DOCUMENTARY: Documentary Filmmaker

John Scagliotti

John Scagliotti

A documentary filmmaker I have researched into throughout this unit is John Scagliotti. John is an Emmy Award-winning American film director, producer and radio broadcaster. He has received donors for his work on documentaries about gay rights and LGBT issues, these include 'Before Stonewall' and 'After Stonewall'. The majority of his work was about gay rights and homosexual people as he also created 'In The Life' for America, this was also America's first gay and lesbian national series. John, himself, is openly gay and was with Andrew Kopkind, who passed away. He also produced a radio show with Andrew, called 'The Lavender Hour'. 

I watched an interview with John about his series, 'In The Life' which was, like I expected, really interesting. He mentions in the interview about knowing that his show was one of the first, in the early 80's, where you could go into someone's living room and feel comfortable with watching something about gay people. He had received letters from viewers, some 16-years-old, who thanked him for allowing them to feel comfortable with their sexuality watching his show around their family. From then on John said he made it a priority to make shows which let people feel comfortable with watching them, all around the world, rather than feeling awkward when watching a gay TV show. 

He also says about at the time there were so many exciting things going on in the LGBT community. John said that the editorial choices were important in his show because they were able to put together different stories at the beginning to make viewers feel comfortable to carry on watching. 

I think this is really important because you never think about making people feel comfortable when talking about issues such as LGBT as you just want to get the point across but maybe viewers weren't interested in listening because they didn't feel comfortable watching gay TV shows. By making people feel comfortable with watching them, it's letting them listen to what it's about and ideally giving them a better attitude towards LGBT. I know I haven't really thought about making my audience feel comfortable in our documentary because we just want to get out about how bad homophobia is, as soon as we reveal that the documentary is about LGBT in football some viewers may think 'no I don't want to watch that' and turn off but that's up to them. 

Dangerous Living: Coming out in the
Developing World, 2003

In relation to my research, the other documentary which interested me by John was 'Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World', which came out in 2003. Once we decided that we wanted to look at LGBT in football, this was another one of the documentaries I looked into. Initially, I looked at this one because I wanted to see how difficult it is to come out, especially around 15 years ago when this was aired - it's supposedly meant to be more common and more acceptable to come out in 2017, as gay marriage has now been legal for a few years, so it must have been really difficult coming out back in the early 2000's.

This documentary gave me an idea into the life of a homosexual and how difficult it is, is the view we want to give to the audience. We want them to think, 'oh actually, coming out is really important and it's time that people should be able to show who they are without being scared or feeling judged'. 

Our documentary and researching 'Dangerous Living' and other documentaries have actually changed my thoughts towards homophobia in football. I never realised it was such a big issue, it's not the sort of thing you hear when watching Premier League games and I just assumed everyone just treated gay people as equal, I now know that sadly this isn't the case, because of this I want to produce a great documentary getting the word out there about homophobia in football and the abuse gay people receive. 




1. UCLA. (2014). In The Life. Available: https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/collections/inthelife/clips/john-scagliotti. Last accessed 17th May 2017
2. Cinema Politica . (2003). Dangerous Living: Coming Out In The Developing World. Available: https://www.cinemapolitica.org/film/dangerous-living-coming-out-developing-world. Last accessed 17th May 2017