The Dividing Lines

“Biggie and Tupac” and “Two Towns of Jasper” have everything and nothing in common. Both are documentaries, both deal with the violent, controversial slayings of black men, and both are among the most talked-about and admired films in this year’s Sundance festival. But after that, they diverge in intriguing and even provocative ways, ways that demonstrate that the nonfiction form is much more supple and adventurous than it’s often given credit for.

“Biggie and Tupac,” erroneously titled “L.A. Story” in the Sundance program, is an investigation into the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, also known as Notorious B.I.G. It’s awash in conspiracy theories, deadly record-label rivalries, bluster, rumor and accusations, all engagingly held together by the on-camera figure of veteran director Nick Broomfield.

Broomfield, who has made about 20 movies--including “Kurt and Courtney,” an investigation into the death of Kurt Cobain, “Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam” and “Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer”--is invariably front and center in his films, popping in, camera rolling, where people most don’t want him to be.

If Broomfield is entertainingly in your face, Whitney Dow and Marco Williams are persuasively self-effacing. To make “Jasper,” their exceptional documentary about community reaction to the 1998 racially motivated dragging murder of James Byrd Jr. as accurate as possible, Dow and a white crew interviewed the East Texas town’s white residents, and Williams and a black crew did the same with the black residents. The resulting feature proved exceptionally difficult to pull together, but its honest picture of the complexity of race relations and perceptions is compelling.

Broomfield, whose “Soldier Girl” played at Sundance in 1980, has made his share of more conventional, observational documentaries. But then he became attracted to what he calls “stories that had a big ‘Off Limits’ sign on them. There is a certain thing about being fascinated wherever there is a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign--you think the secret has to be in there.”

To tell those kinds of stories, Broomfield says, “you need to employ extreme methods; you have to employ different tactics to get at that level. We live in a world that’s changed, people are more frightened. They’ve seen it all; they’re very cynical and less willing to talk. You have to get beyond that.”

The director wasn’t initially convinced that this film, which was begun by his co-producer Michelle D’Acosta, was a subject for him. Then came “various suspicions that Tupac’s murder might have involved the Los Angeles Police Department. Then it became much more of a political story, and I felt I had a right to do it. If you’re going to do something dangerous, know why you’re doing it.”

Broomfield is a favorite of students, he says, because his films “look simple, like they can do it, too, and it would be fun.” In fact, he says, “they’re a lot more exhausting to make. It took a very long time of working six-day weeks, quite long hours, no social life, completely, obsessively focusing on finishing the film. We used to say that every person we filmed took 70 phone calls, never giving up on them. And people you are talking to have to see that you really believe in what you’re doing, not that you just want to put a new extension on your home. The actual filming feels wonderful because it’s such a small part of the week.”

Broomfield also makes use of some very specific narrative techniques. He films almost everything that happens to him, including people telling him both in person and on the phone that they won’t be interviewed. “People define themselves more in what they won’t talk about than what they will,” he says. He’s a filmmaker who thinks the journey to getting his story is at least as interesting as what that story turns out to be, and he is not shy about using himself as the film’s spine.

“On a structural, conceptual level, it’s more interesting than voice-over as a way to hold the film together,” he says. “You’re the connecting thread, taking the audience from one situation to another. The adrenaline of the relationship between you and other people, that’s part of the entertainment of it.”

If Broomfield (despite his acknowledged debt to cinematographer Joan Churchill) can appear to be something of a one-man band on screen, “Jasper’s” insightful picture of the pain and confusion of race relations would likely not have been possible without the 25-year friendship of the two directors, who’ve known each other since high school in Williamstown, Mass.

It was Dow who had the idea for the film first, using phone conversations with his friend as a sounding board and being taken aback when Williams, who is African American, said, “I wasn’t really surprised at what happened because atrocities like that had been committed for a few hundred years.”

Dow visited Jasper and was unprepared to find that it was “not a cliched Southern town with a fat, racist sheriff” but a place with a black mayor and black city council members. Even more of a surprise was “the incredible sense of anger in the white residents who were mad at the victim, who’d gotten himself killed to besmirch their town’s name.” The more the two talked, the more it became apparent that despite their similar backgrounds, they saw things differently and that, in Williams’ words, “the mitigating factor was race.”

Thus was born the two-film-crew notion, which the directors revealed to Jasper residents only on a need-to-know basis. When they did, Williams says, “there wasn’t one person in the black community who didn’t think I was right; it made perfect sense to them. This film is about the reality of difference, about being comforted by those who are like you.” Adds Dow, “people instantly understood it; not to understand the difference in viewpoint is to live in a state of denial.”

The two crews filmed in Jasper for almost a year, through the trials of each of the three white supremacist defendants, shooting about 100 hours of footage apiece. Then came an extensive editing process, so difficult that Dow at one point worried, “What have we done? We put two years into this project, put in all this money, and there’s no way to connect the two films.”

The filmmakers decided the first step was for each of them to prepare a rough draft of their footage, to act as if they were making a first cut to show to a producer when they were in fact making it for each other. Each first cut--which, unplanned, the white director ended up making with a black editor and the black director with a white one--was six hours, and while Dow felt on seeing them that “there’s no way to connect the two films,” Williams “felt like I saw much more possibilities.”

Working with a third editor, Melissa Neidich (the entire editing process took a monumental 18 months), the two directors felt their way to a united version if only, Dow says, “to show the people who said this wasn’t going to work that they were wrong.”

“There was an organic quality to making this that couldn’t be translated into a recipe,” Williams says. “The making of this film was very much what the film itself is about: racial difference, not understanding each other, separating ourselves and attempting to come together.” Adds Dow, “the smallest editorial decision would morph into a long discussion of race. Sometimes the editor would just pack up and leave.”

Despite how well “Two Towns of Jasper” turned out, the directors were not encouraged by what they discovered. Though Dow feels optimistic about some of the changes he noticed in individual townspeople, he says “the differences of race were so much more profound than I imagined.” Williams, for his part, is even more pessimistic.

“I’m not naive, I’m confronted by race on a daily basis, but this brought home to me the profound chasm between black and white,” he says. “I’m left with a quality of despair that racial differences are not necessarily bridgeable. This is the hardest nut to crack.”