From Iowa Caucus to Kurt Cobain, Edwardsville man enjoys successful producing career

Edwardsville native A.J. Schnack has a knack for producing successful documentaries.

After graduating from Edwardsville High School in 1986, Schnack, who directed the “30 for 30” special on the the 1998 record home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, earned a degree in broadcast news, worked at a TV station as a reporter and weekend anchor, and then moved to L.A.

He founded Bonfire Films of America in 1995 with Shirley Moyers, his wife. Their music video credits include blind-182, Incubus, Edwyn Collins, 311, Cake, Ben Folds Five and OK Go (Grammy Award-nominated for “All Is Not Lost.”)

The band They Might Be Giants was the subject for his first feature-length documentary in 2002, “Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns.”

Schnack works with other filmmakers, such as being an editor on Michael Rapaport’s “Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest” (2011), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Producers Guild Award for Best Documentary, and was a cinematographer on Robert Greene’s “Actress” (2014), which was nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Documentary.

His fascination with politics and love of music have led him to various projects, with the goal in mind to take something people think they know and then strip away what’s in their heads and get back to its roots.

His acclaimed 2006 documentary “Kurt Cobain About a Son” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was nominated for a 2007 Independent Spirt “Truer Than Fiction” Award

In 2007, he founded Cinema Eye Honors, which awards excellence in nonfiction filmmaking. In 2016, Schnack received the International Documentary Association Award for Field of Vision.

That year, he directed “Speaking is Difficult,” a nonfiction short on mass shooting events that had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. He would update it to include recent mass shooting incidents, such as Parkland, Florida, in 2018, so that garnered attention, the subject of articles in the New Yorker, New York Times and others.

It received the award for Best Documentary Short Film at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan and the Special Jury Prize at AFI FEST in Los Angeles.

In 2013, Schnack’s film about Branson, Missouri, “We Always Lie to Strangers,” which he made with David Wilson and Nathan Truesdell, opened the St. Louis International Film Festival. He received the Charles Guggenheim Cinema St. Louis Award, which is annually bestowed upon a St. Louis-connected artist/practitioner for his or her contribution to the film industry. He had won the jury prize for best director at the 2013 South By Southwest Film Festival.

His movie “Caucus,” which followed Republican presidential candidates leading up to the 2012 election as they prepared for the iconic initial event in Iowa, was also shown at the St. Louis International Film Festival. He participated in Q&As at two screenings at the Wildey Theatre in Edwardsville

At the time, he said that was very special to him, to screen his films in his hometown and go to a church supper with his mom.

Covering the Iowa Caucus, 2012 election

As for covering the Iowa Caucus, he was first there in 1988 as a student journalist.

“Seeing the entire media and political circus, it was really something to see. It is an interesting piece of the American political process,” he said.

With the 2012 election, and eight candidates slogging through the state’s 99 counties, he had to record it for posterity.

“First of all, the personalities — what an amazing cast of characters. The frontrunner would change all the time. We’ll probably never see one like this for a long, long time,” he said.

U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum emerged in a different light.

Brandon Harris of Filmmaker Magazine said this about the film: “Veteran docmaker A.J. Schnack’s Caucus, a profile of six months with the Romneys and Santorums and Bachmanns and Cains and Pauls in Iowa, is one of the great political non-fiction films of our time, a worthy successor to Robert Drew’s Primary and Hegedus/Pennebaker’s The War Room.”

“Caucus” had its world premiere at the 2013 Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto and U.S. Premiere in June as the Closing Night Film at the inaugural AFI Docs in Washington, D.C. Schnack won the award for Best Director at the 2013 Philadelphia Film Festival.

His work in cinema verité politics has been lauded over the past decade, with The New York Times describing it as “a testament to the power of observational documentary.”

2016 presidential race, other productions

Two films about the 2016 presidential race, in which he spent more than a year on the campaign trail, were “Nomination,” a 10-part documentary short-form series for Vanity Fair that was nominated for an International Documentary Association award for Short Form Series, and “Primaries,” a six-part half-hour television series for the Fusion Network.

For “We Always Lie to Strangers,” Branson piqued his interest early, particularly as an entertainment mecca in a place that’s not so easy to get to — “that was obvious, it was an interesting idea.”

“What interested me was the families, the people who do three shows a day. I wanted to make it about the people who live and perform in a tourist town. The brand of Branson was fascinating to me. I was touched deep inside by these real people and their real situations. Some of it is quite powerful,” he said.

Humanity shines through in his films.

“I think these films have a deep connection to my childhood, growing up in the Midwest,” Schnack said

Just like the one he did for ESPN.

‘Long Gone Summer’

• “Long Gone Summer” produced by Edwardsville native A.J. Schnack
• The documentary chronicles the home-run record chase between the St. Louis Cardinals’ Mark McGwire and Chicago Cubs’ Sammy Sosa
• 8 p.m. Sunday, June 14
• ESPN

Keep up with Schnack on his Twitter, https://twitter.com/ajschnack, and website, https://www.bonfirefilmsofamerica.com.