Product Description
A Lawyer Walks Into A Bar is a lurid tale of lawyers and lawsuits and America's fascination with both. To sue or not to sue, that is the question. The documentary explores the influence of the law and its practitioners on American culture, while following six characters as they do whatever it takes to become lawyers themselves.
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Review
Writer-director Eric Chaikin's feature-length documentary A Lawyer Walks Into A Bar. . . offers a witty, seriocomic look at myriad aspects of the American legal process and judicial system. It hones in on six individuals, all prospective attorneys at the time of the film's production, and follows them through trials and travails as they approach and take the formidable bar. Chaikin then uses the subjects' stories as springboards to broader digressions on U.S. litigation. The film features a myriad of celebrity guest appearances, from both well-respected attorneys and entertainers. Participants include: attorneys Alan Dershowitz, Mark Lanier and Joe Jamail; comics Eddie Griffin and Michael Ian Black; TV commentators John Stossel and Nancy Grace, and many others. --NY Times
...Eric Chaikin's A Lawyer Walks Into A Bar... sounds like the start of a joke, but it s anything but. Instead, the sophomore effort from the director of the Scrabble documentary Word Wars takes a similar approach to a documentary that chronicles the lives of five attorneys-to-be who are studying for the bar exam. Of course, there s natural suspense to whether all six will pass the test or not, particularly in the case of Donald Baumeister, a 41 time flunkee of the California State Bar, and Chaikin intersperses the film with testimonials from such notable names as Alan Dershowitz, Vernon Jordan, Scott Turow and Nancy Grace. However, Chaikin brings the humanity out of this half dozen wannabe sharks and ultimately, they re the real stars of the film. --Premiere.com
...With his writing partner Mike Thompson, Brandon Camp has made a tidy living writing Hollywood screenplays, including the Kevin Costner thriller Dragonfly and the Fox pilot John Doe. Now, Brandon, Mike and Dallasite Jonathan Osborne are turning to the documentary genre. The trio is executive-producing the feature-length doc A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar. "The film takes a lighthearted look at the legal system in America, as seen through the eyes of six characters who are preparing for the California bar exam, which statistically is the most difficult to pass in the country," Brandon says. "The LA mayor, two governors and the dean of the Stanford law school all failed it at least once." Apparently, failing the California exam only once is no biggie. One of the characters in A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar is an ex-Marine who has failed the test 41 times. Sprinkled throughout the film are interviews with lawyer Robert Shapiro, CNN's Nancy Grace , Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, Texas trial lawyer Joe Jamail and Monica Lewinsky's former reference, Vernon Jordan. Director Eric Chaikin (Word Wars) is about three weeks from finishing the master print, but rough cuts have been submitted to the Tribeca, South by Southwest and AFI Dallas film festivals. --Dallas Morning News
About the Actor
Sam Garret, Tricia Zunker, Donald Baumeister, Magda Madrigal, Meagan Meadows, and Cassandra Hooks are all law students trying to pass the 2006 California Bar Exam.
About the Director
Eric Chaikin (Director/Producer) most recently helmed Word Wars: Tiles and Tribulations on the Scrabble Circuit, which premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, aired as part of the Discovery/Times Channel's "Screening Room" series, had a successful theatrical run distributed by Seventh Art Releasing, and was nominated for a Documentary Emmy. He is a Cognitive Science major from Brown University and originally hails from Staten Island, NY. After making this film, he has no plans to become a lawyer.
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