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When Dan Cogan co-founded Impact Partners in 2007 with the goal of making good documentaries that also did good for the world, it was the beginning of what he and others now look back on as the golden age of the form. After decades of relegation to art houses and public television, films like *An Inconvenient Truth, Super Size Me,* and anything by Michael Moore were suddenly finding an audience and making money. The returns were modest by Hollywood standards (Fahrenheit 9/11 is the highest-grossing documentary of all time and only the 589th-highest-grossing movie), but so were the costs (James Cameron blew through Moore’s $6 million budget in five minutes of Avatar: The Way of Water). When streaming began its Hollywood takeover in the 2010s, documentaries presented themselves as a low-cost way to burnish a reputation. Netflix won its first three Oscars for documentaries, including *Icarus,* a 2017 investigation into the Russian sports-doping scheme, which was produced by Cogan.
But as Netflix and other streamers battled for market share, documentaries themselves began to change. The streamers had enough data to know what people liked — murders, celebrities, episodes that end with a cliffhanger — and by 2020, when Netflix was releasing a new documentary or docuseries every week, the streamers were competing less for awards than for the next true-crime hit. Between 2018 and 2021, demand for documentaries on streaming services more than doubled, and films that once had hoped to eke out a couple of million bucks at the box office were now selling to streamers for $10 million, or $15 million, or $20 million.
A genre that had always existed in part to inform and enlighten was now primarily a commercial product. That meant documentarians had more work, which was nice, but the projects often came with shorter deadlines and notes from streamers pushing directors to juice opening sequences with a little extra tension, as if these were spy thrillers that could be punched up rather than representations of real life. A decade after journalism suffered through its own period of disruption, its onscreen cousin entered a kind of clickbait era of its own: Make it fast, see what works, repeat. “People talk about the golden age of documentary, and it was exciting to be a part of that,” Cogan told me recently. “It is also true that we left that age three or four years ago and we now live in the corporate age of documentary.” This past May, A24 added Documentary to its line of film-genre scented candles, alongside Horror and Rom-Com. (The fragrance notes: “university library archives, weathered newspaper clippings, a timeline of the events, found footage.”)
In 2019, Cogan and his wife, Liz Garbus, an Oscar-nominated documentary director, started a new company called Story Syndicate with the goal, this time, of finding a way to continue making thoughtful films while meeting the streamers’ voracious appetite for content. That meant ramping up. In the three and a half years since its launch, Garbus has produced or executive-produced 21 films and series — more than she did in the preceding decade. The company now has dozens of full-time employees and more than 200 freelancers. In December, Story Syndicate released one of the most-watched documentaries ever: *Harry & Meghan.*
Cogan and many of the more than 80 documentarians I spoke to about the state of their industry were frank about both the opportunities and the potential drawbacks of the new era. “Once it became clear documentaries could sell for $20 million or you could get a $5 million budget, all the buyers wanted them to be at that level,” Cogan said. “The smaller films, the more visionary films that were exciting to all of us — those became the films that people were less interested in.” He was reminded of the period in the 1990s, after *Pulp Fiction,* when Hollywood realized there was money to be made in indie film; this was a good thing, but it also produced “a mind trick,” as Cogan put it. “Once something looks commercial, that’s all people want it to be.” When I put this assessment to a former Netflix executive, they didn’t dispute it. “It’s not enough to do something that a few million people might really love when you’re trying to reach 25 million people or 50 million people,” they said. “A lot of documentaries — I would say the majority of documentaries — don’t meet that bar.”
All this has left the documentary world suffering an identity crisis. What even is a documentary anymore? There is more money than ever, but it has come with expectations that didn’t exist when the industry was closer in ethics and taste to public broadcasting than to Hollywood. The people agreeing to tell their stories are now asking for control, or cash, leaving documentarians navigating a sense of responsibility (or fealty) toward their subjects; the demands of the algorithm; and their desire to make great work. For the audience, it has become almost impossible to sort works of art or journalism from glorified reality TV or public-relations exercises: An HBO Max subscriber can scroll through the documentaries tab and find two movies about Lizzo that she herself executive-produced, 41 films and series described as true crime, an Oscar-nominated movie about Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and *Wahl Street,* “a glimpse into global star Mark Wahlberg’s life as he juggles the demands of his personal and professional worlds and hustles to grow his expanding business empire.” Hollywood is now showing signs of retrenching. With budgets shrinking, filmmakers worry the problems of the doc boom could be exacerbated by a doc bust, and that the old-fashioned idea that documentaries could be trusted to tell honest, complicated stories may go down with it.
From left: Subjects then and now: Margie Ratliff in The Staircase (2004). Photo: Netflix (Staircase)And Subject (2022). Photo: Lady & Bird Films (Subject)
In 2018, as the corporate age began, an experienced director who asked that I not use his name — the doc world loves nondisclosure agreements — was hired to make an hour-long episode of a true-crime series for Netflix. It was his first commission for the streamer, and he hoped the project would shed light on a decades-old murder. But as the director began working, he found the production company making the series had expectations and a timeline that didn’t seem conducive to handling such a sensitive story. For starters, he was given just over two weeks to shoot and only ten weeks to edit. The Alliance of Documentary Editors recommends a month of editing for every ten minutes of run time; The Jinx and *Making a Murderer,* the true-crime series that helped kick off the documentary boom in 2015, had each taken years to make.
Before filming began, the production company also sent the director a six-page “Story Structure Template,” complete with breakdowns for what it wanted to happen at specific moments. “Ten percent of the way into your documentary, your hero must be presented with an opportunity,” the template read. Instead of citing other documentaries as reference points, it recommended mimicking Erin Brockovich and *Gladiator.* “For the next 15 percent of the story, your hero will react to the new situation,” it said, pointing to the moment when “Maximus is asked by the dying Emperor to take control of Rome and give it back to the people, in spite of the ambition of his son Commodus.”
I have been told more and more often, and I think this is because producers are coming from reality TV, that ‘We need a scene where X happens.’
Documentary-making has never been ethically pure or entirely subjective. (“I’m working on a project that is the kind of documentary where you do six takes of the person putting a boat in the water to get the right one,” one editor told me.) Every shot and every cut is a choice, and even its practitioners have never agreed on whether the medium is closer to journalism or to cinema. One of the earliest popular documentaries, Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film, Nanook of the North, was about a man supposedly living in the Canadian tundra, untouched by the wider world — and it was full of lies. Nanook’s real name was Allakariallak. His wife in the film wasn’t his wife. (She was, according to another local, one of Flaherty’s multiple wives.) Allakariallak hunted with a gun, but that didn’t fit the story Flaherty wanted to tell, so the director asked him to use a harpoon. In defense of his methods, Flaherty said, “One often has to distort a thing in order to catch its true spirit.”
In 2009, researchers at American University published *Honest Truths,* a report on the industry, in which a nature documentarian admitted to breaking a rabbit’s leg to ensure he got a shot of a predator capturing its prey; another filmmaker couldn’t find home movies of a family featured in a historical film and simply went to a flea market, bought some Super 8 footage of a random family from the same era, and used that instead. The Jinx features the greatest documentary ending of all time — Robert Durst apparently confessing by asking himself “What the hell did I do?” on a hot mic before responding, “Killed them all, of course” — but the two lines were later revealed to have been transposed in an effort to add drama to the climax, an editing technique common enough to have its own name: Frankenbiting.
The streaming era introduced new pressure points into the filmmaking process. There might now be a production company, with a streamer — and an algorithm — looking over its shoulder, asking the director to produce a moment “around 75% of the way into the story” when “something must happen to your hero that makes it seem to the audience that all is lost.” (Think: “Most of the plaintiffs withdraw due to the bungled efforts of the new lawyers, and George leaves Erin.”) Many of the best films of the golden age were made by cobbling together grant money over years while following subjects without a firm sense of where the story was going. But the streamers were now commissioning more films and series upfront, which left less room for experimentation: Selling a film often required a treatment with story beats laid out, a pitch deck with headshots for your cast, and, ideally, a sizzle reel. If you didn’t know exactly how your story would unfold, the response was often “Come back to us when you know what happens.”