2003: The year of the documentary

In 1995, veteran filmmaker Errol Morris read “In Retrospect,” a candid reflection by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on his involvement in the Vietnam War. Six years later, Morris cajoled the 85-year-old veteran of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations into becoming the subject for his next documentary, “The Fog of War.” In the months preceding the Sept. 11 terror attacks, McNamara sat down and spoke his mind.

As Morris fired questions at McNamara in Cambridge, Mass., 30-year-old TV host and producer Jonathan Karsh was winding down a year of intensive shooting on his first movie, 3,000 miles away. His subject was the remarkable family of Susan Tom, a straight-talking California mother whose brood of 13 includes nine adopted children living with a variety of disabilities. The title, “My Flesh and Blood,” would spring from Tom’s loving refusal to distinguish between her birth and adopted kids.

“The Fog of War” and “My Flesh and Blood” couldn’t be more dissimilar: The former is a talking-head political monologue enhanced with impressionistic imagery, the latter an emotional true-life journal in the bold tradition of PBS’ “American Family” series. But they have each become film festival darlings, with Morris’ film captivating Cannes and Karsh’s debut walking off with a prize at Sundance.

The New York premieres of Karsh’s film today and Morris’ film Dec. 19 plant an exclamation point at the end of what is widely considered to be the most fertile year yet for documentaries. While nonfiction films have long been regarded by critics and cineastes as a refuge from the mire of Hollywood commercial boilerplate, they are hooking in with general audiences as never before.

The $21-million box-office performance of Michael Moore’s rabble-rousing “Bowling for Columbine” from 2002-03 heralded a stunning parade of docs as varied as “Capturing the Friedmans,” “My Architect,” “Spellbound,” “Winged Migration,” “Bus 174,” “Balseros,” “To Live and to Have,” “Stevie” and “The Same River Twice.”

Significantly, two of this year’s releases (“Winged Migration” and “Spellbound”) quickly hit the top-five chart of all-time highest-grossing documentaries (not including those made for the Imax format), a list topped by “Columbine” and including the 1994 “Hoop Dreams” ($12 million) and Moore’s splashy 1989 debut “Roger & Me” ($7.5 million).

While “Winged Migration’s” $12-million gross is easily eclipsed by the opening-weekend take of a typical Hollywood blockbuster, it is a quantum leap for documentaries, whose box office used to come in at less than $1 million.

Are audiences becoming more doc-savvy? Are docs becoming more audience-friendly? Or is it simply that docs are getting better?

The general consensus among film cognoscenti is that documentaries have become more accessible. Toward that end, never underestimate the Michael Moore factor, suggests a co-producer of the riveting National Spelling Bee saga “Spellbound.”

“ ‘Bowling for Columbine’ was a monumental documentary for filmmakers and filmgoers,” insists Sean Welch, who stood with other Oscar losers behind Moore as he delivered his incendiary awards-telecast diatribe against President Bush. “It opened up the possibility that documentaries could be much more entertaining than people once thought.”

Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics (distributor of “Winged Migration” and “The Fog of War”), credits the media, backhandedly.

“The best films at Sundance were always docs, but the critics refused to cover them because they were all into the hoopla of who got a zillion-dollar deal for the bad movie of the year. With reality television showing up, the media has decided that real is cool. And the editors have decided that real needs to be covered. And audiences have been conditioned to watch docs through television, just as they were conditioned to read subtitles for ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.’ ”

Sheila Nevins, vice president in charge of original programming at HBO, whose documentary Oscar winners have included “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt” (1989), the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage drama “One Day in September” (2000) and the civil-liberties treatise “Murder on a Sunday Morning” (2001), is less eager to credit the documentary trend to reality television.

“I think it has more to do with 9/11,” Nevins says. “It has to do with the fact that the real world hurts. That there are things that happen to real people that are more painful, more dramatic, more dynamic than fiction.”