A new documentary is based on the same premise that once led reporter Geraldo Rivera to Al Capone's vault.
By Telly Davidson, FilmStew.com
When a documentary filmmaker brings a toothbrush to the edit bay, it's a sure sign that they are not anticipating a quick half-day session. That was the case, many times over, for Darius Marder while working on his profile of real-life treasure hunter Lance Larson, a Utah based jack of all trades who is determined to find World War II stashes buried by American soldiers in the Philippines and Austria .
But what sets Loot apart from the non-fiction crowd is the idea that it was associate produced by actor Misha Collins. It's a reflection of the fact that before he started appearing in TV shows like 24 and films such as Over Her Dead Body and Girl, Interrupted, Collins worked for National Public Radio and was also a White House intern.
Marder sees his collaboration with Collins and others as an attempt to recapture the magic of earlier documentary groundbreakers from the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's, like Victory at Sea or the works of Haskell Wexler and the Maysles brothers. He tells FilmStew at the just wrapped Los Angeles Film Festival that he is passionate about how cinematic storytelling can be combined with truth-telling documentary subject matter.
However, he has no aspirations to be the next Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock. "My work is not polemical for me," he insists. "There's also no pretense of it being just fly-on-the-wall reporting. I edited the film as I shot, and I was constantly amazed at how today's new technologies allow for cost-effectively telling stories while still shooting them cinematically."
Playwright and actor Sam Shepard has deemed Loot a "powerfull evocation of fathers, sons, war and time, that sneaks up on you like a thief in the night." It won the Los Angeles Film Festival's Target sponsored $50,000 prize for Best Documentary Feature.
In Theaters 
