After four years in the making, A Good Man, the feature-length documentary about choreographer Bill T. Jones’ creation of a dance-theatre piece about the life of Abraham Lincoln, will air on Veterans Day, Nov. 11 (11/11/11) as part of the PBS Fall Arts “Festival” series.
A Good Man represents the Chicago arts scene in the PBS series.
The production began in 2007 as a co-production between Kartemquin’s Gordon Quinn and Media Process Group’s Bob Hercules. They were also the co-directors.
“We filmed on Bill’s first day at the Springfield Lincoln Museum through the preview of the dance performance at Ravinia, in September, 2009, the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. We started shooting in 2007 and edited for another year-and-a-half,” says Hercules.
The doc’s Chicago premiere is expected to take place the end of September, when Bill T. Jones and his dance company take up residency at Columbia College, Hercules notes.
When production wrapped this past March A Good Man immediately began a festival tour, with its world premiere at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C. on April 17.
The entire production crew and Jones flew in for the screening: Executive producer Quinn, Kartemquin producer Joanna Rudnick, associate producer Rachel Pikelny, editor David E. Simpson, MPG partners DP Keith Walker and Hercules.
“We had a standing ovation at the end and then Bill himself got up and did a wonderful, spontaneous dance performance,” says Hercules.
Full Frame was followed by the Minneapolis Film Festival also in April, Doxa of Vancouver in early May and it goes to Silverdocs in late June, Woods Hole and Screendance in July. Other festival dates are being confirmed.
On July 31, A Good Man will be among a very selective choice of fall-winter PBS shows to be previewed in L.A. by media critics throughout the country, Hercules notes.
The only other American Masters film chosen for the junket is Cameron Crowe’s new DOC about the band Pearl Jam.
The Ravinia Festival initiated the film in 2007
The concept of a documentary about the brilliant and often controversial Jones took hold in 2007, when the Ravinia Festival commissioned Kartemquin’s Gordon Quinn to shadow Jones’ artistic process as he created the theatre-dance work from inception to performance.
In 2009, ITVS and American Masters joined the co-production to help fund the doc’s hefty $800,000 budget.
“Fortunately, we had the budget that allowed us to travel back and forth to New York where Bill’s company is located, for an ongoing capture of the artistic process of the dance creation as it unfolded before the camera,” Hercules says, whose company celebrated its 25th anniversary last year.
Click here to learn more about the film.
