![]() “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. “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 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. Ĭogan 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. In December, Story Syndicate released one of the most-watched documentaries ever: Harry & Meghan. The company now has dozens of full-time employees and more than 200 freelancers. 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. 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. (The fragrance notes: “university library archives, weathered newspaper clippings, a timeline of the events, found footage.”) “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. ![]() “People talk about the golden age of documentary, and it was exciting to be a part of that,” Cogan told me recently. ![]() 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. 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. ![]() Between 20, 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.Ī genre that had always existed in part to inform and enlighten was now primarily a commercial product. 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. Netflix won its first three Oscars for documentaries, including Icarus, a 2017 investigation into the Russian sports-doping scheme, which was produced by Cogan.īut as Netflix and other streamers battled for market share, documentaries themselves began to change. When streaming began its Hollywood takeover in the 2010s, documentaries presented themselves as a low-cost way to burnish a reputation. 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). 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. 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. ![]()
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