Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story

An engaging look at the fascinating subculture of the song-poem industry, where a dream and a song come together as ordinary people mail in their poems to be set to music for a fee.

Series
Independent Lens, True Stories
Premiere Date
February 11, 2003
Length
60 minutes
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Producer

Jamie Meltzer

Jamie Meltzer is a documentary filmmaker and professor in the MFA Program in Documentary Film at Stanford University. His award-winning documentaries have screened at Berlinale, Hot Docs, SXSW, and Tribeca, broadcast on PBS and as New York Times Op-Docs, and supported by the Sundance Institute, MacArthur Foundation, and ITVS.

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The Film

Off the Charts is a fascinating, hilarious, and at times unsettling film that explores the strange underworld of the song-poem industry. In this little known subculture, "ordinary people" respond to come-on ads in the back pages of magazines ("Send in Your Lyrics—Make $50,000 in Royalties!"), mailing in their heartfelt but often bizarre poems to music industry companies that, for cash, set those poems to music.

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