Reader Question: What about writing a mockumentary?
An open forum question via email from Jason Toon:
I love your blog. You deserve a medal. And that goes double if you can answer my question:
I’m working on a mockumentary and have been surprised to see how little advice there is out there for writing this specific approach. Obviously, a lot of the usual rules don’t apply: characters directly address the camera, voiceovers are often called for, etc. Beyond that, it’s challenging to tell the story without an omniscient camera. Do you have any other advice for would-be mockumentarians? And as far as the industry goes, are mockumentaries looked at differently from other spec scripts — in other words, by going this route, am I setting myself up for a tougher sale?
First a bit of history. As far as I know, the term “mockumentary” — a fake, comedic documentary — was first used in relation to the 1984 movie This is Spinal Tap. One of that movie’s stars Christopher Guest has made a career out of this sub-genre with Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), A Mighty Wind (2003), and For Your Consideration (2006). However I think you could fairly call Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (1969) and Albert Brooks’ Real Life (1979) mockumentaries, even before the designation came into use. Another example would be Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006).
If you look at mockumentaries as a sub-genre of the comedy sub-genre satire, then it’s pretty easy to grasp why we don’t see many of them — a sub-genre of a sub-genre is pretty niche. Plus since mockumentaries are typically a send-up of a specific subject area — e.g., Best in Show: dog shows, A Mighty Wind: folk music, For Your Consideration: movie business — they narrow the potential audience to those people who actually care about and know the specific area the movie is mocking. Finally there’s this: Great satire is really hard to pull off.
Those would be the reasons I see contributing to how few mockumentaries actually get produced and distributed. And to be honest, I think that would come into play at the script acquisition level as well — if anyone knows of a mockumentary spec script that got set up in the last few years, please post in comments because I can’t think of any.
In terms of scripting a mockumentary, I do have a bit of inside info on this. In 1995, Burg & Myers had an office for several weeks at Castle Rock while doing a polish on our original screenplay Alaska. At the same time, the company was in production on Waiting for Guffman, and as a result, I got to see some of the dailies and a look at some script pages.
As you can imagine, Guffman was heavily improvised — which makes sense because to work, the movie has to come off as a documentary, hence, the actors and what transpires has to feel spontaneous and ‘real.’ The script pages I saw did not have dialogue per se, but they did have (A) scenes written to lay out the broad strokes of what the scene was about, (B) key dynamics between characters in the scenes, and © occasional lines of dialogue in scene description. All that suggested to me that Guest and co-writer Eugene Levy had worked out the plot in advance, tested it out through rehearsals with actors, then inserted bits of business into their preexisting script.
Specific to your question about an “omniscient camera,” I think you can make that presumption at the script stage — just assume you can go anywhere. And I would steer you to screen Real Life because if memory serves correct, Brooks has camera operators wearing these ridiculous helmet cameras that are ostensibly supposed keep the camera crews in the background — to help the family feel more comfortable — but end up doing precisely the opposite. In other words, Brooks actually makes the camera and production crew part of the story, which actually contributed to the movie’s humor.
My one big piece of advice: Make sure the script is funny. Really funny. That — and the central story concept, assuming it’s great — are the two most important elements in terms of a possible script sale.
By the way, if anyone has a copy of one of Guest’s scripts or Borat, please contact me.
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