Directors find features no stranger than nonfiction

Amid the media fanfare surrounding the success of the recent documentaries “Capturing the Friedmans,” “Spellbound” and “Winged Migration,” little attention has been paid to another intriguing trend: More and more documentary filmmakers are making the transition to narrative features.

Although many directors have gone from nonfiction to fiction in the past -- including John Schlesinger, William Friedkin, Barbet Schroeder and Michael Apted -- the phenomenon has been less prevalent in recent years. But 2003 has already seen the release of several scripted features from filmmakers who got their start in documentaries, with more on the way.

“Hollywood feels a lot more democratic today than when we first moved here” in 1994, says Randy Barbato, who with longtime partner Fenton Bailey wrote and directed the recently released drama “Party Monster,” about the 1980s New York club scene. “There just seem to be a lot more opportunities, so you aren’t as likely to be pigeonholed and seen as only being able to do one thing.”

This open-mindedness is a fairly recent development, however. For, despite having made such high-profile documentaries as “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and “Monica in Black and White” through their production company World of Wonder, it took years for Bailey and Barbato to raise money for “Party Monster,” which they adapted from their award-winning 1998 documentary of the same name.

Husband-and-wife writing-directing team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini endured similar frustration on the way to making their debut feature, “American Splendor.” The film, a biopic about underground comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, has earned widespread plaudits, including the top prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. But were it not for “Splendor” producer Ted Hope, who recognized an affinity for offbeat characters in Berman and Pulcini’s first two films -- the documentaries “Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s,” about the closing of the famous Beverly Hills restaurant, and “The Young and the Dead,” about the Hollywood Forever cemetery -- the duo might still be looking for its first break.

“It seems as if studios will take a risk with a music-video director or a commercial director,” Pulcini says, “but something about documentary filmmakers scares them.”

Ironically, despite lingering reservations about their skills, most documentary filmmakers contend that shooting a narrative feature is actually easier than shooting a documentary. “People think it’s so difficult to make the transition,” Berman says, “but with documentaries you usually have no money, no crew and you’re working with people who are not actors and are terrified of being on camera. So on a feature, when you have all the tools to actually make the film, it’s like, ‘Whoa! This isn’t so hard.’ ”

Fundamental skills

The fundamentals developed by a documentary filmmaker are readily applicable to scripted material, according to those who have made the leap.

“Documentaries were an excellent way to cut my teeth and learn narrative storytelling,” notes George Hickenlooper, who drew praise for the 1991 documentary “Hearts of Darkness,” about Francis Ford Coppola’s tempestuous production of the Vietnam drama “Apocalypse Now,” before going on to make such scripted features as “Big Brass Ring” and “The Man From Elysian Fields.”

“I think making a documentary is a lot like the process of screenwriting, which involves taking various elements and shaping and sculpting a story. That’s exactly what documentary filmmaking is. You’re building a story using montage, as opposed to a fictional film, where you have a blueprint of what you’re going to do. It’s cinema in its purest form, I think.”

Todd Phillips, director of the comedy “Old School,” which opened in March, attributes his ability to work with actors directly to his documentary origins.

“When you’re making documentaries you’re basically manipulating people to do what you want,” says Phillips, who went from the in-your-face documentaries “Hated,” about punk rocker GG Allin, and “Frat House,” about fraternity hazing, to the teen comedy “Road Trip” and the coming movie version of “Starsky and Hutch.”

“Traditional documentary filmmakers would probably say that’s the thing that’s wrong with some of the movies I’ve made. But I always ask documentary filmmakers, ‘What does a documentary director do if you’re not manipulating people?’ And I think feature filmmaking, to some extent, is also manipulation -- to get what you want, you have to direct actors. I realize ‘manipulation’ sounds like a negative term, but I mean it in a good way, as a means to achieve a goal.”

Having it both ways

More directors than ever seem to be moving back and forth between documentaries and features. Phillips followed “Road Trip” with the documentary “Bittersweet Motel,” about the rock band Phish; Barbato and Bailey are shooting a documentary about the ‘70s porn movie “Deep Throat” for producer Brian Grazer; and after a string of narrative features, Hickenlooper is on the festival circuit with the acclaimed documentary “Mayor of the Sunset Strip,” about influential L.A. music scene fixture Rodney Bingenheimer.

“I love them both equally but for different reasons,” Hickenlooper says. “I think fiction filmmaking, particularly in mainstream Hollywood, is in a less interesting place than it was, say, 30 years ago, whereas documentary filmmaking is in a very interesting place right now.”

Several marquee directors have also interspersed their narrative features with documentaries, including Martin Scorsese (“My Voyage to Italy”), James Cameron (“Ghosts of the Abyss”), Jonathan Demme (“The Agronomist”) and Oliver Stone (“Comandante”). On the flip side, renowned documentarian Barbara Kopple, who won Oscars for her engrossing labor strike sagas “Harlan County, USA” and “American Dream,” is now directing her first feature, the high school drama “Havoc,” for Paramount.

Also spreading their wings this year are directors Michael Winterbottom, Michael Tollin and Terry Zwigoff.

* In the newly released “In This World,” Winterbottom, who began his career making documentaries in his native England, adopted an overtly nonfiction shooting style to tell the story of two young Afghan refugees trying to make their way to London.

* Tollin’s early sports documentaries “Hardwood Dreams” and “Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream” laid the groundwork for his coming feature, the drama “Radio,” the true story of a driven high school football coach (Ed Harris) who befriends a mentally challenged man (Cuba Gooding Jr.) in a small South Carolina town.

* Zwigoff, whose 1994 documentary, “Crumb,” led to the acerbic comedy “Ghost World,” returns in November with the comedy “Bad Santa,” starring Billy Bob Thornton and Bernie Mac.

Echoing the sentiments of many of his peers, Fenton Bailey sees the uptick in this crossover phenomenon as a natural progression rooted in a simple unifying principle. “I think people overplay the differences between documentaries and feature films,” Bailey says. “It’s a bit like blank verse as opposed to a sonnet. There are certain rules to making a documentary, namely that you can’t make it up, whereas with a feature film, you can. But at the end of the day it’s about telling a story.”