We’ve already told you all about “Tell Them Anything You Want,” the Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs-directed documentary on “Where The Wild Things Are” author Maurice Sendak.
Well, the Academy Awards have given out their shortlist for the Best Documentary short category and have come up with eight films chosen by the documentary branch committee. Three-to-five films will make the final cut, but Jonze and Bangs doc has made the first round. It’s not an official nomination, but congrats to them nonetheless. Here’s the eight films shortlisted:
“China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province”
“The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner”
“The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant”
“Lt. Watada”
“Music by Prudence”
“Rabbit a la Berlin”
“Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak”
“Woman Rebel”
“Tell Them Anything You Want” airs this Wednesday (October 14) and we still haven’t received our advance copy, gah! Here’s the trailer for the doc.
BTW, here’s another featurette on the making of the soundtrack that’s much better than the last one and much longer, clocking in around five minutes and half minutes. You get to see Spike Jonze play guitar in it too. He seems fairly accomplished, at least on a chord-playing level. Jonze also references one of the inspirations behind the soundtrack which is the excellent The Langley Schools Music Project album, Innocence & Despair, an Outsider Music-ish LP released in 2001 that basically featured a 1970s Canadian school teacher making his public school classes sing songs by David Bowie, The Beach Boys, and other classics of the day. If you’ve never heard that album, we highly reccomend it. It features a lot of cracked and fractured beauty from kids that don’t really know how to sing or perform perfectly, but the spirit is amazing.
