What are documentaries supposed do … and not do?

By Neil Giordano

Back in April, I sat down with director Penny Lane and editor/screenwriter Thom Stylinski after a showing of their film Nuts! at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. (The film screens at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from July 28 to August 6.) Nuts! is ostensibly the life story of John Romulus Brinkley, a Depression-era doctor who achieved fame by claiming that goat testicles could be used to cure male impotence. Later he went on to become an innovator in commercial radio. But the movie is really an amusingly mischievous (and formally playful)  celebration of an archetypal American con man.

We discussed the film’s precursors and unlikely influences, the importance of a good writing and editing, and the fraught relationship between fact and narrative in documentary film.

---

Arts Fuse: The first image of this documentary is an animation of two goats copulating. Was that an intentional provocation, cinematic clickbait?

Penny Lane: The two goats humping was a late-in-the-game edit, a very last minute change. The film used to start with an ordinary narration: “This is a film about a guy, and here he is …,” but there was no reason to keep watching, so we were thinking about supplying clickbait in a sense, because we wanted the movie to be super, super entertaining. That was the goal. We couldn’t do what we wanted to do with the rest of the movie unless people were pulled in and entertained. So it moves really quickly, and its full of fun stuff.

It was a central question early on: Can we pull this off? Can we feed viewers information through an unreliable narrator, so that they know they’re being fooled and enjoy it, or suspend their disbelief, or whatever that might be, in order to learn later what we had done? In that sense, the documentary is like clickbait that reveals what clickbait is.

AF: Right, I’m not even sure how to categorize it.

Lane: Clickbait is a funny way of putting it. Regarding documentary film, we’re in this media landscape where everyone is competing to get their infotainment in front of you and make you pay attention. I went to art school, and—I’m being a little sarcastic here—they teach that you that smart movies are boring, and they have to be confusing and boring or they’re not smart. I’ve always rebelled against that. If I have a directorial mission it’s to prove that’s not true. And I feel our film is really smart, and what makes it smart is that it’s so effectively entertaining,

Thom came into the process two years in, and at that time Nuts! was an all-archival footage with a narrator. But it just didn’t work because I couldn’t make it entertaining. It was interesting, but it wasn’t seductive.

So I sent it to Thom because he has a perfect comic sensibility, and also he’s a good writer. And because he doesn’t watch documentaries, really. And he said, “This has to be entertaining, like a movie movie.” Because it couldn’t do what it needs to do if it’s a “documentary” in a conventional sense.

We had this great relationship.  I said “No, it’s a documentary. We have talking heads. We have a voice-of-God narrator. We have all the kind of clichés of .. it should be a classic expository documentary.“ Thom pushed against any moment that threatened to be boring. I’d say, “We have to explain the history of the FCC!” And he’d be like, “Do we?”

Thom Stylinski: [laughing] We could probably explain it in 4 seconds.

Lane: He would always say to me, “If you can explain that in 10 seconds, you can have it.” So I had to leave out a lot of the historical stuff that I thought initially would be part of the movie

Stylinski: The first really challenging conversation we had was before the animation had been completed. We thought about how we could hold everything together for an hour, and then have a crazy reveal in the third act about all of these things. It sounds impossible to do as a documentary.

Lane: I put that in all caps in the first email we exchanged: NOTE: THIS MAY BE IMPOSSIBLE.

Stylinski: So I said, well, OK, let’s watch Goodfellas. Let’s learn how to move through time.

Lane: We watched Goodfellas over and over again.

Stylinski: We had to establish Brinkley as a human being rather than the subject of a documentary. And that happened after working on the film for a year or two.

Lane:We kept adding more and more re-enactments, because we realized they were working so well to push the story forward in an efficient way but also to make Brinkley interesting and make you like him. Because you couldn’t do what we did in this film if you didn’t like him.

AF: You had to be rooting for him.

Lane: Right, you had to be rooting for him.

AF: Even though I came into the movie with some knowledge of your premise, I  didn’t know anything about Brinkley. And after 5 minutes, I paused and wondered “Is any of this for real or is it all made up?”

Lane: What’s funny about the whole idea of “Is this real?” is that when we were doing the archival research verification turned out to be tricky because Brinkley created 90% of the archival record. There’s all these stories that everyone repeats, and at some point they become “true.” So even when you say “this is true” it’s not “true” in a factual sense. Even if it’s on Wikipedia that doesn’t mean it’s “true.” We’ve grown to accept a certain account of things, and some of it’s verifiable. We can do our best to fact-check it.

I have a friend who watched the movie early on, and he thought the whole thing was fiction. And that I had just found a bunch of photographs of a guy and built a story around them. I wish I had the talent to do that.

AF: As I watched the film I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to believe. So at some point I decided to just see what happens, see if the movie will reveal what’s real or not.

Lane: Right, it’s a fun exercise to think along with a documentary. When you watch a narrative movie, a fictional movie, like Lord of the Rings, you know up front that you’re being lied to. You suspend your disbelief, so you can enjoy it. And that’s a beautiful thing. That’s what cinema is. The extent to which documentary film does the very same thing is extremely unsettling to everybody.

AF: So what standard of factual ‘truth’ can we hold documentary film to? Or is there a standard?

Lane: In the documentary community we are a part of, basic broad principles about verisimilitude have been accepted, centering around “tell the truth to the best of your ability.” Directors by and large abide by that, though how you do that is fact-specific and case-specific, on a day-to-day, thousands-of-choices-a-day-in-the-edit-room kind of way, or in how you negotiate your subjects. In general, when directors say their film is a documentary, they are making a certain kind of promise to the audience, and they take that responsibility pretty seriously. Making Nuts!, Thom and I talked about how much anxiety I had about the lies in our movie, fabrications that made the story more convincing and more entertaining. A lot of the stuff in the movie is just made up.

Stylinski: At no point did I care. [laughs]

Lane: He didn’t care at all because he’s not a documentary person. He’d say, “So what?” And I’d say “You don’t understand. This is most likely going to become the definitive documentary movie about this person, so everything we say should be legit.” It was a constant negotiation. But the movie, if you watch the whole thing, reveals we’ve been lying.

We tried to do as much as we could in the latter section of the film, in the trial scenes, to review the big picture of Brinkley’s credentials, his book being fake, the fact that he was a conman long before he planned to go to medical school. Those are important points that do come out.

AF: So that clarification worked in the chronology of the film.

Lane: It worked in the chronology of the real story of Brinkley. It’s true, the trial did really destroy him. He really did put himself in court and was ruined. But then there’s other little things in the movie that we made up, like there’s a moment in the film with his celebrity endorsements. We just made those up.

AF: That’s one of the moments that piqued my curiosity. Buster Keaton? And who else was in there? Woodrow Wilson?

Lane: We created a rumor that Wilson has had the goat-gland surgery. But we also had Huey Long in there as one of his celebrity endorsements. And then we strongly implied that Buster Keaton was a patient. [laughs]

But these were things we made up in order to make the story more convincing. Brinkley really did have celebrity endorsements, but it’s no one you’ve ever heard of now. We needed a movie star—Brinkley had a movie star endorse him, but no one you’d ever heard of these days. He had politicians that supported him, but no one’s heard of them now, so we used people that would be familiar to the audience. Those are the kind of things that freaked me out. Of course, it’s for the “higher cause” — to reveal how a charlatan operates, and how giving people a story they want to believe makes them believe anything. But at the same time, it was uncomfortable to lie.

AF: You call Nuts! a non-fiction film rather than a documentary? Why?

Lane: Because we draw on what non-fiction writers have developed as ideas and theories and categories and rules over a long period of time. Cinema is so new. Even the idea of what a “documentary” is not even close to 100 years old at this point. So I find when I say “non-fiction” it helps me put it in the context of different forms: there’s journalism and memoir, and there’s creative non-fiction, and essays. And there’s different conventions and rules that apply to all those forms in writing. But we don’t quite have that level of sophistication yet in the film world. Which is cool because we can still try to define it.

AF: While watching Nuts! one of the ‘documentaries’ I kept thinking about was Exit Through the Gift Shop, another meta-film where I also found myself asking: at what point is the filmmaker creating the story? Isn’t that a form of cheating?

Lane: I’ve watched that movie so many times, and I’ve changed my mind about it so many times too. I thought the whole thing was made up, and then I wanted to find out more, and then I found out that that guy [Brainwash, a street artist, subject of Exit Through the Gift Shop] was a real guy, and he really does exist. But there’s a few things in that film that I still have my suspicions about.

I can’t even believe that Exit is only 6 years old. It was an enormous influence on me. I can’t believe I started Nuts! before I saw it. Because when the film came out, I was a couple of years into the process of making Nuts!. Exit was really inspiring to me, because it proved that smart movies can be fun.

Read the Netflix reviews for Exit. 95% of the people write “This was funny” and “What a weird guy” and “Wow, I’m inspired to do street art.” A minority of reactions are “This is really deep and confusing, and what’s going on here?” That is I wanted to do, make a movie that does that. I guarantee you that most people will watch Nuts! and think, “What a crazy story! I didn’t know that happened” and put aside the meta-documentary part of it. And, that’s great!

---

Neil Giordano teaches film and creative writing in Newton. His work as an editor, writer, and photographer has appeared in Harper’s, Newsday, Literal Mind, and other publications. Giordano previously was on the original editorial staff of DoubleTake magazine and taught at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.