from The Globe and Mail: two feature films change their release dates to avoid being “trampled” by Fahrenheit 9/11. Not that I have any doubt of how it’ll end up. White Chicks will still win the weekend. But at least it’s a tiny shred of sensibility in the movie world.

The new blockbuster docs
Once relegated to public television, documentaries are muscling in on feature films at the box office
By SIMON HOUPT
From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail

New York — It is the epitome of high-stakes Hollywood gamesmanship. Every year, movie studios plant flags on days they consider to be prime real estate to launch their planned summer blockbusters, warning potential competitors to steer clear or face destruction. Backing away from an intended release date is a sign of weakness. But early this month, two movie studios quietly made an inauspicious sort of history by doing something no studio had ever done in the history of Hollywood: They each moved the release date of a feature film to avoid getting trampled at the box office by a documentary.

Not just any documentary, mind you. Sony Pictures moved up the Wayans brothers comedy White Chicks by two days and MGM delayed its launch of the Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely by a week to avoid competing for audiences and movie screens with Michael Moore’s anti-George W. Bush screed Fahrenheit 9/11, which opens in Canada on Friday. The studios’ defensive move illustrated more than just the power of Moore to draw a crowd. It acknowledged the growing might of documentaries at the North American box office.

This season may just be remembered as the summer of blockbuster documentaries. True, no non-fiction feature is going to compete for the box-office crown with Shrek 2, but audiences are demonstrating an unprecedented desire to pay for the type of film people used to think belonged in the sleepy backwater of public television.

For three weeks this spring, Super Size Me, a film tracking one man’s quest to ruin his health by gorging on McDonald’s fast food, landed in the top-10 listings of the weekend box office, marking the first time in history a non-concert documentary had achieved that feat. Not even Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine managed to crack the weekend top 10 during its long run in the fall and winter of 2002, despite winning an Oscar for best feature documentary.

In July, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, will open on more than 500 screens across North America. The heavy-metal band’s rabid fan base is expected to push the film into the upper reaches of the box office for its weekend launch, and possibly, long after.

Meanwhile the Canadian film The Corporation, having already taken in a record $1.1-million at the domestic box office, is now sucking up cash and audiences as it rolls across the United States. Out of all films playing in the U.S., it ranked second only to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in per-screen average during its opening week, a key indicator of desire among audiences, taking in more than $25,000 (U.S.) per screen.

It has all been a bit of a shock to the industry. Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of the Sundance Film Festival, said that shortly before the release of Super Size Me last month, the CEO of one of the top four cinema chains in the United States, a man who oversees more than 2,200 screens, told him the film wouldn’t make any money. “These guys haven’t changed their stripes,” says Gilmore. “They’re still very cynical about what will make money.”

Film-industry analysts say success breeds success. After a film like Bowling for Columbine hits the jackpot, distributors are more willing to put up money for advertising and marketing, which then helps propel the success of other films.

Unlike many documentaries of the past, the new films are fiercely unobjective and usually have a political or social agenda articulated by the filmmaker who plays a central role in the film. “The big docs tend to have a persona in front of them with which the audience identifies,” says Gilmore.

They also borrow one element that helps make Hollywood films so successful. “Large-audience films are often about bad guys and good guys,” observes the noted Canadian cinéma-vérité documentarian Allan King. “To be in a large crowd is to become anxious, to become anxious is to regress, and you can argue that listening to stories of Good and Evil is characteristic of childhood.

“Often, more complicated ways of looking at things are less popular and more demanding to pursue.”

Some of the traditional documentary-makers who value objectivity over agendas are dismayed by the evolution. Fred Wiseman, the dean of American documentary filmmakers, pointedly refused comment last year when asked about Moore’s approach and his self-promotional style.

The new docs have other similarities with popular Hollywood films. Most of the documentaries in the past decade to win an Oscar were concerned with historical issues, either heartbreaking tales from the Holocaust or vexing accounts of the U.S. civil-rights movement. Indeed, this year’s winning film, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, revisited old ghosts from the Vietnam War. But the new popular docs all address issues that are burning up the evening newscasts and they have all been turned around speedily in the editing suite to capitalize on the current interest in their subjects.

Because of their timeliness, the films benefit from the cross-pollination of controversy. Super Size Me prompted sputtering outrage from nutritionists in the pocket of the food industry, inspiring op-ed articles and even copycat films in progress that aim to show eating at McDonald’s can be, as the fast-food company claims, part of a healthy diet. The Wall Street Journal took on The Corporation in its news pages, offering the last word to the noted free-marketeer Milton Friedman, a critic of the film’s message.

“When documentaries get feature-film attention — either from newspapers or electronic media — that drives people to the theatres,” said Sundance’s Gilmore, who notes that none of the films refers to itself in advertising as a “documentary,” perhaps because that term still carries a whiff of preciousness.

The most pressing contemporary issues today in the U.S. concern the actions of the Bush administration toward terrorism and Iraq, issues forcefully tackled by Fahrenheit 9/11. The trade newspaper Variety reported last week that research by the firm Nielsen NRG, which tracks developing interest among audiences for upcoming movies, found Fahrenheit 9/11 was the first choice this weekend of 4 per cent of moviegoers, more people than listed either the Hollywood romance The Notebook or Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adventure Two Brothers.

In fact, the distributor Lions Gate Films said demand for Fahrenheit 9/11 is so high it chose to open the film in two cinemas in New York before its national release. The movie will take up three screens in one theatre alone on the liberally inclined Upper West Side of Manhattan, Michael Moore’s own neighbourhood. A campaign by the liberal grassroots organization MoveOn to raise awareness of the film is seeking to have 100,000 pledge to attend a showing on Friday. As of midday yesterday, only five days after the campaign kicked off, more than 108,000 MoveOn members had made the pledge.

The new wave of popular docs even threatens to swamp some of the smaller fish in the non-fiction sea. Sarah Goodman, an independent filmmaker whose Army of One won the Best Canadian Feature prize at this year’s Hot Docs festival, sent out an e-mail yesterday to her friends asking them to support this weekend’s brief theatrical release of her film in Toronto. “Our challenge now is to get people out to see it in the face of the bigger blockbuster films,” it read. “We can’t compete with the star power and dough of Michael Moore.”