Mike deGruy, an award-winning cinematographer who spent three decades making documentary films about the ocean, was killed in a helicopter crash in eastern Australia. He was 60.

His employer, National Geographic, said Sunday that deGruy and Australian television writer-producer Andrew Wight died Saturday.

Their helicopter crashed soon after takeoff from an airstrip near Nowra, 97 miles north of Sydney, police said. Australia’s ABC News reported that Wight was piloting the copter when it crashed.

DeGruy won multiple Emmy and British Academy of Film and Television Arts, or BAFTA, awards for cinematography.

An accomplished diver and submersible pilot, the Santa Barbara resident was the director of undersea photography for James Cameron’s 2005 documentary “Last Mysteries of the Titanic.”

“Mike and Andrew were like family to me,” Cameron said in a joint statement with National Geographic. “They were my deep-sea brothers and both were true explorers who did extraordinary things and went places no human being has been.”

After spending three years at the University of Hawaii in a Marine Biology Ph.D. program, DeGruy moved to the Marshall Islands, according to his website. He spent three years there, working as the manager of the Mid-Pacific Marine Lab, before transitioning to filmmaking.

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GasLand (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

A documentary filmmaker has been arrested at a House hearing after trying to film the proceedings without the required credentials.

Joshua Fox of Milanville, Pa., was charged by Capitol Police on Wednesday with unlawful entry.

Fox directed the anti-drilling documentary “Gasland,” which was nominated last year for an Oscar. Fox also is an activist who has spoken out against hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which was the subject of the House Science, Space and Technology subcommittee hearing.

Fracking takes place when large volumes of water, sand and chemicals are injected into wells to break up underground rock formations, allowing natural gas to escape.

The oil and gas industry has criticized Fox and his film for what they say is a sensationalized attack on fracking.

James Marsh won the documentary prize Saturday at the Directors Guild of America Awards for “Project Nim,” his chronicle of the triumphs and trials of a chimpanzee that was raised like a human child.

It was the latest major Hollywood prize for Marsh, who earned the documentary Academy Award for 2008′s “Man on Wire.” Among those Marsh beat out for the guild award was Martin Scorsese, who had been up for the documentary honor for “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” and also was nominated for the evening’s highest honor, for feature-film directing.

The film favorites were guild awards regular Scorsese for his Paris adventure “Hugo” and first-time nominee Michel Hazanavicius for his silent movie “The Artist.”

Also in the running were Woody Allen for his romantic fantasy “Midnight in Paris”; David Fincher for his thriller “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”; and Alexander Payne for his family drama “The Descendants.”

At the start of the ceremony, Guild President Taylor Hackford led the crowd in a toast to one of his predecessors, Gil Cates, the veteran producer of the Academy Awards broadcast who died last year.

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Image via Wikipedia

Turkey has marked the international Holocaust Remembrance Day by airing a French epic documentary about the Holocaust.

TRT television’s documentary channel showed filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” late on Thursday, on the eve of the remembrance day.

The filmaker said this is the first time the film was broadcast on state television in a Muslim country.

The documentary was aired as part of a campaign to promote understanding between Jews and Muslims and to fight Holocaust denial.

In March, a Los Angeles-based Farsi satellite channel had also broadcast the 9-plus-hour documentary in Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned historical accounts of the Holocaust.

Lanzmann worked for 11 years on the film, which was released in 1985.

Hip-hop is making itself heard — and seen — at the Sundance Film Festival.

In addition to performances by rappers Drake, Common, Nas, Lil Jon and Chuck D, the festival includes documentary and narrative films about hip-hop culture.

Ice-T’s documentary, “Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap,” premiered at the festival. It stars artists such as Run-DMC, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Mos Def and Eminem.

Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew fame appears in a short film called “The Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke.”

“Filly Brown,” a contender in the U.S. dramatic competition, tells a story of a rising Hispanic hip-hop artist in Los Angeles and the challenges she faces on the way to fame.

Sundance continues through Sunday in Park City, Utah.

Ethel Kennedy prefers coming to the Sundance Film Festival when she’s not the star of a movie.

She has been to Sundance in the past to see films by her daughter, documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy. This time, the widow of U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy is the focus of her daughter’s film, the Sundance premiere “Ethel.”

Ethel Kennedy said she likes it better coming to Sundance “just to see Rory’s films.”

Though initially reluctant when her daughter proposed the documentary, Ethel Kennedy opens up on screen with candid recollections about the family, including falling in love at first sight with her future husband on a ski trip to Canada.

“He was standing in front of an open fireplace,” she said in an interview alongside her daughter. “I walked in the door and turned and saw him, and I thought, ‘whoa.’”

In the film, Ethel Kennedy discusses campaigning for her husband and his brother, President John F. Kennedy, the similarities and differences between her family and the Kennedy clan, and raising 11 children after her husband’s assassination in 1968.

At the time, she was pregnant with Rory Kennedy, her youngest child, who was born six months after her father’s death.

As a widow with such a big family, Ethel Kennedy said she coped simply by going about what she needed to do in tending her children.

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Guilty? The law says yes. But her hair looked fabulous.

I love “Snapped,” or as I sometimes called it, “Crazy Beyotches,” Oxygen’s pulpy documentary series about women who snap (get it?) and kill or attempt to kill somebody. It’s usually short, full of punchy interviews, great editing and twists and turns that make you go “What? Did that really happen?” I love it so much that in my occasional stand-up act I joke that it makes my husband a little nervous. (“He says ‘Gee, honey, I hope we never wind up on that show’ and I say ‘We would never be on that show….They would never trace it back to me…More peas? No?’”)

So I was extra-excited for Sunday night’s premiere of one of the most mind-blowing homegrown murder-for-hire plots I’ve heard of – the Dalia Dippolito case. You remember – the gym bunny convicted of hiring someone to kill her hapless husband, caught giving the performance of all performances on a police tape pretending to be distraught when notified of his “death.” Because he wasn’t dead. Whoops.

The episode is not only interesting because of the weird details, like the tape of her convincing her would-be accomplice to smile while she’s making “sure, sure” that he can get a gun, or because it’s local. It provides the inspired commentary of not one but two of my former Palm Beach Post colleagues, court reporter extraordinaire Susan Spencer-Wendel and police reporter turned Boynton Beach Police public information officer Stephanie Slater. Susan, you might know, has resigned to deal with the effects of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, while Stephanie’s been working with the police for a while.

Fun fact: “Working with the police” is my family’s metaphor for being detained by the authorities for an extended period on an involuntary basis…as in the hoosgow. Which is where Dalia, she of the pouty lips and awesome “I’m a widdle lamb” innocent eyes, will be headed if her appeal of her conviction doesn’t pan out (she’s currently on house arrest).  I had followed the case, perhaps like all of you, but there were some tidbits that were delicious:

- The tape of Dalia’s reaction to her husband’s “death,” where she quite clearly asks several times to see the body. Police take this as evidence that she wants confirmation that her deal, and subsequent inheritance from her hubby, has come through. Of course, she could have just been in shock but…the tape of her setting things up with an undercover cop posing as a hitman says “Liar, liar, surgically enhanced boobs on fire.”

- The unexpectedly hilarious tape of post-arrest Dalia, who, as Susan says, is completely delusional in her denial of the plot, even as police explain she’s been recorded planning it. In a shocking twist that tells me that someone at Boynton Beach Police has watched a lot of “Perry Mason,” we see her lay eyes on Michael, who she’s been told was dead. She keeps saying “Come here! Come here!,” to which he responds something like “Sister, please.” It reminded me of those Scooby Doo cartoons when Scoobs and the gang are fleeing from the villain of the week, who holds out a spindly evil arm and says “Come back here!” Yeah Evil Guy, and wife who’ve I just seen on tape plotting to kill me. That’s gonna happen.

- The fact that Mike Dippiito agreed to be on the show, despite his admittedly shady past and apparently poor character judgement. He’s kinda funny. I feel bad for him that his wife tried to kill him. But weirdly he seems to be taking it in stride.

Did you see it? What did you think? And if your spouse was caught on tape planning your death, would you be in a documentary about it?

Sidney Taussig, 82, lived through a Czech concentration camp and is featured in a movie at the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival. (Thomas Cordy / Palm Beach Post)

The funny thing is that Sidney Taussig doesn’t consider himself a writer. “I really hate writing,” he admits, his clear blue eyes smiling. “I wrote only sports, about soccer games.”

But some writing he did almost 70 years ago with some other boys while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp — writing about sports, school and the jobs that they had — has turned out to be a lasting record of lives that couldn’t be saved.

“I had no youth, really,” says Taussig, 82, glancing behind him at a movie poster on the wall of his Greenacres living room bearing the faces of five young boys, including himself.  “When I wound up in the camps, I was not even 13.”

Those five boys and others at the Terezin concentration camp, in what is now the Czech Republic, wrote a magazine called Vedem. It became a distraction from the horror of war and confinement, from the fate of the boys who streamed into camp and then onto a transport to Auschwitz.

And when there was only one boy left — the boy with the clear blue eyes who now sits before you — he and his father dug up the precious pages of the magazine from where he’d hidden it next to his grandmother’s ashes. Those pages, eventually published, made it into the public consciousness, into a book, a Seattle musical and now a movie, The Boys of Terezin, which opens the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival on Wednesday night.
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By FRAZIER MOORE

You will see his typewriter, the Olympia portable Woody Allen has used for pounding out everything he’s written since his teens.

You will see the contents of the “idea drawer” in his bedside table where he stashes random paper scraps, any of which might inspire his next film.

You will see him in the role of director, both in the distant past and while making his 2010 film, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” — a remarkable unveiling by an artist known for keeping a locked-down set.

In sum, you will see this legendarily private filmmaker up close and personal, charming and candid, and, yes, funny as he strikes a clear contrast with the neurotic, death- and sex-obsessed Manhattanite he has famously depicted in so many classic films.

Turns out, Woody Allen at heart is a writer.

“Writing is the great life,” he says at the start of the film, seen recumbent on his bed scribbling on a legal pad.

Only when production begins on the screenplay he has written does reality set in, he says, and “all your schemes about making a masterpiece are reduced to, ‘I’ll prostitute myself any way I have to, to survive this catastrophe.’”

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HBO will team with Sports Illustrated and Endgame Entertainment to produce a new sports documentary series.

“Sport in America: Our Defining Stories” is a multipart series scheduled to air in 2013. Sports Illustrated will run editorial packages in conjunction with the programs.

The production company Playground also will work on the series. Endgame Entertainment’s James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo will be co-directors. Stern, Del Deo, Playground’s Colin Callender and SI’s Terry McDonell will serve as executive producers.