Uncomfortable Documentaries & Narrative

“But in these plethoric times – when there is too much coarse ‘stuff’ for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor's eye, when there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty – we find ourselves by accident.
“Always before these times, the bulk of the people did not overeat themselves because they couldn't, whether they wanted to or not, and all but a very few were kept ‘fit’ by unavoidable exercise and personal danger.
“Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep himself free from pride, almost anyone can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities the sweat of your deathbed.” – H G Wells

~ ~ ~
One of the uncomfortable things about documentaries (and perhaps one major reason that certain docs are not popular) is that they present us with challenges – moral and ethical challenges, challenges to what we have ‘learned’ and to our thinking.

It is easy for the uninformed to come to an opinion – all one must do is to look at a situation and decide that it is right or wrong, entirely based on one’s preconceived notions.

But a thoughtful and well-researched documentary on a tough subject removes our ability to evade and fudge. Seeing the evidence of our thoughtless collective actions (global warming, over-consumption, wasteful uses of natural resources) puts the viewer in an uncomfortable spot, and it is a discomfort that the doc usually can’t hope to alleviate.

This is one excellent reason to include such challenging examinations into our narratives. The inclusion can be very subtle, such as one used in The Brave One, directed by Neil Jordan. The film’s protagonist (played by Jody Foster) was originally a police-beat reporter. But Foster, a self-admitted ‘NPR fanatic,’ thought that making the protagonist an NPR personality who studied New York City through its sounds.

This change served, as it turns out, a number of purposes. First, it made the protagonist much more internal and isolated from connection with people, while at the same time giving her a unique view of the world around her. Second, it solved a script problem that possibly had not come up until the change – any crime-beat reporter would have had much more knowledge of police procedure than Foster’s character had, so her naiveté would make much more sense if she had another, less-informed career. And third, NPR got some minor billing, which means that perhaps some of the audience dialed in for the first time and found something that cannot be found on standard radio.

The Brave One, while not a masterpiece, is still a solid piece of filmmaking, as might be expected from Mr Jordan. And while that single alteration in the story and script did not change the theme of the film, it did create profound changes in the film’s plot, sound design, production design, sets, and characterization.

In the case of those tough documentary subjects mentioned at the top of this piece, the narrative may come to a slightly different turn, but one no less personal in its application. Any of the tough subjects can be placed a bit in the background (what we call in journalism ‘burying the lead’) by starting the story with the person or persons most affected by the event or situation –say, the Hindi farmer facing starvation because of major climate shifts, or the havoc wreaked for local residents by land abuses such as strip-mining or deforestation. Alternately, the narrative of a documentary about over-consumption could start with the ‘birth’ of a consumer product that then goes through its ‘life’ until it is finally ‘laid to rest’ in a landfill. These techniques can potentially humanize the themes of a project, making it more accessible to more segments of the audience.

So while we are focused on the narrative during this time of our Caligari Narrative Contest, it would be good to review such alterations in narrative that can enliven or otherwise enhance a story. ‘Narrative,’ derived from the Latin verb narrare (‘to recount’), is related to the adjective gnarus (‘knowing’ or ‘skilled’), becoming by connotation ‘a skilled recounting’ of events. And because stories are a profoundly important aspect of culture, making up the basis of a society’s literature and philosophy, it is only through ‘skillful recounting’ that a work of art becomes possible.

So if we aim for art in our work, we should always be concerned with the narrative, even in the stories told in single-frame pieces such as photographs and paintings. And, of course, in our films – including documentaries and even 30-second commercials or PSAs – the narrative becomes the dividing line between mediocrity and art.


David Hakim is an assistant director, producer, and publicity expert who developed campaigns for every major Hollywood studio and handled publicity for the Motion Picture Academy. Find him in the Reel Directory online: www.reeldirectory.com.

All material copyright 2008 David Hakim and may not be duplicated - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

TRANSITIONS

Welcome to CineScene.

I had intended this blog to be published in the magazine that I previously worked for, but it seems that (to put this in the kindest words I can find) I have been made a victim of the economic downturn. That’s transition # 1.

So I am shifting my writing to this blog, in hopes of attracting enough of an audience to make it worthwhile to continue. (Transition # 2.)

As I go along, I will include previous blogs, as they may be of interest to film professionals and movie fans.

And now for Transition # 3, the actual subject of this blog – changes in the film industry, exhibition side. Let’s start with a bit of history.

From 1981 to 2005, studio income from Theatrical Exhibition shrank from 58% to 21% of Hollywood’s total income landscape, while Video Sell-through grew from 7 % to 49%.

That’s a huge change, and it continues to haunt the landscape today – the stalled Screen Actors Guild negotiations are hinged to these figures in both directions: the actors want a bigger share of the pie, and the studios want to keep the bottom line down (read: pay as little as possible).

Meanwhile, from 1981 to 2005, Video Rentals (as a percentage of the whole) stayed the same, while Broadcast Network income dropped from 10% to 1%, and Basic Cable grew from nothing to 3% of the studios’ income.

Studio revenues account for 80% of almost $12BB in consumer spending on sell-through sales, while the studios gained only 47% of the $8.5BB box office, 26% of $8.25BB in rentals, and 21% of $8.4BB from Premium TV, excluding Video on Demand (VOD) and Pay Per View (PPV) – the remaining percentages went to distribution partners.

And in the nascent VOD and PPV areas, the studios took in 60% of $125MM in VOD receipts, and 48% of $200MM in PPV income.

Though they get good percentages on VOD and PPV (studio share, 60% and 48%, respectively), the income is not large enough to warrant major interest (a third of a billion dollars, or less than 1% of total income from all sources).

Clearly, the future of Hollywood is in DVD sell-through (studio share, 80%) – or whatever the next generation of consumer-owned titles will be.

It doesn’t take a math whiz to see that 47% of 21% (Theatrical Exhibition) is a whole lot less than 80% of 49% (Sell-through).

Ok, that’s the money, but let’s look at consumer motivation.

Previously, no one thought that people would want to own films the way they own books – a library at home of favorite titles.

But DVD ownership is a logical extension of the desire to own knowledge or at least to hold onto information, and someone other than a few Kassandras should have seen this trend in advance – people buy and keep books, even though they may read them only once or twice in the time of their ownership.

In 1998, the first year that DVDs were offered on the market, DVDs represented about 8% of total ‘home video’ sales (total sales of $6.5BB).

But by 2005, DVDs had virtually wiped out VHS sales, having reduced them to just $500MM of the total $16.5BB – in 2006 there were virtually no VHS retail sales, and the market was static at $16.5BB. Translation: DVDs added ten billion dollars to the total income of retail sales, at the same time that they caused a decline of $5.48BB in VHS sales – VHS declined to just 3% of the retail ‘video’ market.

Early projections that HD-DVD would outstrip standard DVD seem to be coming true, as Blu-Ray’s market share has grown.

In fact, ‘a la carte’ PPV, VOD, and Internet video promise to be the fastest-growing segment of the studios income stream in the coming years. The 2005 aggregate gross of those three segments was $ 37.8BB retail sales, with studio revenue estimated at $17.26 per transaction.

The numbers will look different now, but the preceding figures came from Adams Media Research, a topline marketing research firm.

So what does it all mean? It means that portable movies are the way of the future, whether on disks or thumb-drives, or stored in iPods or your cell phone. And when we say ‘portable movies,’ we actually mean any kind of narrative moving-picture experience – feature and short films, TV shows, cartoons. But that alone is only half the story.

Another segment of this tale of the future is in how the studios will handle exhibition – and that has a couple of noteworthy components. The first is acquisition.

Previously, each major studio need a new film for the pipeline every two weeks. Why? To hold places in the exhibitors’ (theater owners’) calendars, so that a film from a rival studio would not take that screen.

Studios pretty much figured on 24 films per year, and they initially made almost all of them in-house. The studios made a range of films, with different budgets and bound for different markets or audiences – many were small films that could be sacrificed to make room in the exhibitors’ calendar.

But as budgets soared and the value of money declined, the studios started negative buys. To fill in their slates, the studio acquisition reps bought films at festivals or at film markets – especially foreign films or those that would fit into ‘indie’ slots. In 2008, there was a feeding frenzy at Sundance, with bidding wars going on for acquisition of new indies.

Why? Because the studios had cut their production slates so drastically – they were making (a very rough) half of the number they had made a few years previous.

And at the most recent Sundance festival, reps were buying films they had not even seen. This interesting fact was printed on the same page that claimed that Box Office receipts were up for January, in spite of the predicted collapse of the American economy.

Ah, the American economy. Yes, the playing field is changing under our feet. And people are always looking to the last war – or, in this case, the last depression. I keep hearing that movies are ‘recession-proof’ and that people went to movies to escape their woes during the 30s. But theater tickets did not top ten bucks then, and the studios did cut budgets, like it or not.

There’s a big difference in two bits for an A movie and a B movie, plus cartoons and newsreels. And you could stay in the theater all day if you chose – which many people did, to say out of the cold in the winter and out of the heat in the summer.

But let’s get back to the second component of how Hollywood will handle exhibition in an uncertain future: marketing.

We hear much of the long tail these days, and not enough people know what that means. In the case of exhibition, the long tail means finding niche markets or select groups to whom to promote a film.

Gone are the days of full-page ads – hell, there may not even be newspapers around when you are reading this – and marketing to a wide audience. Using focused marketing, the studios can reach only soccer fans or only horror fans or only tightly-framed demographics.

As costs go up and marketing techniques become more sophisticated (and your personal preferences become commodities traded behind the computer screen), we will see the entire scale of marketing change.

And that’s the topic for a future CineScene blog!

(Well, along with why you won’t really have to worry about watching films on your phone.)

David Hakim is an assistant director, producer, and publicity expert who developed campaigns for every major Hollywood studio and handled publicity for the Motion Picture Academy. Find him in the Reel Directory online: www.reeldirectory.com.

All material copyright 2009 David Hakim and may not be duplicated - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.