L.A. Film Festival 2013: Documentaries About the City, From Rappers to the LACMA Rock

When Our Nixon director Penny Lane heard that the library housed 500 reels of never-seen Super 8 footage of Nixon shot by three of his aides, she wasn't expecting to see him watching a bear riding a bike at the Moscow Circus, or the staff sunbathing at the beach. "A lot of it is really sweet and goofy," Lane says. "Home movies operate on a scale of banal to adorable, and what the home movies were so clearly about was the time before Watergate defined that presidency forever."

The film is a rare look at California's most maligned commander-in-chief, which sees him for what he was: a human. Make that a human surrounded by other humans who really believed that he was the right politician to lead the country. Lane sighs, "You see them all working really hard with big, excited smiles on their faces — it's hard to watch because we know the future."

>>Character actor Harry Dean Stanton, he of the sunken cheeks and hawkish eyes, has almost 200 credits on his résumé. At 86, he's staying active — just this January, he was shot in the head in Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Last Stand.

ILLUSTRATION BY FRED NOLAND

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Still, he's better known by his face than his name. And he's barely known for his music. "He doesn't talk much — that's part of why he sings," filmmaker Sophie Huber says.

Her project, Harry Dean Stanton — Partly Fiction, isn't a traditional portrait. "He would freak out if I said biography or documentary," laughs Huber, who admits the oddly camera-shy Stanton hasn't even brought himself to watch the final film.

But even if he's uncomfortable arguing for his place in Hollywood lore, Stanton's filmography makes the case: The Avengers, Alien, Cool Hand Luke, The Last Temptation of Christ. Or as Huber and countless other directors recognize, "To me, his face alone says a lot."

>>That's the story of Hollywood: a land that's always spinning stories and then uncovering new ones about itself. Take the HBO-distributed doc Casting By, which started when Tom Donahue asked himself a question: "How come, having loved film since I was a little kid, I never thought of the importance of the casting director?"

Unrecognized by the Motion Picture Academy and unloved by actors who regard them as the gatekeepers and haters who've sidetracked their careers, casting directors have been written out of the film canon they helped to create by, say, pushing Dustin Hoffman for Midnight Cowboy or Michael Keaton for Batman — both of which were done by recently deceased casting legend Marion Dougherty.

"It's a long-overdue conversation," Donahue says. "You really do finish this movie going, 'Oh my God, that's a whole other way of looking at a history that I thought I knew.' "

See also:

*L.A. Film Festival 2013: The Basics

*L.A. Film Festival 2013: The Best Films to See

*L.A. Film Festival 2013: Music Videos for the Sake of Art, Not YouTube Views