Issue #13: Pulled from the Archives: The Documentary Content Mill
"The streamers and networks are just churning out stuff — they have to fill airtime, and documentaries in that world."
Welcome to Shamira Explains It All/Shamira Explique Tout, a culture newsletter discussing the origins and impact of Black production and exchange, identity, and intellectual property via our digital, social, and archival discussions - and whatever else may be timely and interesting. Part English, Part Francophone. Reach out with feedback, suggestions, tips, and ideas at contact@shamirathefirst.com.
Happy August! It has been a while since I shared anything here — between health and family matters as well as the grind of freelancing, this newsletter had to take a bit of a backburner as I worked on nurturing other projects. One of the biggest changes for me in 2023 has been that when my body and mind chooses to slow down, 8 times out of 10, I heed the call. I am blessed to be in recovery from my major medical crisis of 2022, and I am not aiming to return there.
As I alluded to, I have been collaborating on other projects that I hope to be able to reveal soon — major features and initiatives that I am really honored to have been tapped for. I am also beginning the hunt for a position as a Culture Writer, so should you see any openings that you think I would be a good fit for, please do not hesitate to email me and share them: contact@shamirathefirst.com
This month, I have been thinking a lot about the content mill of streaming services that has accelerated in the wake of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes: true-crime and docu-series. It is a cottage industry that has rapidly accelerated in the pandemic — I worked on a feature around this and spoke to some top tier documentarians, including the inimitable Stanley Nelson, around their experiences with this explosion, for a feature that was ultimately killed. With recent industry developments, I felt the themes were especially pertinent — particularly the parallels to reality TV, an industry that boomed in the last writers’ strike — and wanted to share that with you all today.
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Onto the essay.
Jennifer Lopez’s 2022 Netflix documentary Halftime opens on West Side Story. As clips of the 1961 movie musical play, Lopez waxes nostalgic, praising its portrayal of the vibrant, beautiful barrio neighborhoods like the one the South Bronx native grew up in. She applauds Rita Moreno, a “triple threat” before Lopez could set her sights on the descriptor; before her family, the public, and the tabloids could doubt Lopez’s ability to achieve it; and before she proved them all wrong. It’s a whole-hearted embrace of a film that Moreno herself found to be more complicated, expressing frustrations over how the Puerto Rican cast was darkened for “authenticity” on screen. But it’s Lopez’s narrative around which Halftime revolves — a triple entendre of a title, documenting Lopez’s 50th birthday, her “middle-age”, and her Superbowl performance — a documentary that similarly glosses over the complexities of the actor-singer-dancer’s career, particularly after her breakout in Selena. There’s no mention, for example, of the criticism she’s faced for extractive relationships with Black recording artists such as Ashanti and Christina Milian, whose temporarily uncredited labor helped get Lopez all those hits. The story here is about the crystal clear barrage of bad faith press around Lopez’s personal life that dogged her professional ambitions and turned her into a Hollywood punchline. The baseline conviction: compared to her blonde contemporaries, Lopez received excessive scrutiny for having the audacity to want to be successful, to love, to have it all.
Halftime, co-produced by Lopez’s manager Benny Medina and her business partner Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, is more documemoir than formally executed biography; the effect is not comprehensiveness or fidelity as much as it is reclamation. After years of reading about herself, Lopez offers a storyline to affirm the legacy she wants for herself — as the star and producer of Hustlers, as a Superbowl halftime show headliner, as presidential inauguration entertainer, as the generator of money hand over fist for some of the biggest corporations in the business.
The throughline is a clear extension of several celebrities taking the reins as a reflexive reaction to the media assault from paparazzi in the early aughts, but the execution falls short at several junctures, failing to articulate the how after stating the what. Lopez is far from alone in projects of this stature. The touted gold standard is The Last Dance, a ten-part leviathan dedicated to cementing the legend of Michael Jordan in perpetuity. Similarly, directors Coodie & Chike manufactured the equivalent of event television in January 2022 with the three-part Jeen-Yuhs documentary, a film trilogy that granted an empathetic insight into Kanye West through the perspective of those who grew up in the music industry alongside him as hip-hop’s biggest rockstar was contemporaneously navigating a hostile relationship with the media, high-profile divorce, and public speculation on his mental health and temperament. Typical of a film that intended to affirm an artist’s legacy, it was highly contingent on the expected engagement and uncritical support of West’s fan base, leading to flashpoint debates after every release over fact versus fiction: notably, after Week 1, fan ire cascaded towards Chaka Pilgrim, then marketing head of Roc-a-Fella, for seemingly not properly acknowledging the greatness of College Dropout hit single “All Falls Down” while filming, not comprehending what it may feel like to be accosted with a camera at the workplace to execute a function outside of her then-job responsibilities. She would go on to become President of Roc Nation, Executive Produce Jay-Z’s 4:44 videos, and have a reputation as a fierce artist advocate, despite the documentary’s indications to the contrary.
In a similar context but different application, Tina Turner bravely used her film to close the chapter on her musical career, reframing the project as a journey to reclaim her name after experiencing horrific abuse for a long stretch of her life in the limelight and indict the continued cultural belittling of her traumas. The family of XXXTentacion released a documentary entitled Look at Me:XXXTentacion, a film that attempts to paint a complete picture of a young man who was plagued with demons and given no tools to address them, hurt many of those closest to him as a result (including his ex-girlfriend, who endured severe harassment from his fans for coming forward about domestic violence), and was working on his own redemption journey before his premature passing. In efforts such as these, the breezy sheen found in legacy affirming celebrity docs is absent, leaning into tensions in pursuit of the narrative corrections but willfully curating the stakes for the optimal result; it is up to the viewer to choose whether they agree with the argument presented.
Legendary point guard Earvin “Magic” Johnson debuted his own legacy affirmation via a 4-part series with Apple+, They Call Me Magic, which premiered a month after HBO’s new Adam McKay-produced sports drama, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, based on sports writer Jeff Pearlman’s book 2014 New York Times Bestseller Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s. Each episode opened with pronounced white text on a black background: this series is a dramatization of certain facts and events. Magic rebuffed the series as “not even close” to an accurate portrayal; Skyhook legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, known for his affinity for imperious prose in recent years, took to his own Substack to express his displeasure over the series. “The result of using caricatures instead of fully developed characters”, he writes, “is that the plot becomes frenetic melodrama, sensationalized invented moments to excite the senses but reveal nothing deeper.” The former Laker executive and NBA logo himself, Jerry West, demanded an apology from HBO and McKay for “Winning Time falsely and cruelly portray[ing] Mr. West as an out-of-control, intoxicated rage-aholic”, a storyline that according to West’s lawyers is “fiction pretending to be fact – a deliberately false characterization.”
In response, HBO has asserted that their series is a drama and not a documentary, and therefore not beholden to any accountability over the truth. While the language used by HBO may be intended to absolve them of their liability as a documentary — whether it be legal or in the court of public opinion — that contention is not nearly as cut and dry as it may seem. In contemporary discourse, the rubric for evaluation is ever-fluctuating: to take, for example, John Grierson's "the creative treatment of actuality” as the gold standard implies that there is a universal consensus on said actuality, and as recent political affairs have borne out, that could not be further from the truth. For example, in They Call Me Magic, which the legend has posited as the authoritative record from the horse’s mouth of the Showtime Lakers era and beyond, there are certainly storylines that are narratively pruned in favor of enshrining the Lansing, Michigan native’s legacy as the best point guard in NBA history: Magic’s highly public and fraught two years in the Lakers front office gets nary a mention in the documentary that charts his many accolades and tribulations.
“I define a documentary as a moving image production, about which it would make sense to ask the question, could it be lying to you?” says Penny Lane, documentarian who has made phenomenal films from Listening to Kenny G, Hail Satan?, and Our Nixon. “A fiction film, we all sort of understand is made up, even when they get into the based on a true story stuff, you would never say this film is lying, even if it's not quite what happened in history. But a documentary is a film that would make sense to ask that question about.” Filmmaker Stanley Nelson, the legendary documentarian of Black American life who recently received his first Oscar nomination for his documentary Attica, defines the genre more broadly as a non-fiction film, with the key caveat that there are multiple devices that can be used in the form. “But generally, it’s not fiction, it’s not a story that somebody wrote and then fed people lines to say,” Nelson asserts.
A cursory click through other live films will further muddy the waters as to what a documentary is or is not. Homecoming: A Film By Beyonce is taxonomized by Netflix under “social & cultural docs;” Hulu categorizes the 2018 unearthing of Aretha’s Amazing Grace recording under documentaries as well, as is Michael Jackson’s This is It. The first two seem to be straightforward concert films — the last was plagued by accusations of the usage of body doubles by the Jackson estate, which leads one to question what story is actually being told. When projects do expand to cover an artist on a larger scale — such as a Billie Eilish or Janet Jackson — they can tend to have the looming shadow of the artist or their PR team’s editing hand, whose approval is required for music licensing clearance, and often end up as a project largely serving as a promotional vehicle for new upcoming products, whether it be an album, book, or a tour, and little contextual examination or artistic engagement of internal paradoxes of the man, myth, and legend. There are the very rare and notable exceptions, such as Kenny G and Alanis Morrisette forfeiting final edit in recent history, the latter ultimately accusing director Alison Klayman of a “salacious agenda” in the days leading to the film’s release.
“Writing is an older art form. It's been around for millennia longer than film. And you sort of have a sense when you look at the analog in nonfiction writing, that there's a very wide range of types of nonfiction writing,” Lane points out. “People largely do have a language to understand those things. Even if you go to the bookstore and you look for nonfiction books, there's not one section called nonfiction, there's biography, history, social sciences, pop culture, whatever. Documentary —film in general — has been around for only a little over 100 years, and my guess is that as time goes on…it'll just become the case that there are these subcategories that are sort of more understood.”
At present, the average consumer of streaming platforms seems to be hit with a plethora of self-designated documentaries; in addition to the increasingly frequent celebrity “legacy affirmations” and “narrative corrections”, it seems that hardly a month has gone by without a film or limited series getting released attempting to recreate a contemporary version of appointment television out of relatively recent history. There is a de-facto content production pipeline that has been generated: viral scandal that consumes social media — and thus, much of digital media — takes place, feature story is generated months later and optioned, and then a documentary and/or a limited series based on the story is then created. Two years of derivative and endlessly promotional content based on stories that generally chart out the misery brought to endless people —WeWork, Bad Vegan, The Way Down, LulaRich, take your pick.
“The real answer is, it’s reality TV, isn’t it,” Lane states, in reflection of the radical change over the last 10 years. “For a long time, there was really a very high and thick wall between reality TV programming and documentary. It was kind of like different worlds entirely, like different executives, different networks, different editors, different producers, everything. I didn't know anybody in that world. But since the advent of these, like new streaming platforms…those are all being kind of populated with a mix of executives from reality programming and from — let's call it prestige documentary programming, and the walls are really coming down in a way that's confusing for a lot of makers.” As a result, she points out, it can be increasingly difficult to make a creative distinction within the pitches one receives, which she now gets every day. “You're kind of like, are you looking for — it's like quite hard to explain what you would mean — are you looking for reality TV? Or are you looking for a documentary? And it's increasingly difficult to like quite find the line between those things.” There is no clear definitional distinction between the two genres — for example, the commonly maligned “frankenbite” in reality TV is often employed in documentary editing. However, there are established community practices and guidelines about how the tool is employed ethically to serve a narrative purpose; that is to say, not to misrepresent a person’s dialogue. The overlap between the two spaces, however, allows for big-budget projects that are wrapped in artifice. “You’re hired by a big platform to do what they're calling a documentary film, and then you kind of get into the process of it and you discover that what those executives — most of whom come from reality TV, it turns out — actually want is glamour, fast, loud music, conflict, yelling, you're like, oh. Slowly, it dawns on you that that's actually not what you do,” Lane laughs. “How many of those things can you take on before you're like, I'm actually making Bravo reality TV?”
“When I started out, there was just PBS and HBO”, says Nelson. In just the last two years, he has worked on Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool for PBS American Masters, Vick for ESPN 30 for 30, Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy for Netflix, Attica for Showtime, and Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre for A&E. “The streamers and networks are just churning out stuff — they have to fill airtime, and documentaries in that world. An hour and a half of Crack doesn’t compare to an hour and a half of Bridgerton. Crack is cheap,” he jokes. “They look at the filmmakers who have been around as a sure thing – they’re gonna give me the money, I’m gonna make Attica, I’m gonna make Vick, and it’s going to be airable.” As the documentary has continued to become more of a robust business and a transactional one, Nelson has worked to create a documentary lab of his own at Firelight Media to work with first-time filmmakers, as well as the William Greaves Research and Development Fund for second and third time filmmakers, to help them create the experience required to enter into the expanding profit pipeline.
The impact of COVID-19 in filmmaking has also shifted the demands for the industry as well. While many documentarians such as Nelson continued to work on passion projects such as Attica, which filmed on location in late 2020 with over 70 interviews with senior citizens and extensive primary archival materials, buyers also became increasingly hungry for projects that were heavy in archival material and minimal supplementary shooting needs – a service that the new documentary model could fill. “If the story has already happened, then we already know what the ending is, and we already know it’s interesting,” Lane explains about calculations made by studio executives. “The idea of working with archival, it used to more exotic because it was a harder process. There aren't that many images, and you have to go find them and pay someone. But now it's like, you fucking type stuff into YouTube, and there, it's like, thousand of things. And it's really easy to operate – these stories are all stories that happened recently. So there's tons of social media feeds to mine, there's tons of Instagrams to mine.” This process, however, is a lot more expensive than normal, requiring a filmmaker to budget for additional licensing costs, researchers, and mastering different media formats into one cohesive project.
Ultimately, it is indisputably true that we are being deluged with documentaries that feel uninspired and unchallenging; failing to explore the animus of the various artists that shape and define this contemporary era and the central tensions that influence their work, or wave after wave of aimless “content”, from the celebrity “legacy affirmation” and “narrative correction” to the “music documentary”, and even the “augmented reality”. It is a hapless mass of videos, looking to shill a story about your favorite celebrity to the next fan willing to buy it. Perhaps, however, we are to stop expecting documentaries to serve as a purveyor of truth and authority and trust the consumer to get more savvy as to the machinations of the different stakeholders behind each sub-category and their intended purposes as entertainment and storytelling. We will still have the subversive projects such as Listening to Kenny G and radically important ones such as Attica alongside glossy vanity efforts such as Halftime – and the viewer can choose what satiates them at any given point. “When I started making documentary films, you know, nobody went into documentary films for the money,” Nelson remarked, reflecting on gatherings over the years at DOC NYC and Sundance. “We used to all get together and complain. Now everybody’s smiling; everybody’s better dressed.”