CBA Media & Entertainment Law Committee
Date: January 25, 2008
Location: 131 S. Dearborn St., 3oth Floor, Chicago, IL
January 25, 2008 Meeting Announcement
CBA Media & Entertainment Law Committee
Please RSVP to CHI-CBA@HKLaw.com
Date: Friday, January 25th
Time: 12:15 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Place: Holland & Knight LLP
131 South Dearborn, 30th Floor
Chicago, IL
Speakers: Jon Siskel, co-founder of Siskel/Jacobs Productions
Greg Jacobs, co-founder of Siskel/Jacobs Productions
JJ Hanley, Documentary Film and Website Producer
Justine Nagel, Kartemquin’s Dir. of Communications and Distribution
Lunch: Available for $10.00 if ordered in advance (e-mail to ellie.cozzi@hklaw.com)
Topic: Documentary Film, Fair Use and Television Production (Part 1)
Please join us for the CBA Entertainment & Media Law Committee’s the first monthly meeting of 2008 to hear our speakers, Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs of Siskel/Jacobs Productions, and JJ Hanley and Justin Nagel of Kartemquin Educational Films, discuss documentary film, television production and fair use.
Siskel/Jacobs Productions is a Chicago-based television and documentary production company. Since its founding 2005, Siskel/Jacobs Productions has produced a variety of feature length documentaries for television broadcast including Head On, a two-hour special for the Discovery Channel, and Forensics under Fire, an episode of the National Geographic Channel’s “Naked Science” series. The Company is currently in production on a two-hour special for the History Channel titled, Voices of 9/11.
Greg Jacobs is co-founder of Siskel/Jacobs Productions (SJP). Prior to launching SJP, Jacobs served as Vice President and Chief Creative Officer at Tower Productions, where he oversaw the content of more than 200 documentaries on five different networks, including A&E, the History Channel, the Weather Channel, Discovery Times, and CNN. During his seven years at Tower, Jacobs also produced, wrote, and supervised more than two dozen other shows, including a number of mini-series and specials for the History Channel, and two documentaries on the Iraq War for Discovery Times. A graduate of Yale University, Jacobs holds a master’s degree in history from Ohio State and is the author of Getting Around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools.
Jon Siskel is co-founder of Siskel/Jacobs Productions (SJP). Siskel has developed, produced and directed documentaries filmed on location in Africa, Mongolia and Southeast Asia. He was executive producer and co-creator of the series “Fake Out,” which ran for two seasons on Court TV. Siskel has also produced shows for several A&E series, including American Justice, Investigative Reports, and Biography. Siskel’s work has been aired on the Discovery Channel, the Travel Channel, and the History Channel.
Kartemquin Educational Films is a Chicago-based educational documentary production company. For 40 years, Kartemquin Films has been making documentaries that examine and critique society through the stories of real people. Kartemquin’s first film in 1966, Home For Life -- a powerful chronicle of two elderly people entering a home for the aged, established the direction the organization would take over the next four decades. Kartemquin’s most recent documentary, Golub: Late Works are the Catastrophes, which revisits the American artist Leon Golub 13 years after Kartemquin’s initial film on his work (Golub, 1990), is currently being broadcast across the country on P.O.V.’s “True Lives” series.
JJ Hanley’s Internet productions bring websites to life. Recent projects include One World, a call-to-action clip branding the anti-poverty mission of a global development think tank, and Common Ground, the story of an up-and-coming, visionary leader of a youth organization promoting religious pluralism in a post-9/11 world.
She conceptualized, developed and produced Refrigerator Mothers, about mother’s who were blamed for causing autism in their children the 50s and 60s. The film won multiple awards, including Best Documentary at the Sedona International Film Festival, 2002 and the Grand Jury Award at the Florida Film Festival, 2002. She has also managed project and client communications for a national PBS business series with emphasis on web-based interfaces.
A breadth of real-world, global experiences contribute to JJ’s grasp of the promise and possibility of new media to address the cultural challenges brought on by globalization. She lived in Turkey, revolutionary Iran, Spain and Mexico, and spent several years trading financial securities in New York and London before becoming a writer/producer. JJ graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College and speaks Spanish.
Justine Nagen is Kartemquin Films’ Director of Communications and Distribution as well as the Associate Producer on Kartemquin’s’ documentaries Terra Incognita: Exploring the World of Stem Cell Research and The One and The Many. She is also currently developing Typeface, a documentary short on American typography and graphic design. Prior to these projects, she worked with Kartemquin on development of the series, The Learning Chronicles while earning her Master’s Degree in the Humanities with an emphasis on Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago in 2004. Other recent Chicago experience includes teaching at the Hyde Park Art Center, as well as working as a Theatre Manager at the Cadillac Palace and Thorne Auditorium for the Chicago International Film Festival and as a summer Fellow for The HistoryMakers, an African-American video oral-history archive.
Before moving to Chicago, she produced promotional spots for Public Television, directed the post-production department for a small media firm and worked for various other companies ranging from M&C Saatchi in Sydney, Australia to Michael Feldman’s “Whad’Ya Know?” on National Public Radio. Justine received her Bachelor’s Degree in Film and Journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 2000.