Now, Meet The Dockers

By RICHARD CORLISS

No film genre has a less sexy name. Documentary: a five-syllable word that smells of parchment and sounds like homework. Who goes to the movies for a civics lesson? If people want to be harangued about how rotten the world is, they can listen to talk radio.

But get folks into a documentary, and they can't stop talking about it. In the past two years, Fahrenheit 9/11 had audiences proclaiming Michael Moore as savior or anti-Christ. Super Size Me, that Big Machiavellian experiment in fast-food bingeing, made a star of director and guinea pig Morgan Spurlock. Capturing the Friedmans posed a troubling mystery about a seemingly nice suburban family that viewers had to resolve for themselves. And Winged Migration turned every moviegoer into an awestruck ornithologist. The moral: films needn't serve as just pacifiers or pulse racers. That's what Hollywood does. Get people arguing, thinking. Stir them to anger or awe. That's docu-tainment.

This year, in a summer full of remakes and comic-book movies, documentaries are getting even more attention. They also have the feel of Hollywood movies: less docu-, more -tainment. And after half a dozen Bush-bashing agit-docs last year, the plexes are suddenly short on political nonfiction. If there's a Fahrenheit 9/12, it might be Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares, a thoughtful, corrosive analysis of political and religious fundamentalism that won cheers at last month's Cannes Film Festival--but its U.S. release will probably be deferred until 2006. For now, the emphasis is on personal stories--inspirational tales of those who overachieve against all odds.

There are the inner-city kids of Rize, who raise local spirits by dressing up in clown costumes and performing an impossibly energetic, strenuously graceful "ghetto ballet." Or the Dominican preteens in New York City who take up ballroom dancing in Mad Hot Ballroom, or the music students in Rock School. And though the quadriplegics who play a brutal form of wheelchair rugby in Murderball are gruff, grown men, they too are capable of uplift. "I'm alive," says one. "I use everything I have, to get through life. That's what we're all here to do. Use everything we have."

These are subjects we have seen on TV or in specialty cinemas. But the new dockers--documentary filmmakers--want to reach everyone they can. "From Day One I wanted to make a film that was for the cineplex, not for the art house," says David LaChapelle, the hip magazine photographer and video director making his feature debut with Rize. "I wanted to make a broad, popular film. I come from pop art, and I wanted to make a film that was popular."

They also aim to show, not tell. Moore is a terrific salesman for his point of view, but the new dockers avoid the omniscient narrator, who conjures up dusty memories of driver-safety films. "Documentaries used to have that should factor," says Dana Adam Shapiro, who co-directed Murderball with Henry Alex Rubin. "Like, you should know about the horrors of Vietnam. But it wasn't entertaining. We wanted to make a movie about these quadriplegics, not a movie about quadriplegia. We wanted it told from their perspective, which is why we shot much of the film from a wheelchair. We've kicked away the soapbox. We aren't preaching at you. We also tried to shoot, edit, score and pace it like a feature film. We chose subjects who had, if there is such a thing, star quality. We tried our best to make the movie not look and feel like a documentary."

Shapiro may be exaggerating the public's docuphobia. Consider how quickly the home audience tired of sitcom verities and embraced the supposedly factual dramas laid out in Survivor and its spawn. If reality TV can take over, why not reality Moo-V?

Or reality MTV. That network's film division is distributing Murderball--which Shapiro says is "definitely more MTV than PBS"--and will give it plenty of on-air promotion this month. MTV's kid brother, Nickelodeon Movies, put money into Mad Hot Ballroom. When dockers go to Nick and MTV rather than to the New York State Council on the Arts for support, something has changed. Docs have stopped relying on government sponsorship which was drying up anyway) and found allies in the marketplace. Mark Zupan, one of the "stars" of Murderball, will be part of Reebok's "I Am What I Am" campaign. And at the Cinemark multiplex in Long Beach, Calif., a 6-ft. cutout display of Rize rubs cardboard shoulders with a life-size Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

The real-life Pitt has done right by Shapiro. The actor's production company has optioned Shapiro's novel The Every Boy and signed Shapiro to write and direct the movie version. "My goal was to make a great documentary, not to get a job in Hollywood," Shapiro insists. "But it's not a bad by-product."

Shapiro will join a distinguished roster of filmmakers who either got their start in docs or frequently return to them. Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston and William Wyler all directed World War II docs. Robert Altman made his feature-film debut in 1957 with The James Dean Story. Martin Scorsese has made nearly as many documentaries as fiction features. (His study of Bob Dylan premieres on PBS in September. He is also in talks to do a film on Airbus.) Such notables as Jonathan Demme, Spike Lee, Taylor Hackford and Michael Apted still shuttle from one form to the other. Werner Herzog, the world-class German auteur, has completed three superb docs--The White Diamond, Wheel of Time and Grizzly Man--each one as mystical and magical as the most surreal fiction film.

Whatever the level of artistry or popular appeal, the documentary is no longer ashamed. "When Hoop Dreams came out in 1994," recalls director Steve James, "it hid the fact that it was a documentary." Sheila Nevins, who oversaw the excellent America Undercover series for HBO, concurs. "When we started," she says, "we used to try to not call our programs documentaries for fear the public would run away from it. Now we can't wait to use it."

The old word doesn't stink of parchment anymore. To Hollywood, it smells like money. --Reported by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles

With reporting by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles