Documentaries
The documentarist has a passion for what he finds in images and sounds—which always seems to him more meaningful than anything he can invent. Unlike the fiction artist, he is dedicated to not inventing. It is in the selecting and arranging his findings that he expresses himself; these choices are, in effect, comments. And whether he adopts the stance of observer, or chronicler, or whatever, he cannot escape his subjectivity. He presents his version of the world.
Documentaries are produced to capture fragments of actuality, the creative treatment of actuality, the interpretation of recorded images and sounds, and the selection of a socially important topic for clarification.
A documentary is a film that deals with the relationships between people and their environment, people and their work, people and other people, and any combination of those relationship as seen in any society existing at the time of producing the film.
Documentaries make drama from life through the interpretation of actuality and by using the perception of symbolic equivalents to make a socially emphatic value judgment.
Each of the definitions of a documentary listed above indicates the range of what may make a media production a documentary. The range of definitions is one of the sources of confusion about documentaries; another is the evolution and changes that documentaries have passed through in the century of their existence. As a writer of a documentary, it is critical that you reach an understanding of what you are attempting to accomplish. A documentary must be produced to make a point, to win an argument, or to solve a puzzle about a socially important topic. Once that goal has been reached, the production technique used is not as important as the method of capturing the reality of the subject and the choice of material used in the final program.
The first documentaries were created accidentally. Photographs from mid-19th-century wars in Europe and the United States Civil War became comments on the price of war, in suffering and in death. Unintentionally, the photographs graphically created an emotional anti-war documentary.
The earliest motion pictures were “documents” of reality. The films showed people leaving a factory, families interacting, and the activities of the city. But without a specific point of social comment either for or against an issue, these films were not documentaries, but merely archival recordings of human activity. Robert Flaherty has been credited with producing the first true documentary with his study of man in and against his environment in Nanook of the North, produced in 1922. John Grierson of England, and later Canada, followed with his intense studies of people in their environments and the social issues of living within those environments.
In the 1930s, radio first explored issues raised by the news of the world with the Voice of Time, Harry Von Zell, leading a cast of actors, a full orchestra, and sound effects technicians recreating key stories of that week on the radio newsreel Time Marches On. The less sophisticated audiences of that time, with limited access to alternate news sources, accepted the radio recreations as actualities. Since the writers worked for Henry Luce, the publisher of Time magazine, the liberal political point of view was the key to the documentary stories.
Earlier film had explored the issues of the daily news in silent newsreels produced in England, France, and Germany. In the United States, newsreels were shown in theaters between the feature and the animated short. The March of Time film series connected short subjective news stories of the lives, problems, and activities of people throughout the world that could be reached with a film camera. The liberal social and political attitudes of the producers contributed to classification of many of the shorts as documentaries. By the late 1930s, the German government had found film documentaries as the ideal propaganda tool to sell Nazism through such documentaries as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Both Russia and the United States followed the German propaganda lead with less success until late in World War II.
The term propaganda acquired a negative standing in communication, although the term simply means a communication method used to manipulate public opinion to gain support for a specific cause. In many ways, a documentary may use propaganda techniques to win an argument.
Following the war, newsreels continued in the theaters until block booking ended the monopoly control of film distribution by the major studios. Before 1945, the major film studies also owned the distribution and theaters that exhibited the films. Both their own and independent theaters leased films in a package. If a theater wanted to show a new major release, they also had to take a set of a short, a newsreel, and an animated cartoon, as well as a series of “B” lower-quality movies. A lawsuit against the major studies in the mid-1940s required the studios to divest either the distribution or the exhibition part of the combination. They chose to release the theaters. This act did not totally end block booking, but it diminished the power of the major studios to determine what the theaters could use to make up their programs. By the middle of the century, exhibitors cut the animated cartoons, short features, and newsreels to increase the number of times a feature film could be run each day.
Fortunately, television opened new distribution channels for all genres of film, including documentaries and animation. The early TV documentaries tended toward information and travelogues without hard-hitting social values, but each examined some aspect of the human social milieu and the problems therein. Classic examples include the hour-long live (before videotape) Wide, Wide World, produced by NBC. The program featured live segments from around the county using microwave connections to feed individual segments to the New York control room. Each program and segment investigated a particular part of American life, from changes in the railroad business to psychological counseling.
In the 1960s, CBS, ABC, and NBC produced series that investigated the human condition. CBS Reports, ABC’s Closeup, and NBC’s White Papers looked at humans in action and how they reacted to their environment, including careers and family life. Some were very powerful and controversial, especially those produced by Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow of CBS. The conflict with the redbaiting Senator Joseph McCarthy, civil liberties, and segregation were topics subjectively covered to reveal specific points of view. The 1960s also saw the increased use of cinema verité techniques using small handheld film and video cameras without an imposing presence to reach subjects.
The 1970s produced a mixed bag of quality documentaries. Murrow was replaced with Don Hewlitt’s 60 Minutes, a collection of short subjective analyses of current topics in the news, not unlike the original March of Time, but more sophisticated and subtle. Documentary subjects began to fight back with lawsuits filed based on privacy and libel laws. In most cases, the suits were settled or thrown out of court, but the effect was to indicate to producers and especially networks that some caution had to be shown, depending on the subject and how close it came of concern to a major sponsor. Since the income to produce documentaries depends on sponsors paying for commercials, a documentary that annoyed a leading and major-spending sponsor could stand less of a chance being produced or aired. During this time, networks refused to air independently produced documentaries, so the control of the sponsors shut off such documentaries investigating and promoting fuel-efficient automobiles and alternate power sources.
As society changed, so did documentaries. During the 1980s, feminists, homosexuals, and racial and ethnic minorities become sources of topics. During the late 1980s and the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as repressive governments in Asia, Africa, and South America, provided fodder for a new wave of documentaries. Cable and satellite operations provided distribution opportunities for biographical, travel, and informational documentaries, as well as some topics too violent and sexually oriented for broadcast television.
The first decade of the 21st century found documentaries examining as prime sources for topics large corporations, their financial problems, and relationships with both consumers and employees; the Gulf Wars; and the threat of international terrorism.
Despite the wide range of topics covered throughout the history of documentaries, three basic formats have developed that allow the freedom to make the necessary value judgments and points and, at the same time, maintain the feeling of actuality and realism necessary for a documentary.
| Dramatic | Uses an emphasis on actualities of the people or the action of the topic. The more the camera and microphone show what is happening without narration, the greater the dramatic impact. But the documentary must rise and fall through a series of crises, following the dramatic storytelling pattern. The climax may be social or personal in nature, but the argument must be presented in resolving the crisis. |
| Biographical | Relies on either the subject talking about and showing his or her life, or close friends, relatives, and experts on the subject discussing the subject. When possible, show how the life of the subject was important, and clarify either the positive or the negative aspect of that life to reach a conclusion to the argument. |
| Compilation | May be a combination of both dramatic and biographical, but more importantly, it is a collection of everything possible to illustrate the point being made about the subject through the ups and downs of the personality’s life or the societal of the argument. Often archival and news footage, photographs, and interviews are all are edited together to tell the story. |
Script and Production Patterns
The basis for the production of documentaries allows, if not requires, unique means of assembling information and carrying out production techniques. Despite the need for in-depth research before shooting a documentary, the actual creation of a formal script may take a variety of forms. The forms may vary from no written script at all to detailed shooting scripts with complete narration, sound effects, and music prepared before shooting begins.
No Formal Script
Once the basic concept and point of the argument of a documentary has been worked out and locations are determined, shooting may begin in an effort to capture as much information on film or tape as possible. The recordings then become the secondary source from which the complete program may be assembled in the editing room. If the wild and natural sound recorded with the visuals is powerful enough to maintain the flow of the story and to carry the meaning intended, then no written narration is necessary. This type of documentary must be based on extremely powerful and meaningful visuals and sounds, or the audience will miss the argument being made.
Figure 5.1. The point or argument of a documentary should be made with actual footage shot on location of real people and events.
Again, if the shots and material recorded carry the message strongly enough, a production may proceed without a formal script until the editing process begins. Once the editing has been completed, the wild and natural sound may be supplemented with a minimum of written narration to fill gaps not fully explained with the visuals. Also, such a production may have a complete narration written, to be added after the editing has reached the final cutting stage.
Post-Shooting Script Outline
Another system may be followed by creating an outline after viewing all of the footage shot. Watching the footage and choosing the best available shots gives the producer/writer and editor the means to assemble the program without a formal completed script until after editing has finished. The outline then will guide the editing process. Once editing is completed, narration may be added if needed.
Figure 5.2. A documentary script may only indicate in a general manner the writer’s concept, which may or may not come to fruition in the completed edited production.
A second method would be to view the footage, write the script, and then edit the material, adding narration as needed.
Pre-Shooting Script
After a complete script is researched and written and the shooting schedule is assembled, then the visuals, interviews, and narration are recorded. All of the material then moves to the editing suite, where the production is assembled in its final form, following the script with modifications that occur because of changes in the material that finally arrives in the editing room.
Another method of scripting is based on recording the interviews and then writing the script from the interview material. Cover shots are recorded to illustrate the topics of the interviews, and then these are integrated with the interview footage in the editing suite.
Sponsored Documentaries, Biographies, and Docudramas
These pseudo-documentaries should be fully scripted well before production begins. These types of semi-documentaries need approval from several sponsoring or funding sources before actual production may begin to make certain the information included satisfies the sponsors or funding agencies. These productions also tend to be shot as dramatic productions and generally require full preproduction stages, with larger casts and crews than a typical documentary.
For-profit and nonprofit organizations may commission sponsored documentaries to confirm or supplement their public vision and presence. The danger for you as the writer to avoid is creating a lengthy infomercial without any socially redeeming value.
Depending on who commissioned a biographical documentary, it may only promote the person, leaving the audience without any specific judgment of the person’s social significance or value to or against society, giving them an ego-centered puff piece.
The expense of producing feature-length documentaries with no assurance of a return, much less profit, discourages writers and producers from investigating topics that may turn audiences away rather than attracting them to the theater. The solution has been to modify documentaries by adding dramatic touches to create the genre of docudramas.
Docudramas take two forms:
1. An actual historical event, time period, or incident, dramatized using people who may only represent the actual participants in the incident
2. An actual single person or group of people placed in a created series of events that represents what may have happened at some point in time
The first often are based on ancient or very early historical events, such as depicted in the film Troy; the event happened and some of the people depicted may have existed or took part in the event, but the dramatic aspect of the relationships between the people provides the basis of the story. Battles and other action sequences may be added to enhance the story, but the reality is based only on the event. The Killing Fields, set in more modern times, follows the same pattern of basing a dramatic story on an incident, filling the plot with relationships of people who may or may not have actually existed.
The second type of docudrama is biographically based. The film tells the story of a real person, such as Howard Hughes, as revealed in the film The Aviator (among several similar films of his life), using some events tied together with the person’s relationships with other people. Much of the story is based on recorded facts, but the story depends on dramatizing the events surrounding the subject, rather than a chronological historical review of the subject’s life.
Television series and one-off specials also have produced both types of docudramas. The long-running M*A*S*H*, originally a feature film and then TV series, was based on the mobile medical troops of the Korean War. Brian’s Song related the story of a sports figure, and Judgment: The Court Martial of Lieutenant William Calley added the Vietnam War to history of another war.
Some productions defy absolute categorization as to whether they are a documentary, a docudrama, or a dramatic feature. Good Night and Good Luck falls into that nebulous category; it is in many ways all three. It is a detailed look at the career and times of a single person, Edward R. Murrow, the world events surrounding and involving him, and his battle to defend personal freedom against a bigoted politician.
Documentary Preproduction Process
Before cameras or recorders may roll, several steps of the production process should be completed.
1. Research comes first. You must thoroughly investigate the topic. You must know both sides of the question before decisions can be made as to what interviews and scenes are important to proving the point of the topic.
2. Your preproduction conversations and interviews provide detailed background information, names of possible participants, and historical information important to the topic. You may or may not record your preliminary conversations at first, but you may record them later as on-camera interviews when specific questions are better framed through your research.
3. You must carry out site surveys of possible locations to determine equipment needs and possible production problems to be solved before the crew arrives. This should be accomplished with the producer, the director, and the key crew chief.
4. Permissions must be obtained from all owners of property, including civil units such as city, county, and state sites. If possible, obtain signed releases from anyone interviewed, shown on camera, heard, or whose property is visible in any shot, whether or not that sequence is used in the final production.
Short Forms
The earliest short-form documentaries made up the balance of the segments filmed for presentation within the newsreels, especially the March of Time. This series began as radio programs and motion pictures shorts during the 1930s. Although the production techniques made the program appear to be straight reporting, those topics covering politics, the economy, and other socially significant stories were intentionally aimed at revealing a specific point of view. Through the years, the newsreels, including those of March of Time, degenerated into reporting on the latest in fashions, new buildings, and entertainment culture.
Today, the most often used short form documentaries are segments within full-length programs such as CBS’s 60 Minutes, NBC’s Dateline, ABC’s Close Up, and PBS’s Wide Angle. These hour-long programs consist of two to six stories, each ranging in length from 7–20 minutes. These documentaries must make their point quickly, sharing some of the writing techniques of hard-hitting news stories. The audience often cannot discern the difference between short documentaries and in-depth news reporting. The difference is determined by the point of view clearly stated by the documentary and the attempt at balancing a story in a news report.
Radio long since has given up on producing accurate documentaries, except for NPR. The thoroughly researched and well-edited programs under the title of Watching Washington delve deeply into topics of social and political significance. Programs based on highly opinionated talk show hosts do not qualify as documentaries, despite their one-sided coverage of the topic at hand. Those types of programs are intended to be controversial just to attract an audience by eliciting emotionally heightened responses without studied and accurate research or valid socially significant solutions.
Periodically, television networks and some local stations will produce individual programs that may be categorized as documentaries. The constraints placed on broadcasters by sales policies and, more often today, pressure groups make writing and producing documentaries that clearly define a social issue and a solution without attempting to please all segments of the audience very difficult, if not impossible. In the past, CBS’s Selling of the Pentagon and ABC’s All the Children Were Watching did succeed in making the type of statements required of quality documentaries. Both generated heated responses, and in the case of Selling of the Pentagon, the government attempted interference and legal action.
Cable channels such as the Sundance Channel proved brave enough to take on a challenging topic and give it a full and pointed coverage, as it did with the history of surfing, Riding the Giants. The History Channel’s programs vary from balanced historical narratives to documentaries and docudramas. This mixture confuses the audience unless the program is clearly labeled as using restaging and reenactments instead of actual historical footage to describe the incidents that make up the story. Reenactments are used in documentaries when needed to fill gaps in available scenes but not to add dramatic value as in docudramas.
Networks have produced and aired series of documentaries on an irregular basis, as opposed to series that run for a specific length, called miniseries. The PBS science and nature series NOVA has a long history of accurate and specific coverage of topics that may or may not be controversial. Instead, it takes a specific point of view of a scientific breakthrough, investigating the topic in depth to leave the viewer with the opportunity to accept or reject the information provided to make the producer’s argument. Each episode of the Ted Turner Documentary series, such as “Avoiding Armageddon,” makes a strong argument based on the information presented.
On the other hand, the networks that produce and schedule miniseries that run for a length shorter than a normal season but longer than a single episode alternate between a documentaries, such as PBS’s Baseball, and docudramas, such as Roots. Each may make a strong argument. Although Roots told a lengthy story based on historical facts, it was highly dramatized to hold an audience over several nights during the time of its scheduled run.
The production of full feature-length documentaries for theatrical distribution has had limited success. Exhibitors reserve their screen time for features that will show a promised profit, starring leading actors and directed by successful directors and telling stories that people want to see (as shown by ticket sales). Audiences looking for escape or entertainment generally do not look to thought-provoking controversial documentaries. The recording of the 1970s music festival Woodstock, which exemplified the time and social changes of the period, held a young audience it needed to be a film success. In the past few years, two unusual types of documentaries surfaced, again as a reflection of the early 21st-century times and social attitudes. Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me and the anti-war Why We Fight reflect a growing dissatisfaction with the corporate and military worlds. The other aspect of the population’s concern appeared in the support for the nature documentary, March of the Penguins, which filled the theaters and won an Academy Award.
All of the confusion and abstraction swirling around the documentary genre leaves you, the writer, with a true conundrum as how to proceed. The following are five suggested steps to be taken:
1. Develop or create a clear argument as the basic concept. You may take a stand against or for a topic, person, or event, but your writing must eventually say to the audience, “I believe the following is the correct way to interpret a socially important subject.”
2. Research is a critical stage in documentary writing. It is important that you are totally aware of all of the possible information on the subject, both for and against your view. To take a stand, you must know both your view and the opposing view or views. You must have at your fingertips enough information that, as you gather your material, you will know what will support your view and what information may need to be countered to avoid losing your advantage. The research must be accurate and complete. What you did not find out in the research stage may destroy your argument in the long run.
3. Gathering footage, interviews, historical materials, and creating graphics and other supporting visuals as well as music and sound may lead you toward or away from your first concept. You must know your material well enough to be able to adapt and change your plan as you approach the actual writing stage.
4. Depending on the type of documentary, as indicated earlier in this chapter, the script and scriptwriting stage may vary from nonexistent to a script that is completely detailed, word for word, shot for shot. But the more you have worked out in writing in advance of shooting, the better prepared you will be to take advantage of what you have gathered and what becomes available to you during the production stage. You probably will discard much of your original research by the time you have finished editing.
5. Once the editing and assembling stage begins, then the final decisions will need to be made. Material supporting your argument needs to be assembled in a logical and coherent manner so that the audience will understand and most importantly accept your argument. The story and available material will determine how precisely you edit the production, but do not make the mistake of using everything you have recorded. Be brutal in editing out anything extraneous; use only the best you have available. Do not fear using counterarguments to support your concept. Often, an opposing view makes the best argument for your stand, depending on how you control the editing.
Final advice—do not lose sight of trying to win an argument. Use all legitimate persuasive techniques within ethical standards of the gen re to convince your audience of the validity of your point of view.
Documentaries over time evolved from single-issue archival representations to powerful investigations of complex and controversial social issues. Radio, film, television, and motion pictures provided the media needed to reach audiences over the years. The three basic types of documentaries—dramatic, biographical, and compilation—give the writer wide latitude in program design and concept. Script formats range from virtually nothing on paper before recording and editing to complete, detailed scripts with narration and all shots accurately described. Sponsored documentaries, biographies, and docudramas vary the level of presenting documentary material without precisely meeting the criteria of a documentary.
Producing a documentary depends on thorough research of the topic, the people involved, and the locations for shooting. The controversial nature of documentaries suggests that you follow careful legal advice and make certain all permissions and releases have been obtained. Documentaries vary from short segments of earlier newsreels and today’s television programs to full feature-length films and TV series.
Writing documentaries requires a clearly articulated argument, thoroughly researched to determine all available material both supporting the argument as well as contradicting the argument. The completed project depends on the availability and access to the people involved, written records, and historical materials. The writing process of a documentary begins with a concept and ends with the final edited production, ready for distribution.
1. Develop a clearly definable argument.
2. Completely research your topic from all angles.
3. Collect all available material both for and against your argument.
4. Keep an open mind to discover and use material or information beyond your original concept.
5. Edit carefully to include only the best material that will win your argument, including the voice of the opposition.
1. View a copy of an early documentary such as Nanook of the North or The River. Outline how the argument is developed and what visuals were used to explain the writer’s point of view.
2. View a copy of a more recent documentary such as Super Size Me, and compare the techniques with the documentary viewed for Exercise 1.
3. Watch a historical program on the History Channel and determine if it clearly falls within the definition of a documentary or a docudrama.
4. Do the same as Exercise 3 with a historical feature film now running in theaters.
5. Choose an event in your family’s history and write a documentary about the event or the key person in the event. Keep in mind that you are going to convince the audience of your point of view.
6. Find a copy of one segment of the PBS series Jazz and determine if it is a documentary or a docudrama.
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Bluem, A. William. Documentary in American Television: Form, Function, Method. New York: Hastings House, 1965.
Carroll, Raymond. Factual Television in America: An Analysis of Network Television Documentary Programs, 1946–1975. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1978.
Cumings, Bruce. War and Television. London: Verso, 1992.
Edmonds, Robert. About Documentary: Anthropology on Film, A Philosophy of People and Art. Dayton, OH: Pflaum Publishing, 1974.
Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel, 1911–1967. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972.
——. The March of Time: 1935–1951. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Hammond, Charles Montgomery Jr. The Image Decade: Television Documentary 1965–1975. New York: Hastings House, 1981.
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Rosenthal, Alan. The New Documentary In Action: A Casebook in Film Making. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971.
——. Writing, Directing, & Producing Documentary Films. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
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