They're called "mockumentaries," and as the name implies, they are films that employ the techniques of documentary cinema to tell a fictional story.
The form has been popularized in recent years by the comedy hits of Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy and their improvisational colleagues: "This Is Spinal Tap," "Waiting for Guffman," "Best in Show" and now "A Mighty Wind."
But the idea behind mockumentaries — if not the phrase itself — goes back more than 60 years. The earliest — and most infamous — example may be Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds."
The story was presented as a usual night of musical programming interrupted by phony news bulletins about Martian space capsules landing in New Jersey. The result was a national panic.
Television got into the act with the CBS show "You Are There," a Sunday afternoon news program starting in 1953 with Walter Cronkite as host. The show, based on an earlier radio program, took a live news approach to historic events.
For example, CBS reporters (in modern dress) would cover the great Chicago fire of 1871, doing on-camera interviews with city leaders, witnesses and even Mrs. O'Leary, whose cow reputedly started the blaze by kicking over a lantern. One early episode covered the hanging by the British of Revolutionary War spy Nathan Hale (played by Paul Newman).
The idea of using the documentary format as a comedy vehicle may have originated with Woody Allen, whose first film "Take the Money and Run" (1968) purported to be a documentary about an inept career criminal named Virgil Starkwell.
As with many subsequent mockumentaries (including those by Guest), there was no attempt to maintain a consistent documentary point of view — Allen would go from TV-style talking-head interviews to footage of Virgil's life that could not possibly have been captured by a documentary crew.
Later Allen embraced the documentary style more completely with "Zelig" (1983), about a (purportedly) famous personality of the 1920s who could undergo chameleonic changes to adapt to any group in which he found himself. For example, surrounded by fat men, the normally skinny Zelig would balloon. The entire film was made to look like old newsreel footage.
For his first directing effort comic actor Albert Brooks adapted a semi-mockumentary approach for "Real Life" (1979), a spoof of the popular PBS documentary series "An American Family."
In recent years the mockumentary has become a regular feature on movie screens. Among the titles:
— "This Is Spinal Tap": Though directed by Rob Reiner (who went on to employ faux documentary interviews in his "When Harry Met Sally"), 1984's "Spinal Tap" featured the crew who would become regulars in the Christopher Guest-directed "Waiting for Guffman" (a mockumentary about small-town theatrics), "Best in Show" (a dog competition) and "A Mighty Wind" (a reunion of '60s folkies). "Spinal Tap" purported to be a documentary about the comeback tour of "England's loudest band," consisting of regulars Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean.
— "Fear of a Black Hat": This 1994 mockumentary spoofing rap music follows fictional artists like Tone Def and Ice Cold.
— "Drop Dead Gorgeous": A 1999 mockumentary about a high school girl (Kirsten Dunst) determined to win her local beauty pageant. Ellen Barkin and Allison Janney co-starred.
— "The Blair Witch Project": Not a comedy, but the most successful mockumentary of all time. Released in 1999, this low-budget entry — purporting to be footage left behind by college moviemakers who vanished while documenting eerie goings-on in the Maryland woods — earned $140 million in its domestic theatrical release. The accompanying Web site so effectively maintained the illusion that this was a real story that many viewers refused to believe the whole thing was fiction and dunned Maryland officials with calls for an investigation.
Why mockumentaries?
"The form bridges two different intentions on the part of filmmakers," said Davin Gee, head of film production classes at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. "It allows a director to make some sort of social comment without forgoing entertainment value. A lot of earnest documentaries are kind of joyless; this lets you make your point while having fun."
Perhaps encouraged by the success of the Guest films, many of Gee's students are drawn to making mockumentaries.
"Part of it is they don't trust their skills yet and feel that mockumentaries can be more forgiving of their mistakes," Gee said. "They may rely on the form too much. Students make the mistake of thinking a mockumentary is an easy, lackadaisical way to make a movie."
"For one thing, mockumentaries lend themselves to low-budget filmmaking," said director Kevin Willmott, whose own mockumentary "C.S.A." is about what life would be like if the South had won the Civil War.
Since they emulate the off-the-cuff, unstaged style of TV news footage, mockumentaries don't require much in the way of fancy sets or polished cinematography, Willmott noted. If the footage looks grainy and jumpy, that only adds authenticity.
"With 'C.S.A.' it seemed to be the only way to tell the story in a manner that the audience could accept," he said. "I didn't want to be winking at the camera; mockumentaries create a realistic universe that people have a hard time dismissing."
Moreover, the talking-head interview allows characters to say and do surprising things that would be impossible to integrate into a straight dramatic narrative. Being "interviewed" frees up their characters to say and do things in a way that a scripted scene could not.
"If you had to create scenes to accommodate all those laugh lines it would be a long way around the barn," Willmott said.