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confession. As soon as I read the article, I knew this was the story we had been waiting for.
    When Bruce got to work that morning, he burst into my office, excitedly waving the same article in my face. He had read the piece that morning and had come to the same conclusion. Before we had a time to change our minds (and encouraged by the positive reception that “Outrageous Taxi Stories” had received from film festivals during the past year), we threw ourselves into making what would eventually be Brother’s Keeper. A few days later, with no budget and little filmmaking experience, we drove four hours to the tiny town of Munnsville to see if there was a film there waiting to be made. We spent a year shooting Brother’s Keeper, holding down our full-time jobs at Maysles Films while spending weekends in Munnsville, often crashing on the floor of people’s homes (or, sometimes, their incredibly frigid cabins). We maxed out a dozen credit cards between us and took out second mortgages on our homes to get the film in the can. Just as the case was going to trial and we had run out of money, the now defunct PBS series American Playhouse came to our rescue, giving us $400,000 in funding to complete the film. We quit our jobs at Maysles Films and set up our own production company Creative Thinking International. With real money from a real broadcaster, we were able to film the trial, giving us the story arc and climax we needed.

    Bruce and I took turns operating the second camera. Our constant use of two cameras allowed us to get true reaction shots. (Courtesy of Annamaria DiSanto)
    Making Brother’s Keeper turned out to be quite a Cinderella story for us. The film won the Audience Award at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. It also garnered Best Documentary honors from the Directors Guild of America, the National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics Circle. Comparing the film to “fine fiction,” the late Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Brother’s Keeper “a remarkably rich portrait of a man in the context of his family, his community, the law, and even the seasons.” As budding documentary filmmakers who considered ourselves storytellers as much as journalists, there was no higher compliment.
    Bruce and I were now officially documentarians by profession. As much as we loved the acclaim for Brother’s Keeper, I think what really hooked us was the adventure of capturing the unknown. Verité filmmaking requires a huge leap of faith: following a story as it unfolds means not knowing how—or even if—the story will end. The payoff isn’t just a compelling story; a great verité film reveals larger emotional truths about the human condition that are rarely the domain of straightforward news reports or historical documentaries.
    Gimme Shelter, for instance, is so much more than just a brilliant concert film that captured the Stones in peak form. The Maysles Brothers followed the Stones on their 1969 American tour as it led up to the Altamont concert. On the advice of the Grateful Dead, the Stones hired the Hells Angels motorcycle gang to provide security This was a tragic mistake. The bikers had no idea how to handle the job. During the opening sets by the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Jefferson Airplane, the Angels—strung out on acid, speed, and who knows what else—began beating up people in the crowd. By the time the Stones went on, things were out of control. “People, people,” Mick Jagger implored the crowd, “who’s fighting, and what for?” But it was too late. By the time the show was over, four people were dead. One of them was stabbed by an Angel, caught on film by the Maysleses’ cameras. In part due to the film, Altamont became legendary as a symbol of the flameout of the ’60s utopian dream. Through a keen eye and a groundbreaking editing technique, the film gives a sense of the context this all occurred in—the tumultuous period that led up to the band’s ill-fated attempt at a