Documentaries

U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone said he sees Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as an energetic, principled champion of change in Latin American and hopes to capture the spirit of his drive to roll back U.S. influence in a documentary he's been filming. "The film's about the spirit of the changes in South America," Stone told a reporter in Venezuela. The Oscar-winning director said the documentary, as yet untitled, should be released in a matter of months.

Herzog screening: An item in Thursday's Calendar section about a Werner Herzog event said he would screen two documentaries with backing by live musicians tonight at UCLA. The event will be selections of the documentaries, and the live music portion has been canceled. The program now consists of the screenings and a conversation with the filmmaker.

Tom Brokaw is hitting the road in search of Americans affected by the recession. In an unusual promotional tie-in with USA Networks, the NBC newsman will film a series of documentaries at various towns along U.S. Route 50, a fabled highway that spans the nation from Maryland to California. The segments will run on various NBC News platforms as well as USA, the cable network owned by NBC Universal, although the exact details are still being worked out. -- Scott Collins

No one wants to be a shark's chum, but viewers are more than eager to kick back for a week every summer to dive into shark lore. Shark Week, which begins Sunday on the Discovery Channel, features six new documentaries. Discovery shark advisor Andy Dehart acknowledges that Shark Week has been known to sensationalize the animals -- even this current crop includes a new film about the 1916 attacks that inspired "Jaws." But he said the yearly marketing campaign has helped change people's views on sharks.

Dole Foods is withdrawing a defamation lawsuit against a Swedish filmmaker after complaints in Sweden that it was trying to limit free speech, the company said Thursday. Dole had sued filmmaker Fredrik Gertten for showing the documentary "Bananas!" despite a court ruling that the case on which the film was based had been part of a massive extortion plot against the company. The documentary shows the alleged plight of Nicaraguan workers who say they were made sterile by a pesticide used at Dole banana plantations in the 1970s.

It would be easy to think that we've heard all there is to hear -- or said all there is to say -- about Julius Shulman, at least for the time being. Dozens of obituaries, remembrances and eulogies followed the architectural photographer's death in July at age 98. And now, as if to top it all off, a documentary, "Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman," has arrived in theaters. Directed by Eric Bricker in a fizzily honorific style, it features appearances by fashion designer Tom Ford, curator Joseph Rosa, architect Frank Gehry and actress Kelly Lynch, among many others.

In terms of sheer scope, there are few artists who can compete with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Over the last 40 years, they have wrapped the Reichstag in fabric and strung a 24-mile-long fence through Sonoma and Marin counties, incorporating tons of steel, millions of square feet of fabric and untold thousands of man-hours. The six documentaries Albert Maysles has made about the couple's projects are modest by comparison, running a mere six hours in all.

"A Walk to Beautiful," a new documentary opening Friday, focuses on five poor Ethiopian women who have suffered traumatic childbirth injuries. After enduring sometimes more than a week in labor, these women delivered stillborn babies that left them with obstetric fistula, a hole in the birth canal that causes incontinence. Abandoned by their husbands, shunned by their families and villages, they live in shame and in hiding.

Location. Location. Location. A few years back, Hart Bochner was making a movie in Bakersfield. The production moved to the desert town of Trona for two night shoots. The experience there proved so overwhelming that he was compelled to write and direct a movie about it. "Just Add Water," which opens Friday, is set in the town on the edge of Death Valley.

The Weinstein Co., the studio that bought the movie rights to the autobiography of reggae legend Bob Marley's wife, may have to make the film without his music. The family of Bob Marley, which is co-producing a documentary of the singer by Martin Scorsese, said in a statement Monday that it won't license his music for the Weinstein movie based on Rita Marley's book, "No Woman No Cry: My Life With Bob Marley." The Scorsese documentary, co-produced by Steve Bing, is the "best way to represent our father's life from his perspective and any other film project pertaining to our father will be empty without his music to support it," Ziggy Marley said in the statement.