I attended the world premiere of the documentary film The Hollywood Librarian at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC on June 22, 2007. I was really disappointed. I had seen an earlier cut of the film at a conference two years ago that looked much more promising. The final cut really lost touch with the original premise of the film as I saw it: enabling regular people (non-library users especially) to get to know librarians as people, rather than as a stereotype.

One thing that is often true of librarians is that they are multidimensional characters who have had diverse and colorful experiences in their personal and professional lives. When you get to know them, they are quite often fascinating individuals. They are also often quite passionate about librarianship and the role that libraries play in society. In this age of social networking, a fun and entertaining documentary film that allowed regular people to become better acquainted with real librarians could been very powerful in terms of promoting both libraries and librarianship.

Unfortunately Ann Seidl, the writer and director, seems to have gotten too interested/involved in the plight of suffering public libraries (particularly the Salinas Public Library) and the Patriot Act over the past two years and incorporated too much straightforward coverage of these issues in the film. The result was something that felt more like two half-realized films, rather than one complete film. And though beautifully packaged, it was pretty much a downer, with little entertainment value. Most of the Hollywood film clips seemed superfluous, and some of the most compelling interview footage seen in the earlier, much shorter, cut of the film seems to have been left on the cutting room floor. In the earlier cut of the movie, I was really impressed with the way that Ms. Seidl had woven together segments from interviews with real librarians with clips from Hollywood movies that depict librarian characters. She had done a good job of breaking the documentary and interview footage up so that the stories and personalities of the individual librarians were revealed gradually and in direct contrast to the more static and stereotypical characters depicted in the films.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the premiere was the method of distribution that Ms. Seidl proposed for the film. Rather than sell the film to a commercial distributor, Ms. Seidl wants librarians to help her distribute the film by sponsoring screenings in local public libraries all across the country. She wants local public libraries to offer screenings during banned book week, and she wants them to charge people regular movie theater admission prices to attend the screenings. She thinks that this will bring the film to a broader audience. I think this is a bad approach because the people she most wants/needs to reach with her message are those who don’t currently use their public libraries, not those who do. Only avid public library users would be likely to pay to attend a screening of any film, let alone a documentary film about librarians, at their local public library. If she is really serious about getting her message out to the people who need to hear it most, she’d be better off distributing it through more mainstream channels (film festivals, commercial distribution, Internet streaming, etc.), even if she reaches a smaller audience. Then again, in its final form, I don’t think this film is compelling or entertaining enough to make much of an impact on those outside the existing library universe, so perhaps it’s just as well if this film only preaches to the choir.

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