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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Documentaries on the rise

Ed Rampell The Philadelphia Inquirer

‘I’ve always loved documentaries,” Charlize Theron told Los Angeles Film Festival moviegoers earlier this summer.

She spoke not only for herself but also for millions of other film fans.

America is in the midst of a long and increasingly deep love affair with the documentary – an affair that says much about changes in filmmaking, and a loss of confidence in the mainstream media.

“What excites me,” Theron said, “is struggle, emotions. … I don’t compartmentalize between fiction and documentary.”

She likes documentaries so much she helped make one. The best actress Oscar winner for 2003’s “Monster” was so “mesmerized by Cuba’s youth culture” she co-produced “East of Havana,” a documentary about rappers in Castro’s Cuba, which debuted at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

During the festival, one free screening was so mobbed that security forces had to close off the space, turning away disappointed fans.

Was it the red-carpet premiere of Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts’ latest blockbuster? No – it was the climate-change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” with Al Gore appearing in person.

Not since the early 20th century have nonfiction pictures been so prominent. Back then, Dziga Vertov documented Russian revolutionaries in Soviet Russia, and American Robert Flaherty made “Nanook of the North,” a 1922 film about Inuits. In Britain, John Grierson, who coined the term “documentary,” made mid-century films extolling British workers.

Now, a coming together of history, technology, changes in audience taste, and a crisis of confidence in established media have brought documentaries to the fore:

“History.

It’s a truism that post-9/11, “everything is different.” One way in which the world changed is that documentaries experienced a renaissance, led by “Bowling for Columbine,” Michael Moore’s 2002 film on U.S. gun culture, and prominent 2003 documentaries such as “Capturing the Friedmans” and “My Architect.”

By 2004, Variety reported, 19 of the top 100 films were documentaries – the highest number ever. Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me” was the first to make America’s weekly top 10 box-office listing; the anti-McDonald’s movie, made for $65,000, earned more than $28 million.

Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” with the biggest budget every for a documentary at $6 million, earned more than $250 million.

“Technology:

Equipment for making, editing and processing movies is more portable and cheaper than ever. Much of Marshall Curry’s Academy Award-nominated 2005 documentary “Street Fight,” about a mayoral primary in Newark, N.J., is single-camera, single-microphone.

Combined with new distribution venues, filmmakers can leapfrog traditional gatekeepers to make independent films and reach audiences. Producer/director Robert Greenwald, who co-created the 2004 film “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism” and several other documentaries including “The Big Buy: Tom DeLay’s Stolen Congress,” also pioneered alternative release mechanisms that include the Internet, DVDs and nationwide house parties.

Theatrical release, too, has increased, with good examples being Academy Award winners “Bowling for Columbine” and “March of the Penguins” and the Oscar nominee “Darwin’s Nightmare.”

The expanded television universe also offers a plethora of outlets, from all-news channels to cable networks such as HBO (which has made a huge commitment to documentaries), Sundance (where each Monday is “DocDay”) and Discovery, which debuted Tom Brokaw’s dire, Gorelike “Global Warming: What You Need to Know” last month.

“Audience:

Documentaries have also benefited from a paradigm shift in public viewing tastes and habits thanks to reality television.

Network series such as “Survivor,” “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and “Fear Factor” broke down genre prejudices, proving that nonfiction – traditionally considered “educational” (i.e., dull) – can be as entertaining as fictional programming.

CBS’ “Big Brother” and NBC’s “The Apprentice” have primed prime-time audiences for media and corporate exposes such as the 2003 film “Orwell Rolls in His Grave” and 2005’s “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.”

“Loss of confidence in traditional media.

Documentaries are thriving because of a widespread feeling that mainstream media outlets are not doing their jobs. And when truth is suppressed, it doesn’t just conveniently disappear: Alternative outlets appear.

According to filmmaker Greenwald: “The primary media are not giving us information to help us make … critical decisions. So people are searching for other ways to get the information. Internet, books and film are all viable ways to get points of view and perspectives in depth that we don’t get in the 30-second sound bite.”

Long considered the poor relation of feature films and network series, documentaries discovered substantial audiences because, again in Greenwald’s words, “we’re at a time of huge political import where politics are personal because it affects … whether somebody’s going to war. … That takes it out of the abstract. …

“Jobs, health care, education. … politics are not really something you debate in an academic sense in the period of time we’re living in now.”

The documentary wave isn’t all coming from the left. As conservative writer David Horowitz acknowledges: “Twenty years ago, there were 5,000 documentary filmmakers; 4,995 were left-wingers.” No more.

Horowitz’s L.A.-based David Horowitz Freedom Center recently merged with the Liberty Film Festival, which showcases right-leaning documentaries such as “Is It True What They Say About Ann?,” praising Ann Coulter; “Dead Meat,” an expose about socialized medicine; “Celsius 41.11,” writer Lionel Chetwynd’s anti-Moore rebuttal; and talk-show host Larry Elder’s film “Michael & Me,” also bashing Moore.

The Los Angeles Film Festival also screened the new Barry Goldwater biopic “Mr. Conservative.”

Documentaries often offer equal-opportunity criticism. Theron’s “East of Havana” criticizes both Communist bureaucracy (for stifling hip-hop) and Washington (for its longtime Cuba blockade).

“Films like this can make social change,” Theron said, hoping perhaps that her documentary spurs reconciliation among rappers and Fidelistas, Yanquis and Cubans.

Coming soon to a screen near you: Moore’s health-care expose “Sicko,” as well as his sequel “Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2”; Spurlock’s “The Republican War on Science”; the conservative On the Fence group’s documentary “Indoctrinate U,” a look at political indoctrination on college campuses; Stephen Marshall’s “Holy Wars,” about religious fundamentalism from the Christian right to Hezbollah clerics; and Greenwald’s “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers.”