Full Description
Winner of the Golden Spire Award (1996) at the San Francisco International Film Festival, TELL THE TRUTH AND RUN chronicles the astonishing life and work of muckraking reporter George Seldes. Throughout a long and frequently difficult career Seldes, who died last year at the age of 104, was tenaciously devoted to uncovering the truth. His exposés of Mussolini in the 1920s earned him expulsion from Italy - and serious death threats. He also reported on the deadly effects of tobacco decades before the mainstream press. Eventually, Seldes started his own iconoclastic weekly, In Fact (a precursor and model for I.F. Stone's Weekly), to tell the stories other publications would not - like uncovering the broad corporate corruption of American newspapers. The film features rapid-fire interweave of sensational archival footage and interviews with Ralph Nader, Daniel Ellsberg, Ben Bagdikian, Nation editor Victor Navasky and others. TELL THE TRUTH AND RUN offers a timely and thoughtful perspective on the press given the recent rise of censorship and tabloid journalism. Susan Sarandon narrates and Ed Asner provides the voice-over for Seldes's own words.
Filmmaker Bio(s)
Born and raised in Valley Stream, Long Island, I am the son of Kennedy / Stevenson liberal parents -- a pinkish-diaper baby, you might say, or a fellow-travelling toddler. I was brought up on Yiddish folk songs, the Weavers, Burl Ives and Nichols and May. I went to Hebrew school, got bar mitzvahed, didn't believe in god, and went to synagogue reluctantly, when at all.
In 1969 I enrolled at Brown University, transferred down the hill to the Rhode Island School of Design (Riz-dee), where I studied furniture design, architecture and got my first taste of filmmaking (super-8 silent). I also protested the Vietnam War, canvassed the neighborhoods, and finally dropped out, deciding that I'd been going to school since I was 5 but was drawn to Mark Twain's philosphy : "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."
After gigs as a coffee-house blues and folksinger, psychiatric aide, Berkeley Free Clinic counselor and administrator, and prisoner rights advocate, I took a course in the basics of 16mm filmmaking and never looked back.
At the first Jewish Film Festival in 1981, (I'd been living in the decidedly goyish Bay Area since 1975) suddenly had the feeling I was at a family reunion, listening to other audience members debate, argue and expound on the fascinating array of films shown at the festival. My Jewish heritage began to resurface.
Unbeknownst to me until at least mid-way through the 7-year production of TELL THE TRUTH AND RUN, the making of this film tapped into my somewhat dormant sense of Jewish identity. Seldes's moral outrage at social injustice and apathy, resonated with my own feelings about similar themes. The outrage, I ultimately recognized, was decidedly Jewish in nature -- not religious in the least, but certainly according to the teachings and traditions of my parents and forbears. It was through this film, I hoped, that I could put that outrage into a productive form, one that could maybe make some social and political impact. You judge.
