The Style
The visual building blocks of D-Man are:
The dance story
Using the cinéma vérité shooting of one of America’s
foremost dance and documentary cinematographers,
we will follow the young company as it prepares for its
performance, the drama of its confrontation with the
past.
The dance itself
Using several different innovative forms of dance
photography, inside and outside the dance, slow
motion and moving camera, the performance of
D-Man in the Waters by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane
Dance Company will be the visual memory, the
subconscious of the film, evoking the power of D-Man
in the Waters and the actual experience of dancing it.
Interviews
Already shot, the remembrances of the original
dancers form, according to cinematographer Tom
Hurwitz, “the most powerful set of interviews that I
have filmed in my 35 year-long career.”
Archival material
Still and film footage of Demian Acquavella, the
original company, the performance of D-Man in the
Waters in its premier.
Music
Music will be both the original Mendelssohn Octet in
E-flat Major - the music of the dance, and an original
score woven in and around it.
Distribution
The Audience
To maximize audience and exposure, the distribution
plan for D-Man will include broad-spectrum film
festivals such as Sundance and Berlin. Members of
the main crew include two Sundance veterans: awardwinning cinematographer, Tom Hurwitz, A.S.C., and
award-winning editor, Toby Shimin. We will also submit
the film to more targeted film festivals such as Dance
Camera West, the International Screendance Festival,
Dance Films Association, and the LGBT Festival,
Frameline to increase distribution into educational
and semi-theatrical markets (museums, schools and
art centers). The work of Bill T. Jones is ubiquitous in
university dance and LGBT curriculum, and courses
about art made in the age of AIDS are more and more
frequent in the collegiate core curriculum. This film
offers a significant contribution to dance education,
LGBT studies, and it augments the historiography of
AIDS in America.
The target audience for D-Man will be the dance
community, dance aficionados, the academic
community, the HIV/AIDS community and the LGBT
community. With the widespread fame and following
of Bill T. Jones, coupled with the film’s association
with the educational partnership between Loyola
Marymount University and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane
Dance Company, the core audience will be diverse
and international in scope.
We have already had meetings with Dan Cogan, and his
associates at Impact Partners, and Jeff Dupre of Show
of Force, who have reputable contacts with leading
documentary film distributors and broadcasters like
PBS, Autlook Film Sales, Dogwoof and other leading
European and British distributors.
A robust, grassroots outreach to these targeted
communities began early in the project’s inception
and has been active throughout. The project has a
website, Facebook page, and a Twitter account. There
have been screenings of work-in-progress footage at
Loyola Marymount University and at the American
Dance Festival.
The following organizations have already requested
screenings of the finished film: The American Dance
Festival; the Purchase College Performing Arts Center;
Dancers Responding to AIDS; Loyola Marymount
University; and New York Live Arts.
We will continue to use social media, Internet platforms
and academic platforms throughout production in
order to broaden the audience for the finished film.
The Fundraising Strategy
D-Man has an overall budget of approximately
$500,000. $115,125 has been raised to date. Loyola
Marymount University is the fiscal agent for the project.
The strategy for continued fundraising includes
seeking support from foundations and individual
donors. A grant pending with Sundance Film
Institute will be announced in fall 2015, and there
are letters of inquiry out to the Embrey Foundation,
Ford Foundation: JustFilms, and individual donors.
Loyola Marymount University dance department has
included D-Man in a multi-faceted campaign to fund
the groundbreaking educational partnership between
the university and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance
Company. To that end, the D-Man project and the
LMU College of Communication and Fine Arts are
submitting joint grant applications to the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation and the Surdna Foundation, both
due in the summer of 2015. Ongoing strategies include
sending fundraising letters to individuals and using the
website as a platform for support and promotion.
Secured Sources of Funding
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Dancers Responding to AIDS
Donations from Individuals
Drollinger Family Charitable Foundation
Graves Foundation - Award for the Humanities
Indiegogo Campaign
Infiniti Dance Studio Fundraiser
Loyola Marymount University
Pending Sources of Funding:
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Chicken and Egg Pictures
Embrey Foundation
Fundraising letters to individual donors
JustFilms Ford Foundation (Letter of Inquiry sent)
Sundance Film Institute
Potential Sources of Funding:
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• Frameline Completion Fund
• Individual Investors/Donors
The D-Man Team
Director of Photography / Co-Director
Producer / Co-Director
Tom Hurwitz
Rosalynde LeBlanc
Tom Hurwitz, ASC is one of America’s most honored
documentary cinematographers. Winner of two
Emmy Awards, the Sundance and Jerusalem Film
Festival Awards for Best Cinematography, Hurwitz
has photographed films that have won 4 academy
awards and several more nominations (most recently
for Dancemaker and Killing in the Name). Other
award-winning films and programs that he has
photographed include: Queen of Versailles, Valentino:
The Last Emperor, Love Free or Die, Harlan County
USA, Wild Man Blues, My Generation, Down and
Out in America, The Turandot Project, Liberty, Dolley,
Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. In addition, films
that he has directed have won the Cine Golden Eagle
(for Bombs will Make the Rainbow Break) and have
been shown in festivals around the world. He is also a
founding member of the faculty of The MFA Program
in the Social Documentary, at New York’s School of
Visual Arts.
Rosalynde LeBlanc began her professional career
with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
(1993-1999), and then continued on with Mikhail
Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project (1999-2002).
In addition, she has danced in music videos for Janet
Jackson and Jen Chapin, several stage productions
with The Metropolitan Opera Ballet, and was invited to
perform at the 2006 Salzburg Opera Festival, Austria.
She has also worked with film directors, Burt Barr,
John Turturro, Gretchen Bender and Matthew Rolston
and she can be seen in the short film, Roz; the PBS
Specials, Still/Here, Free to Dance, Dancing in the
Light, A Good Man; and in the feature film, Romance
and Cigarettes. She re-stages the work of the Bill T.
Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at colleges around
the country and she is a full-time member of the dance
faculty at Loyola Marymount University - Los Angeles.
Editor
Editor
Toby Shimin
Dina Guttmann
Toby Shimin began her film career as a sound editor,
and switched to picture editing in 1988 when she cut
The Children's Storefront, which was nominated for an
Academy Award. Since then, she has cut numerous
films that have premiered at Sundance, including
Martha and Ethel, A Leap of Faith, Miss America,
Out of the Past, which won the Audience Award,
Everything's Cool, Buck which also won the Audience
Award, and most recently, How to Dance in Ohio
which will premiere on HBO later this year. She has
edited several diverse projects for PBS, including AIDS
Warriors, Seabiscuit, for which she received an Emmy
nomination and Emmy-nominated Reporting America
at War. Three of Hearts: A Post-Modern Family,
premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and A Sea
Change has won several festival awards, including the
NOAA Environmental Hero award. Toby is a principal
of Dovetail Films.
Dina Guttmann joined the documentary film world
in 1996 and is an editor specializing in unscripted
documentaries. She has edited films that have aired
nationally on PBS (Independent Spirits in 2001; National
Geographic Specials' The Last Royals in 2005; and, A
Healing Art in 2010, which won the POV Award at the
2009 International Doc Challenge competition) and
films that have enjoyed successful rounds on the film
festival circuit (Ilona, Upstairs - 2005 HBO Audience
Award at the Provincetown Film Festival; Mezzanotte
Obscura - 2010 Best Short Documentary at the Kent
Film Festival; and Zemene - 2014 Best Editing and
Best Documentary at the Boston Film Festival). Dina is
a principal of Dovetail Films, a production and editing
company she co-founded with Toby Shimin in 2001.
“
“
In a dream, you saw a way to
survive, and you were full of joy.
– Jenny Holzer,
epigraph for D-Man in the Waters
Contact
Rosalynde LeBlanc
1 LMU Drive
MS 8346-Dance
Los Angeles, CA 90045
dmanmovie@gmail.com