Don’t want to show Andrew’s documentary in LA? You wish! Andrew will do it himself!

Here is a 23 March 2006 LA Times article that Andrew informed others and me in a mass e-mail.

(Oregon Public Broadcasting)

'Armenian Genocide' will show at Egyptian
With KCET-TV refusing to air his documentary, Andrew Goldberg has rented out his own theatre.
By Rachel Abramowitz, Times Staff Writer
March 23, 2006

With local PBS affiliate KCET-TV refusing to air his documentary "The Armenian Genocide," filmmaker Andrew Goldberg has decided to rent out Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre to show the film in continuous free screenings on April 17 — the same day it will be playing on most of the top PBS stations in the country.

"We will continue to screen the film that day and night as long as we have the theater," Goldberg said Wednesday.

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The filmmaker, who is paying for much of the $10,000 tab out of his own pocket, noted that "the largest market of Armenians outside Armenia is in Los Angeles."

Goldberg's one-hour documentary focuses on the Ottoman Empire's role in the massacre of at least a million Armenians during and right after World War I.

The Ottoman Empire became the modern republic of Turkey, whose government disputes that a genocide occurred, attributing the deaths instead to war, disease and starvation.

The documentary has already created a flap, in part because PBS commissioned a 25-minute panel discussion to run afterward, which featured two academics who believed that the killings constituted genocide, and two who argued that a holocaust did not occur.

An Armenian group launched an online petition against the panel program and several members of Congress complained to PBS. They argued that the network would never follow a documentary about the genocide of Jews during World War II with a panel discussion featuring holocaust deniers.

KCET said it wouldn't run either the documentary or the panel follow-up.

Bohdan Zachary, the station's executive director of programming, said it would instead air a French documentary about the Armenian genocide, which the station felt offered a more comprehensive examination of the issue.