The Sun (Baltimore)
July 3, 1998
Baltimore film maker made
'Waco'
Screening: Former disc jockey Dan Gifford comes home Sunday for a three-day
run of his Oscar-nominated documentary, 'The Rules of Engagement.'
By Ann Hornaday
Sun Film Critic
Baltimore radio fans may be surprised to learn that Dan Gifford -- who
was a disc jockey at WBMD and WCBM in the 1960s -- will return to Baltimore
on Sunday, not as a radio personality but as a film maker.
And not just any film maker. Gifford, a 1966 graduate of Baltimore Polytechnic,
is the Producer and co-Executive Producer, with wife Amy Sommer Gifford
of "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," the Oscar-nominated documentary
about the 1993 stand off between Branch Davidian leader David Koresh
and the federal government.
It will be Gifford's second visit to Baltimore with file film, which
had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996. In March,
"Waco" was featured as part of the Human Rights Watch International.
Film Festival showcase at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
According to Gifford, the message of "Waco" -- is that the U.S. government
not only mishandled the 51-day siege, but 'also started the fires' that
claimed 76 lives, has proven difficult to take on the college campus
circuit.
"We got a lot of flak for bringing it over there from the [JHU] administration,"
said Gifford -in a recent telephone interview, adding that he attributed
the resistance to the university's dependence on government research
money. But Gifford was just as disappointed in the Hopkins audience.
"The people at Hopkins who came to see the film couldn't care less about
mass murder in the U.S.," he said. "It's class warfare. They're looking
at the Davidians and saying, 'They're religious, and I'm not, I'm highly
educated, they're not.' They'd like to see people like the Branch Davidians
taken out of the gene pool. What strikes me is that these are the same
people who would absolutely rip everybody about the world's failure
to stop murder in Bosnia or clitoridectomies in Africa. They still get
bent out of shape about Kent State and the Gulf of Tonkin. It's very
elitist."
Gifford, who is in Denver producing the fiction feature "The Hungry
Bachelors Club" with Amy Sommer Gifford lived in Baltimore as a teen-ager.
His mother taught medicine at Johns Hopkins University and his father
worked at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.
Gifford left Baltimore m 1969 and went on to pursue a career in television,
news, 'ultimately working as a reporter for CNN and the MacNeil/Lehrer
News Hour. (Sommer Gifford worked for "A Current Affair" and Maury Povich.)
In 1995, Gifford met a man who had followed the Branch Davidian siege
closely and continued to investigate it independently after it was over,
had acquired some infra-red videotape taken by the FBI and wanted Gifford
to package the material into a one-hour documentary.
"It was quite by accident," Gifford recalls of getting involved with
'Waco." "If we had had a [fiction] project like 'The Hungry Bachelors
Club,' we never would have done it. We 'thought it would be an hour
long thing, but we kept finding more and more stuff. It wouldn't fit
into an hour. It was far more complex.
"It's just about intellectual honesty," Gifford says of the controversial
conclusions the film reaches. "It's what Cliff Barrett, my news director
at WCBM, always said. It's just a matter of determining what the facts
really are and telling the public so they can make an informed decision."
"Waco: The Rules of Engagement" opens today at the Charles Theatre for
a three-day run. After the film's final screening at noon Sunday, Gifford
will be on hand to answer questions. Later that day, the film will be
shown at the Libertarian Party's national convention in Washington.
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