One of the fun jobs is thinking up story ideas -- how to tell the story of someone's life, sum up their entire life and legacy, in a short amount of time. I joined one of those servivces that sends you movies in the mail and I've been requesting as many documentaries about musicians and artists and all, trying to find something similar, to see how other people do it.
I've been surprised at just how unsatisfying most of the documentaries are. Usually, they're too long or tell the story in the conventional manner. Maybe if a person is a huge fan of some artist, they would LOVE to watch the documentary. But if they're not a huge fan, like myself, then the standard documentary format (a big long string of topics that meander around, following a loose chronological order, that goes on and on and on) just doesn't hold my interest for very long.
Only a few documentaries have caught my attention: F For Fake, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, The Kid Stays in the Picture all have some sort of unique way of telling the story. F For Fake is more an essay about fakery than it is about its subjects, an art forger, a con man and a filmmaker. 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould combines fiction with interviews. The Kid Stays in the Picture story is told entirely by the film's subject, no other interviews and uses an exciting method that creates 3-D space from 2-D photographs.
Since Blaze is obscure and I'm totally obscure ... that's a major obstacle to getting the movie distributed. Fortunately, there's the internet and that helps. But more than that, I need to find a way to tell Blaze's story in a unique, unconventional manner that will help spread the word about the documentary, give people a reason to mention it to their friends, give reviewers a reason to write about it, give screeners a reason to recommend it and give film festivals a reason to program it. It's all about giving, isn't it? Give the viewer something new that they haven't seen before.
Posted by Kevin at July 19, 2006 06:41 PM