PUTTING THE ACT IN FACT
Actors used to be taboo in docs, but now they're doing heavy lifting as filmmakers use fiction techniques
The new Netflix documentary Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal carries an unorthodox tagline for a non-fiction film: “Starring Matthew Modine.” The award-winning actor plays William (Rick) Singer, whose academic-coaching business was a front for an elaborate cheating and bribery scheme to get the children of wealthy parents into prestigious universities. Director Chris Smith, best known for the documentary Fyre, wasn't particularly interested in making a film about the Singer episode unless he could find a unique way into the story.
His screenwriter, Jon Karmen, made a bold proposal: Why not use the public record — hundreds of pages of affidavits and FBI wiretap transcripts — as fodder for a screenplay, and have actors play Singer and his clients?
“I'm not one of those filmmakers looking for an opportunity to do something in the narrative space,” Smith says. “It was just a consequence of, how do you tell this story? We didn't have access to the parents, and we didn't have access to Rick Singer. The next best thing were the transcripts of these conversations between Rick and some of the people he was working with. For me, it was the closest thing we had to a window on that world.”
Blurring the lines between fact and fiction is nothing new for Smith: He made his filmmaking debut in 1996 with American Job, a fictional movie about a young man working a minimum-wage job that was so convincing, many viewers assumed it was a documentary. His second effort, American Movie (1999), chronicled the real-life exploits of low-budget filmmaker Mark Borchardt. The documentary was so funny and full of you've-gotta-be-kidding-me moments that several audiences assumed it was fiction. Now, with Operation Varsity Blues, Smith says, “it finally made sense to put them together.”
It's part of a trend in documentary filmmaking, a discipline that has historically frowned upon devices like re-enactments, dramatizations and other conceits borrowed from narrative fiction. In 2005, controversy erupted when Robert Houston's short documentary Mighty Times: The Children's March won an Oscar, despite containing undisclosed re-enacted sequences. Errol Morris's 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line failed to receive an Oscar nomination, despite its groundbreaking use of narrative techniques such as re-enactments; stylized, slow-motion insert shots; a moody Philip Glass score; and a noir-esque, whodunit structure. In fact it was just those flourishes that reportedly turned off oldschool members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' documentary branch.
Today, such tut-tutting seems as dated as the cheesy, ripped-fromthe-headlines TV movies that gave the term “docudrama” a bad name.
Morris used actor Peter Sarsgaard in his 2017 documentary series Wormwood, about the CIA's secret experiments with LSD.
In Netflix's 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma, about the malign effects of social media, filmmaker Jeff Orlowski illustrates the observations of several executives, activists and academics by way of travails experienced by a fictional suburban family, played by an ensemble featuring Kara Hayward.
Lisa Nishimura, vice-president of original documentary and independent films at Netflix, welcomes the innovations, emphasizing that they're “not about blurring the lines between fiction and reality, but really about adding to the fabric of the story when it makes sense and supports the filmmaker's vision.”
Used with ingenuity and transparency, such conceits are valid means to the end of good storytelling, says Taghi Amirani, whose 2020 documentary Coup 53, about the plot conceived by British and U.S. intelligence to remove Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh from office, includes sequences starring Ralph Fiennes as real-life MI6 operative Norman Darbyshire.
Like Smith, Amirani and his editor and co-writer, Walter Murch, had access to Darbyshire's words — in this case, the transcript of an interview conducted by the producers of the 1985 Granada Television series End of Empire. Fiennes delivers a crafty, utterly mesmerizing performance.
Despite vociferous pushback from the End of Empire team, who maintained that they never filmed Darbyshire and have criticized Coup 53 for allegedly distorting the details of Darbyshire's involvement in their film, Amirani regrets nothing. For one thing, he says, the way he staged Fiennes's scenes — where the audience can see him preparing amid lights and cables, and talking over last-minute notes with Amirani — signals its speculative nature.
The ultimate question, of course, concerns the filmmaker's unspoken contract with the audience: When we see a documentary, we assume that it will tell us, if not the truth, then at least a version of the truth that the filmmaker has been honest about shaping. For Amirani, the acid test is whether he can go home and say, “I have not misled anyone in this scene or this cut or this entire film (and) I've used the entire cinematic tool box to keep them interested and lead them through the story.”