TRUTH ON SCREEN
Doc 2 Feature: The Central Park 5, Man on Wire, Chicago 10+
The biopic is a popular genre that purports to tell the real-life story of a person or event. Of course, these films and shows are still fictionalized accounts. They often change major plot points for narrative purposes, sometimes even omitting characters or combining multiple people into one. And of course, sometimes, the truth is far stranger than fiction, and storytellers find themselves changing factual events to make the biopic seem more feasible. For example, think if a writer pitched a movie about all of the events of this past year. They may be told there are too many or too outrageous plot points: a pandemic ravaging the world, a con man in the White House trying to stage a coup, and what about those murder hornets? But a documentary does not need to alter elements of a story to make it work. That’s its beauty. Below we have rounded up several great documentary films whose tales became narrative movies and shows.
Documentary: The Brandon Teena Story directed by Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir (1998)
Feature film: Boys Don’t Cry directed by Kimberly Peirce (1999)
This documentary is about the 1993 rape and murder of Brandon Teena, a young trans man in Humboldt, Nebraska. The film combines interviews with people involved in the heinous crime along with archival footage of Teena. The feature film was directly inspired by the documentary and actually used footage directly from it.
Watch The Brandon Teena Story on Amazon Prime
Rent/Buy Boys Don’t Cry on iTunes
Documentary: Chicago 10 directed by Brett Morgen (2007)
Feature film: The Trial of the Chicago 7 directed by Aaron Sorkin (2020)
After you’ve watched Aaron Sorkin’s new drama The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix, check out this documentary about the same event. It uses a mix of animation and archival footage to look at the events of the 1968 Democratic Convention that led to eight activists being arrested for conspiracy to incite violence.
Rent/Buy Chicago 10 on iTunes
Watch The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix
Documentary: The Central Park Five directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon (2012)
Mini-series: When They See Us created by Ava DuVernay (2019)
This documentary delves into the 1989 case of five African-American teenagers wrongfully convicted of raping a woman in Central Park. The boys spent 6 to 13 years in prison for a crime they did not commit until the real culprit, a serial rapist, confessed.
Rent/Buy The Central Park Five on iTunes
Watch When They See Us on Netflix
Documentary: Man on Wire directed by James Marsh (2008)
Feature film: The Walk directed by Robert Zemeckis (2015)
In 1974, French daredevil Philippe Petit performed a death-defying act. He successfully walked across a tightrope strung between the towers of the World Trade Center. Robert Zemeckis later adapted the story into a feature film, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Both create an extreme sense of dread and awe as you watch Petit do the unthinkable.
Watch Man on Wire on Tubi
Watch The Walk on Crackle
Documentary: High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell directed by Jon Alpert, Richard Farrell, and Maryann DeLeo (1995)
Feature film: The Fighter directed by David O. Russell (2010)
This HBO documentary follows three crack addicts living in Lowell, Massachusetts, a formerly thriving town that had fallen on hard times. While David O. Russell’s feature film The Fighter is not an adaptation of this documentary, it was heavily inspired by it. In The Fighter, one of the film’s leads, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), is addicted to crack and watches a fictionalized version of the documentary.
Rent High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell on Vimeo
Watch The Fighter on CINEMAX GO
