This is a 90-minute feature documentary film about falconry from award winning filmmakers Elisabeth Haviland James, Revere La Noue and Robert Nixon. The project will create a documentary experience that connects the past to the present and weaves together distant lands and cultures though a character-driven exploration of the art of falconry.
This project will produce Into the Amazon: The Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition, a special presentation of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, for broadcast on PBS. This two-hour film tells the story of a remarkable expedition, led by former US President Theodore Roosevelt and legendary Brazilian explorer Candido Mariano Da Silva Rondon, to explore an uncharted spur of the Amazon in one of the most remote and forbidding landscapes on earth. Over eight eventful weeks in the Brazilian rainforest Roosevelt and Rondon encountered and ultimately overcame a seemingly endless array of obstacles, including poisonous snakes, ravenous insects, flesh-eating fish, and impassable rapids. Meanwhile, indigenous people watched the expedition from the shadows, and debated whether the interlopers should live or die.
INTO THE DEEP: America, Whaling & the World: a two-hour documentary film for national broadcast on PBS in 2010, directed by Ric Burns and co-produced by Steeplechase Films, American Experience, and WGBH/Boston, explores the history, culture and significance of the American whaling industry from its 17th century origins in drift and shore-whaling, through the golden age of deep ocean whaling in the 18th and 19th centuries, and on to the industry's demise in the decades following the American Civil War. Combining stunning archival material with powerful on-camera interviews, evocative live cinematography, dramatic reenactments, and underwater footage of whales at sea, the film will bring alive the complex reality and extraordinary experience of American whaling as the nation rose to the threshold of global power, all the while registering the larger forces, economic, social, cultural, technological and environmental, that shaped and propelled American Whaling.
This two-hour documentary, John Muir in the New World [working title], shot on high definition for PBS' American Masters, will follow the life of the Scottish-American naturalist and place his writing, his beliefs, and his activism in the context of late 19th and 20th century American history. We will show how, through his writings and associations, Muir became an early and influential spokesman for the conservation movement of the United States. Visually, this film will be strongly rooted in the locations of Muir's life, from Scotland to California, which were the prime influences on his thinking and writing. While preparing this documentary, we will look specifically at the emergent field of environmental history and the new scholarship on the definition of wilderness.