The Sincerest Form of Flattery:
A Brief History of the Mockumentary
by Thomas Doherty

          “There hasn’t been a new film genre since Fellini invented the mockumentary,” declares Donald Kaufman, or maybe it was Charlie Kaufman, in Adaptation, quoting screenwriting guru Robert McKee. He’s wrong, of course—fake docs, mock docs, bogus docs, parodic send-ups, shameless frauds, and sundry filmic forgeries have self-reflexively stroked the motion picture medium long before 8 1/2 (1963) vented the angst of autoauteurism. To uncover the original phony film means rifling through the back of Edison’s Black Maria, where some wise guy probably restaged The Kiss (1896) with his horse.

Whatever title marks the genesis of the genre, the locus classicus—the first truly authentic exemplar of the fake documentary in American cinema—was conjured by that media con artist par excellence, Orson Welles, whose fake radio news bulletins in the Mercury Theatre’s production of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds traumatized an invasion-wary nation in 1938, and whose fake screen obituary in Citizen Kane (1941) unraveled the stiff formal wear of the bombastic Hollywood newsreel.

The “News on the March” sequence that fired off Citizen Kane was an expert mock-up of the trademark devices of the monthly screen magazine The March of Time, a regular feature of the motion-picture bill from 1935 to 1951: the pompous Voice of God narration spoken by Westbrook Von Voorhis, the dyslexic syntax of orthodox Time-speak, and the mesh of archival footage and dramatic reenactments. As with so much else, Welles’s sleight of hand was prophetic and pathbreaking: not simply parody, but cinematic mimesis, the meticulous replication of newsreel grammar, style, and look via staged interviews, faux library stock, and unsteady peek-a-boo shots from an Eymo newsreel camera. Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz penned the ripe satire of the Henry Luce house style (“Legendary was the Xanadu...”), but the purely cinematic caricatures were scrawled by Welles, who, with cinematographer Gregg Toland, trampled on film footage to deface the screen image with the scuff marks of a print dragged too many times through a projector, simulating the grainy register and torn sprocket holes that bespeak archival authenticity. “Life is in color, but black and white looks more realistic,” quipped Welles, epigrammatically nailing the perceptual link between historical memory and the motion-picture record— F being not just for Fake but also for Film.

In the wake of Welles, as mile upon mile of film footage and videotape documented the postwar pageant of American life, the moving-image record of the past expanded exponentially. Spurred on by the establishment of the Vanderbilt Television Archives in 1968, the donation of the Universal Newsreel collection to the National Archives in 1972, and the belated preservation efforts of the major networks and film studios, a mammoth and readily retrievable cache of stock footage supplied the raw material for the patchwork genre known as the archival or compilation film, the preferred delivery system for motion-picture-mediated history lessons. With the onset of the age of cable, whole networks—A&E, E!, and The History Channel—can snub original programming by repackaging the extant record. The result has been a population explosion in celluloid and video-dependent texts. “Film begets film,” quoth film historian Jay Leyda.

And real begets fake. The proliferation of archival documentaries spawned in turn a teeming school of pilot-fish imitators, parodists, and deconstructionists, both popular (Ernie Kovacs) and avant-garde (Shirley Clarke). Most strived to mimic not just the tone and content but also the technique and technology of the original, a mimetic impulse that fulfilled its Platonic dream with the seamless matching and digital precision of Computer Generated Imagery. CGI launched a true revolution in motion-picture perception, giving forgers the means to replicate, with a fidelity undetectable to the naked eye, the look of the archival blueprint—and thereby overthrow the privileged status of 35mm photography as a reliable reflection of a preexistent metaphysical reality.

As if anticipating the demotion in prestige, while delegating the tasks of generic demolition, two serious comedies mimicked and mocked the two dominant traditions in documentary filmmaking, the fly-on-the-wall style of cinéma-vérité and the cut-and-paste mosaic of archival compilation: Albert Brooks’s Real Life (1979), a satire of PBS’s landmark reality TV series An American Family (1973), and Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), a documentary bio-pic of a man who was never there.

In Real Life, a camera crew led by the neurotic documentarian Brooks (playing “Albert Brooks”) barges into the household of an average American family and proceeds to ruin their lives. Like many a practioneer of cinéma-vérité before him, he learns that reality qua reality “sucks,” so the fly on the wall becomes the fly in the ointment. When the probed and exposed family finally pulls the plug on the high concept, Brooks sets their house on fire to create a blazing end-reel climax. “There’s no law that says `start real—can’t end fake,’“ he figures. “What are they going to do—put me in movie jail?” In retrospect, the joke was on Brooks. Today, judging from the battalions of eager contestants vying for self-immolation on reality TV, Americans would gladly send up their homes in flames, not to mention their privacy and interpersonal relationships, for a chance at video-fueled celebrity.

It was left to Zelig to incinerate the facade of that other documentary mainstay, the archival film. Though Allen’s affinity for cinematic mimesis was visible as early as Take the Money and Run (1969), his hallucinatory excursion through the Jazz Age and Jewish assimilation ratcheted up the stakes for fake verisimilitude. The vaunted verbal agility of Hollywood’s most screen-centric auteur was more than matched by a visual acuity that created an uncanny simulacrum of archival reality. Woody in a ticker-tape parade, Woody batting on the diamond with Babe Ruth, and Woody shoulder to shoulder with Eugene O’Neill—in each portrait, Woody fit perfectly into the frame. His key innovation, now a cliché, was to parade real experts (Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow) to lend their gravitas to the bogus conceit. Only the third act of Zelig, where Allen cannot resist crashing the Nazi Party and inserting himself into the iconic newsreel footage of the Third Reich, seems out of synch with the filmic milieu of the Roaring Twenties.

The fake documentary that firmly yoked (and hilariously ripped apart) the you-are-there immediacy of cinéma-vérité and the archeological work of the archival documentary was This Is Spinal Tap (1984), directed by Rob Reiner and featuring the power chord lineup of Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer (about whom more later). Mimicking the conventional tools of both trades (hand-held traveling shots, available lighting, off-the-cuff interviews, and the fabrication of dated screen grains, notably kinescopes from the prevideotape television era), the film tapped into the deep memory of The Ed Sullivan Show, Shindig (1964-1966), Don’t Look Back (1967), Gimme Shelter (1970), and Let It Be (1970) to fashion what documentarian Marty DiBergi (Reiner) dubbed a “rockumentary, if you will,” a phrase that inspired the neologism that stuck: “mockumentary.”

Since then, few cultural phenomena chronicled by a real documentary have not been granted a mockumentary hommage as a kind of certificate of arrival: Medusa: Dare to Be Truthful (1992), Julie Brown’s catty take-off on Madonna’s Truth or Dare (1991); Fear of a Black Hat (1993), a streetwise dissing of gangsta rap pretensions; and even a mock version of VH1’s seemingly mock-proof Behind the Music on The Simpsons (“Success/Fame/Doughnuts”), to name a few.

As might be expected, along the corridors of academic film studies, the meta-textual mix and match that is the stock and trade of the mockumentary has been catnip for smitten exegesis—usually bereft of the wit of the text on the dissection table. The highest praise to bestow is ‘subversive’ and the hippest name to drop is Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary theorist whose critical stock has never been hotter. Bakhtin’s notions of the “carnivalesque,” “auto-critique,” and “desacrilization” celebrate parody as a radical blow against the narrative empire that blasts asunder the hegemonic superstructure of the monolithic truth-mongering “sacred text”: exposing the stentorian Voice of God as a squawking charlatan behind the curtain. Alas, this being America, whatever guerrilla chops the genre may have brandished have long since been dulled by commerce and cooption. To watch, say, Stephen Kessler’s The Independent (2000), a mockumentary about a Roger Corman-like minimogul played by Jerry Stiller, is to see how a once-witty goof calcifies into a riff gone stale.

But not in all hands. The most successful and dedicated practioneer of send-up cinema has been the multitalented and not merely multihypehnated writer-director-star Christopher Guest. In conspiracy with a gifted cast of kindred spirits, he has presided over three genuine gems of the genre, Waiting for Guffman (1997), Best in Show (2000), and, most recently, A Mighty Wind, the last seemingly the capstone piece of a makeshift trilogy and a likely case study for the delights and demerits of mockumentary making. In fact, Guest rejects the term “mockumentary” as too glib and condescending, but a ruse by any other name is still a ruse.

Mainly eschewing the penchant for mimetic Xeroxing that propels so much of the genre, Guest puts the ethos of cinéma-vérité to the methods of improvisational comedy: turn the camera on, and eventually, serendipitously, something funny will happen. According to the production notes for A Mighty Wind, Guest and his screenwriting partner Eugene Levy, who also cowrote Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show, compose “a detailed outline describing the characters and laying out the story’s key plot points in a scene-by-scene format,” a process that results in “a traditional film script, minus dialogue.” After rehearsals fill in the character outlines and inspire the ad-libs that become the dialog, more spontaneous magic is conjured up during the actual filming in Super 16mm. Guest and editor Robert Leighton then shape the rough footage into a polished, but not too polished, feature film; the shot ratio is approximately ten to one, or roughly fifteen hours of filming for ninety minutes of screen time.

However ragged and risky the improvisational method might seem, the bits and routines are buttressed by the sturdy pillars of a three-act structure:—assembly, rehearsal, and show. As in a backstage musical, offstage melodrama and antics vie with proscenium performances throughout the Guest-Levy trilogy—a theatrical production (Waiting for Guffman), a dog show (Best in Show), and a reunion concert (A Mighty Wind). (In Best in Show, in a bow to 42nd Street [1933], dogwalker Cookie actually sprains her ankle so her understudy husband must go on with the show.) The high-wire act also has a sturdy net in the bench strength of the ensemble. In the case of Levy, Guest, McKean, Shearer, and the indispensable Catherine O’Hara, over three decades in harness in the pressure cooker of sketch comedy-on-demand in Second City nightclubs, Saturday Night Live, and live radio have honed a comedic agility that usually finds the troupe landing on its feet.

Gentle ribbers rather than go-for-the-jugular slashers, Guest and his ensemble are more interested in getting inside their characters than in drawing and quartering them. The outlook acknowledges the always doubled-edged relationship of parody to the original: both parasite on the host and slave to the master. To mimic with such dead-on accuracy demands an in-depth involvement and surrender of self that is never just ironic. A bright ensemble of sharp professionals dumbing themselves down to impersonate a delusional gaggle of second raters can skid perilously close to smugness, but Guest and company never seem to be slumming in the world of never-weres (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show) and has-beens (This Is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind). Perhaps every performer, no matter how successful, still feels the anxiety of being one gig away from residing in the where-are-they-now? file. His surname signals his stance; Guest is a polite visitor, a kindly participant observer among the fallible and the lovable.

Nonetheless, A Mighty Wind blows in via a newscast obituary —shades of Orson Welles—that flourishes its purely mockumentary chops. The archival wallpaper of a canned video obit unspools a convincing enough alternative universe mourning the death of legendary folk-music impresario Irving Steinbloom—faux 8mm footage of a faux coffee house, the videotape texture and cheesy set design of a Hootenanny-like television show, and the godawful color schemes of pre-British Invasion album art. The images evoke a halcyon age dating roughly from 1958 to 1963, part of a culturally intriguing resurrection of the better-behaved front end of the 1960s at the expense of the ruder back end, also on sight in Catch Me If You Can (2002) and Down with Love (2003).

To honor the great man, Irving’s anal-retentive son Jonathan (Bob Balaban) decides to mount a memorial concert (“Ode to Irving”) at New York’s Town Hall (played in the film by Los Angeles’s Orpheum Theatre) and broadcast by a Channel 13 clone to peddle tote bags. Jonathan manages to recruit Irving’s entire stable of classic acts: the Folksmen (McKean, Guest, and Shearer), a Kingston Trio and ultimately Peter, Paul and Mary-like cohort of frat-boy folkies; the New Main Street Singers, a New Christy Minstrels-like “neuftet” whose members are not quite as wholesome as their orthodontry; and, lastly, the Richard and Mimi Farina-like former sweethearts of the folk world, Mitch and Mickey (Canadian SCTV vets Levy and O’Hara, long since annexed as American national treasures), whose performance of the syrupy “Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” was always sealed with an emblematic kiss, a gesture fondly remembered by a generation as “a great moment in the history of humans.”

Time has not been on the side of the old folk, who have been off the charts or out to lunch since Dylan went electric. The Folksmen are musically rusty, physically pudgy, and follically impaired, barely remembered for their one semi-hit “Old Joe’s Place” (their career was later stalled by a record company that forgot to punch a center hole in their albums). The New Mainstreet Singers are a secondary generation spin-off, the founding members being variously retired, indicted, or dead; the replacements include former teen runaway Sissy (an alarmingly perky Parker Posey), ex-porn star (last screen credit: Not So Tiny Tim) Laurie (Jane Lynch), and Laurie’s husband and fellow color-worshiping cultist Jerry (John Michael Higgins). Bespectacled Mitch and autoharp strumming Mickey may have fared the worst: the covers of Mitch’s record albums (one shows him digging his own grave) and song titles (“May She Rot in Hell”) chart his descent into clinical depression and Mickey is married to a model-train nut (Jim Piddock) in “the bladder management industry.” Swirling around the edges of the geriatric rave-up are a Nordic public-broadcasting executive (Ed Begley) who seems to think Yiddish is lingua franca, a pair of public relations flacks who share, at most, one brain between them (Julie Campell and Larry Miller), and a blowhard agent (Fred Willard) with wild bleached hair and an irritating catchphrase (“Wha’s Happening???!!”). Throughout, no matter how off handed the improv-vérité seems, the details bespeak precision craftwork: check out the prescription drugs, yogurt cups, and Chinese take out strewn over Mitch’s motel night table.

Strutting their musical versatility, Guest, McKean, and Shearer perform bad folk music as proficiently as bad heavy metal music (Did I hear Guest finger a few licks from Nigel Tufnel’s trademark ‘solo’ on banjo during a Folksmen tune?). Reportedly, the rest of the cast also gamely strummed and sang along, with John Michael Higgins (a comic chameleon who played opposite McKean as the gay parents of a pampered shih-tzu in Best in Show) contributing the vocal arrangements for the New Main Street Singers. In their sham performances, the Guest stock company holds faithful to a strict authenticity.

Likewise, the faux folk music written and performed by the ensemble is not parodic trashing in the ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic/“Like a Surgeon” mode. The tunes are only slightly off center, just this side of the real thing, musically of a piece with the zesty, major-chord twang of “If I Had a Hammer” and “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley” (“the kind of infectious that it was good to spread around”). Only the daffy lyrics wink at the listener: “Never Did No Wanderin’,” about a feckless homebody who hears but never heeds the whistle of the locomotive, and the rousing curtain line of the title tune, “A Mighty Wind” (“It’s blowing peace and freedom/It’s blowing you and me.”)

Amid the whiplash jests and sudden bursts of slapstick (the biggest laugh in the film comes when a frustrated stage manager whacks Jonathan upside the head), Guest hits more than a few grace notes. There is a real pathos in the post-folk slide of manic-depressive Mitch, now an addled shell of his former self, slowed in speech and dulled by meds, and quietly desperate Mickey, singing a jingle at trade fair for her husband’s “Sure Flo” product line. Just as Best in Show engendered an authentic rooting interest for the dog lovers, A Mighty Wind lures viewers into the wings to see whether Mitch and Mickey will reenact that great moment in human history.

Guest’s sweet-tempered, open-hearted oeuvre suggests that—Bahktin notwithstanding—the mockumentary is at heart a soothing genre. It repays a lifetime of arid channel surfing with an oasis of cool attitude and flatters spectators with assurances of their media sophistication and oh-so-wry sensibility. Americans may be hazy about the dates and details of real history but a nation of televisual scholars boasts an encyclopedic knowledge of the tropes and turns of history-by-the-screen.

Which is why it is always advisable, whether in mock docs or doc docs, to keep a sharp eye and ear out for the selective memory of the audiovisual filter. In deleting the soundtrack of the civil rights movement from its song catalog, A Mighty Wind practices the mockumentary equivalent of revisionist history. The folk music here is folk music as sung around CYO camp fires (though even there, if memory serves, “We Shall Overcome” was on the playlist). To mock Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” would be to highlight what the film seeks to suppress, the political dimension of folk music in union organizing, civil rights, and antiwar activism. But among such rousing singalongs and cheerful hand-clapping, it seems almost pedantic to point out the difference between the cover version and the original recording.

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