How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960–2022 (Web Exclusive)
by Nora Stone. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 224 pp. Hardcover: $125.00, Paperback: $34.95.

Reviewed by Will DiGravio

Few words in the lexicon of contemporary cinema are more diluted than “documentary,” a term that has come to embody all moving images that operate outside fiction. Turn on cable, click open a streaming service, or go the theater, and you are likely to encounter a documentary more than ever before. In politics, for example, every Donald Trump accomplice seems to have featured in a documentary of their own—Get Me Roger Stone (2017), American Dharma (Errol Morris’s work on Steve Bannon, released in 2018), Where’s My Roy Cohn? (2019). Portraits of deceased celebrities abound. Filmic treatments of living figures have become the new memoir—why hire a ghostwriter when you could put together a film crew for a glorified commercial? The same is true in sports: the success of series like ESPN’s 30 for 30 has led to countless miniseries, some now starring and financed by team owners, like Hulu’s Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers (2022). Earlier this year, before the Boston Celtics had even won the NBA Championship, news broke that a camera crew had, in fact, been following the team around for a documentary now available to stream on YouTube, All In: The Boston Celtics. And do not forget that cultural pillar known as “true crime.” 

This onslaught of documentary production begs an essential question: How did we get here? How did films once referred to in the movie business as the “d-word,” a mode of filmmaking reserved mostly for elite movie houses and public television, become a staple of the streaming wars? Such is the story Nora Stone tells in How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960–2022. Stone’s highly readable work takes the long view, identifying through lines that reveal how the seeds of today’s highly saturated documentary ecosystem were planted decades ago—before there was Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023), there was Dont Look Back (1967). Sure, perhaps today there are more “soft documentaries,” as Stone generously calls them, but, on the positive side, this bread-and-butter content has also led to both the creation of formally innovative, socially minded, and well-financed works, and a wide audience that would have been unfathomable at the beginning of the century. “If I’m telling these stories to reach a mass audience,” director Ava DuVernay said of 13th, her 2016 Netflix documentary on the prison-industrial complex, “then really, nothing else matters.” 

Stone’s work marks an important intervention in the history of documentary. Read the book, and you will encounter familiar names—Shirley Clarke, D. A. Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers, Marlon Riggs, Ken Burns, Jennie Livingston, Morgan Neville, the list goes on. But the study is not an analysis of aesthetics, nor a look into the histories of major films, figures, or movements. Instead, the history focuses on small distribution companies, exhibitors, and promoters who cultivated the documentary market that exists today. Stone ends with that behemoth known as Netflix, which later swooped in and remodeled the market in its own image, making way for more corporations to feed their bottom lines with nonfiction. Readers may remember when, at the  2019 Sundance Film Festival, the streaming giant broke records by paying $10 million for Knock Down the House, which chronicled the 2018 House campaigns of four progressive women. (Two of the protagonists—Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush—were eventually elected to Congress.) The deal caused many in the press to mark the beginning of a “new golden age of documentary.” Look around, because you’re still living in it. 

Fifty years before Sundance acquired Knock Down the House, the Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin released Salesman, the canonical documentary about door-to-door Bible salesmen and the film with which Stone begins her history. In the 1960s, Direct Cinema like that produced by the Maysles, Pennebaker, and Robert Drew and his associates, became a welcome reprieve from the newsreel-style documentaries and more journalistic pieces to which viewers were accustomed. Histories of Direct Cinema and its twin movement, cinéma vérité, rightly acknowledge its radical, more experimental approach, one at home in the Cinema 16 film society founded by Amos Vogel, for example. Yet, what Stone wisely shows is how that more commercial strand of documentary existed even as these films charted a new way forward. The 1960s and ’70s saw an increased interest in art-house movies as audiences craved to experience the auteur filmmakers of Europe. Yet, there was a problem. “The growing number of independent art house theaters needed product,” Stone writes, “but there was a diminishing supply of foreign films.” To feed the interest, theaters turned to “touristic documentaries,” works “designed to shock and amaze audiences, by reveling in exotic landscapes, lifestyles, and customs.” Mondo Cane (1962), a now-dubious collection of travelogues, emerged as the most resonant and commercially successful of the genre, leading to a best-selling album, Academy Award nomination, and TV licensing deals. 

Then there was 1967, what Stone describes as a “banner year for documentary.” Just as documentaries served art-house audiences, they also began to capitalize on the interests of America’s youth and the counterculture. The dam broke with Dont Look Back, self-financed by the independent Pennebaker and Richard Leacock for $40,000. To the shock of trade publications and the industry writ large, the film was a massive hit, one that reviewers immediately identified as a shift in the public consumption of documentaries. “The idea of a documentary being popular and profitable,” Stone writes, “was new.” Yet, she continues, there was a precedent. She points to A Hard Day’s Night (1964), “a scripted film in which the members of the Beatles play themselves,” as an obvious precursor to the phenomenon. “Both films were essentially presold properties with built-in audiences,” she writes. “Dylan’s career and all the promotion surrounding it were essentially an advertisement for the film.” In situating this history as she does, Stone begins to draw useful throughlines which she then tracks across subsequent decades, making clear that no matter how aesthetically innovative or politically radical a work may be, many often remained a two-for-one special: entertainment for theater audiences and a commercial for ancillary products. This is not (merely) cynicism, but the realities of production. 

The importance of individual players in the documentary film market is carefully cultivated by Stone in the book. She shows how the entrance of documentaries into the mainstream is a byproduct of players working to increase commercial viability. Establishing and debating documentary canons is easy and fun. What is far less so is unpacking the unsung labor of financing, distributing, licensing, and so on. An institution that receives ample praise is Film Forum, the venerable New York City theater that still sits at the intersections of art-house, documentary, and repertory screenings. Film Forum became a springboard for documentary filmmakers, who could not only show their work before a high number of influential critics and a discerning audience but also rely on the theater’s generous revenue-sharing model. Stone gives an example from 1981 when filmmakers could bank on a thousand bucks for a two-week showing, or thirty percent of the box-office earnings, whichever was higher. 

Each of the chapters in Stone’s linear history could function as an article of its own. Interested in the role of PBS? Turn to chapter three. The so-called “Docbuster Era” ushered in by Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002)? See chapter five. Stone’s work is an essential reference for anyone interested in the development of American documentary film. Yet, to read all the chapters together is to witness how the collective body of documentary films produced across decades became a highly desirable, cost-effective commodity. In the 1990s, companies like Miramax and Fox Searchlight began to acquire documentaries on mainstream subjects to balance riskier fiction projects and vie for industry awards. As major studios moved documentaries to the back burner, cable channels began to license documentaries to fill their programming slots. HBO continued to produce original content, building a brand that would include stand-up comedy specials and the popular series American Undercover. 

With the new century came the growth of film festivals—a natural breeding ground for documentaries—and the new DVD technology. Cheaper than VHS, and higher quality, DVDs gave new life to documentaries, one that, Stone writes, “grew into a mutually reinforcing relationship” with “the theatrical documentary market.” Docurama became the first home-video label dedicated solely to documentaries, bringing to market a range of titles both new and old. Among their partners was a new upstart promising to disrupt the market: Netflix. 

The longest and final chapter of Stone’s book is dedicated to the streaming giant, tracing how Netflix filled its DVD inventory with documentaries as a cost-effective strategy and to present itself as a service for more sophisticated viewers. Stone’s book is not a history of Netflix nor an analysis of its cultural impact, perhaps explaining why some of the harsher critiques one could level at the company feature mostly in passing: data mining, limited revenue sharing, and its general disregard for theatrical exhibition. In the book, Stone walks a fine line, acknowledging such truths while trying to offer a more objective history, however possible. Stone, usefully, treats the growth of Netflix and its competitors as the climax of the broader market’s growth; perhaps not inevitable, but logical, nonetheless. Maybe (one hopes) the best is yet to come.

Will DiGravio, a Cineaste assistant editor, is a Brooklyn-based critic and researcher.

Copyright © 2024 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol.  XLIX, No. 4