Box Office Docs

Jonathon Last points out the embarrassingly bad box office returns on Al Franken’s lefty political documentary, God Spoke, and helpfully notes this Box Office Mojo chart listing political documentary grosses. He writes:

Notice how many of the biggest-grossing political docus have come in the very recent past: 15 of the top 20 were released post-2000. Also notice how many of them are of a leftward persuasion. If nothing else, George W. Bush's administration has been great for liberal documentary filmmakers.

Alright, that's too glib. But it is striking how the liberal documentary market has come alive in the past six years. Of the 62 highest-grossing political documentaries of all time, 49 of them were released after the 2000 election, and nearly all of them are lefty. It's another entire medium that has come to be dominated by the left.

Well, sure, the Republican-controlled Bush era has been a boon to lefty filmmakers, and while I second Last's lament that the medium is so dominated by one political side, I think the left's "accomplishment" is somewhat less impressive than it might intially seem. First of all, as Last goes on to note, digital video and cheap distribution methods have made filmmaking far more affordable and accessible to the masses. The left, for too many reasons (Ross Douthat does a nice job of analyzing the situation here), has long been better at rallying and encouraging the artistic community than the right, and those drawn to inexpensive political filmmaking are—at least in our current cultural climate—going to tend to lean leftward.

Additionally, I think our increasingly visual, image-saturated culture is really ceasing to differentiate film from text. I’m not suggesting that text will go away, but the distinctions people have traditionally made between videos and words are increasingly blurry and bound to become more so. Eventually the right will pick this up, but for now, the artistic innovators are mostly on the left.

And, I think, it’s also useful to note how limited the success of these films really is. Look at the list: Only 9 films have made more than a million dollars; only three have made more than 10 million; and only one—Fahrenheit 9/11—could genuinely be called a mainstream hit. Yes, Bowling for Columbine and An Inconvenient Truth were both fairly profitable, but their actual reach and box office performances were, in Hollywood terms, fairly small. Twenty million dollars in ticket receipts just isn’t much our current days of hundred million dollar movie marketing plans. When studio advertising execs casually declare that an expenditure “may seem like a paltry $2 million,” it’s a reminder of how unbelievably moneyed the movie industry is. Political documentaries tend to get far, far more attention than other films of similar cost and stature, and thus at least seem to wield more influence, because many members of the media have, understandably, a jones for the intersection of art and liberal political advocacy.

Also, as I mentioned, the left has the art and entertainment world pretty much bagged, meaning that it will focus its own considerable powers of promotion on its favorite products. Witness the sparse coverage and mild reaction to Ron Galloway’s sensible, relatively well-produced free market documentary defense of Wal-Mart versus the media hype surrounding Robert Greenwald’s anti-Wal-Mart tirade, The High Cost of a Low Price (back in December, I compared the two films). These films seem much more successful than they are because of the attention they get, but for the most part, they’re tiny blips on the box office radar with little mainstream reach.