Product Description

In this fast-paced companion book to Robert Greenwald’s explosive documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, author Greg Spotts takes you behind the scenes of the making of this controversial film and the grass-roots pressure campaign challenging one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies.

The story of a wide-ranging investigation that was kept secret from its target, this book describes Greenwald and his crew on a nine-month journey filled with breakthrough moments and unexpected challenges. Given unlimited access to the filmmakers, Spotts reveals the new tactics and technologies that are revolutionizing political filmmaking, offering inspiration for aspiring filmmakers and activists.

Director Robert Greenwald shares his filmmaking goals in an exclusive introduction. Revealing behind-the-scenes photographs and stills from the film "Filmmaker’s Toolbox" sidebars provide inside knowledge on how to make and market a political documentary.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #328258 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

About the Author
Greg Spotts serves on the Santa Monica Arts Commission. He is the director of the film American Jobs, a documentary looking at the loss of blue and white collar jobs to global sourcing.

Customer Reviews

The Wrong Book
Usually, when a book is published to coincide with the release of a documentary film, the book contains details and information that serve to flesh out the synoptic look that the documentary format provides. If you're looking for that sort of book here, I'm sorry, my friend. This is the wrong book.

Instead of looking at the information stored in the movie, this is a making-of document. It goes point-by-point through initial research and primary shooting up to about halfway through post-production. Also there are little pointers interspersed through the film on how to make politically motivated documentaries, in case the reader wants to be the Cecil B. DeMille of political harangues.

I'm sure there are people who are interested in the internal controversies that accompanied designing the poster for this film. I'm sure some people are interested on why one of the principal interviews, with a former Wal-Mart manager, takes place in a car and looks so incredibly cramped. But that's not why I bought this book, and that's probably not why you're considering it. This is E! True Hollywood Story stuff, not the content of a companion volume for a political diatribe.

Where this should be a book of hard facts that can be used in arguments against the continued invasion of the Wal-Martians, instead we get backlot gossip and pelf. Perhaps another book is in the offing in the near future, containing a more detailed look at the information in the movie. In the meantime, unless you hope to be a documentarian yourself, save your money. This isn't the book for which you're looking.

thought this was the movie
It is how they made the movie and their struggle to get it out. I guess it may help those hoping to do the same thing.

The making of the film - with unlimited access to the filmmakers
This companion to Robert Greenwald's documentary WAL-MART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE provides a behind-the-scenes focus on both the making of the film and the grass-roots pressure campaign challenging the world's biggest business. Greenwald and his crew went on a nine-month underground investigation kept secret from Wal-Mart as they put together their film: Spotts received unlimited access to the filmmakers and reveals their tactics, objectives, and how political filmmaking is changing businesses and the film world alike. It's hard to easily categorize this book - it could just as easily have been featured in our film column - but businesses shouldn't miss the discussion of the film methods and focus, which hold wide-reaching implications for future political film surveys of business inner circles.