Moviemakers Give Back Through 'Filmanthropy'
Filmanthropy: helping kids from the Bronx, Los Angeles, and the Dominican Republic land jobs in the film industry. Preserving and restoring films. Showing classic movies to thousands of people in Macedonian refugee camps. Here is how Caroline Baron, Vin Diesel, David O. Russell, Martin Scorsese, and Jon Turteltaub practice it.
David O. Russell: Ghetto Film School
“Why shouldn't we help kids in poor urban areas of New York make films?” says Russell, who serves as fund-raiser and educator at the school, founded in 2000. “The goal is to build a magnet school. Right now, it's this after-school program in the Bronx that's spreading to public schools in other boroughs.”
Martin Scorsese: Film Foundation
In the late 1980s, Scorsese learned that more than 75% of silent films had either deteriorated or disappeared. “It was even more disturbing to realize that 50% of all films made in America before 1950, sound and silent, were gone.” So in 1990 he gathered Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Coppola, Woody Allen, Robert Redford, Stanley Kubrick, and Sydney Pollack to start the Film Foundation, launching systematic restoration of major studio titles and educational programs that teach students how to interpret the language of film.
Caroline Baron: FilmAid International
Nine years ago, Capote producer Caroline Baron heard a report about refugee camps in Macedonia -- idleness, fear, trauma, boredom. She thought she could help by showing films. Six weeks later, she was in Macedonia with one screen, one projector, and three crews. “We had an audience of tens of thousands of people watching Charlie Chaplin films and The Wizard of Oz,” Baron recalls. “When you've got 70, 90 or 100,000 people in a refugee camp, there is no Internet, no phone, no BlackBerry. But a big movie screen does communicate. It's very old-fashioned but very effective.”
Vin Diesel: One Race Global Film Foundation
Diesel met with Dominican Republic president Leonel Fernandez four years ago. “He wanted me to bring the film industry there. The president and I came up with this four-week summer course where we pull 32 kids from impoverished neighborhoods and give them the education and tools to become filmmakers.” In its third year by 2008, the foundation had achieved real success: when the Fast & Furious crew flew to the Dominican Republic, they employed 10 former students.
Jon Turteltaub: Inner-City Filmmakers
“These students want to work in the wardrobe department, the camera department, the editorial department as well as wanting to write and direct,” Turteltaub says of ICF, which provides free year-round professional training to inner-city youth. “One young woman's first gig was in the wardrobe department on National Treasure. Now she's in the union. This is a career and a life she has -- something she's good at, something she worked hard to learn.”