1 The Last Broadcast (1998)
The Last Broadcast’s greatest strength is its central gimmick: before Blair Witch Project exploded on the scene and made cheap, videotaped horror films into a cliché, Broadcast used grainy footage and cheap visual effects to tell its story about an ill-fated public-access TV show’s foray into the New Jersey woods. Broadcast never admits its fictional basis, and it’s easy to imagine someone stumbling across it some late night and falling for the gag; on the surface, it’s believable enough, built out of interviews, old footage, and the sonorous narration of supposed documentarian David Leigh. Only two things spoil the game: one is intentional, as the film breaks into third person for its finale, but the real tell is the generally poor acting and even worse script. It’s a clever idea that manages a few unsettling moments, but for the most part, Broadcast feels like a dry run for the far superior Blair Witch. It’s proof positive of just how difficult it can be to pretend to be real.
2 The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Indie-film marketing was changed forever—for better or worse—by the Internet campaign waged on behalf of The Blair Witch Project. Ads, videos, links, and planted urban legends were designed to create the impression that the film might actually be what it claimed: footage shot by a group of amateur filmmakers who got lost in the woods while searching for a supernatural phenomenon. Investors reacted positively to the Blair Witch team’s pitch videos, which presented the premise as straight-up fact; why wouldn’t the moviegoing public do the same? Few people were fooled in the theater, but there’s no doubt that the thoroughness of the pseudo-documentary illusion is key to the movie’s success and lasting impact. As a cultural touchstone, it was parodied and imitated in equal measure. But the purity of its methodology—as the first genre movie to fully embrace an emerging DIY and new-media aesthetic—meant that it was destined to be inspirational for a generation. A decade later, the makers of Cloverfield adopted the approach wholesale, producing the Godzilla movie that Blair Witch directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez might have created in 1999 if they’d had $30 million instead of $25,000
3 Paper Heart (2009)
Charlyne Yi and co. made a conscious effort to keep the details of Paper Heart—a documentary about love—under wraps before its Sundance première this year. The effect was twofold: media speculated about whether Michael Cera’s involvement meant the film was heralding an Arrested Development movie, and it shielded first-time viewers from the storytelling techniques, which mixed interviews of real-life couples and experts with the story of Yi and Cera’s courtship. While the studio is billing the two as a real-life couple, Yi has insisted in interviews that those segments are staged and improvised. (No debate about the fact that the film casts actor Jake Johnson in the role of the director; he’s the only person not playing himself.) The purpose of the ambiguity is unclear, but Paper Heart is a compelling (albeit often sickly-sweet and sometimes gratingly precious) story nonetheless
4 The Buried Secret Of M. Night Shyamalan (2004)
In the promotional run up to what was supposed to be the latest addition to the theoretically unstoppable M. Night Shyamalan juggernaut (The Village turned out to be the beginning of the end), SyFy eagerly hyped a three-hour, supposedly unauthorized documentary that would reveal big things about America’s latest Spielberg. Hours before it was set to air, carefully planted rumors that the documentary was a staged hoax began to leak. Watching it as an unintentionally revealing act of hubris, it’s pretty fascinating. Though Shyamalan is the ostensible subject, he’s mostly kept offscreen; the real star is overqualified documentarian Nathaniel Kahn. Coming off the successful release of his fantastic My Architect—a lengthy, self-indulgent, riveting profile of his architect father Louis—Kahn exploits all of his persona’s weaknesses from that film, coming off as intentionally dithering and utterly humorless. The end result: a three-hour mockery of a filmmaker whom 99 percent of the viewing audience had never heard of
The central joke itself is kinda wan—M. Night really does see ghosts, and he’s scared of water!—but as a sheer novelty project, it’s inarguably one of a kind
5 20 Dates (1998)
In 20 Dates, manic jackass/aspiring filmmaker Myles Berkowitz decided to combine his quest for love with his dire need for professional validation by making a documentary that would follow him through 20 oft-disastrous dates with women apparently turned on by his combination of neediness and cynical calculation. The twist is that Berkowitz ostensibly found that special someone (oh, the poor, poor woman) well before he reached the 20-date mark. The film plays it relatively straight in the early going, but by the time 20 Dates producer Elie Samaha is “encouraging” Berkowitz to go out with Wayne’s World starlet Tia Carrere (Samaha’s real-life wife) to sex up the project and increase its commercial prospects, it’s evident that Berkowitz’s grating ploy to simultaneously kick-start his love life and his non-starting film career is far from the genuine article, in every conceivable sense
6-7 Borat (2006)/Brüno (2009)
Unlike many faux-documentarians, Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t really trying to fool his audience: They know that Borat and Brüno (both characters created on his Da Ali G Show and spun off into their own films) aren’t “real.” But the situations Cohen puts himself in are often very real—it’s a wonder he hasn’t been assaulted more often by rednecks. Most of his targets aren’t aware that they’re part of the joke—they think they’re part of an actual documentary. But Cohen also doesn’t make any onscreen distinction between those who are in on the joke and those who aren’t: A hooker played by stand-up comedian Luenell, for example, is one that rides the line in Borat. Sasha Baron Cohen has basically invented a new type of film: part documentary, part fiction, part reality, all brazen provocation.
8 Frat House (1998)
Long before The Hangover, director Todd Phillips made his name with an altogether different portrait of men behaving badly in Frat House, which purports to be an accurate depiction of the hazing rituals endured by a pledge class at the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College. In the film, Phillips and co-director Andrew Gurland submit themselves to everything from doing push-ups in their would-be brothers’ puke to being locked in a dog cage and pelted with beer and cigarette ashes, all in order to capture what pledges really go through. There was only one problem: Most of the students involved later claimed that many of those outlandish “rituals” were, in fact, the filmmakers’ idea. While Phillips and Gurland have vehemently denied those allegations, blaming the controversy on “wealthy white kids that have lawyers and parents in the corporate structures” and are out to cover their own asses, the mere whiff of exaggeration was enough for HBO to ban the film entirely, so that it now languishes on bootleg video
9 Forgotten Silver (1995)
In October 1995, New Zealand TV treated its viewers to an incredible piece of history, unveiling the long-forgotten Kiwi filmmaker Colin McKenzie, who single-handedly put the New Zealand film industry at the forefront of cinema innovation during the silent era. McKenzie’s work included the first tracking shot, the first sound feature (which flopped due to the dialogue being entirely in Chinese), and a new film stock made from eggs. McKenzie’s career culminated in a wildly ambitious adaptation of Salome now lost to the ages; it survived only via the remains of a gigantic set now decaying in the New Zealand jungle. Forgotten Silver’s documentarians proudly displayed the just-discovered set as their movie’s jewel in the crown, buttressed by commentary about his genius by authorities like critic Leonard Maltin, actor Sam Neill, and producer Harvey Weinstein. Naturally, Forgotten Silver caused a huge swelling of national pride among New Zealanders. That was short-lived, since it soon came out that the whole thing was a hoax, cooked up by the movie’s co-directors, Costa Botes and future Lord Of The Rings mythologizer Peter Jackson. Though it seems an obvious mockumentary (and a very funny one), Forgotten Silver was an effective hoax because it was so careful to build up its details, presenting what later seemed obviously ridiculous in perfect deadpan. And it got so many supposedly unimpeachable sources to play along—a writer from the magazine The Listener even penned a pre-broadcast article talking up McKenzie’s supposed “extraordinary life.” It also benefited from early use of Jackson’s digital-effects wizardry, which in ’95 was relatively new. But perhaps unintentionally, it also played right into the inferiority complex common to people in small nations (or smaller U.S. states, for that matter), who loved the idea that one of their own had been a step ahead of Hollywood his whole life. And as any good con artist would note, it’s much easier when the mark convinces himself of the lie. One reviewer noted afterward, “I wanted to believe this marvelous story of ingenuity, courage, and tragedy so much that I pushed such churlish ideas away
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