It was shut out of the Oscar race for Best Documentary Feature, but Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, now playing in New York City, could easily inspire a Hollywood film about the life of its heroic subject. And that dramatic version could potentially garner multiple Academy Award nominations. It wouldn’t be the first time a figure documented in a nonfiction film was later portrayed in an Oscar-nominated movie. In fact, one of this year’s Best Picture contenders, Milk, is almost like a remake of the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk.
Actual dramatic remakes of documentaries include Werner Herzogs’ Rescue Dawn, which revisits the subject of his earlier nonfiction film Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Michael Caton-Jones’ Memphis Belle, which fictionalizes the story of William Wyler’s doc The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, and Martin Bell’s American Heart, which is loosely based on one of the subjects of his Oscar-nominated doc Streetwise. Also, the upcoming HBO dramatic film Grey Gardens was inspired by the Maysles brothers’ doc of the same name, and Hollywood has toyed with or announced remakes of the films The King of Kong, Murderball, Bra Boys and Sherman’s March.
To carry on the tradition, we’ve selected nine nonfiction films in addition to Blessed is the Match that would make great dramatic features.
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If you were a nature documentarian and you were filming a lion’s hunt, would you intervene and save a gazelle from being eaten? Probably not, but if you were making a documentary about poor children in the Red Light district of Calcutta, you’d probably want to help the kids out, maybe even film yourself doing good deeds in order to show just how much of a saint you are. Obviously there’s a big difference in the ethical obligation to human beings versus animals, but there has also always been a debate with documentary regarding just how much interaction and intervention is okay. Should a filmmaker remain completely detached from his or her subject? Should the line be drawn at life or death situations, or is it fine to become involved with the filmed people? If direct-cinema kings Albert and David Maysles can interact so much with the Beales of Grey Gardens, even potentially becoming romantically involved, then nobody should question a documentarian’s desire to be an angel with a handicam. Right?
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Celia Maysles, daughter of David Maysles (who, with his brother Albert, directed such landmark documentaries as Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens), has directed a film about her attempts to get to know her late father called Wild Blue Yonder. When the film had its world premiere at IDFA last fall, Albert Maysles (who is seen in the film denying Celia access to her father’s archives, on the grounds that her film might conflict with his own autobiographical doc) told indieWIRE that he had so far not been allowed to see his niece’s movie. But he apparently caught up with it at some point, because at an event celebrating his own The Gates last night, Albert offered The Reeler a review:
Terrible…Unnecessarily, I come off badly. I wanted to cooperate with her, but I was — and am — making my own autobiographical film at the same time. I couldn’t just let her pick whatever she wanted. I wanted the two of us to cooperate in that process. She took that as an offense. And as you see in the film, I come off as the bad guy.
Maysles concedes that Yonder is actually “fairly well-made,” but cites what he claims are numerous inaccuracies, and ultimately writes off the whole endeavor as “unnecessary.” Sour grapes or solid critique? We’ll find out when Wild Blue Yonder has its US premiere at the SXSW Film Festival next month.
