Interview: David Hoffman

A month ago, the History Channel released Sputnik Mania on a 2-disc DVD. You might have missed this wonderful little documentary last year, as it briefly played in theaters, but now Killer Film had the chance to talk to David Hoffman, the film’s director and long time filmmaker, about the film, as well as other interesting things. Read on for our exclusive conversation.

Jon: What was it that made you want to document this time and era?

David Hoffman: Well, you know, documentary features are a wonderful thing for the filmmaker but they almost never break into the theatrical world as you know. They fail most of the time. So, this is my fifth documentary feature and none of mine have made a lot of money. But they all have been critically reviewed favorably. So I thought I’d pick a subject by looking at the past who would think of the present, even though I never mention the present. I’m talking about America 50 years ago, but anyone who sees it will think it’s about America today.

That’s why I picked it. I knew the subject was good; I seen some old footage that was pretty intriguing, but I knew it would be hard to find enough film to make a feature, that would be dramatic.  So I went for broke! I told myself I’m not making this if it was a television show but as a feature and as such I was going for theatrical music, dramatic story, and footage you could not believe, and fortunately I found that footage.

Jon: How long did it take to round up everything and edit it together?

Hoffman: I’d say it took a year, which is pretty typical for a documentary feature I think. For some people it takes a lot longer since it takes so long to find the money. They’re constantly fighting to find the resources to allow you to finish. It’s just a torturous process. The guys, who backed it, really thought the story was dramatic and by thought it had a chance to break into the theatrical world. Although it did break into the theatrical world, it ran in about 50 cities, before it ran on the History Channel. It never really made any money; it just kind of broke even.

Jon: When did the History Channel get involved?

Hoffman: The History Channel takes films like mine, very few of them by the way, when they know are in trouble theatrically. Meaning, I can’t charge them a million dollars to run it. They paid pretty heavily for it and they ran it in the prime time, and scored very high ratings for them. In fact, they were very helpful to me, because they gave me back the money I got from investors and the upped the DVD sales enormously. It’s selling very well on DVD because I think people are buying it to show their kids. I don’t mean people who lived through the era even, who actually witnessed it.

Jon: That’s true. When and how did Liev Schreiber get involved?

Hoffman: Leiv Schreiber is kind of the number one documentary narrator right now. Everybody likes him. The reason is interesting; he has a style that is very soft spoken as if he’s not in the room. The traditional documentary style is like March of the Penguins were you using a voice that adds to the drama. Leiv doesn’t do that as if he’s speaking from a distance. He just speaks as if he is almost watching the movie and for your generation, the younger generation who are watching documentaries, it’s very good because they don’t like being lectured too. He does not lecture, he just tells you the story and he hopes you’ll find it dramatic. He liked the movie, and so he agreed to do it because it fit his style.

Jon: The film was culled together from various sources; did you ever run into problem with quality of the sources when transferring it to theatrical distribution?

Hoffman: No. What I find is that, when you are talking about any kind of history, even going back five years, the audience watching on the big screen doesn’t care if the quality is less than perfect. What they care about is the drama. For example, let’s say I have a scene with a boy who is having his hair cut by his mom because she thinks his hair is too long. Let’s say it’s about this guy who has nothing to do with hair, and if I shot it in VHS quality and blown it up to 35mm for the theaters, nobody cares.

So I find the technical quality only matters when you’re watching for the beautiful of a scene. But if you’re watching a documentary scene and it’s grainy and hopefully, not wiggly, the audience accepts it as fine.

Jon: You said in an interview, that pop culture is real culture. The film has some wonderful PSA and other kitsch material. Do you believe this because historians tell us how to feel about the time and real life people tell us about their experiences?

Hoffman: That’s a really good question, I think, and a really good insight. I’m not saying pop culture is the only way to look at history, but I believe if you don’t see the pop culture of anything you are looking at, even something from last week, you’re missing the essential truth of that experience. For example, Obama is being hit left and right for doing too much or something, but the pop culture is “Hey, man! This guy is trying stuff. We’re excited about that!” 80% of America is saying, “Hey, he’s trying! This is really good!”

If history records this from a year from now, as he was being attacked from the day he started from all sides for trying to do too much, that’s only have the story. The other side is “we like this guy. He was going great, we hope he does it and if he doesn’t, well, he tried”. And that’s the pop culture. It’s a big part of history. Now, the way you get pop culture is by looking at media but also personal media. I think you’ll find this very interesting, I often find that outtakes, for Sputnik Mania I went to Congress for the National Archives for outtakes because I find that news is the event of the day. Now, in the 1950s, there wasn’t very much independent photography, so there’s very little video, so those outtakes had all kinds of pop culture that you would never see, if you seen the news item.

Much of my film is taking the personal things around the main thing. For example, if you look at a game show circa 1958, you learn a different thing about John Glenn. You find out more in my film than the John Glenn stuff the government made. So, I have John Glenn in Name that Tune game show, and he’s completely different there than he was in the government films.

Jon: The film’s official website has some great resources for teachers. What type of response have you gotten from educators and what made you make your film so open to them?

Hoffman: Yes, 100% positive response from the educational community for two reasons: If you look at this time and you blame everything on the government, we don’t have money for schools, music is being cut, teachers are being fired, and you’re looking at half the story. The other half of the story is about what did the parents and kids do? Sputnik Mania is proof when the country wants to, it can turn itself on a dime. There’s no other country on the planet that can turn its attitudes and its ideas than the United States when they put their minds to it. So, what the film basically says is that the students have a responsibility and the parents have responsibility, and not just the government. They like that. They don’t know what to do, we don’t have enough money, and how do we fix things if we don’t have the parental and student involvement? So they run the film for the kids to see and their response is, “boy, I wish there were Rocket Boys now, so I can help out, because back then boys were building rockets to help us beat the Russians.

We need that same type of attitude now; we need to help the country out ourselves. Using science of course, which is always a good way to go, and I’m getting hugely positive responses from teachers for Sputnik Mania and I just finished another film called The Sputnik Moment and it’s about one hour about what happens specifically in school. So I sent out for footage, which wasn’t easy to do, about how the schools changed in one year.

Jon: The DVD has a great second disc of bonus material, which is a bit unorthodox for docs to have some much bonus material. Were these elements you were unable to fit in the film, or added educational content?

Hoffman: Well, if you like the pop culture, we had a lot of it. I had 375 oddball videos from the era that I had collected, so I felt on the DVD I would stuff it there. Even if it doesn’t directly link together, you sure like watching it. Most eras to Americans are interesting, but the thing about the 1950s is that it’s particularly funny and yet its not. We had the Cold War, we were at risk for nuclear war, the Civil Rights was beginning and  America’s middle class is becoming real and yet your generation looks at that time as interested in that whole culture, even the media culture as film and television were evolving. So I thought I stuff the DVD.

Jon: I especially love the short on the dog, Laika (the first dog into space). Did you have any problems getting this Soviet stuff?

Hoffman: Sure, it was a really funny story. When the wall came down in 1988, apparently filmmakers when into the Russian film archive, who knew about this archive, and basically stole the footage. So if you want to get this footage, you have to buy it from Russian filmmakers who will charge you through the nose. They have the rights…no, sorry, nobody has the rights, they just have the footage and in the case of Laika, which is a great story on the dog, they had great footage which is in my film. But also they had extremely high quality of the footage, 35mm, beautifully transferred, even HD quality.

So I got some beautiful footage from those guys but I paid for it! It was worth it now as I couldn’t get it any other way.

Jon: It seems like the Space Race is a product of a bygone era. Why do you think in today’s eyes, space exploration seems to be unimportant? Did 9/11 affect this?

Hoffman: Yes. I think that’s a really good insight. You know, long-term I think space is important. I’m a space nut, but like other Americans I don’t feel like it’s the number one important thing right now. We got other things we need to do; our infrastructure is falling apart, our schools are in bad shape, people can’t get medical care. These things are vastly more important now than space. I’m not rich enough or visionary enough to say space is just as important in this economy, I don’t think that’s true. So I’m like a lot of other people who think space is great but we need to put that money to fix the bridge, so to speak.

Jon: You kind of touched on this earlier in the interview but I read an article about how last year on how theatrical documentaries were having tough time making money. Was your film affected or was it just the economy ready to collapse that affected the marketing of theatrical documentaries?

Hoffman: I have to tell you, I think that unfortunately, most people don’t go to the theater to think. We go not to think. The latest Hollywood fare does an extremely good job at keeping you going with fast editing, digital graphics, and loud noise. The next time you go to the theater, and I’m speaking to your audience, notice the sound level and the level of effects. And you’ll think to yourself, somebody is trying to keep me on the move here and it works. You feel like you’ve been through some kind of experience and that isn’t what documentaries are about. A documentary is about going to the theater to think, and when you come out of it you talk to your colleagues, family, and friends, about what you saw. That’s a small audience that likes that.

They say that’s about 10% of a theatrical audience, and that’s really small. So when you’re in New York, like I was for the premiere for Sputnik Mania, you find on any given evening on a Friday, 17 such films. That’s 17 films that you have to think to enjoy and that’s just too many! That 10% is not big enough to satisfy or support those 17 films, so Hollywood has found a way to support a documentary that breaks ground even though that’s rare.

Michael Moore breaks ground because he’s a great entertainer. I admire his entertainment abilities more than anything else, no matter his film; he’s just fun to watch. Even he doesn’t make as much as he would like. That’s my feeling. My feeling is it isn’t a medium for the documentary and at the end of the day, what we have to do is to use the web to build an audience. That hasn’t happened so far. I hopefully one day a business can be built. Now I make most of my money on documentaries by selling them on Amazon, where they sell well, but not well enough because the Amazon search engine doesn’t find documentaries that you don’t know the name of it. My best resource is Google Edwards where I advertise my documentaries. Even if you aren’t thinking of my documentaries, the thing comes up with my documentary with an ad. If you click on that ad, you go to my website and that’s how I make my money through those mechanisms like Google Edwards.

Jon: That’s a good story there. I saw Sputnik Mania in Omaha at Film Streams last Fourth of July, and thought it was a fantastic documentary. I hope our readers seek it out after my review and our interview. I also want to thank you for your time here.

Hoffman: Hey, what you are doing is great! I think the interesting thing is that you’re saying that they, the audience, are more likely to go to these say, more artful movies and you guys are helping the audience shift through all of them.

Here’s an example: I was at a film festival where I was selected as a winner out of eight there. The other seven were all, this is an analogy because it isn’t any one of them, but were all handicapped, wounded, Iraqi kids. It was kind of like that for those movies, just really depressing. My movie isn’t depressing, and I thought about that and said, “Boy, I said, you guys got to review them, because I’m not going to sit through all those depressing films.” I feel terrible. So you guys got to tell me which ones to watch! That’s the problem with docs is that many of them are politic statements, more than they are great films.

Jon: Especially last year, there were a slew of them.

Hoffman: A slew of them! Holy Mackerel, there was! After seeing them, you almost don’t want to have dinner. (laughs) Listen, I thank you and this is appreciated.

Don’t forget that Sputnik Mania is out now on DVD with a great 2-disc set and look for our review soon of Sputnik Moment.

Anything to add? Comment below or feel free to email me at jon@killerfilm.com