Michael Moore did not win an Oscar last night for Sicko, which may only mean that the Academy’s overwhelmingly left-leaning voter base are, like most rich people, far more concerned with the moral and historical implications of the current wars (and, particularly, the way we’re fighting them) than they are with the everyday lives of poor people here at home. But that’s okay, because even Michael Moore has stopped working the health care issue, at least temporarily. He’s too busy trying to Save Documentaries.
Moore made a speech at last week’s International Documentary Association awards, in which the filmmaker announced a plan to declare Monday nights Documentary Night at theaters across America. Mondays are traditionally the weakest night of the week for exhibitors, so, says Moore, with the right marketing small non-fiction films could match the typically low numbers produced by most studio films on that night. He’s essentially calling on studios to devote resources to, as the indieWIRE story on the matter puts it, “a consortium of PR and marketing people at the studios who would support and promote documentary, bolstering the work of smaller companies with limited resources.”
When this story broke last week, it was generally reported without comment, positive or negative (although AJ Schnack did take a small swipe at Moore for showing up at the IDA reception when he had something to promote, after failing to make an appearance when the body honored his career last year). But
Agnes Varnum is now asking some real questions about the plan, in this post. She suggests that a plan such as this might in effect marginalize documentaries further:
The plan ghetto-izes certain films as unable to make a profit so they can only get into the theater on a night when almost no one goes anyways. By creating a subsidy, it lets distributors off the hook for not doing good business (IE breaking the studio strangle hold on theaters, and picking up fewer and/or better films and investing in their success), and at the end of it, something tells me that Doc Mondays would overall not be worth the effort for theater owners for them to want to continue or expand it.
Agnes’ post puts some of my inklings about Moore’s plan into better words than I could find. Moore boasts that “theater chains have made a lot of money off of my films,” and I’m sure that’s true, but I don’t see how that translates into these businesses being willing to program whatever he tells them to.
There’s also the question of constitutes mainstream success for a non-fiction film––or, rather, what filmmakers are willing to settle for. Certainly there will be some filmmakers who are happy to show their work in a multiplex at all. But surely there will be others who, having seen the success of films like An Inconvenient Truth and, yes, Sicko, which competed against studio films instead of in their stead, will reject the notion of having their work relegated to a cult experience on, as Agnes puts it, the “night when almost no one goes anyways.” Even if Moore’s plan is a short-term success, is segregating documentary films away from traditional studio releases really the rescue action that the industry needs in the long-term?
