Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/994862
72 DGA QUARTERLY for Non-Fiction Programming. His other subjects have been Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly and Cary Grant. His fi rst American Masters outing, in 2000, was about director George Cukor. "You have to show the audience why and how their life infl uenced their work," he says of the artists. Invariably, this means navigating what Trachtenberg calls "tender areas" on fi lms that are authorized by families or estates. Making On Cukor, Trachtenberg found himself weighing how to contextualize the director's homosexuality in terms of his life and prodigious work in Golden Age Hollywood. "Here came the sage advice of Arnie Glassman," Trachtenberg says, refer- ring to his editor on the fi lm, the late Arnold Glassman, who co-directed and edited Visions of Light, about the art of cinematog- raphy. "We were sitting in the editing room, and there was a certain moment where we could have taken it a step further, and Arnie just looked at me and said, 'The train has to stay on the tracks.' And he was right." Perhaps the biggest obstacle, though, was budget. Trach tenberg wanted to con- vey that Cukor's career was prodigious but less heralded than those of Frank Capra or Alfred Hitchcock, both of whom had pub- licists. This necessarily involved licensing clips that spanned decades, dating back to the 1930s. "When you license a clip from the studios, more often than not, the clip has background music. OK, so you're not paying actors residuals for fi lms made before 1960, but there's usually music tied to the clip, and then you're paying the sync license, and the publishing license—and it could be $15,000 a cue for music you barely hear in the back- ground. Back then they didn't do split tracks, so you can't dim the music down or take it away for the clip." During the editing of On Cukor, Lacy came out from New York. "She looked at me CONTINUED FROM PAGE 61 and she said: 'I have a decision to make. I can save the money and make this a 60-min- ute film, and wreck it, or I can find the money and let you tell the story correctly,'" Trachtenberg recalls. On Cukor came in at 126 minutes. Beyond Dorothea Lange's Dust Bowl Americana Dyanna Taylor wasn't just intimately fa- miliar with Dorothea Lange's work, she'd lived with it, literally, growing up in San Francisco as the photographer's grand- daughter. Over a decade in the making, Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning features be- tween 800 and 900 of Lange's photos, from her early studio portrait work to her emer- gence as a documentary photographer on the streets of Depression-era San Francisco to the photos she took of her own family in later life. Lange's best-known image, "Migrant Mother," became synonymous with Dust Bowl-era America. But the fi lm doesn't give it particular weight. "I really with great in- tention wanted the decades of other kinds of