First-time filmmaker Tasha Oldham was looking to examine the life of a lesbian Mormon when she instead stumbled upon the wrenching story of Steve and Kim Smith of Salt Lake City. Turned down by a series of funders and financing the project by working as a script supervisor for the Disney Channel’s “Even Stevens” series, Oldham began filming the Smiths in 1999. She eventually amassed 100 hours of footage and in October she aired a nine-minute clip at the Independent Film Market in New York. It caught the eye of the folks at “P.O.V.,” public television’s highly acclaimed documentary series.
“They were in the final selection process” for this season’s programming, Oldham says. “They saw it, and they really loved it and they wanted to see the rough cut.” After a run at several major documentary festivals, the 79-minute film was completed only five weeks ago.
And Tuesday, “The Smith Family” — which chronicles the saga of an apparently rock-solid Mormon marriage that is turned upside down by revelations of homosexuality and HIV infection — lead off “P.O.V.’s” season on WTTW-Ch. 11.
Documentaries are popular
Once thought of as “the cod liver oil” of programming, in the words of “P.O.V.” executive director Cara Mertes, documentaries are enjoying a popular TV renaissance, finding showcases on such traditional outlets as PBS and HBO and on newer cable venues like A&E and even Court TV. Given the explosion of reality-related programming — and the proliferation of cable networks — the definition of documentary has been expanded and, in some cases, even perverted.
“There is a golden age of independent documentaries,” Mertes says. “There are a wide variety of opportunities. . . . There is huge demand for content now. . . . I think more people have access to cameras and equipment and editing systems. More people are looking at the media as a tool.”
A number of these films address the kind of hot-button issues — drugs, sex, and violence — popularized by fictional entertainment television. And no one seems to have had a better knack for pushing those buttons and generating buzz than Sheila Nevins, HBO’s executive vice president for original programming. Her fiefdom also includes Cinemax’s “Reel Life,” which on Thursday debuts a characteristically timely look at organized religion: “Questioning Faith: Confessions of a Seminarian.”
“I think maybe it started with HBO, in the sense that reality became profitable and entertaining,” Nevins says. HBO’s range of “documentaries” runs from its respected “America Undercover” series to considerably more dubious fare, such as “Taxicab Confessions.” But as Nevins notes, “if good realities could compete with movies, it can compete with dramas and series.”
Festivals are good exposure
These days, documentary filmmakers can often get crucial exposure for their work and important networking opportunites at a number of festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival, The Full Frame (formerly DoubleTake) Documentary Festival and the South by Southwest Film Festival. And the competition can be fierce. The annual submission process for the “P.O.V.” season, which this year includes 13 films, usually involves about 500 to 600 candidates.
“I’m looking for a passionate story, well told, generally about a contemporary issue,” Mertes says. “They must have a point of view. We’re not looking for journalism.” (PBS’ journalistic documentaries are in the “Frontline” series.)
One “P.O.V.” selection is “Two Towns of Jasper,” slated to air this fall. It used a black film crew and white film crew to independently examine the aftermath of the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., the black man dragged to death behind a pickup truck in Texas. Filmmaker Whitney Dow was intrigued by the case and went to Jasper to survey the racial climate shortly after the killing. The entire project took more than three years to complete, and entailed six months of fund-raising. But Mertes liked what she saw. “You have total control of your film,” says Dow, explaining the editorial process. “We had no comments from anybody on content througout the process.”
HBO’s Nevins doesn’t talk like your standard independent film impresario. She touts the cable network’s X-rated “Real Sex” series and expounds on the kind of subject matter that garners ratings: “If you take your clothes off, you get a high number. If you go to a school and . . . it doesn’t have pencils, you get a low number.”
“Yes, they have all these sex docs,” acknowledges Patricia Aufderheide, the director of American University’s Center for Social Media. But “HBO has really consolidated itself as a public voice for social issues.” Aufderheide cites the “America Undercover” documentary “Blue Vinyl,” which examined the environmental hazards of vinyl, as “the first toxic comedy.” Recent HBO documentaries have included “Southern Comfort,” a look at transsexuals on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, as well as “Monica in Black and White,” which featured the nation’s most famous ex-White House intern.
Nevins is proudest of “In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01,” which relied on material from more than 130 news organizations and private citizens. The film, she says, “was archival, contemporary, and somewhat cathartic. . . . It’s been hard to go back to work since that show.”
Tamar Hacker, executive producer of A&E’s documentary specials, is working on a film, brought to her by Julia Roberts’ production company, about three women who are more than 100 years old and have been friends for about 95 of those years. The “Escape the Ordinary” cable network shows about 12 feature-length documentaries a year, including Michael Apted’s “Married in America,” a study of nine recent weddings, which aired last week.
“Television documentaries have always been around,” Hacker adds. “It’s certainly part of our television experience.”
The genre’s legacy
That family tree, according to television historian Alex McNeil, dates to such 1950s fare as Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” on CBS or “Victory at Sea,” a 26-part series about World War II, complete with a Richard Rodgers score, that NBC broadcast. Another landmark in the genre was PBS’ 1973 series “An American Family,” which followed the trials and tribulations of the Loud clan. In the relatively recent past, Mertes credits such crowd-pleasing documentaries as “Roger & Me” (1989) and “Hoop Dreams” (1994) with dramatically popularizing the genre.
Jim Lane, executive director of Emerson College’s Los Angeles Center and the author of “The Autobiographical Documentary in America,” finds a burgeoning interest today among young people in “documentary studies. . . . I think that [things] like Madonna’s film `Truth or Dare’ had a lot to do with the kind of niche market for youth market documentary.” For some audiences, Lane says, VH1’s “Behind the Music” or MTV’s regular visits with Ozzy Osbourne and his kin represent the new wave of reality programming.
There is little doubt that the expanding cable universe is bringing a lot more programming under a widening tent of what counts as a documentary. Art Bell, executive vice president of programming and marketing for Court TV, says that when he came to the network almost four years ago, “We had to build a prime-time lineup. We [found] we could draw on our daytime court coverage for leads on documentaries we could produce.” Bell includes a number of his ongoing non-fiction programs — such as “Mugshots” and “The System” — as documentaries.
Even under the looser, more commercial definition of documentary — and the expanding opportunity that provides for films to get crucial television air time — the financial constraints, the limited resources and intense commitment required make documentary work challenging and sometimes thankless.
That’s why, on the heels of “The Smith Family,” Tasha Oldham is looking for other creative pastures.
“Documentaries have kind of beat me up,” admits Oldham, who is now “in development with a feature-length narrative film.” Her goal, she adds just a tad sheepishly, is to do a ” `Kissing Jessica Stein’ meets `Thelma and Louise.”‘
