2009 Cliburn sets stage for 'Surprise' documentary

Here are a few things that didn't exist in 1989, when veteran filmmaker Peter Rosen did his first in a series of documentaries about Fort Worth's Van Cliburn International Piano Competition: YouTube. Smartphones. And some of the contestants who competed in the 2009 competition.

In fact, Rosen noticed that some of the pianists featured in A Surprise in Texas, his documentary about the 2009 competition, were more at ease around camera crews than even the ones he filmed for the 2005 competition, now that he's dealing with a generation that grew up with reality TV and the Internet.

"I don't know whether it's reality TV as much as the technology," says Rosen, whose Surprise gets a national airing Wednesday on PBS stations, including KERA/Channel 13. "The cameras now are tiny.... You can go into people's homes now, you can ride in cars with them, you can be backstage, you can be in their dressing room, [and] they forget that a film is being made. Maybe because they've got so much else on their mind, but also because they don't really see any real equipment around."

The film follows the run of the three-week competition, shadowing several competitors during rehearsal and performance, showing them with their host families and working with Cliburn Competition conductor James Conlon. Among the competitors, a distinct star emerges: Nobuyuki Tsujii, the then 20-year-old blind pianist from Japan who shared the gold medal in a tie with China's Haochen Zhang, who was 19.

Some reviews criticized the documentary for focusing too much on Tsujii, and questions about that have also come up at film-festival screenings. Rosen says that it's a fair criticism, because he could have made a film just about Tsujii. But he adds that despite the contestants' overall increased comfort level around film crews, some were still reluctant to be filmed.

"Haochen Zhang was very reticent to spend a lot of time with the camera crews," Rosen says. "We sent a couple of people to the home that he was staying in multiple times, and they were politely turned away.... [But] I knew the family from some previous competitions, so when I showed up, I was able to get Haochen talking. But that's a case where no matter how unobtrusive we were, he was much more focused on what he had to do at the keyboard."

Rosen's film captures some candid moments, including when one competitor gets upset at the staff at Jake's Hamburgers, which won't serve him alcohol because he doesn't have proper ID. One of the better backstage moments occurs when Di Wu, one of the six finalists, comes offstage and repeatedly says she can't believe she survived the Cliburn. For Rosen, capturing that moment was a minor coup.

"[She] was really trying to avoid the cameras the whole time she was there," Rosen says. "We were lucky that she didn't expect [us] to be there. She was, of course, in a completely different realm, but if she would've seen the camera and wasn't at such a high emotional point, she probably would've said 'turn that off.' Because she was in the 2005 competition, and she [said at a New York] film screening that she spent too much time with the press in 2005, and that may have been one of the things that kept her from doing better."

When Fort Worth is depicted on TV, whether it's in reality shows or in the upcoming scripted NBC series Chase, the predominant images are still cowboy hats and cattle, despite the city's arts-and-culture scene. A Surprise in Texas provides a slightly different perspective, showing Bass Hall and other downtown locations. The Surprise in the title refers to something that, by now, isn't too surprising -- the tie at the end of the competition. During screenings of the movie in other cities -- this is the first of Rosen's Cliburn documentaries to get some big-screen treatment -- the "surprise" was often about Fort Worth and the Cliburn itself. And it wasn't only people from other states who were surprised.

"I spent a lot of time in Dallas, because I have friends there, and I was at the opening at the Angelika in Dallas," Rosen says. (The movie played at this year's Dallas International Film Festival.) "So many people in Dallas came up to me saying, 'Oh, my God, we're going to have to go to that Cliburn competition in Fort Worth next time.' They were so amazed and they loved it and they wanted to see it for real, and they didn't even know about it in Dallas."

Rosen's documentary, however, is focused much more on the competition than on the city. In a Dallas International Film Festival interview that appears on YouTube, Rosen says he showed more of Fort Worth in his early documentaries, but he didn't want to risk repeating himself. The city has changed a lot since 1989, though, and he has an opportunity to examine its growth if he does another Cliburn documentary.

He's not sure there'll be one, however. But then, Rosen told the Star-Telegram in 1993 that he wasn't even sure he wanted to do a second documentary, much less turn this into a series about the quadrennial competition.

"We didn't even get too excited about this one, until I heard about Nobuyuki," he says, adding that he and Richard Rodzinski, who was then the president and executive director of the Cliburn Foundation, had a lot of long talks about whether another documentary was necessary. Rosen believed that he had covered every angle in past documentaries. But as Rosen worked on the Cliburn's 2009 webcast, which was streamed live worldwide 11 hours a day for the entirety of the three-week competition, he began to see that there was material for another documentary.

"But even in 2009, we were getting tired of doing the same competition all the time," says Rosen, who has directed scores of other films, dating back to 1970. "So in four years from now, unless something even more unique than a Nobuyuki comes along, I don't see how we can do something differently."

The next competition will be in 2013 -- roughly the 50th anniversary of the Cliburn (after the first competition in 1962, the contest repeated every four years, except for 1969, when it was moved up a year to fit around other international competitions). The quasi-golden anniversary, Rosen says, may give him a reason to film it again.

"We may want to do some retrospective on the past 50 years and what went on," he says. "Every [project] you do, you want to do something new and test your imagination on how to use the medium in different imaginative and creative ways.... You couldn't ask for better partners in this kind of project, because they really let the filmmakers do their own thing."

Robert Philpot, 817-390-7872