Document this
Documentary film maker Michael Moore has come up with an interesting suggestion.
Moore is in the beginning stages of pushing an idea that movie theaters open up more screens to documentaries.
Who knows if the idea is anything more than whistling in the dark, but here’s the outline, at any rate. Moore suggests documentarians “show them (movie production companies and theaters) a way where they can make more money than what they are making on that 15th screen or on that (expletive) night of the week when nobody’s in there”.
An interesting idea, to be sure. But for whose benefit is Moore making the pitch? Documentarians, of course. Movie production companies and theater owners might take exception to his suggestions about how they should run their businesses, especially given the average movie-going audience’s general reception to documentaries.
In three words, if you take a look at the realities of the box office, when it comes to documentaries, people don’t go.
Two documentaries in history have earned more than $25 million at the box office: “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “March of the Penguins.” Even Moor’e highly publicized “Sicko” didn’t crack $25 million.
(“Sicko” was outgrossed in 2007 by such relative bombs as “Balls of Fury,” “Hannibal Rising,” “Mr. Woodcock,” “Nancy Drew” and “Grindhouse.” All of those films, however, had about double the number of prints in theaters as “Sicko,” which is one of Moore’s points.)
Take a look at that list of top-grossing documentaries. I’ll be stunned if anyone reading this has seen half of them. I’ve only seen about a third, and as I scrolled through it, I kept finding films I’d forgotten I wanted to see. (My Blockbuster queue has exploded a bit as a result of researching this entry.)
And there are some great films on the list. “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” was one of the best films I saw in 2005. I often argue “Hearts of Darkness” is a better film than the one whose making it documents, “Apocalypse Now.” “The Thin Blue Line,” about a man wrongly convicted of murdering a policeman, is chilling.
In conversation, I often tell people “Lost in La Mancha” – a documentary about director Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to film “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” – the best film they’ve never seen. And “The Filth and the Fury,” which documents punk band The Sex Pistols more than 20 years removed from their breakthrough, is simply gorgeous and riveting, and features the unlikely sight of Johnny Rotten (Lydon), filmed in silhouette, tearing up at the memory of the death of his friend and bandmate, Sid Vicious.
Where do you fall in the whole documentary discussion? Do you think you’d go to more if they were more present in theaters? Or would you cherry pick? Or do you prefer to rent home video versions? Or would you rather see another Martin Lawrence flick? Or is the whole idea awful simply because it’s Michael Moore’s?