Brad Lichtenstein on How BizVizz Can Help You Shop Smarter

Posted on February 5, 2013 by ITVS Staff

Filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein, the man behind the new app BizVizz

BizVizz is a brand-new free iPhone app that makes corporate behavior transparent and available to all. Just snap a picture of a brand’s logo or bar code, and presto: A simple, graphic screen tells you the financial truth about 300 of America’s largest corporations.

Independent Lens sat down with BizVizz co-founder Brad Lichtenstein, the filmmaker behind the award-winning PBS Independent Lens documentary, As Goes Janesville, to find out more about the app.

Congratulations on BizVizz going live! OK, so let’s set the scene for the app’s practical use. I’m shopping. I see my favorite cereal, and scan the logo on my smartphone using BizVizz. Up pops all kinds of information about the company: profits, donations, taxes paid, government subsidies, etc. What am I supposed to do with this information?

A lot of people these days are very conscious of how the products they use and consume are made. Fair trade, green, how a company treats its workforce — these are values people care about. We think BizVizz is another way for people to shop their values, especially when we are into our fifth year of economic recovery and asked to sacrifice.

We think people will care when they learn that one company pays their fair share of taxes vs. another that pays none at all. BizVizz is such an easy way for people to find out this information, plus it’s fun to take pictures of logos — though maybe not so fun to learn that all of the brands on the typical grocery shelf lead to just a couple of companies.

Could an app that easily reveals this kind of information be seen by some as anti-business?
BizVizz shows that this exerting influence is not a Republican or Democratic thing. It’s a power thing. Ordinary citizens don’t have the political muscle to write tax laws. We think of BizVizz as a tool to give people like you and me some power to point out how the system is unfair, and influence on the law-making process is something that money buys in America, which ultimately corrupts our democracy. Continue reading →

Introducing BizVizz: A Corporate Responsibility App Inspired by ‘As Goes Janesville’

Posted on February 4, 2013 by ITVS Staff

By Brad Lichtenstein
Director, As Goes Janesville

Inspired by the Independent Lens film As Goes Janesville, the BizVizz app serves as the transmedia component of the documentary, enlightening users how specific companies behave when it comes to corporate and social responsibility.

There’s a scene in As Goes Janesville (airing tonight on Independent Lens), towards the end, where the city council votes to approve a $9 million incentive package for Shine Medical Technologies. Shine is a startup looking for a town in which to set up their medical isotope operation and, like many companies, it is compelling cities to compete with offers. Though Janesville is desperate for jobs after losing their GM plant, $9 million is 20% of their budget. This is the scene that inspired BizVizz, our corporate accountability app.

I was aghast when filming this scene. There was no public hearing prior to the vote. There was no public disclosure of a third party audit of Shine Medical. While the City Manager of Janesville expressed some reservations to me on camera, there was barely an opportunity, through the media or otherwise, for those reservations to be discussed by the taxpayers who were footing the bill. What galled me was not so much the gamble with public money, but how the democratic process was subverted. A selected handful of business leaders working behind closed doors with the city council were deciding what to do with the public’s money.

One brave guy stood up just before the city council vote and said “ I feel like a pair of brown shoes in a room full of tuxedos….nine million dollars…maybe 125 jobs…no guarantees.” That’s what I felt like with my camera, observing this unfold: a pair of brown shoes in a room full of tuxedos. I badgered my subjects with questions about why this deal was never put before the public but none of them felt that democracy required the public to know or engage more, beyond the role city council played.

What happened in Janesville happens everyday in America.

BizVizz is an attempt to give the public more access to corporate behavior. Corporations spend millions on their image and message so that we don’t question what they do. We figured people might like to know how much a company pays in taxes, if they receive government subsidies, and who they support with campaign contributions. All the information found on BizVizz is shareable on Facebook and Twitter, helping to put a little power back into the hands of ordinary people. Continue reading →

What Makes a Good Work-in-Progress? Part 2: The Veteran Filmmaker

Posted on January 6, 2013 by ITVS Staff

By N’Jeri Eaton
Programming Manager, ITVS

The ITVS Open Call deadline is only five days away, making it the perfect time to read the next installment of our ‘work –in-progress’ series.

Submitting an enticing ‘work-in-progress’ can be difficult, even for the veteran filmmaker. Today, we bring you As Goes Janesville’s Brad Lichtenstein, who despite having vast filmmaking experience, had to learn how to wrangle five main characters in his sample before being successfully funded. Continue reading →

The Making of the Unmaking of Janesville, WI

Posted on October 8, 2012 by ITVS Staff

Independent Lens sat down with As Goes Janesville filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein in the midst of a whirlwind media tour ahead of the premiere of his film on Monday, October 8, 2012 at 10 PM (check local listings).

Watch Focus on the Challenges That Janesville Faces on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

What impact do you hope As Goes Janesville will have?

The film is about the most vexing of questions: how do you reinvent an economy and sustain the middle class? It’s complicated by political unrest and polarization. I hope the film serves as both an instructive and cautionary tale about how to try to reinvent our economy in a fair way that includes the middle class, and how to overcome political polarization and work together toward a common purpose. I want to use the film to bring business, labor, community and civic groups together across political and other boundaries and find ways to unite them in their communities.

What led you to make this film?

I wanted to tell a story about our economic crisis, not so much the fall but the very difficult process of reinvention. And I knew about the closing of the GM plant in Janesville because my wife grew up there. What they faced — massive unemployment and, ultimately, political upheaval as Wisconsin erupted into a firestorm over unions — is a microcosm for all of America.

What were some of the challenges you faced in making this film?

Scope and access. Though the film is about a small city, it covers three years, the closure of a GM plant, the battle over unions, a recall election. It’s epic, so our editor, Leslie Simmer of Kartemquin Films, and I struggled just as epically to tell the story through the experiences of our five main subjects. Access was always a challenge, not so much with the laid-off workers but with the business community. They put a premium on confidentiality and were skeptical of our effort to tell and candid, behind-the-scenes story. Continue reading →

Filmmaker Notes from Orientation, Summer 2011

Posted on August 1, 2011 by ITVS Staff

Filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein attended ITVS’s latest producers orientation for Open Call funding and was kind enough to share his notes.

We’re producers. We’re used to 13-hour days, right?

Actually, I heard nary a complaint. Instead, what I heard was praise and genuine joy for an opportunity to be with fellow filmmakers in an atmosphere of celebration and camaraderie.

Take day one of orientation, for example. After a breakfast that included vegan granola (it is San Francisco, after all), we were whisked away into workshops and meetings that were all about the money. Financial reporting. Budgeting. Contract negotiation. It was a lot to absorb and my brain was mushy by 5PM when we gathered to walk over to the Dolby Lab.

Dolby’s screening room is not what I expected from the millions of promo trailers I’ve seen and heard in movie theaters — you know, the ones that culminate in something like the sound of broken glass shards raining over you. The room is like a 1970s revival of a 1920s deco theater — but the sound is pristine.

Every film’s five minute cut was great, from the story of America’s first gay bishop to the story of a family trying to do Christmas without products from China. ITVS had prepared a program to hand out and staff introduced each film. Filmmakers did Q&A. I felt deeply respected and maybe even a little coddled as they introduced our film, As Goes Janesville, one of several that received funding after multiple tries.

Most importantly, the evening reflected the sincere support ITVS conveyed all week. Not only did they successfully create a supportive, collegial space for us to balance contract numbers with content ideas, but they helped us understand how we fit into their broader mission.

Just look at us and our film topics. We are from New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Bay Area, Milwaukee, Austin. We are Jewish, Chinese, African American, Native American, Indian-British, LGBT. We are old and young, men and women, veteran and emerging. We — and the staff of ITVS — are truly diverse, fulfilling a mission originated in the 80s to respond to a report by the Carnegie Foundation that bemoaned a public media system without innovation and diversity. No tokenism here. ITVS is serious about supporting a wide array of filmmaking voices.

The only buzzword as potentially hollow as diversity is innovation. But ITVS is serious about substance in this area too. We learned about FUTURESTATES, short fiction films that imagine a social problem as it plays out at some point in the future. And we learned about Project 360 enhanced, an innovation initiative that supports ITVS filmmakers in creating technology projects that address issues raised by their films, from games and apps to anything you can imagine. Companion websites are so two-thousand and late.

I had not expected to see the intensive three-day orientation through the lens of age, but somehow that’s how it came into focus for me. I had been around ITVS before, first as a producer at Lumiere Productions throughout the 90s, then in 2005 as part of the LINCS initiative with my film, Almost Home. Many of the ITVS staff are still here from each of those times. I chuckled at the references they used during presentations. While one of the more “mature” (as in my age) staff members used a Tom and Jerry reference, another who was likely born around the time I started working in film referenced He Man, a character I had to look up on Wikipedia to discover that it was a popular cartoon in the early eighties.

But this observation is trivial compared to the change I noticed since I was here five years ago. Last time around there was tension over the contracts and especially over distribution strategies. Five years ago filmmakers in my LINCS group felt overwhelmed, even a bit assaulted, by the sheer size and demands of the ITVS contract and what was perceived as a lack of concern for festival and theatrical releases.

But this time workshops and one-on-one meetings made the contract transparent and understandable. What’s more, ITVS’s lawyer (whom I shall not name here) is a kind, gentle, dare I say, baby-faced man who makes contracts go down like honey. And ITVS is light years ahead of other outlets with whom you may have negotiated when it comes to distribution. Instead of arguing over release windows, the entire team is ready to work with filmmakers to devise a strategy that helps our films reach audiences through festivals, PBS broadcast, outreach and community engagement activity and public relations. We met with each department over the course of three days. If anything, I felt like I would struggle just to keep up with ITVS’s support for our film.

I wish I could be more critical, if not ironic. Yet I can’t. The orientation days were long, yes, but they were lovely and I left energized to make our film and very happy to know a fantastic bunch of filmmakers well. I wish I could find something to complain about. Okay, I know, the room we were in most of the time had no windows. C’mon ITVS, can you work on that?