When you come out to Hollywood hoping for any kind of career in filmdom one of the first and easiest groups to fall in with are the dreamers who never give up waiting for the big break that never comes. At first it’s fun to be around those who share your same passion and struggle – who doesn’t like to commiserate? – but pretty soon you discover this group of endearing oddballs are talkers, afraid to risk, afraid to fail, afraid…
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If you respect doers, documentary filmmaker JD Johannes is a doer and then some; a former Marine, television news producer, campaign manager, and Senate Staffer who saw what was happening in Iraq, saw how the defeatist media was covering it, did what it took and took all the risks — financial and otherwise — to get himself in country in order to uncover the truth and report back on what he saw. The result was a series of “Outside the Wire” documentary films with a fascinating and unique perspective all their own.
Johannes tells the story of war from the ground up. Embedded with units throughout Iraq, he covers singular events with a soda straw perspective focusing on small groups of men doing the everyday, un-glamorous grunt work of winning (and for a time, and through no fault of their own, losing) the war — one heart, one mind, one round, one patrol at time. The Big War Wheel turns in Iraq, but Johannes takes you into the all-important guts of the machine and shows you how the smaller gears operate. There’s really no better way to understand how we won. When you meet the extraordinary men and women of the U.S. military who talk about their commitment to victory and to protecting the Iraqi civilian population in matter-of-fact language, you know all they needed was a General Petraeus.
“Baghdad Happens” is the latest from Johannes, and it offers everything that made his previous frontline work so special with the added benefit of attitude and spice. From the website:
Baghdad Happens is the story of an improbable, unforeseeable, irreplicable sequence of events that took place one day in Baghdad.In his fifth documentary on the Iraq war, JD Johannes throws many of the cliches of what a war documentary should be out the window.
“Our guiding vision was to ask, ‘What would PBS and Bill Moyers do?’ then do the exact opposite,” Johannes said.
“The soldiers in this documentary were really up beat. They had been on a string of successful missions and they could tell the fortunes of war were turning in their favor,” Johannes said. “So, we took that positive energy let it show through.”
Johannes conducted the interviews with the soldiers at Joint Security Station Black Lion a day after the successful mission.
“These guys were riding high at that moment and you rarely get to see that in a documentary,” Johannes said.
Other anti-PBS aspects include a disco-funkadelic-surf-rock soundtrack and Johannes narrating the documentary on-camera in a tavern.
The doc’s theme examines how the first casualty of any assignment in war is the plan, and how decisions made in the field by highly dedicated, well trained, and intuitive members of the military can change everything. Embedded with a small patrol, one cog in a bigger plan to capture a suspected terrorist everyone assumes is at home, something not on the map demands a right or left turn, and that decision creates a series of unexpected and sometimes harrowing and humorous events.
Taking us through the story is Johannes himself, a charismatic presence whose on-camera narration adds to the bemused tone of how in Iraq, Baghdad Happens.
All of JD’s films comes highly recommended. His website is here, and the quality of his work is as worthy of your support as the intent behind it.
Last year, I had the pleasure of interviewing JD via email. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.
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