Accomplished documentarian Maro Chermayeff–who is repped for commercials by Workhorse Media–is debuting Circus, a six part documentary series on PBS this week. Circus was created and directed by Chermayeff and Jeff Dupre.
This is not your grandma’s circus. Then again, in another sense, it is. The documentary series, which premieres on November 3, follows a season with the Big Apple Circus, a traditional European style one-ring circus (in contrast to three-ring). It’s the only one that features “Grandma” the clown played by 58 year old New Jerseyite Barry Lubin. Chermayeff is a practitioner of cinema verite or direct cinema. She goes deep into the subculture–the people with “sawdust in their blood”–from the back lot to the big top, moving from town to town, pitching tents, rehearsing and performing.
“We’re not looking for the craziest most insane thing we can do,” said Chermayeff, “but we find it anyway. It’s called real life and real people, and in the most normal of circumstances, the spectacular is revealed. All of our series are about characters and stories, and about finding people and capturing a world view that we otherwise wouldn’t have an opportunity to become part of. Everyone has had that fantasy about running away and joining the circus. This hasn’t changed in 40 years. This series, in a sense, is about the world of our past imaginings.”
Chermayeff and Dupre went to work on the Circus series, which was initially proposed by John Wilson, head of programming at PBS. “It’s not a children’s show, it’s about the life of the circus and what it takes to make it in that world,” said Chermayeff. “We wanted to make an adult show about true life and real people.”
In fact Chermayeff believes the circus has always been a metaphor for survival. “In the circus, if someone does a triple somersault, they are really doing a triple somersault. They are working their whole life on a continual basis to make that triple somersault every night in every show. There’s a true element of danger and risk.”
The recession even makes an appearance in this series. The market crashed while she was shooting and that underscored the precariousness of earning a living under the big top. The series, like most of Chermayeff’s work, does not have a narrator. In true verite tradition, the stories are experiential or told in the voice of the subjects themselves. The idea is to get a sense of the circus from the circus members’ perspective.
“In their mind, the circus is glorious. When you stand in the middle of the ring, you are surrounded by 2000 people. It’s absolutely mesmerizing. It’s the circus that’s in their mind. It’s the circus behind the circus.”
Chermayeff captured this visceral feel with a high speed Phantom HD camera, the type of expensive equipment routinely used on big budget feature films. Circus was shot at hundreds of frames per second, which helped push the film look into a “hyper-reality.” The production also used Varicams, handicams and HD helmet cams for the trapeze artists. “You can actually see what it feels like when a body is coming at you and you have to catch that body and hurl that body.”
Chermayeff’s credits include other notable series for PBS. She directed all 10 episodes of Carrier, which chronicles life aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. Mitchell Block, president of Carrier Project, Inc., conceived Carrier and co-created and executive produced the series with Chermayeff, and Bruce Davies, Mel Gibson and Nancy Cotton at Icon Productions. Carrier Project, Inc., produced the series with Icon Productions. The program, which premiered on PBS in ’08, was honored with a Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Cinematography/Reality Programming.
Chermayeff additionally served as one of the producer/directors of the PBS series Frontier House, in which three modern families homesteaded in the American West circa 1883.
She has collaborated closely with noted journalist and interviewer Charlie Rose, having produced and edited many of his one-hour specials. Chermayeff also was director of documentary programming at A&E for two years, and was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the series Biography. In addition to PBS and A&E, her work has appeared on HBO, TLC, Bravo, Discovery, Channel 4 in the UK and France 2.
Chermayeff currently has two films in the works with HBO’s documentary division. She’s directing Mann v. Ford, an investigative piece about a toxic waste lawsuit brought by a New Jersey Indian tribe against Ford Motor Company (“my Erin Brokovich film”), and she’s one of the creators and producers of a profile of the performance artist Marina Abramovich, who spent three months sitting in a chair in the Guggenheim Museum. Despite how it sounds, according to Ms. Chermayeff, the film is not like watching paint dry.
“She sat still and motionless for three and half months. It was physically and emotionally and every way excruciating. Marina is beyond charismatic.”
Chermayeff, who also is a founder and chairman of the MFA Program in Social Documentary at The School of Visual Arts in New York City and a former faculty member of New York University’s Graduate School of Film and Television, has worked on branded content. She spent her formative years working on feature promotion at The Kanew Company, R/Greenberg Associates and Balsmeyer & Everett, where she cut trailers and helped produce movie ads.
Martin Scorsese On “The Saints,” Faith In Filmmaking and His Next Movie
When Martin Scorsese was a child growing up in New York's Little Italy, he would gaze up at the figures he saw around St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. "Who are these people? What is a saint?" Scorsese recalls. "The minute I walk out the door of the cathedral and I don't see any saints. I saw people trying to behave well within a world that was very primal and oppressed by organized crime. As a child, you wonder about the saints: Are they human?" For decades, Scorsese has pondered a project dedicated to the saints. Now, he's finally realized it in "Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints," an eight-part docudrama series debuting Sunday on Fox Nation, the streaming service from Fox News Media. The one-hour episodes, written by Kent Jones and directed by Elizabeth Chomko, each chronicle a saint: Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene, Moses the Black, Sebastian and Maximillian Kolbe. Joan of Arc kicks off the series on Sunday, with three weekly installments to follow; the last four will stream closer to Easter next year. In naturalistic reenactments followed by brief Scorsese-led discussions with experts, "The Saints" emphasizes that, yes, the saints were very human. They were flawed, imperfect people, which, to Scorsese, only heightens their great sacrifices and gestures of compassion. The Polish priest Kolbe, for example, helped spread antisemitism before, during WWII, sheltering Jews and, ultimately, volunteering to die in the place of a man who had been condemned at Auschwitz. Scorsese, who turns 82 on Sunday, recently met for an interview not long after returning from a trip to his grandfather's hometown in Sicily. He was made an honorary citizen and the experience was still lingering in his mind. Remarks have... Read More