IT’S ALL IN THE CASTING
Compelling figures usually found at core of successful documentaries
Boys State Apple TV+
The documentary Boys State follows four Texas teenagers as they navigate the title summer leadership program in their home state, an intense weeklong lesson in running for office and hard-nosed realpolitik.
The four young men occupy a range of descriptions and political positions: Ben is a person with disabilities who worships at the altar of Ronald Reagan; Robert is a preppy-looking Austinite who hopes to enter West Point; Steven, the son of Mexican immigrants, campaigned for Bernie Sanders in 2016; and René is a progressive-minded African-american who has recently moved to San Antonio from Chicago.
As Boys State chronicles their campaigns for the leadership of their parties — and, eventually, Boys State itself — the film manages to capture what turns out to be a dramatic head-to-head competition between two of the principle protagonists.
As Boys State co-director Jesse Moss said in a recent interview. “There was Plan A and then there was the abyss.”
After all, what are the chances that out of the thousands of kids who attended Boys State in 2018, Moss and co-director Amanda Mcbaine would find four perfect subjects, two of whom would go the distance? But what looks like an amazing stroke of luck was actually the result of an arduous process that’s rarely acknowledged in documentary filmmaking: casting.
Moss and Mcbaine, who are married, had spent months interviewing potential subjects, first on the phone and later in front of their camera. Because Texas is largely conservative, they also wanted to make sure they found subjects with a range of views. “We found Steven at an orientation in Houston,” Moss said. “He was this quiet voice ... but he has an old soul and a thoughtfulness and integrity . ... We just knew he was really interesting.”
By the time Moss and Mcbaine got to Boys State that June, they knew they would focus on Ben, Robert and Steven. “We knew right away that they were exceptional, complicated, interesting kids,” Mcbaine said. Then, in the middle of a meeting, René stood up and delivered a barnburner of a speech, a moment the documentary captures that was also the first time Moss and Mcbaine met him. “It was like, ‘Who is this adult in a sea of boys?’” Mcbaine said. “We cast him on the spot.”
Casting is a word usually associated with fiction filmmaking, where actors audition for roles in front of agents and a video camera, then wait nervously for callbacks and news that they got the part. (Cue Emma Stone in La La Land.) Although documentaries are non-fiction, they are just as dependent on the charisma, appeal and watchability of the people who populate them — maybe even more so than their Hollywood counterparts.
Finding the right subject is “critically important” to non-fiction filmmaking, says AFI Docs director Michael Lumpkin, who theorizes that there are plenty of films that never get made because the filmmakers are unable to find a suitable protagonist. “There’s something about the person involved that tells the filmmaker this could be a great film. I think that probably happens more than we realize: You find a story and then you start doing the research and you find the people behind the story, and then you decide (if ) there’s a film there.”
It’s rare to find an engaging film about an issue that doesn’t have a compelling figure at its core: Without the heartbreakingly sympathetic basketball players William Gates and Arthur Agee, Hoop Dreams would have just been a movie about high school sports and exploitation. Without the self-destructive, self-deceiving Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly Man might be a movie about the dangers of hubris and anthropomorphism.
Which makes it all the more impressive when an issue-oriented film winds up being a character piece. When Elyse Steinberg brought her partners Josh Kriegman and Eli B. Despres an idea for making a documentary about the ACLU, her aim was to chronicle the most pressing civil liberties cases being litigated during the Trump administration. The team began filming ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt, who had helped overturn Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017, and eventually followed four of his colleagues as they represented cases addressing transgender, reproductive and voting rights.
The resulting film, The Fight, provides a deep dive into those policies. But it’s also a surprisingly entertaining group portrait of lawyers who emerge as smart, stylish and often amusing characters in their own right — especially Gelernt, whose haplessness with technology becomes a running gag in the film.
The fact that The Fight wound up being so engaging surprised Joshua Block, who can be seen in the film working with his colleague Chase Strangio to allow transgender people to serve in the miliary. “I was like, ‘This is going to be a really boring movie,’” he said. “We’ll talk on the phone a lot and ride on trains, and who’s going to want to watch this?”
But Strangio pointed out that, in some ways, lawyers are natural performers. “Being a litigator ... has a very theatrical component to it,” he said. “Not that we’re acting, but the process of telling stories is what we also do in one way or another.”
That said, Despres acknowledges, lawyers can be counted on to stay in character, on and off the screen. “We do have outtakes of 50 million hours of people reading or typing that didn’t quite make it into this movie for some reason.”