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The Pennsylvania Gazette
Profiles the Director
Cool article in the Penn Gazette just came out profiling the Director and all his personal problems. Pretty interesting stuff. Here's a sample:
But to start the project, Robbins had to lie to himself, both about the scope of the film and his chances for success. He told himself that the film would be short and not very time-consuming. And if everything went right, he reasoned, his documentary could be a critical success and earn an Academy Award nomination, the same way Spellbound had a couple of years earlier.
“Realistically, your chances of winning an Academy Award are similar to your chances of winning the lottery,” Robbins says. “But emotionally, you think, someone has to get an Academy Award nomination. The fantasy keeps you moving at all times.”
Read the whole article here!
Debate Team is Reviewed by the Chronicle!
Check this out. We got a review in the San Francisco Chronicle! The Chronicle's rating system uses a "little man" icon. If the little man has left his seat that's one star. If he's sleeping that's two stars. If he's awake and watching, that's three stars. If he's applauding, that's four stars. And if he's applauding wildly, that's five stars. Well the little man in our review is applauding! DEBATE TEAM got a four out of five star review! This is what the Chron says:
Bay Area filmmaker B. Douglas Robbins takes us inside the kill-or-be-killed world of obsessive arguers . . . . [T]he film is . . . an often compelling, and even scary, look at people who spend hours and hours without sleep or showers, researching topics and amassing files of data . . . ."
So that's pretty freaking cool. Check out the whole review here.
Debate Team on Public Television!
Debate Team made its television broadcast premiere on KQED, public television for the San Francisco Bay Area, in July 2009. KQED even cut their own trailer of the movie. It's not the official trailer, found on this website, but it's still pretty cool, I have to admit. Check out KQED's short trailer here!
Does Debate Actually Teach Persuasion?
Legendary debater Tejinder Singh has just written an article exclusively for the DEBATE TEAM website. It asks, does the competitive aspect of debate actually make it less educational? Singh talks about the tension in debate between winning and learning. This sounds sort of boring right? No. It's freaking amazing. Singh talks about his own debate experience and how after exiting the activity to go to Harvard Law School, he discovered he was not the badass rhetorician he thought he was. And why not? Because there are subtle pressures in debate that actually discourage debaters from mastering the art of persuasion. Read the article here and prepare to be rocked.
More Press!
Even cooler, the Director, Douglas Robbins did a radio interview on KALX, about the documentary, and got some cool press from FilmClick. This is part of what FilmClick had to say:
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of debate, is a popular metaphor that coaches use to train winners: you have to be able to kill a puppy. This metaphor captures the ruthless, heartless attitude that debaters strive to achieve. This documentary is equally shocking and entertaining as it takes an unforgettable look at competition at its most intellectual and yet most vicious state.
What? How Many DEBATE NOVELs Are There?
Okay, so here's sort of a crazy thing. A long time ago, the director of the documentary wrote a novel about college level debate. Originally the novel was structurally modeled after the Sound and the Fury, so there was going to be three first person sections and a fourth, third-person omniscient. Each section was supposed to interact in some way with the others and help to tell the larger story from different perspectives. This is an idea, stolen from Faulkner, later made popular by Pulp Fiction.
Anyway, it wasn't supposed to be a big deal. Just four short short stories that interact. Except when the author got started he had a hard time stopping. Each short story turned into a novel. So instead of having a single novel with four interacting stories, like the Sound and the Fury you had four free-standing novels going on for hundreds and hundreds of pages, more like the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
Well we've made the first novel, written from the perspective of Richard Hobbes, a student at Berkeley in the mid-1990s, available on this website in PDF chapters. This is the First Volume of THE DEBATE, a novel on college debate. Check out the side-bar, at right.
So it's hard to believe there is so much cool debate stuff but there it is. Enjoy the free novel, buy the DVD, and send us your feedback!
Love,
The DEBATE TEAM team