Verite’s very hot days

It was the Saturday night before the Oscars. A spate of glitzy bashes for Hollywood insiders and film fans alike was in gear. A 10 p.m. screening of Nathaniel Kahn’s “My Architect” was the last offering on the International Documentary Assn.’s DocuDay presentation of the Academy Award nominees -- an unlikely destination for all but the die-hards.

Think again. The Writers Guild of America theater was packed, clearing out only at the conclusion of the post-screening Q&A; with the filmmaker and the editor around 1 a.m. People, many of whom had been on the premises since morning, had to wend their way around the cleaning staff.

“We sold 405 all-day passes compared to 277 last year -- doubling our ticket revenues,” said IDA Executive Director Sandra Ruch. “Even more amazing, 100 of them were sold prior to the announcement of the nominees. That’s a blank check, a vote of confidence in documentaries, as a whole. Theater owners take notice: If you show them, they will come.”

Once relegated to public broadcasting, cable channels or independent film festivals, the genre is increasingly viewed as popular entertainment worthy of big-screen play. Though many documentaries still face an uphill battle, Hollywood’s perpetual stepchildren are finally getting seated at the grown-ups’ table. They’re making money. They’re easier to finance and market. And they are increasingly feeding an adult appetite in a movie world that is more often aimed at teenagers.

“Not to say that every documentary does business,” said Sony Pictures Classics co-President Michael Barker. “But those of a certain quality can break out in a way they couldn’t have done before.”

Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning “Bowling for Columbine” was a breakthrough, everyone agrees. Moore has become a movie star of sorts, a media personality who gives the genre more mainstream legitimacy. Broadening the definition of a documentary to include “attitude” and “advocacy,” his 2002 film grossed a record-setting $21.6 million.

“For a documentary to take in that kind of money was a mind-altering experience, breaking down barriers for the consumer, the media and distributors,” said ThinkFilm theatrical distribution head Mark Urman, who released “Spellbound,” a film about eight teenagers competing for the 1999 National Spelling Bee. “Within 10 hours of the first screening at the Cannes film festival, [“Columbine”] was sold for multiple millions of dollars -- many times the norm.” Typically, documentaries don’t make enough to warrant that kind of money, he notes. That “Columbine” did “emboldened others to do the same.”

The enhanced profile of documentaries was reflected in this year’s Oscar race, adds Urman, who will have released four nonfiction films by the end of the summer. The controversy fueled by “Capturing the Friedmans,” in which the filmmaker was accused of favoring convicted child molesters Arnold and Jesse Friedman, is a sign the genre has “arrived,” Urman maintains.

“Who would have wasted time blasting ‘Nanook of the North?’ ” he asks. “People are spending a lot of money on campaigns, with publicists on each coast, VIP screenings, and, occasionally, full-page ads.”

‘Two zeroes’ no more

Three of this year’s Academy Award nominees -- the Oscar-winning “The Fog of War” (whose total tally could reach $10 million), “Friedmans” ($3.1-million gross) and “My Architect” (doing well in limited release) have scored relatively big at the box office, just as “Spellbound,” “Winged Migration” and IMAX’s “Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure” did in recent years.

When it comes to box office receipts, “two zeroes” -- Errol Morris’ answer to a question about the difference between drama and documentaries -- no longer applies. And commercial appeal, said to have worked against movies such as “Hoop Dreams” and “Crumb” in past Oscar competition, no longer connotes “anti-intellectual.”

This year, all of the nominees had extended theatrical runs far exceeding eligibility rules -- a first for the motion picture academy. And last September, 15 documentaries were playing in nearly 300 locations, according to IndieWIRE.com. In the coming months, Stacy Peralta’s surf-culture film “Riding Giants,” “The Corporation” (filmmakers Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar’s examination of the corporation as social institution), Harry Thomason’s “The Hunting of the President” (a look at the campaign to discredit the Clintons), and Jonathan Demme’s “The Agronomist” (a portrait of an assassinated Haitian human rights advocate) will find their way into neighborhood theaters.

These films, though strong, are no better than previous releases, industry insiders maintain. But they’re benefiting from fiscal and technological changes in the industry -- as well as the current mind-set. “Reality” is the buzzword of the moment, with “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” dominating the small screen. Adults hungry for more than headline news -- or Hollywood’s adolescent-oriented releases -- are seeking more in-depth coverage and real reality fare.

“The intellectuals in society, who still exist, and some of the average Joes, want to see a more complex version of reality than ‘Headline News’ ... something richer than a sound bite,” “Capturing the Friedmans” director Andrew Jarecki observes. “And documentaries don’t have their sharp edges shaved down, unlike studio films made by committee.”

The documentary cause has also been served by the growth of art houses geared more toward audiences interested in “Osama” than “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” notes former IDA President Michael Donaldson. Cable outlets such as the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Lifetime and the History Channel are key buyers of documentaries aimed at their niche markets.

“On the theatrical front, the proliferation of multiplexes does away with the need to fill movie palaces,” he said. “Moore is lobbying theater owners to dedicate one screen in each of them to the documentary form.”

Battles won

“The Year of the Documentary,” as it’s been called, stands in contrast to the 1990s, when the academy’s Board of Governors twice voted to phase out Oscars for documentary shorts, which were perceived as TV fare. Fighting back, documentarians won both of those battles -- and an even bigger victory in 2001 with the creation of a documentary branch.

“There’s a covenant of sorts,” says Oscar-winning documentarian Freida Lee Mock (“Maya Lin”), one of three governors from the 128-member branch. “They gave us a direct voice in the governing of the academy and acknowledged the importance of the genre. In return, we make sure our movies have a strong theatrical presence. It’s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, after all.”

New procedures also changed the selection process. The documentary committee responsible for choosing the nominees used to consist of volunteers from each of the academy’s branches such as acting and directing who as a group had to screen all 60 to 70 films. That eliminated many busy professionals. The documentary branch, in contrast, consists solely of documentarians who now view a more limited number of films -- on tape, until the nominees are chosen, which allows for a broader geographical mix.

Gone are the days when an Oscar-nominated film could be turned off after a short time if enough members of the documentary committee were unimpressed. Those disinclined to continue had only to turn on their flashlights during the screening and it was on to the next. “The process has been reformed,” Jarecki said. “There’s a bigger group making the choices -- one with more wide-ranging taste.”

Not everyone is impressed, however. “Documentaries should be treated no different from other films in the academy,” Morris says. “Instead of being ghettoized, voted on by documentarians, they should be submitted to a mass vote.”

Robert Redford and his Sundance Film Festival have adopted an egalitarian approach, screening the same number of films in both the fiction and nonfiction competition. The 8-year-old Sundance Channel, another longtime supporter of the genre, aired more than 150 documentaries last year. By all accounts, however, HBO is the 800-pound gorilla in terms of licensing for broadcast. The company was involved with six of the eight feature-length and short documentary nominees this year, acquiring “The Agronomist” within days after it was picked up for theatrical distribution.

Most telling of all, some companies are now getting in on the ground floor, financing a movie from the get-go. PBS -- a veteran supporter of documentaries -- partly funded “The Weather Underground,” a 2004 Oscar nominee, and Sony Pictures Classics plunked down $1.5 million for “Fog of War” before the first frame was shot.

“ ‘Fog’ is a film made to be shown in theaters rather than on TV,” Barker says. “The Philip Glass score is as intricate as the one he composed for ‘The Hours.’ ‘Winged Migration’ looked like ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ -- as though it was shot by David Lean. There are as many [editing] cuts in ‘Fog’ as in a major motion picture. And the sound design, honored by the Sound Guild, was as complex as for ‘Lord of the Rings.’ These kinds of films used to be few and far between.”

Technological changes have also fueled the documentary boom, making it possible to access target audiences without expensive media buys. E-mail lists advise art-house patrons what’s coming and when. And people logging on to Amazon.com to buy “American Splendor” are advised that others who bought that DVD also enjoyed “Capturing the Friedmans.” Digital cameras, tailor-made for a genre that relies on spontaneity rather than visual perfection, make it easier -- and cheaper -- to shoot and edit. DVDs are even more important in terms of the bottom line, a format especially popular with movie buffs, who are drawn to the supplementary footage.

Film historian Richard Schickel has shot short documentaries for the back-ends of DVDs and had his “Chaplin,” a portrait of the Little Tramp, and “Shooting War,” a look at combat cameramen in World War II, packaged in DVD boxed sets. A lucrative DVD deal, he says, is often the final piece in the financial puzzle and a crucial new revenue stream.

“ ‘Chaplin’ did $14,000 in one weekend on one screen in New York -- huge by documentary standards,” he said. “Then, it’s brought out on DVD, with theatrical reviews driving the sales. I don’t want to sound like a cockeyed optimist -- it doesn’t happen all the time. But it’s a far better place to be than 10 years ago when opportunities were more limited. The Year of the Documentary is not a fad but testament to an utterly changed business.”

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Two-way successes

Oscar-nominated films that have scored commercially and raised the documentary profile in recent years:

QUEST: “My Architect” director Nathaniel Kahn sought truth about his celebrated father.

SCANDAL: “Capturing the Friedmans,” about a family toppled amid a criminal case.

VIETNAM ERA: Robert McNamara in Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning “The Fog of War.”

TWIN BEAKS: African white pelicans in the French import “Winged Migration.”

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A genre’s bright prospects

Coming documentaries that are generating buzz in the independent film community:

BUSINESS: “The Corporation” addresses the impact of such institutions.

HANG 10: “Riding Giants” is directed by Stacy Peralta (“Dogtown and Z-Boys”).

STRATEGIST: James Carville in “The Hunting of the President.”

Elaine Dutka can be contacted at [email protected].