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The decade from the mid-60s to the mid-70s was also the great golden age of non-fiction movie-making. As a kid I remember being fascinated and feeling enlightened by documentaries like Don't Look Back, about Bob Dylan… and Harlan County USA, about a coal miners' strike in West Virginia .
And by An American Family, the 12-week series on PBS. We were riveted back then to watch the real life of a nice-looking, well-to-do nuclear family – the Louds – melt down.
It was one of the brilliant documentaries of that era. And I think without question THE most groundbreaking and influential.
It did take some time for that influence to be felt in the culture.
But by the end of the 90s, a bunch of storytellers, in prose and films, were sensing that the old standards about privacy and prurience were moot, and the old barriers between entertainment and reality were evaporating.
Such as Ed TV, starring Mathew McConaghey, as a guy whose regular life becomes the subject of a live 24-hour cable channel.
And then with uncanny speed, it was just a year later, in the first months of the 21 st century, that we learned the phrase “reality TV” when “Big Brother” and “Survivor” went on the air.
But “reality TV” -- Joe Schmo, Extreme Makeover, even Colonial House, the whole cheesy glut – turns out to be nothing at all like those fictional movie scenarios we saw a few years ago. Because in order for reality TV to be successful, it can't be … real – it has to be juiced up with all kinds of fakery … elaborate lies, game-show stunts, 11th hour switcheroos, and lots of glossy post-production.
But if you look closely at most of those shows, the 30-year-old DNA of An American Family is in there, still. Because before An American Family was broadcast, there was no such thing as a weekly documentary TV series with recurring characters.
Before they filmed An American Family, documentaries almost always chronicled the lives of the very fortunate, like Bob Dylan, or else the damaged or unfortunate… but NEVER ordinary, ”normal” middle-class Americans.
And it was An American Family, not Survivor or The Bachelor, that first turned the spectacle of normal Americans crying and acting out into prime-time entertainment.
So is reality TV all that's left of that great documentary era from 30 years ago? What has become of the full-length non-fiction film? Theatrical documentaries about important subjects?
Fortunately, there are still gems being made like Capturing the Friedmans, My Architect and the new film called Some Kind of Monster, about the heavy metal band Metallica.
And there is “Fahrenheit 9/11,” about George W. Bush and the war in Iraq , which is generating more talk and more ticket sales than every other documentary combined, more than any ever.
The problem for me is that Michael Moore's movie plays very fast and loose with the facts to serve his ideological ends – in other words, it embodies exactly what it reviles in the Bush Administration.
Just as TV shows like Who Wants to Marry My Dad and Wife Swap are the stupid bastard grandchildren of the PBS series An American Family, so is Fahrenheit 9/11 the debased descendant of the politically engaged documentaries that thrilled me so 30 years ago.
But…fine: free expression is what it's all about, even if you're producing depressing reality TV or reckless agitprop. However, I can't help but feel that if what we had 35 years ago was “the golden age” of documentary filmmaking, today is a different era -- more like “the best of times and the worst of times.”
