Stock: The Thrill of the Hunt

The Fog of War:
Footage that shows and tells
Ann Petrone arrived home from work one evening about seven years ago to find a message on her answering machine from the wife of legendary director Errol Morris. The two had a mutual acquaintance through Petrone's days working at a Boston auction house, and Morris - a collector of Americana - wanted to set up a meeting. "I went to his office and we talked," recalls Petrone of that first encounter, "and then he said, 'Do you want to come work for me?' That was how it worked. We just hit it off."

Since that fateful day, Petrone has sourced hard-to-find images for such projects as Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. and the similarly quirky yet fascinating First Person, a series that aired on bravo in the U.S. in 2000. More recently, Petrone was supervisor of archival research for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara - the 2004 Oscar winner for best doc feature in which McNamara, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, looks back over his career. As Morris says, "I'm lucky I have Ann, who's an extraordinarily good researcher."

Petrone started work on FOW early in the filmmaking process. After watching selected portions of the McNamara interviews with Morris and editor Karen Schmeer, the group brainstormed on possible visual metaphors, which Morris believes should advance the theme of the movie. "Most of the use of stock footage is perfunctory in documentary," he observes. "I think one of the things that Fog of War proves is that it doesn't have to be." For instance, the recurring images of bombing represent McNamara's perspective of World War II and the Vietnam War. "It's been kind of at arm's length, and the use of visual material underscores that," says Morris.

The famed auteur interviewed McNamara for 20 hours, so large chunks of the material weren't going to make the final cut. Working from the interview selects, rather than reading the transcript, saved time and money by greatly narrowing Petrone's stock footage search. Watching the selects also gave Petrone a sense of pace, as well as valuable insights as to where stock footage was needed for punctuation or illustration. "There's a very moving scene," says Petrone, "in which McNamara describes Kennedy's grave. He wells up. His voice cracks. That's something you want on camera, rather than stock footage of JFK's grave. Reading the transcript, I would have never known that."

While Morris and Schmeer went through the monumental task of cutting down the raw interview footage, Petrone worked to find stock material. It took two years of intermittent work ("It's not like I sat shackled to a desk," she laughs) to collect over 700 hours of archival footage - about 45 minutes of which made it into the film. Much of the material came from Archive Films/Getty Images and the CBS News Library, though the largest percentage was sourced from the U.S. National Archives.

The cost for stock footage licenses and film transfers totaled US$67,830. "This is deceptively low, because so much of the archival footage in the film is from the National Archives," cautions Petrone. "Much of the material housed there is in the public domain and not subject to license fees, which can be a tremendous savings." An additional $5,431 was spent licensing stills.

Petrone notes that she started her dig with a massive online search of the Washington, D.C.-based National Archives so that when she visited in person she was able to maximize her time. She made the trek about eight times, for three or four days each visit. As Morris puts it, searching for something at the National Archives is not like finding a needle in a haystack, "but a needle in a million haystacks."

And occasionally it's not a needle one finds, but a gem.

One of Morris and Petrone's favorite FOW clips from the National Archives is footage of Chinese laborers toiling to construct runways that were going to be used for the bombing of Japan. "McNamara often would be talking about things that have been, for all intensive purposes, forgotten," recalls Morris. "But once you know about them, you can say to yourself, 'Well, I wonder if people shot any footage of these historical events he's describing?'" From a strictly filmic perspective, Petrone loved the theatrical quality of the airfield footage. "It looks like Cecil B. DeMille should be there giving direction to all these extras," she says. "Plus, it's so crazy, with all these people banging rocks."

A Google search also turned up footage used in a scene in FOW that shows the 1967 march on the Pentagon. The website alerted Petrone to a protester who had shot handheld footage of the event; she tracked him down and paid him $1,800 to use it. Cut against a sanitized Universal Newsreel story, Petrone says the contrast in film format and framing "helps emphasize the disconnect between the Pentagon administration and the demonstrators."

The rights cleared for the clips were worldwide, all media, in perpetuity. "I hoped FOW would have a long shelf life and I didn't want to have to re-negotiate clearances at some future date or risk having clearances lapse," says Petrone.

Fahrenheit 9/11:
Following the footage
Even before Michael Moore's 2003 Oscar-winning doc Bowling for Columbine hit theaters, the director was brainstorming ideas for the next film on his roster, Fahrenheit 9/11. As Carl Deal, Fahrenheit's archival producer, explains, "We didn't start off knowing we were going to make a film about the war in Iraq."

Originally, the film was going to focus on how the Bush administration handled the events of 9/11, but the war was in full swing by the time Moore began the US$6 million doc. That meant both current and archived material had to be gathered at a frenzied pace. "We watched a lot of TV," says Deal, who worked with full-time researcher Salimah El-Amin and a fluctuating number of part-time researchers. "But we acquired footage largely the traditional way, which was through the archives and their agents."