Remember Alamo Pictures!

Remember the Alamo!

Yes, and now, get ready for Alamo Pictures.

I was sitting on a plane recently. I was switching through the channels looking for a video to watch. The choice was okay, if you like middle of the road story lines with every predictable plot line going.

I switched to the documentaries. Soon I settled into some real films about real people with some real stories to boot.

I don’t know if you have noticed but we are living through a Golden Age of Documentaries. Maybe it is because the news these days is more fantastic than any fiction maker could invent. Maybe it’s just we have woken up to the fact that the world around us and that person sitting across from you right now may be more interesting – no, probably is more interesting – than a whole host of Hollywood stars prancing around a sound stage pretending to be real. I mean in their real lives those same actors are hardly real!

Anyway what I’m trying to say is: I was intrigued. And when I get intrigued then I start to look for business opportunities.

You may remembered a few weeks ago I wrote about the explosion of podcasts – both product and producers – onto a willing public, hungry for the oral pleasures of listening to great stories well told. The thing is the podcasts out there are largely true stories told well, often using the techniques of fiction and drama to do so.

So, we love being told stories but we still want to watch them too. So I decided that this is the time, the moment for real stories told through a fictional lens and then you have the best of both worlds and you do not have to listen or watch some actor dialing it in.

It’s not so very long since documentaries were only to be found on television. I remember them. They were dull and worthy, like the people who made them. All the fun was in the fiction factory of Hollywood.   There were exceptions such as World at War (1974), but a lot of documentaries were educational or about current affairs. They were just not allowed to be entertaining let alone fun.

In the intervening years something has changed though. According to the British Film Institute, the number of documentaries produced in the United Kingdom each year has risen from four in 2001, to 86 in 2015.

That’s quite a jump not just in material but in people are investing in and producing the stuff. The films are also a million miles from its former subject matter. Today docs are beautifully shot with cinematography equal to anything Hollywood can do. They tell some really intriguing stories too – often larger than life. They are also far more commercially viable than they once were. Did you know that the famous the Cannes film market is now made up of 16% docs? And that is precisely the type of place where you can chart the future path of the box office and thus cinema itself.

It had been coming for a while but there is one man who is largely responsible – but not solely responsible – for what has happened.

Meet Michael Moore. Yep, it was his Fahrenheit 9/11 that took the Cannes Palm D’or in 2004. It was the first documentary to do so. Fahrenheit 9/11 did what drama – until then at least – was known to do. It dissected the then Bush Administration in a forensic fashion, exposing its dirty laundry along the way and coming up with a plausible if hyper real take on what US politics is really all about. It was also as gripping and as engrossing any blockbuster – maybe more so.

This was followed by a few other landmark documentaries – notably Super Size Me. This was a candid and disturbing but still wholly entertaining look at the fast food industry and all its medical implications. Food Inc. was served up next and looked at the industrial farming complex. And then Blackfish swam ashore!

All of this got audiences and, therefore, attracted money and in the film bizz money begets money.

What became known as “factual cinema” – guys, just call them docs – started to gain ground and a whole new era in documentary films was born, and is largely still with us. Take a look at what is topping Netflix’s charts – Making a Murderer – or what the BBC can’t get enough of – David Attenborough’s Planet Earth – or the critically acclaimed Searching for Sugar Man or Exit Through the Gift Shop and so on and so on

So, why this change in audience appreciation?

Well, let’s be honest the days of grainy and worthy cheap looking docs is now over. Documentary makers have upped their game. In the process they have become better at their art. The days of basically delivering a dull lecture over a few tasteful camera shots of your subject matter are now history, and I for one am cheering!

The makers of documentaries also started picking engaging subjects. They started realising what Hollywood for all its crimes against cinema never forgot – it’s all about the story!

Using storytelling techniques, they are pulling the viewer into the investigation, as well as presenting reality in a raw, real manner that sounds authentic because it largely is just that.

The documentaries have become slicker with better production values. Often beautifully crafted, they really just are an old form of storytelling that has had one almighty face lift.  The interviewing of people is more natural now, their reactions less scripted, their emotions tangible. The whole thing feels not just more real but really more cinematic.

New technology also has allowed for a cinema revolution to take place.  It has in turn opened the genre up to a whole new swathe of up and coming filmmakers. There are more doc makers running around London’s Soho than ever before. There are more festivals too. This means more money is about looking for the the next Fahrenheit 9/11. To be a documentarian was seen once as a bit grim, today it is super trendy.

And fact-based entertainment of all sorts is becoming more popular in general. Speak to any publisher.  Increasingly people are buying factual books at a rate and across a range of subjects that just was not the case even ten years ago. As with documentary filmmaking, this is because non-fiction authors have begun to craft factual books with the same creative care and flare previously reserved for fiction. Podcasts have only increased interest in the facts and the real people behind them – Serial podcast anyone?

So let me say this only once: the future is factual!

So, never wishing to miss an opportunity I am setting up a film company dedicated to making movies – documentaries that is, for television, for on line platforms and for your local movie theatre. The movies and the people behind them are in the business of telling stories and, for me, that means largely American stories in general, and Texan ones in particular.

I’ve called it: Alamo Pictures.

Remember the Alamo! was the battle cry of the Texan Republic.

I hope soon the descendants of those same Texans will be remembering the Alamo too. Only this time it is the stories that Alamo Pictures are going to be telling.