Developing Story Ideas Page 17

  Bernard, Sheila Curran. Documentary Storytelling: Creative Nonfiction on Screen, 3rd ed., 2010 (A how-to that includes the author’s experiences and interviews with documentary-makers, and the importance of treating filmmaking as a business).

  Hemley, Robin. Turning Life into Fiction, 2nd ed., 2006 (Transforming real life into stories, gaining psychic distance between memoir and fiction, and the ethical and self-protective considerations that arise when you take liberties with fact).

  Rabiger, Michael. Directing the Documentary, 6th ed., 2014 (My magnum opus in ten languages describing the history of the genre and the process of making documentaries. Makes a case for all film language, and particularly that of documentary, being rooted in the psychological/emotional processes of human perception).

  Rosenthal, Alan. Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and TV. 1999 (Excellent anthology of essays laying out the history, principles, and uses of this sometimes treacherously hybrid form).

  19 Documentary Subject

  How richly, even dramatically ordinary people lead their lives is the specialty of documentary, and making it appeals to those who see living as an inspired, improvisational process. This makes documentarians the jazz musicians of filmmaking, and their brethren in fiction are like the symphony orchestra that needs a score to function. There are however significant fiction directors who prefer laying an improvisational foundation with their cast, figures such as Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Jean-Luc Godard, and Mike Leigh. We will look at their methods later in Chapter 22, “Catalyzing Drama.”

  Research

  Research for documentary and fiction are similar, because novelists and screenwriters often immerse themselves in the situations they mean to write about. Literary fiction, screenplays, and documentaries all set out to achieve credible and entertaining visions of the human condition.

  Writers research those they intend to write about, to see how they live their lives and handle real situations. The kind of research so necessary in documentary allows the novelist to write with similar depth and authority.

  The ability to research real people in their actual surroundings is highly rewarding, for nothing can equal the profundity and sheer unexpectedness of the real. Seldom will you find stories readymade, but you will find a profusion of parts waiting for you to imaginatively assemble them into whole stories. The challenge if you want to portray a yoga ascetic, a mine-clearing squad, or a young African shepherd at work will always be the same: to figure out what story to tell, what point of view to take, and what convictions to examine.

  Like a sculptor visualizing what statue lies within the block of stone, the documentary-maker must decide what to liberate from the surfeit of everyday detail that obscures every subject. Stories emerge from the framing and directing that the audience sees, feels, and considers.

  Modern documentary seldom arranges life for the camera; instead it aims to capture particular events as they occur. This can be highly unpredictable, so the documentarian gambles on capturing what can reasonably be anticipated, and what else comes as gifts (or blows) from the gods.

  Planning a documentary seems maddeningly speculative. How, people ask, can you possibly plan for something that has not yet happened? Why even bother? Why not just wait and shoot whatever occurs? Ask a documentary editor if this works, and he or she will tell you that a passive approach produces a scattered record, not focused documentary materials. Real authorship relies on the interpretive intelligence of an overall vision. Who would shoot a football match without knowing the game? If you are to create a compelling picture of a match, you must know the rules, the characteristics of the players, the referee, and the supporters. To make yourself ready to capture all that matters, you write a hypothesis to help organize what you know, and help sensitize you to the unexpected the moment it arises.

  Thus a documentary proposal promises what reasonably can be expected and predicts as many of the unknown outcomes as possible. You cannot, for instance, foresee that your film on Civil War games will be subverted when a cannon wheel runs over an artilleryman’s foot, or that the wailing siren of an EMT crew will invade the 1860s battlefield. You can know that accidents happen, and find out which are the commonest.

  Imagine, instead, that you set out to cover a volatile marital situation. You face true uncertainty, but also the promise of a film with considerable dramatic tension. David Sutherland’s The Farmer’s Wife (Public Broadcasting Service documentary series, USA, 1998) shows in harrowing detail a Nebraska couple battling to hold on to the family farm as they slowly run out of money. Every new crisis in their deteriorating marriage brings multiple possible outcomes, and for each the crew must make contingency plans and shoot accordingly.

  For this assignment, begin by aiming to involve us in something important to you. See if you can provoke us into strong feelings and critical thinking.

  Documentarians tend to choose between two main shooting philosophies. Observational documentaries treat reality like anthropologists, aiming to remain relatively invisible to their subjects. In participatory documentaries, directors can interact at will with their subjects to catalyze truth by providing challenge, stimulus, or opposition.

  Observe Truth or Intercede to Provoke It?

  A basic decision is whether you want to film like an anthropologist and use a strictly observational style to capture truths, or whether you interact with your subjects to catalyze them. You may even need to appear on-camera yourself. If so, you are making a participatory style of film, even a self-reflexive one (the documentarian’s version of selfies!).

  Figure 19–1 Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light juxtaposes the telescopes in the Chilean desert with people digging for the bones of their loved ones who disappeared during the dictatorship (frame from the film).

  Today most documentary-makers avoid TV style interviewers and “talking head” shots like the plague, unless the speaker is divulging something extraordinary or deeply felt. Recent works like Patricio Guzman’s deeply moving Nostalgia for the Light (2010, Figure 19–1) mostly shun narration and to-camera interviews. Instead they tell their stories mainly, but not exclusively, through imagery, action, and behavior. Every rule has its exceptions, and Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), apart from its famous reenactment scenes, is largely interviews. Yet its characters, their story, and the presentation that Morris uses, are all so original and fantastic that the film belongs in a class by itself.

  As your situation develops, your film’s setup and subsequent exposition must provide enough information about the story’s context to orient the audience. If your setting is a failing neighborhood grocery, for instance, you will need to show the context for the owner’s sleepless nights of worry. You will need bank manager and wholesaler scenes that establish how market forces have encircled businesses like hers. You might also need to establish how supermarket chains force down their prices by removing employee benefits and shaving profit margins. To paint all the difficulties and ironies, you must gather good evidence and multiple versions. To make a documentary, you shoot a multiplicity of promising materials, then winnow the final content and meaning during editing.

  This assignment, however, only asks that you propose what you would shoot and how you might use it.

  Portraying Human Predicaments

  Human problems arise when people fall prey to a combination of inner and outer forces. You don’t need to depict them all—catalogs are the job of the social historian or sociologist—but you do need to cover the essentials that create conflict. The audience knows when a situation is over-simplified, incompletely justified, or rendered in the ideological monochrome of good versus evil. If, however, you show your grocery going bust through the perceptions of someone to whom the breakdown really is a matter of good and evil (a beleaguered teenage son, for instance), then you can sketch complex forces he is unable to appreciate and make us feel the poignancy of his simplified view.

  Documentary is drama, and drama i
nvestigates the human condition. Effective documentary confronts us with its participants’ paradoxes, fears, enigmas, and problems. You aim to go much further than presenting facts or reflecting what anyone present would see.

  Like the best fiction films, documentaries are strongest when they show characters in action. Action is in the present, while interviews come from memory and describe what is already past and foreclosed. A historical subject, of course, can probably be made no other way, but current subjects are always best recorded in the present as they unfold. To watch two beginners clumsily piloting a canoe down a fast river is far more involving than seeing them recall it later. If, however, an agnostic canoeist finds himself praying that he will survive, something has occurred inside him that no amount of camerawork can reveal. Only voice-over or interview can get at that.

  A documentary audience feels dramatic tension as uncertainty and anticipation, something the wise storyteller tries to keep on the boil.

  Plan to film what will make the audience see, feel, and think about the issues. Often this means deliberately orchestrating a conflict between the opposing forces at work. Good drama, by making us aware and involved and by confronting us with contradictory evidence, stretches our emotional, critical, and analytical faculties.

  You may ask, isn’t this manipulation? Yes, it is. Manipulation is unavoidable in art generally, and in filmmaking in particular. You cannot take an objective shot, still less make an objective film. Every camera position, every length of action recorded, every choice in editing requires a subjective human decision, and thus everything is manipulated. Nothing objective here. All artworks are constructs meant to lead the spectator through the essentials of a gripping human experience. We turn to art when we long to see through other eyes, to feel what it is like to be someone else.

  Confrontation

  The forces in conflict in your film must meet each other in confrontation—something you may have to contrive so it happens on camera. With your encouragement, the pregnant daughter thrown out of the home two decades ago by her outraged father will get up courage and ask her mother, with whom she is still angry, why she failed to protest. She will ask, “Why didn’t you try to save me?”

  The uses of delay. The father of the mystery novel, Wilkie Collins, advocated delay in storytelling as a way to hold the reader’s attention: “Make them laugh, make them cry, but make them wait.” Good advice for all storytelling!

  You need to show (not tell) the contradictory evidence that a reasonable person would interpret with difficulty. Interesting characters must be deliberately developed, which means you show their complexities and contradictions, and delay resolving them onscreen as long as possible so the audience can make its own determinations.

  You should avoid expounding causes, since we all thoroughly distrust “messages.” Instead, let your audience draw its own conclusions from pertinently presented evidence (see sidebar on the uses of delay). Build in the ambiguities you could not resolve, since that respects the audience’s intelligence.

  “Character is fate.” By making choices as we do, we help to construct our own destiny.

  For the documentary work in this chapter, the goals are to:

  Find a real situation or event that resonates your chosen themes.

  Turn that situation into a factually based screen story that will serve your authorial purposes and interests.

  To develop a subject for your documentary film, choose a situation from your collection of news-clippings, one that:

  Could be developed into a thirty-to-sixty-minute documentary film.

  Has an inbuilt sequence of events and an evolving character. That way, the film won’t merely outline a static, unchanging situation like a scanner at work.

  Engages your audience in some significant aspect of the real world. (Meaning, it involves your audience in ways that might be fascinating, disturbing, aggravating, frightening, funny, engrossing—you name it).

  When you discuss ideas for documentaries, consider the following questions:

  What is the topic, the “corner of life” you want to show us? What makes it potentially interesting and significant?

  Whose POV are we seeing through?

  What is the central conflict in the situation or main characters?

  Does the film promise a confrontation between the opposing forces its character faces?

  Do you see a development likely in the main character(s)? What is it?

  Can you find a distinctive style for your film?

  Does it have something heartfelt to show or say?

  How do you think you could most affect a general audience?

  Many documentaries are biographical, and thus character-driven. Invariably characters of magnitude have issues in their lives that arise from the imperatives of their temperament. To show real people wrestling with their goals and demons is a richly satisfying way to explore the nexus between disposition and destiny. Best of all, by astute casting you can explore important issues in your own life—with no need to step in front of the camera yourself.

  There are also:

  Event-driven documentaries that chronicle an event and its effect on given characters

  Diary documentaries, in which the camera becomes a notebook

  Essay documentaries, which do what a photo or literary essay might do

  Historical documentaries

  Travelogue documentaries

  Journey or process documentaries

  Reflexive documentaries, which reflect on the effects of making the film or on the filmmakers’ conceptual process

  Fake documentaries (“mockumentaries”), that lampoon the clichés and deadly earnestness of the stereotypical documentary

  There’s something for everybody; some of these forms can be realized in one of the two other assignments calling for simple video documentaries rather than written proposal materials.

  Assignment 19–1: A Documentary Subject

  In your writing,

  Step 1: Give a brief outline of the background or context to the subject.

  Step 2: Describe your main character(s) and his/her/their major problem.

  Step 3: Try to bring a magnifying glass to a situation that is significant but small. Resist the novice’s urge to include everything life has taught you.

  Step 4: Explain what your film’s underlying story organization would be. Usually this requires that you: a.Consider how to handle the progression of time in the movie

  b.Decide whether the main character is the POV character

  c.See if there is another valid POV you can use

  Step 5: Describe any special approaches you might take in shooting, directing, interviewing, or any ironic editing techniques you’d use to get your thematic argument across.

  Example

  Documentary Subject (Angela Galyean)

  Timmy B——, ten years old, hated going to school. His truancy became so chronic that his parents took him to a psychiatrist who prescribed Prozac as treatment for Timmy’s obstinacy. At first, Timmy’s reaction to the drug was positive. It was not until the psychiatrist increased his dosage that Timmy began to experience violent mood swings. “He’d get really angry and stuff like that. He’d scream at you and then a few minutes later, he’d love you and hug you and not even remember being so angry,” his mother, Cindy, said after the court hearing.

  Only weeks after the start of Timmy’s Prozac regimen, the fourth-grader grabbed his three-year-old niece as a human shield, aimed a twelve-gauge shotgun at a sheriff’s deputy, and exclaimed, “I’d rather shoot you than go to school.” It comes as no surprise that Timmy’s lawyer blames this outburst on the antidepressant drug.

  Timmy’s court case is the first known to involve a child using Prozac, which has not been proved [safe] for use in children for any condition. The drug’s label notes that Prozac’s safety and effectiveness for children has not been established. But Prozac is used to treat fifty-six percent of depressed children’s cases because it has be
en proven effective for adults.

  “Timmy B——was under the influence of a mind-altering drug at the time of the incident,” the B——s’ attorney noted. Prozac is the world’s largest-selling antidepressant, with sales of more than $1 billion a year. However, the drug’s success has been clouded by claims that it causes violent mood swings and suicidal thoughts.

  Angela writes:

  This story is particularly fascinating to me because it involves an obvious dysfunctional family situation and the mystery/fascination of today’s Prozac. I have always feared the use of Prozac and have intimately experienced its effects on people I have known before, after, and during the use of the drug. This case is unusually interesting to me because it incorporates a child’s life and mind. Timmy’s life has been permanently damaged by a decision he did not make.

  The film would first focus on Timmy, his parents, and the events of Timmy’s life before he hated school, and therefore prior to seeing his psychiatrist. Then it would cover his experience in therapy, and the event itself. I would like to push ahead to examine what effects the trial is having on Timmy and what his life is like now that things have calmed down. I am only concerned with the cellular life of Timmy and the B——s, and this would make up the heart of the film.

  By showing as much as I could of the lifestyle they had and have, I could translate a truly human experience made unique by Timmy. The narrative organization would depend on what response I got from the B——s, their community, and the participants of the court case. These people would be featured in the film, but my goal would be to show as little of the outside world as I could to parallel the entrapment of Timmy’s mind while under the influence of the drug.