Documentaries' popularity on rise

PARK CITY, Utah -- The possibility of plunking down $9 to see a documentary at the mall multiplex was until recently a rare opportunity. On the big screen, movies about real people in a real world were like exotic creatures -- you had to hunt them down at midnight on college campuses and in stuffy little art houses with bad seating. That is changing.

With the remarkable financial success last year of Michael Moore's Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine" -- a $3 million movie that grossed $40 million worldwide -- and the visibility of this year's awards contenders, such as "The Fog of War," "Spellbound" and "Capturing the Friedmans," moviegoers are now getting a chance to check out fresh, challenging and often funny documentaries at a theater near you.

And for the first time a documentary opened the Sundance Film Festival, the annual independent-flick fiesta: "Riding Giants," Stacy Peralta's piece about the birth of surfing and the mythological hunt for the perfect wave.

"Riding Giants" was quickly snapped up by Sony Pictures Classics for general theatrical release this year. This follows Peralta's 2001 Sundance success, "Dogtown and Z-Boys," his documentary on the gritty stoner kids who transformed the skateboard into a sport, an art form, a lifestyle. That film reached theaters in 2002.

This year's Sundance is showcasing 137 full-length films -- 91 features and a record-setting 46 documentaries. Sundance founder Robert Redford said he and his team were bowled over by the quality and new techniques of storytelling that the documentarians are bringing.

Of course, a handful of dramatic films have also broken out at Sundance and are being gobbled up by distributors and studios -- films such as Walter Salles' "The Motorcycle Diaries," about the young pre-revolutionary Che Guevara, and Zach Braff's "Garden State," about a lithium-zoned Gen-Xer getting in touch with his feelings. But the films that are generating fest-buzz are the docs, which are as punchy as any of the dramas.

There's a "beyond the shoes" look at "Imelda," the wife of onetime Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. And "Word Wars," about the lives of semipro Scrabble players who try to memorize the entire dictionary. In "The Control Room," the filmmakers probe the worldview and journalism of al-Jazeera, the Fox News Channel of the Arab world. "Dirty Work" concerns the kinds of jobs that parents warn their teenagers they are destined for unless they cram for the SATs -- the strangely well-adjusted wage-slaves who collect bull semen, empty septic tanks and apply lipstick to corpses.

Why documentaries and why now? For one thing, the public is now in the thrall of reality TV. Another reason might be a change in the documentary's style -- the best films employ the narrative techniques of feature dramas. They are driven by a compelling story -- a plot with a beginning, middle and end. They employ musical scores, crisper editing, better cinematography.

"And I think there's something else going on," says Andrew Jarecki, the director of "Friedmans." Jarecki believes mainstream audiences in the post-9/11 world are hungry for the subtlety of documentaries. "There's been such a steady diet of news that feels so black and white, good versus evil."

As it turns out, Jarecki adds, Army private Jessica Lynch wasn't blasting away with her weapon at her Iraqi foes; the teens sentenced to prison in the Central Park jogger rape case weren't guilty; the governor of Illinois concluded that some of the prisoners on death row in his state might not be guilty -- and DNA evidence proved him right.

Jarecki says documentaries often feel more real than TV news shows. "We show people as awful and wonderful and trust the audience to make up their own minds," he says.

"Everybody says this is the year of the documentary," says Robert Stone, director of "Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army," showcased at Sundance. "And it's true a lot have broken out, but a lot haven't. I think people are looking for substance. There's this heavy interest in trying to figure out the world."

Stone's film about America's homegrown terrorists, college kids in the early 1970s who went on a murderous bombing and bank robbing spree that culminated with the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, is a textbook case of how zealotry, paranoia and feelings of impotence can combine to produce people who would steer jetliners into tall buildings.

Some of the documentaries are traditional, in the sense that they feel like advocacy journalism on the big screen, somber social- justice flicks, such as "Deadline" (about Illinois death row inmates)or "Farmingville" (about the tensions between illegal immigrants and locals in a Long Island suburb).

But the breakout films might be the oddballs. Morgan Spurlock, a New York director of music videos and commercials, debuts as the guinea pig in "Super Size Me," in which he commits to eating nothing but McDonald's fare three meals a day for a month. During his junk- food odyssey, Spurlock pukes up a quarter-pounder with cheese, sees his cholesterol rise through the roof, his liver become overwhelmed with saturated fats and his sex drive diminish. But the film is broader -- and includes scenes of fry-gobbling schoolkids in lunchrooms, the natural history of sugar addiction and the desperation of the clinically obese.

Finally, there's "I Like Killing Flies," by New York illustrator and music-video director (for Sting, U2, Tracy Chapman, Metallica) Matt Mahurin. It's about Kenny Shopsin, the mad-genius hectoring chef at a Greenwich Village hole-in-the-wall who profanely dishes up exotic pancakes and his Freudian-Zen philosophy about morality, butter, sex, bodily functions and child-rearing.

Mahurin's film feels as intimate as it does amateurish (see Shopsin in his closet-size kitchen with Mahurin's hand holding a microphone in the frame). Mahurin arrived at Sundance "with no machine," no publicists, posters, buttons or pre-fest buzz -- but an invitation from Sundance's review panel.

"I was sick and tired of talking about making movies," Mahurin says. He rented a digital camera, amped up the hard drive on his computer and went to work. The film cost $5,000.

"There's this thing about documentaries. If they were regular movies, nobody would buy them," Mahurin says. "They're too outlandish. People would never believe that this kind of thing could happen."

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