse for Best Foreign Film at the Taiwan International Film Festival for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture, from the Mystery Writers of America, for The Thin Blue Line (1989)
• Gates of Heaven (1978) has long been on Roger Ebert’s list of the ten greatest films ever made.

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Errol Morris

• Errol Morris’s website
• Errol Morris on Twitter
• Errol Morris at the Internet Movie Database
• Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Errol Morris from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Errol Morris (Rotten Tomatoes)
• Errol Morris (Jonathan Crow, Allmovie)
• Errol Morris on “The Fog of War” (Livia Bloom)
• Errol Morris on “The Fog of War” (Video interview from Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary)
• Errol Morris (GreenCine, Nina Rehfeld)
• Errol Morris on “Standard Operating Procedure” (IFC)
• Essay on “Standard Operating Procedure” (Paul Arthur, ArtForum)
• Errol Morris on “Standard Operating Procedure” Livia Bloom, Cinema Scope)
• Werner Herzog in coversation with Errol Morris (The Believer)

Published in the Winter, 2004 issue of FLM Magazine

THE FOG OF WAR: 13 Questions and Answers on the Filmmaking of Errol Morris by Errol Morris

Q: Is it true that you interview people using a machine?

A: Yes, the (patent pending) Interrotron. It’s a machine that uses existing technology in a new and novel way. When I made my first film, Gates of Heaven, I interviewed people by putting my head right up against the lens of the camera. It seemed as though they were looking directly into the lens of the camera, but not really. Almost, but not quite. Of course, they were looking a little bit off to the side.

Q: What’s wrong with that? What were you trying to achieve?

A: The first person. When someone watches my films, it is as though the characters are talking to directly to them… There is no third party. On television we’re used to seeing people interviewed sixty-minutes-style. There is Mike Wallace or Larry King, and the camera is off to the side. Hence, we, the audience, are also off to the side. We’re the fly-on-the-wall, so to speak, watching two people talking. But we’ve lost something.

Q: What?

A: Direct eye contact.

Q: Eye contact?

A: Yup. We all know when someone makes eye contact with us. It is a moment of drama. Perhaps it’s a serial killer telling us that he’s about to kill us; or a loved one acknowledging a moment of affection. Regardless, it’s a moment with dramatic value. We know when people make eye contact with us, look away and then make eye contact again. It’s an essential part of communication. And yet, it is lost in standard interviews on film. That is, until the Interrotron.

Q: I don’t get it.

A: I got tired of sitting so close to the camera. (In my early films, my cameraman would grab the back of my head and pull me back because you could see the side of my head in the lens. When he yanked me back, it often hurt.) And I started to wonder, what if I could become one with the camera. What if the camera and myself could become one and the same?

Q: You’re losing me.

A: Well, not literally. Are you familiar with Teleprompters?

Q: Not really.

A: Well, Teleprompters are used to project an image on a two-way mirror. Politicians and newscasters use them so that they can read text and look into the lens of the camera at the same time. What interests me is that nobody thought of using them for anything other than to display text: read a speech or read the news and look into the lens of the camera.

Q: OK.

A: I changed that. I put my face on the Teleprompter or, strictly speaking, my live video image. For the first time, I could be talking to someone, and they could be talking to me and at the same time looking directly into the lens of the camera. Now, there was no looking off slightly to the side. No more faux first person. This was the true first person.

Q: It sounds like Buck Rogers. Were people willing to tolerate this?

A: I worried at first. Would it frighten people? Would they run out of the studio screaming? Who could say? I used it for the first time in Fast, cheap and out of control. And it worked like a charm. People loved the Interrotron.

Q: The Interrotron? Did you make up the name?

A: No, it was named by my wife, Julia Sheehan. She liked the name because it combined two important concepts — terror and interview.

Q: But doesn’t the device intimidate people?

A: Oddly enough, no. It doesn’t. People, if anything, feel more relaxed when talking to a live video image. My production designer, Ted Bafaloukos, said, “The beauty of this thing is that it allows people to do what they do best. Watch television.” We often think of technology as working against the possibility of intimacy. But there are so many counter-examples. The telephone is a good counter-example. There are things we can say to each other on the phone that we would never say if we were in the same room. You know, “Being there is the next best thing to using the phone…” The Interrotron is like that. It creates greater distance and greater intimacy. And it also creates the true first person. Now, when people make eye contact with me, it can be preserved on film.

Q: Have you used it much?

A: Whenever I need to. I used it in a film that introduced the Academy Awards in 2002. Gorbachev, Laura Bush, Iggy Pop, Al Sharpton and Walter Cronkite have all been on the Interrotron.

Q: Did McNamara like it?

A: Well, you have to remember that we are talking about someone who has been interviewed a thousand times. He walked into the studio and said, “What is that?” I smiled and said, “The Interrotron.” He said, “Well, whatever it is, I don’t like it.” But then he sat down, and we proceeded to record over twenty hours of interviews. I guess he came to like it, too.

Call Bill at 917-414-5489 or 212-952-1800

• The American Movie Company.
• 50 Broadway, Suite 1012
• New York, NY 10004

AMC is a full-service, boutique video production facility specializing in HD green screen studio production, editing and digital compositing.

Contact: Bill Milling 917-414-5489

The Presidential Prompter.

The Presidential Prompter is used more and more frequently by public speakers.  It frees them from worry about memorizing their copy perfectly, or making a mistake    or saying  anything other than exactly what they intended.

The more important the speech, the more important the  need for a presidential teleprompter.  The device consists of two relatively inconspicuous stands with a thin glass panel atop each.

The speaker sees his/her copy projected on the glass to the right and left of him/her while the audience sees nothing but transparent glass.  Thus, the speaker can keep eye contact with the audience, feel relaxed and “on message”, while delivering a terrific speech that conveys exactly what the speaker intends.

If you are an educational institution, medium to large size company or public speaker, you really want to find out more about how to not only use a teleprompter but the more useful presidential teleprompter or Errol Morris Interrotron. Teleprompters are often called autocue devices in non-us jurisdictions.