By Peter Caranicas, April 25, 2007
HBO's Documentary Films unit is nothing if not ambitious. Over the years, under the stewardship of Sheila Nevins, its president, it has fearlessly taken on one visceral subject after another. Iraq in Fragments and The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib visit the tragedies of the Iraq War, Bastards of the Party delves into gang violence and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts excoriates the government's response to Hurricane Katrina.
Now comes Addiction, a massive project that HBO calls "an unprecedented multi-platform campaign aimed at helping Americans understand Addiction as a chronic but treatable brain disease." More than a documentary, Addiction comprises a 14-part documentary series, a four-disc DVD set, a Rodale Press book (Addiction: Why Can't They Just Stop?), four independent addiction-themed films, a Web site and a national 30-day community outreach campaign.
This multi-pronged effort takes on nothing less than a crisis that directly affects a quarter of the U.S. population, as one in four Americans either struggles with or has a family member struggling with drug or alcohol abuse. The film graphically depicts addiction's enormous social costs and wrenching personal heartbreaks. But--in a somewhat controversial twist--it also offers new hope by maintaining that addiction is a curable brain disease that can be medically treated like other illnesses.
The project's main film, Addiction--which HBO calls the event's centerpiece documentary--premiered on March 15. The film is also available on the network's digital video-on-demand platforms, as well as in both Web stream and Podcast form.
Thirteen prominent documentary filmmakers directed or produced the nine segments of this flagship film. The list reads like a who's who of that community: Jon Alpert, Kate Davis, David Heilbroner, Susan Froemke, Liz Garbus, Rory Kennedy, Eugene Jarecki, Barbara Kopple, Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus and Alan and Susan Raymond.
"It's a dream team," says Froemke, who directed two of the segments ("A Mother's Desperation," with Albert Maysles, and "Insurance Woes"). She also served as producer of the entire project, working under contract to HBO. "Many of them, like me, have worked regularly for HBO. And a lot of us come from the same discipline. We're verite filmmakers."
According to Froemke, the idea for Addiction came from Nevins in early 2004. HBO staffer John Hoffman and Froemke were assigned as producers in May of that year, along with Micah Cormier, co-producer. "HBO has a long history of looking at difficult subjects, like mental illness and drug abuse," she says. "John and I took a year and researched the project. With Sheila, we came up with about 11 story ideas we thought would communicate what we wanted to say. Our focus was to give information that would help families, bring new understanding of addiction and chip away at stigmas preventing a lot of people from getting help."
Once the story ideas were in place, the producers sought their directors. "We thought about which filmmakers would be appropriate to work on those films," Froemke recalls. "We spoke to each one and talked about different ideas. It was a collaborative effort."
Froemke predicted that the filmmakers she approached would recoil at the idea of making short films. "Most of us had made 90-minute or two-hour films for [HBO's documentary unit], and here we were with an assignment to make a 20-minute film that might need to be cut down further depending on how the larger film took shape a year later. But they embraced the idea."
Froemke and Hoffman assigned all the directors to their projects in early 2005. Shooting took place during that year. Editing took place in-house at HBO throughout 2006. Early in 2007, the centerpiece film was complete. The project's other films remained in post through the early part of 2007.
The filmmakers themselves were responsible for first and second edits. "The individual directors gave us their first cuts," Froemke explains. "They would come in with a rough cut, we'd give notes, and they'd come back with a fine cut."
After HBO's editing, the nine segments ended up ranging in length from about five to ten minutes. They run in succession, separated by titles and interviews with addiction experts and medical researchers. For a film that daisy-chains the work of some of the world's most individualistic, iconoclastic artists, each using different cameras and working in his or her own way, Addiction is amazingly uniform and consistent.
The uniformity results from the fact that "we're all verite filmmakers," explains Froemke. "It's hard to tell a vérité story in 20 minutes, which accounts for the similarities. But even more, it's our approach. For example, we didn't ask Michael Moore to do a piece, which would have been very much in your face. We stayed within our genre of filmmaking."
Yet the distinctive artistry of each filmmaker comes out. "Jon Alpert's piece is very Jon Alpert, very immediate," Froemke notes. "He's in there, at the center of it all."
Alpert figures he got selected for the film's "Saturday Night in a Dallas ER" segment because of his previous film for HBO, Baghdad ER, which received four Emmys and was also set in a hospital, although "that hospital was close to battlefield conditions," he says.
Another kind of battlefield exists in Dallas, and Alpert approached it, as he usually does, with a one-person crew
. "We shot with the Sony HVR-Z1U HDV camcorder," he says, "which we had battle-tested in Iraq. We find it to be an excellent tool, lightweight, and it works well in low light."
"Saturday Night in a Dallas ER" goes inside Parkland Memorial Hospital to examine the consequences of injuries sustained through substance abuse. We see a stabbing victim who was high on cocaine when he was attacked, a man who snapped his ankle after a night of drinking, an underage accident victim who celebrated his 20th birthday by downing 15 to 20 whisky shots, and a level 1 trauma patient who dies. Everything is presented in a handheld, in-your-face style.
Ironically, Alpert's HD footage had to be downconverted to SD because most of the other filmmakers' material for Addiction was shot on SD video. Alpert says he used the HDV format because, unlike many other documentary makers, who prefer film, "we've always been tape people interested in climbing up to the next best level of technology. As soon as this stuff became available, we had the first camera that Sony let anybody use."
Alpert adds, "When I first saw the quality of HD, there was no going back. By now, almost everybody else in this group has probably switched over to HD, but we were the first to do it. We kind of led the charge." Alpert acknowledges that when he started shooting using the HDV format, post was still tricky, but "now we've mastered those issues ourselves and have a seamless path from field tape to HD delivery."
Just as Alpert's jumpy and nervous style shines through on "Dallas ER," so does Albert Maysles' intimate manner inform "A Mother's Desperation," which Froemke co-directed with her longtime collaborator. "It's quintessential Maysles," she says. "That car scene, where the mother picks up her daughter from an arraignment, driving back home--that's a very intimate scene, very close to the subjects. So much is told in the expressions. The mother is trying to pull some order together, but you can see 'No way' in the daughter's face."
"A Mother's Desperation" follows a Pittsburgh mother's attempt to rescue her 23-year-old daughter from "the street" and prevent a fatal overdose. The daughter, who has been addicted to heroin for seven years and has been in and out of rehab 12 times, is reported missing by her mother; she later turns herself in to the police. Driven home by her mom, she admits she can't keep living like this, but she also can't promise to stay clean.
The segment that Froemke directed alone, "Insurance Woes," was less cramped in its feeling. She shot it at a live hearing in Harrisburg, Penn., with two camera operators and ended up using four different video formats for the piece. Froemke stresses the underlying distinctiveness of all the segments. "The [Pennebaker/Hegedus] piece on opiates unfolds in a very naturalistic, vérité way," she points out. "Barbara [Kopple]'s piece on the steamfitters union is total Kopple. And the Kate Davis piece on adolescent addicts is similar to her other work."
Still, despite the individuality of each filmmaker's style, the centerpiece film's consistent look is undeniable. Much of that visual cohesion can probably be attributed to the fact that, even though HBO issued no brief to the directors as to which cameras and recording media to use, "we had to shoot in video," says Froemke. "We knew that from the beginning. It wasn't going to be 16mm. Very few of us can afford to shoot 16 these days. But whether to shoot with Panasonic's VariCam or Sony DigiBeta or another format--that decision was left up to the filmmakers."
The post process also contributed to the film's consistency. Color correction was performed by near-legendary colorist John Dowdell at New York's Goldcrest Post. "John gave it the look," says Froemke. "It was not easy because there were a lot of variables, but he's a genius. He did his magic."
In addition to Addiction, the centerpiece documentary, HBO presented what it calls the supplementary series: 13 short films that delve deeper into other dimensions of the issue. These segments feature interviews with drug experts, profile family training and treatment approaches, and highlight alternative programs that minimize the occurrence of relapses.
Like the centerpiece, these supplementary films enlisted the talent of leading documentarians. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky directed South Boston Drug Court, which looks at alternatives to incarcerating repeat but non-violent drug offenders. Ellen Goosenberg Kent directed Treating Stimulant Addiction: The CBT Approach, which examines cognitive behavioral therapy as an effective treatment for stimulant addiction. And Academy Award-winner Jessica Yu directed Getting an Addict into Treatment: The CRAFT Approach, which looks at community reinforcement and family training as a gentle and effective way to guide people into treatment.
Although HBO did not publicize the Addiction project's budget or financial details, it described it as a presentation of Home Box Office in association with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. (It should be noted that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's eponymous founder also built the small family firm of Johnson & Johnson into the pharmaceutical giant, whose addiction treatment drugs are mentioned in the films.) The project's outreach efforts were coordinated by Join Together, Faces and Voices of Recovery, and the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America (CADCA).
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