Documentaries

While the furor continues over "The Thin Blue Line's" lack of an Oscar nomination for best documentary film, what about the documentaries that were nominated? Unsurprisingly, all but one of them are political. ("Let's Get Lost," a portrait of musician Chet Baker, is the exception.) Perhaps political is too limited a word: They are films about justice and the unfaltering work of some very different men and women to see that it prevails.

A documentary based on the accounts of Holocaust survivors in Ukraine can help undermine activists who try to deny the attempt to eliminate European Jewry, U.S. filmmaker Steven Spielberg said. Spielberg, whose grandparents came from Ukraine, co-produced "Spell Your Name" and attended its premiere Wednesday after visiting Babiy Yar, the site outside the Kiev city center where the Nazis slaughtered more than 33,000 Jews in two days in September 1941.

The two surviving members of the Who are producing a documentary about the British rock band's turbulent history, an ongoing 40-year saga of death, drugs and timeless music. Guitarist/songwriter Pete Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey have joined forces on the feature-length project with director Murray Lerner, an Oscar-winning documentary director who first filmed the band during the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival.

Charles Bukowski was the center of attention Friday night at the American Film Institute, where HBO was hosting a reception for "The Best Hotel on Skid Row," a documentary about the denizens of downtown L.A.'s Madison Hotel. The poet narrated the film, which will be shown several times this month on the cable network. Filmmakers Christine Choy and Renee Tajima were in high spirits.

Only the hardy and adventurous have tackled the Baja 1000 off-road race since its first running in 1967, but those who did usually returned with stories of the unbelievable contrast between beauty and stark desolation of the land below the California border. And of what it took for riders and drivers to conquer the silt, the rocks, the desert, the soft sandy seashore and the steep mountains of the roads laid out by SCORE officials -- through daylight and into the darkness.

"A Cup of Courage--The Jockeys' Story," a 48-minute videocassette produced by Jericho Pictures of Pasadena, is a documentary dedicated to jockey Mike Venezia. Some of the proceeds from sale of the documentary will go to the Don MacBeth Memorial Jockeys' Fund, which was established to help injured riders. MacBeth was a leading rider who died of cancer. In the documentary, Laffit Pincay, Angel Cordero, Chris McCarron and others talk about the dangers of riding horses.

The Otis School of Art and Design's "From Adams to Van Der Zee," a one-day festival of documentaries on major photographers, will be held May 8 from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at USC's George Lucas Building. Information: (213) 251-0509.

In an attempt to mount a new documentary series for public television, four non-commercial stations have set out to raise funds for what they're calling "The American Documentary." The stations in the consortium are the same ones that presently produce public television's "American Playhouse" drama series: KCET Channel 28 in Los Angeles, WNET in New York, WGBH in Boston and South Carolina Educational Television.

CBS is airing "The Wall Within" tonight. This one-hour "CBS Reports" special is about Vietnam veterans still mentally suffering from the war. It's an old-fashioned kind of TV documentary. "The Wall Within" is not a quick-hit, hot-topic production. According to Dan Rather, who anchors that kind of effort on CBS's "48 Hours," tonight's special, which he also anchors and reports, was 14 months in the making. And it's only the first "CBS Reports" this year.

Admit it. Until recently, if you had a free Friday night and were forced to pick between going to see a documentary or, let's say, memorizing the collected speeches of Gov. Gray Davis, you'd probably have said, "What if I just poked myself in the eye with a sharp stick instead?" But times have changed. For everyone from snobbish cineastes to casual moviegoers, documentaries have gone from a dirty word to de rigueur.