A ‘golden age’ of documentaries
Thirst for real stories is growing and they’re a cheaper alternative to scripted movies
NEW YORK
You’re on the couch. It’s been a long day. The remote control is in your hand. What can you watch? There’s that new CNN documentary series on the pope. Or maybe you’re more in the mood for some sinners in Girls Incarcerated on Netflix? There are cute critters on March of the Penguins 2: The Next Step or you could watch former slugger David Ortiz as he figures out his next career step.
Keep scrolling? Sure. What about a new three-part documentary about Silicon Valley on Science? How about the A&E series on adults returning to high school in Undercover High? What about some David Bowie or Elvis on HBO?
If you’re looking for documentaries these days, they’re hard to miss. Once considered more medicinal than entertaining and consigned to high-brow places such as PBS and art house theatres, documentaries are scattered across the film and TV spectrum, as well as online portals such as Facebook Watch or YouTube Red and on video streaming apps such as go90. Even NBC is getting in on the act with a documentary on Martin Luther King Jr. that aired on Saturday.
“It feels like the golden age of documentary right now,” says Josh Koury, a professor at Pratt Institute and a documentary filmmaker. “It’s an amazing time to be making documentary stories.”
Starz, which last fall began offering new documentaries for the first time, has doubled down by adding four original docuseries to its summer schedule, exploring everything from the criminal justice system to the legacy of hip-hop.
Jeffrey Hirsch, chief operating officer for Starz, says the boom owes a large part to technology, which has allowed filmmakers access to relatively inexpensive high-quality cameras and editing equipment. What has emerged for content-hungry platforms is often a cheaper alternative to scripted films and series.
“The cost of creating these stories has come down, I think. The ability to travel and to actually be your own investigative journalist has become possible. And the world has gotten smaller through technology,” he said. “So I think the opportunity to relive or retell some of these stories has become a lot more accessible.”
Showtime also has increased its output of documentaries, said Vinnie Malhotra, head of documentary programming for the network. He marvels at how much the landscape has changed from 15 years ago when docs were independently financed and had limited releases.
“There are more outlets for documentary than there ever have been before,” he said. “There’s a lot of money being fuelled into the documentary industry from newer platforms that have emerged with interest in the form of storytelling — place ssuch as Netflix, Amazon, other streaming and tech companies.”
No wonder recent documentaries have lately found themselves at the centre of popular culture, including Ava DuVernay’s 13 on the American prison system, the Oscar-winning O.J.: Made in America, The Jinx about Robert Durst, and Blackfish, for treatment of orcas. Netflix scored its first Oscar this year with the documentary Icarus.
Award-winning filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has been lured to the genre, executive producing National Geographic’s 10-episode One Strange Rock about planet Earth — and he has brought Will Smith along to narrate.
The lure of documentary making has also recently attracted Judd Apatow, known for scripted comedies such as Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Said Apatow: “I’ve probably wanted to make one for a very long time, but didn’t know how to approach it.”
In 2016, he teamed up with Michael Bonfiglio on Doc & Darryl for ESPN’s 30 for 30 series and last year’s May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers on HBO. This month he’s on his own with a fourhour HBO documentary about Garry Shandling.
“I’m endlessly fascinated by how we all deal with this life. Sometimes, it’s fun to write about it, but lately I seem much more interested in trying to capture how different people have chosen to live,” Apatow said.
“We’re in an amazing environment where, as a result of all these streaming services and cable stations, they desperately want great documentaries,” he said. “Now, we’re getting incredible documentaries. I couldn’t be happier about it.”
Many thank Sheila Nevins for bringing documentaries into mainstream popular culture during her 38-year tenure at HBO. It was Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films from 2004 until this year, who shook up the format — usually nature shows or archive footage explained by experts — with such lurid shows as Taxicab Confessions and Real Sex.
“When I arrived at HBO, docs were considered a high-brow thing. That never interested me. I didn’t care about the life of the university professor. I care about his doorman,” she says.
Under Nevins’s watch, HBO pumped out more than 1,200 documentaries, most recently with such films as the Scientology investigation Going Clear and the Oscarwinning Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden. HBO once tried to hide its offerings as “docutainment.” Now it proudly has a documentary tab on its home page.
Nevins credits the new interest to technology but also reality TV shows such as Big Brother for championing the lives of noncelebrities. “It’s the democratization of documentaries, the spotlight is on regular people and the struggles everyone faces,” she says.
What’s clear is that documentaries have come a long way since their dusty, formulaic and educational ancestors. Malhotra of Showtime credits today’s documentarymakers with being bolder, innovative and more cinematic.
“As we’ve broadened our horizons in terms of what works in a documentary, I think that the filmmakers themselves have also evolved quite a bit. I think even they’re bored of the headshotarchive-headshot-archive type of style,” he said. “We want people shaking up the format.”
One of those is filmmaker Sabaah Folayan, whose debut film Whose Streets? exposes the gap between mainstream media coverage of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and what was happening at the grassroots. It’s a documentary that’s urgent, angry, visceral — and timely, using cellphone video and tweets to tell its story.
“We’re having a kind of crisis of logic and a crisis of language where it feels like words don’t mean things anymore and nothing has to make sense,” she said. “People are more thirsty for this content. People are recognizing that they need to know about others and this is the way to do it.”