Featuring special guest: SHELDON RENAN.
To borrow from Bette Davis’s Margo Channing, fasten your seatbelts viewers, it’s an unsettling – but jaw-dropping and interesting – BEHIND THE LENS as director and author SHELDON RENAN talks about his chilling and unflinchingly graphic 1981 documentary THE KILLING OF AMERICA.
Not for the faint of heart, but for a short screening in New York in 1982, THE KILLING OF AMERICA has been on the shelf – until now as it becomes available digitally and Blu-ray/DVD in a remastered edition with interview extras. You’ll be as fascinated, and as chilled to the bone, listening to Sheldon speak with film critic debbie elias, as he talks about interviewing the “Co-Ed Killer” Ed Kemper. Terrific reminiscences come from Sheldon as he talks about producer/writer Len Schrader and editor Lee Percy (who most recently edited “Snowden” for Oliver Stone), as well as providing the minutiae of creating a narrative thru-line and melding archival news footage with contemporaneously lensed transition shots. And as for the Zapruder film capturing the Kennedy assassination? You’ve never seen a more complete version, and thanks to remastering of the film, you’ll cringe on seeing what happens with each moment a bullet impacts its target. Sheldon goes into great detail on obtaining the footage and the restoration process. But it’s when talk turns to the “average man” (or girl) serial killers that the mind reels. A fascinating “mondo” documentary and a fascinating conversation with SHELDON RENAN.
