Five selections from the 2023 DOC NYC Festival

Reviewing 'The Disappearance of Shere Hite,' 'Bad Press,' 'Nathan-ism,' 'The Trials of Alan Dershowitz' and 'How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer'

The annual DOC NYC Festival is ongoing in New York City with the in-person portion wrapping up today, but the online portion continuing through the 26th. While I attended part of last year’s festival in person, I’m all virtual this year. But thanks to the fest’s extensive online platform, I’ve been able to watch several of the films. Here are reviews of five of them: 

The Disappearance of Shere Hite 

This film, directed by Nicole Newnham, is actually releasing in theaters on Friday, following a festival run that lasted throughout the year. It’s the story of Hite, a model-turned-pioneering sex researcher whose work in the 1970s and ‘80s very much shook things up culturally. 

Dakota Johnson reads from Hite’s work, including 1976’s The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, which concluded that most women are more likely to orgasm clitorally than vaginally. And while you’d think men would be appreciative to get some pointers about how to better pleasure the women in their lives, they didn’t exactly take it that way at the time. 

The film, through lots of archival footage, showed how Hite was essentially pushed into exile, in part by men acting extremely boorish to her on talk shows. It’s a fascinating exploration of a figure of the past who I confess I was very unfamiliar with before. 

Bad Press 

Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler have made an intriguing documentary about a battle for free speech on a reservation in Oklahoma. 

It's a rare film in which both the heroes and villains are Native American. Bad Press is about Mvskoke Media, a media company trying to report on political corruption in an area of Oklahoma where the tribal government is seeking to subvert the First Amendment. 

This is a fascinating exploration of the sort of story that I wasn’t sure was even possible in America, while the filmmakers had cameras present for all of the best parts. 

Bad Press remains on the festival circuit, with some one-off screeners in different markets. 

Nathan-ism

We now reach the “old Jewish man” portion of the program. Nathan-ism is a film about Nathan Hilu, a former American soldier who once guarded Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials. At the time of the film, in his 90s, Hill is an accomplished cartoonist, drawing stories from throughout his life. 

The film, directed by Elan Golod, goes into an interesting direction in the third act, beginning to question whether Nathan’s stories were actually true, but it ultimately concludes that it’s more about the unreliability of memory than actual dishonesty. 

There’s no release date set for Nathan-ism. 

The Trials of Alan Dershowitz 

Here’s a documentary, directed by John Curtin, that’s more fascinating when one thinks about the calculation of the subject agreeing to participate in it, than for anything that happens on screen. 

Dershowitz has been one of America’s most famous lawyers and law professors for decades. He’s had famous (and infamous) clients, including O.J. Simpson, Claus Von Bulow, Leona Helmsley, and Mike Tyson, and he’s been portrayed in movie and TV adaptations of his cases, most notably by Ron Silver in Reversal of Fortune, and he’s notorious for appearing as a talk show guest seemingly at the drop of a hat.

 More recently, “Dersh” has become more notorious for a couple of things: His advocacy for Donald Trump, including actually representing him in the first impeachment, and his enmeshment in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. He has been directly accused of sexual impropriety — although his accuser has said she may have been “mistaken” — but there’s no dispute that Dershowitz was Epstein’s friend and lawyer. 

The film goes through Dershowitz’s entire life story, including his most famous cases, and he argues that just about all of his clients — yes, even O.J. — were innocent. But it’s pretty clear that he agreed to participate in the documentary so he could argue his case about the Trump and Epstein matters, and somehow mitigate his late-in-life shunning. 

There’s no word on release plans. 

How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer 

This doc from Jeff Zimbalist hearkens back to a time when novelists were celebrities and the sort of people who pontificated on talk shows and occasionally got into fistfights with one another. 

Assembled from a huge cachet of archival footage, the film charts Mailer’s career and extremely colorful personal life, which included six different wives — one of whom he stabbed — and ten children. 

If you enjoyed this famous tweet by Joyce Carol Oates, this documentary is for you: 

By the end, Mailer is the old cranky guy in the late 1980s, ranting about the feminists and how political correctness was ruining everything- sounding practically identical to the anti-cancel culture warriors of today. It shows that what those guys are bleating on about is nothing new.

There’s no word about a release date for How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer.