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A new wave of documentaries
Conventional wisdom has it that the only documentaries that make money on the big screen are either sports movies or music films, or ones that showcase big-name comedians. In other words, if you don’t have Muhammad Ali or Madonna, Roy “Chubby” Brown or Richard Pryor, you’re stuffed. This trend, though, seems to be changing. In the US, largely thanks to Michael Moore, documentaries have become the new fad.
Moore may have antagonized certain sections of the Oscar- night audience with his anti-Bush rhetoric, but Bowling for Columbine has already garnered close to $20 million in the US. James Cameron is shortly to unveil Ghosts of the Abyss, his 3D documentary about his journey to the wreck of the Titanic. And The Kid Stays in the Picture, an account of the life and times of Robert Evans, one of Hollywood’s sleaziest, most narcissistic and self-aggrandising moguls, generated plenty of hoopla, even if it underperformed at the box office.
“Documentaries are filling the gap in the art-film market. People are bored with the art films that are available,” suggests Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald. His new project, Touching the Void — an action-adventure documentary based on the book by climber Joe Simpson, who smashed his leg while on a trip through the Peruvian Andes in the mid-1980s — has prompted a bidding war among US distributors.
LA-based distributor Neil Friedman (whose company Menemsha specializes in documentary and foreign-language fare) agrees.
“The studios are making more and more popcorn, merchandisable films — package films with no core. But there’s an audience who want to see movies about the real world who only get the opportunity to do that when they see documentaries.”
In theory, then, this ought to be a golden moment for documentary makers in the US.
That’s not how Steve James (the director of Hoop Dreams) regards it. Next week, his new documentary Stevie is finally released in the US. James freely admits that his subject, Stevie Fielding, a poor white kid from a “trailer trash” background, isn’t immediately likable. In the 1980s, James, then a graduate student, was a volunteer “big brother” to Fielding. In making Stevie, he wanted to find out what had happened to him in the intervening years and to give a platform to a type of character utterly marginalized in the mainstream US media. (“The only place you really see people of Stevie’s world is on talk shows like Jerry Springer, where they’re basically cartoon characters and mostly despicable.”)
James soon discovered that Stevie’s fortunes had fallen yet further. He was out of work and estranged from his step- grandmother. Worse, he had committed a horrendous crime, a sexual assault on a minor, for which he was sent to prison.
“When I went back to make the film, it felt like unfinished business for me...I had very mixed feelings about Stevie,” says James. “I was guilty because I had lost touch with him, but in the process of making the film — and I hope this comes across — I felt that in spite of the awful crime he commits, I was far more successful as a “big brother.” Somehow, I connected with him in a way that I never did before.”
James may have “connected” with Stevie, but US distributors and commissioning editors did not. When he pitched the project to potential backers, they almost always assumed that Stevie was black. (“Two-thirds of people on welfare in the US are white, but you wouldn’t think of that.”) They certainly didn’t want to invest in the film. One of James’s rejection letters told him: “I don’t want to see this film and I don’t know anyone who wants to see this film.”
In the end, he turned to the BBC for funding. His problems illustrate one of the key paradoxes about US feature documentaries: that they are often financed abroad. This was even the case with Bowling for Columbine, which was financed by a Canadian company.
Just occasionally, the Hollywood studios do put their muscle behind a documentary. Sony, for instance, acquires films (like Macdonald’s One Day in September that it believes have a chance of winning an Academy award. The success of Bowling for Columbine has spurred companies such as Miramax (which is shortly to release the Motown documentary Only the Strong Survive) into copycat tactics.
“That’s the Harvey Weinstein game. As soon as someone proves these things can work, everybody joins in,” one sceptical US distributor suggests of the new-found US fad.
Everybody agrees that there is an audience out there. The problem is in tracking it down. While the box-office fate of a blockbuster is generally determined over the opening weekend, that of a documentary can hang in the balance for months. Take Shanghai Ghetto, for example. A film about the German Jews who fled Nazi persecution and took refuge in Shanghai (the only major city in the world that didn’t require entrance visas), it received rave reviews when it was released in New York last September. Its distributor, Neil Friedman, then took the film on the road. Six months on, he has finally got as far as Dallas and is exhausted — but at least the movie is now in profit, having made over $500,000 on its epic journey across America.
“Documentaries can succeed (on the big screen) if they provide a cinematic experience,” insists Will Clark, whose company Optimum successfully released Lost in La Mancha (a behind-the-scenes look at Terry Gilliam’s ill- starred Don Quixote project) in British cinemas last year.
Macdonald agrees. He believes that frustration with low-grade reality TV shows and formulaic factual series may prompt audiences to take a risk on documentaries. With Touching the Void, he deliberately aimed for spectacle.
“There’s a lot of interest in adventure and in the idea of testing yourself against the environment,” he says of his film. “It’s very consciously made as a cinema film. It’s big and dramatic, full of extraordinary locations, people hanging off the top of mountains and all that sort of stuff.”
Perhaps the new wave of feature documentaries will prosper at the box office, but past experience suggests it will be an uphill battle to lure audiences away from the fireside. As one seasoned distributor warily points out after seeing a much-hyped recent release flop, “Documentaries are still what people think they have their tellies for.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
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