He was arrested again for not notifying authorities that he was leaving illinois. The child Stevie, we learn, was constantly beaten by his mother and then raped and beaten during his tours of state orphanages and foster homes. One of the reasons "Hoop Dreams" is such a great movie, and "Stevie" such a good one, is that, after a while, we implicitly trust his judgement and choices. I wasn’t able to film him the last two weeks of his life because the doctors didn’t want us around.”As a result, James ended up making a creative decision to weave his e-mail exchanges with Ebert throughout the film. I don’t know if there is a silver lining in this film, but it made a very different film than what I set out to make. The process itself is enriching.”James detailed some of the problems he encountered during three productions and explained how he turned them into silver linings.James had a hard time getting anyone to talk on camera about an incident where star basketball player Allen Iverson was arrested after a racial brawl in a bowling alley in Hampton, Virginia, the small town where James grew up.
"Stevie," the latest documentary by one of the modern masters of the form, Steve James of Chicago's Kartemquin Films, is a film so troubling and unflinchingly honest, that watching it becomes a test of empathy and compassion.James' "Hoop Dreams" has a subject easy to get behind--the story of two likable inner-city African-American kids trying to achieve dreams of basketball stardom and, in some ways, getting rooked by the system.
But it’s also the deepest film I’ve made.”If there is a silver lining, James said, it’s that “I did end up making this film and I’m proud of this film now and even though it’s a long and tortuous film.”When James set out to film Roger Ebert’s autobiography, “we started while he was alive and there was no expectation he was going to die during the making of it,” he said. But he succeeds as filmmaker because of his even-handedness and devotion to his subjects, his determination to get the story right, even at his own expense. James' socially active wife Judy, who works with sex offenders and troubled kids and urged James to get involved in the first place, at one crucial point argues her husband out of lending Stevie money to get out of jail. A Lions Gate Films release of a Kartemquin Films/SenArt Films production; opens Friday. What happened to Stephen dale fielding the subject of Steve James documentary Stevie? It is the disquieting tale of a dysfunctional family in rural Southern Illinois, and the "monster" they seemingly produce: a gap-toothed, balding, long-haired, tattooed, profane, chronically unemployed troublemaker named Stevie Fielding, who has lived a life of institutionalized rebellion and petty crime. That archetypal liberal sentiment will probably be rejected by hardcore Darwinists or ultra-conservatives in the audience; they may find some solace in the fact that this is also a film about the weaknesses of modern liberalism as embodied by James himself.James may have failed as a Big Brother. I was always very skeptical about the whole enterprise. He went to tennessee. “I I like to delude myself into thinking it’s going to be a short film and then it’s three hours long,” said James, who added that this was a difficult film to get funding for — even after the mega-success of “Hoop Dreams.”As with “No Crossover,” James had no plans to insert himself into the story, but things didn’t go according to plan.The film was initially going to be a short profile of Stevie Fielding, a man whom, a decade earlier, James had mentored as a Big Brother. Her contact with Stevie was sporadic, so when this happened she claimed that she really didn’t know, and then all of this stuff started to come out that she said she was unaware of.
It didn’t start out that it was going to be a eulogy of Roger as well as a biography.”While James had counted on being able to interview Ebert, he ended up having to craft e-mail questions for him while he was in the hospital with what seemed to be a minor hip injury, but turned out to be much more serious. He has been released from prison and is currently homeless in Nashville, Tennessee.