Cable and Other Networks Cable also offered new outlets for independent producers as well as for established units, like Time-Life's ...
Cable and Other Networks Cable also offered new outlets for independent producers as well as for established units, like Time-Life's and National Geographic's. Regular documentary fare on channels specializing in nonfiction subject matter for modest-sized core audiences has tended to be formulaic, establishing the company’s “brand image,” and likely to be frequently repeated. The Arts and Entertainment channel led the field with Biography, which picked up where Wolper left off, Investigative Reports, and American Justice. Bill Kurtis is an example of a producer who took advantage of this development. After a career as a news reporter for CBS, Kurtis formed his own production company in Chicago in 1988. In the late 1990s a Kurtis documentary was likely to be seen on A&E at least once a week.
The Turner Broadcasting System likewise invested in long-form documentaries to complement its 24-hours news service, CNN. In the 90-minutes Dying to Tell the Story (1998), a young woman, Amy Eldon, seeks to understand why photographers and videographers risk their lives to cover the world’s wars and tumults. Her search was prompted by the death in Somalia in 1993 of her brother, Dan Eldon, a 22-year-old 21 Reuters photographer. Ted Turner took a personal interest in investing $12 million in the 24-part Cold War (1998-1999), a joint production with the BBC and with the same executive producer, Jeremy Isaacs, who had been responsible for The World At War in 1974. The series was criticized by some for its neutral approach, but is widely used in schools and colleges. C. Style and Subject Matter Network documentaries in the 1960s and 1970s were criticized for their institutional appearance. In the 1980s and 1990s documentary makers appeared with an individual style, which differed greatly from the traditional form. Jon Alpert, based at Downtown Community Television Center in New York’s Chinatown, is known for work that exposed the abuses of American capitalism at home and abroad, some of which was taken by the networks. He is videographer and reporter in one, speaking as he shoots. His voice, recorded live with the pictures, becomes a real time commentary, jarring to some who find it overbearing, but welcomed by others for its spontaneity and openness. In One Year in a Life of Crime (1989), Alpert tracked the escapades of three young talkative shoplifters on the streets of Newark,
New Jersey. Ten years later, in A Life of Crime Two (1998), which was shown on HBO, he returned to his subjects to see what had become of them. The film ends with a hopelessly drugged Rob, one of his original three subjects, collapsing, a total wreck, in the gutter. Errol Morris’ approach has been more cinematic, if also more stylized. He is best known for The Thin Blue Line (1988), a film about two young men in a Dallas jail and whether the right one was found guilty of a policeman’s murder. Morris shot multiple versions of the murder scene, illustrating different accounts offered by participants in the drama whose role is not explicitly identified. The trademark style of the British documentary maker, Nick Broomfield, is to include the difficulties he encounters as he pursues his subject. Broomfield holds the microphone when shooting and the camera shows him negotiating for interviews and other material as filming progresses. Viewers become party to what goes on in making the documentary and often to seedy characters and unpleasant talk. Three documentaries released on VHS are typical of this approach: Aileen Wuornos, Portrait of a Serial Killer (1992), Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood Madam (1995), and Kurt and Courtney (1997). Too great an emphasis on style risks overwhelming subject matter, but some subject matter can also place too great a burden on conventional documentary form. In Shoah (1995), Claude Lanzmann spent hours conversing about the holocaust with survivors, train drivers, technical workers, bystanders - anyone connected with the death camps - to create a 9½-hour audio-visual book of remembrance with no archive footage, but only present day landscapes and city scenes. Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), about French collaboration with the Germans during World War II, and Hotel Terminus (1988), about the life and times of the Gestapo chief of Lyons, Klaus Barbie, likewise deployed lengthy interviews. But Ophüls used archive footage and humor in unexpected ways and his editing was more subtle. Abstract ideas like evil, torture, loyalty, courage and fate are made palpable through the faces and speech of his subjects. Both films run 4½ hours. (The French state-controlled television service banned Sorrow and the Pity when it was completed in 1969. It was then shown outside France. In 1971 it 22 was screened in a movie theater in Paris where it ran for more than 18 months to record audiences. In all some 700,000 French people saw it before it was finally broadcast on French television in 1981. It then had an audience of 15 million.) The network documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s were driven by a sense of public responsibility that seemed justified by the national and international events of those decades - the Cold War, civil rights, the Vietnam war, Watergate and the impeachment of President Nixon, American embassy hostages in Iran. An air of serious purpose determined the choice of subject matter as well as the manner of its presentation. The passing of the Cold War, however, and the end of network dominance of documentary production proved liberating in both form and content to many documentary makers. At 30 minutes, Yum, Yum, Yum! (1990),
by Les Blank, offered a joyous look at cajun cooking. Hands on a Hard Body (1998), by S.R. Bindler, shot in 1995 when he was in his mid-twenties, followed 24 contestants for more than 70 hours in the hope of winning a Nissan truck by being the last to remain on their feet with a hand on the truck’s body. Unzipped (1995), by Douglas Keeve, is a portrait of a New York fashion designer, Isaac Mizrahi. Shot cinéma-vérité style, the film is as anarchic in its composition as its subject, no doubt reflecting the fast-moving world of fashion. In the late summer of 2000, Hopkins 24/7 on ABC and American High on Fox, both tried a new documentary approach - the former, of the day-to-day work of a leading American hospital, the latter of the day-to-day life of students at a high school in Chicago. Neither subject was new to the documentary, but both attempted to win new audiences to their subjects by adopting what critics have called the “docu-soap” form. The four part BBCA&E series Crusades (1995) tapped Terry Jones of Monty Python fame in the traditional role of on-camera lecturer-talent, resulting in some entertaining high jinks; Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) by the Australian Mark Lewis brought humor into a documentary about a species of toad that was rashly imported into Australia in the 1930s and now threatens to overrun the country. Lewis followed this with Rat in 1997, using a rat wrangler to provide extras in the contest between man and rodent for living space in New York City. ln the last two decades of the 20th century, then, documentaries have appeared in such a variety of forms and covering such widely different subject matter as to make it difficult to assess the value of the genre itself or the meaning of the term used to describe it. Any list of titles leaves out too many that deserve mention, let alone the hundreds of short documentaries that are regularly produced for major television events, for example, during network broadcasts of the Olympics
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