documentary

JOHN BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL: anatomy of a fiasco

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Photo caption: Linda Blair in JOHN BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL. Courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures.

John Boorman and the Devil tells the true story of an all-time movie-making fiasco – and it’s more entertaining than the original film could have ever hoped to be. That 1977 bomb was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, which I correctly judged at the time to unfathomably bad. In John Boorman and the Devil, Boorman and his collaborators explain, in their own words, what happened.

The Exorcist became a monster hit in 1973, making an unexpected fortune for Warner Bros. The studio, seeing others profit with Exorcist ripoffs, wanted to cash in with a genuine Exorcist sequel. Trouble was, both The Exorcist’s director William Friedkin and writer Peter Blatty felt cheated by Warners and were embroiled in bitter litigation.

The studio courted director John Boorman, who was at his height of marketability, having just made Point Blank and Deliverance, two great films that have since been added to the National Film Registry. Boorman, however, was bored by the idea of making a horror movie; instead, he wanted to make a trippy art movie, as he had with Zardoz. Unfortunately, Boorman’s vision, as reflected in the continually rewritten screenplay by Rospo Pallenburg, manifested itself as incoherent cinema. (I remember being completely puzzled as I watched Max Von Stdow wandering through an Ethiopian desert,)

Of course, the target audience for the film was the folks who had enjoyed The Exorcist. Because The Exorcist was a horror movie, they were understandably expecting Exorcist II would be another horror movie. Disappointed by the lack of horror, confused and bored, Exorcist II: The Heretic was greeted with hostility. and then ridicule, and finally laughed off the nation’s movie screens.

John Boorman in JOHN BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL. Courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures.

In John Boorman and the Devil, director David Kittredge brings us interviews with Boorman himself, stars Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher, the screenwriter, the assistant directors, a camera operator and the script supervisor. We even hear from the biologist in charge of wrangling the thousands of locusts. Boorman is a good sport and reflects on his biggest personal disaster with a minimum of defensiveness or self-pity. Blair and Fletcher are delightful raconteurs.

It didn’t help that Exorcist II: The Heretic is filled with unintentionally funny moments. At one point, Linda Blair tap dances. Wearing an African tribal headdress, James Earl Jones spits out a whole tomato. Even today, Blair and Fletcher burst out laughing at the name of the movie’s demon – Pazuzu.

Boorman dryly recounts advice he received from the great director David Lean: “Everybody makes failures. Just don’t make a famous one.”

I had heard William Friedkin taking delight in a hilarious anecdote about a disastrous Pasadena test screening of Exorcist II. Because Friedkin wished the sequel and its studio ill, I had presumed that he had embellished the incident – but John Boorman and the Devil brings an eyewitness who corroborates Friedkin’s version.

And here’s another tidbit – Boorman wanted to cast then emerging star Christopher Walken, but the studio insisted on big name Richard Burton. Burton turned in a one-dimensional performance, relying on his majestic voice and gravitas and little else.

John Boorman and the Devil is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV and Fandango. On October 9, Turner Classic Movies is showing John Boorman and the Devil in a double feature with Exorcist II: The Heretic; watch the first and skip thr second.

THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE: a lens on absurdity

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Photo caption: John Wilson in THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The comic doc The History of Concrete finds filmmaker John Wilson looking for a project. His Emmy-nominated HBO series How to with John Wilson is off the air and some of his residual checks are in the single digits. He decides to embark on making a film with built-in absurdity – a documentary on the most uninteresting subject imaginable – concrete.

Off he goes with his camera and his wry sensibility- riffing off concrete and his own distractions. His deadpan movie pitches are funny, and so is the guy who takes outsized satisfaction at every piece of chewing gum that he sandblasts off the sidewalk. Other segments, like members of a Buddhist cults take turns walking around the same block in Queens until they amass 3100 miles, get tiresome.

But the funniest bits are only tenuously related to concrete, if at all. Wilson attends a screenwriting workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie. And then he stumbles across a new business model that preserves the tattooed flesh of departed loved ones, suitable for framing. Yikes!

Now, John Wilson is an acquired taste. I find his nasal voice to be whiny, even when he’s not whining. He also overestimates the humor and insight in some situations and lingers on them too long. The History of Concrete, while in the same vein as Erroll Morris’ Gates of Heaven or Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, doesn’t approach matching the mastery of those auteurs. But, if you enjoy Wilson and his How to with John Wilson, then this is your movie.

The History of Concrete releases into theaters this weekend.

SWEETHEART DEAL: a triumph of cinéma vérité

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Photo caption: Kristine in SWEETHEART DEAL Courtesy of Abramorama; copyright Aurora Stories LLC.

The engrossing documentary Sweetheart Deal follows four Seattle sex workers; none of them want to be working in prostitution, but each is a heroin addict and sees obstacles to getting sober. They are at best indifferent to the men they service, and each night they fear that some customer will turn out to be a murderer.

Elliott is a man in his 60s who lives in an RV parked on the strip. He says his mission is to keep the prostitutes safe, offer them comfort and encourage them to kick their addiction. All four women drop in to Elliott’s RV for a meal or a nap. Elliot’s RV is the hub of Sweetheart Deal.

This is a remarkably empathetic film. Each woman tells her own story of addiction, and we witness the ravages of heroin addiction upon their health and the carnage in their family relationships. In the third act, there’s an an unexpected betrayal, sickening and monstrous. Not every heroin addict who works the streets is going to survive. But even the most vulnerable can sometimes find the power to find justice and save themselves – and that’s the ultimate redemption in Sweetheart Deal.

It’s harder to identify with Elliott, despite his self-proclaimed altruism. Essentially, he’s just another homeless guy who is getting a form of status and authority from his vocation with the women. He enjoys the attention of the documentary crew and reporter, so much so that he doesn’t notice that the reporter is appalled by an inappropriate boast.

Sweetheart Deal is a triumph of cinéma vérité. A project of over seven years, Sweetheart Deal is the first feature directed by Elisa Levine and the late Gabriel Miller, and it is brilliant filmmaking on several levels. The filmmakers managed to engender an amazing level of trust with their subjects, resulting in the access that allows the audience inside their world. It’s also brilliantly constructed and edited; the very first shot of the film – a man feeding pigeons – takes on new meaning and importance by the end of the film.

When I screened this movie in 2024, I had already seen fifteen documentaries and screened another 80 while helping to program a film festival – Sweetheart Deal was the best of them all.

Sweetheart Deal had a brief theatrical run in 2024 and is now available to stream on Amazon and AppleTV.

REMAKE: a father asks how we got here

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Photo caption: Ross McElwee in REMAKE. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

In his poignant documentary Remake, filmmaker Ross McElwee traces the joys, frustrations, absurdities, resilience and heartbreak that he has experienced, always questioning how he got here.

First, let’s talk about McElwee’s style of filmmaking, which centers on his filming his own everyday life. I would be annoyed of a friend or family member only conversed with me through a view finder, and McElwee’s family and friends have definitely been annoyed. McElwee has a self-deprecating appeal, as he shows us how he stumbles through his own life, as we all have done, missteps and all. Sure, it’s often navel-gazing, but McElwee is not the least bit pretentious about it.

When I stepped into my local art house in 1986, I had never before seen a film like McElwee’s Sherman’s March. McElwee, as a modern Southerner, wanted to make a movie reflecting on the impact of General Sherman’s March through Georgia in the Civil War. But his mind wanders on to thoughts of nuclear annihilation and Burt Reynolds. His sister scolds him abut his dating life, and his poet friend Charleen hilariously critiques his lack of game with the ladies.

Sherman’s March is a uniquely whimsical film. Shot and constructed in the same way, Remake is not.

Remake includes a lot of footage of his son Adrian, who was especially adorable as a child. But Adrian struggled as a young man, became addicted to drugs and was eventually diagnosed as bipolar. That arc turns any parent’s life into a rollercoaster, and McElwee ultimately suffers the most profound tragedy – the death of his son.

Remake also chronicles joyful child-raising, the breakup of a marriage, the gift of a second love and the absurdity of Hollywood trying to monetize an adaption of Sherman’s March. Charleen reappears, with her unfiltered vibrancy intact, despite a loss of memory.

But it is Adrian’s death that provokes McElwee’s deepest questioning of what has often bewildered him. And he does so with the courage to face the unfiltered truth.

Ross McElwee is a treasure to American documentary filmmaking. After Sherman’s March, he went on to teach film at Harvard, and to make a few more offbeat films. His masterpiece, Sherman’s March, has been re-released. Do you need to have watched Sherman’s March to appreciate Remake? No, Remake samples enough of Sherman’s March so that Remake can be appreciated on its own.

Thought-provoking, evocative and Intimately personal (sometimes painfully so), Remake will be available on digital on September 8.

TICKLED: from the odd to the unimaginable

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Photo caption: A subject in TICKLED. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

New Zealand journalist David Farrier specializes in filming oddball human pursuits and peculiar obsessions. Looking for an amusing subject for a playful documentary, he happened upon an online video of “competitive tickling”. where an athletic young man is securely manacled and other athletic young men tickle him. But when Farrier and his partner Dylan Reeve made their very first inquiry, they unleashed a torrent of vile abuse and intimidation.

The documentary Tickled is the story of Farrier and Reeve stumbling upon something apparently silly and harmless, and uncovering a sinister web of sadistic personal destruction. What’s going on here? Whoever is behind the weird but seemingly innocuous tickling videos is acting as if there is something massive worth hiding. There is no escalation in the attacks – because they start out at the maximum. Threats of lawsuits, cyberattacks and invasion of privacy ensue. A three-man team is sent from the US to New Zealand just to intimidate Farrier and Reeve in person. Persisting, Farrier and Reeve uncover a vast underworld operation that has ruined scores of lives.

Farrier and Reeve go to America to track down and face the twisted and sadistic mind behind it all – what they find is unexpected and bizarre. I love jaw-dropping documentaries that reveal human behavior that we could never imagine – and this is one.

Tickled was originally an HBO documentary, but I can’t find it on HBO Max tight now. It is streaming on Amazon. AppleTV and YouTube.

EPiC: ELVIS PRESLEY IN CONCERT: pure Elvis

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Photo caption: Elvis Presley in EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, Courtesy of NEON.

The appeal of the documentary EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is that it’s pretty much just Elvis, and that’s both entertaining and insightful. The film focuses on Elvis’ ten-year residency in Las Vegas, where he performed 1100 shows, sometimes as many three in an evening. All we see is archival film (some never-before-seen) of Elvis performing, rehearsing, getting to and from shows and being interviewed. Other than the voices of interviewers, we only hear the words of Elvis himself.

There are bits where he reflects on his mother, his army service and Colonel Parker. The most revealing elements of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert are:

  • His unfilled aspirations to make better movies and to perform in Europe and Japan.
  • His patience and generosity to the fans who want to inavde his personal space by touching and kissing him. Asked about the frenzy of crazed adulation, he says he accepts it as part of the job and that it doesn’t bother him. He reflects for a moment and then says that he thinks he would miss it. Wow.
  • Despite his reputation for being both simple and mercurial, his calm discipline when being asked the most ridiculous and provocative questions, and his refusal to take the bait and be trapped into controversy.
  • Elvis’ playfulness, both behind the scenes and on-stage, often referencing his own image. He seemed to deal with the grind with jokiness.
  • The unusual continuity in his band over a decade, which indicates that the musicians must have liked him as a person and found him easy to work with. His corny gags and goofiness seem to keep the work fun for the band.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is the first documentary feature directed by the famed Baz Luhrmann, whose work over the past twenty-five years I have despised as shallow eye-candy. After starting with the sweet little Strictly Ballroom and the visually spectacular Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann has made garish, hackneyed crap like Australia and The Great Gatsby. Here’s my rant on his recent biographical narrative Elvis.

But Luhrmann really can’t add an excess of glitz to somebody who is karate-kicking in white bellbottoms, with his fringe swishing and his massive belt buckle gleaming.

So, what we have hear is pure unfiltered Elvis, not interpreted by someone else, except, of course, for Luhrman’s choices in what to put in and what to leave out. One of Luhrmann’s best choices is an extended segment near the end of the film – an epic performance of Suspicious Minds with Elvis teasing out one faux finale after another. This clip brings together many of the themes in EPiC – Elvis’s charisma and magnetism, his showmanship and relationship to a live audience, his command of performance and his playfulness.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

CORONER TO THE STARS: too transparent?

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Photo caption: Dr. Thomas Noguchi in CORONER TO THE STARS. Courtesy of Journeyman Pictures..

The absorbing biodoc Coroner to the Stars tells the story of Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the former Los Angeles County Chief Medical Examiner and his bouts with fame (or infamy). His LA County jurisdiction meant that he was responsible for conducting the autopsies of a striking collection of celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe, William Holden, Natalie Wood, John Belushi and the Manson Family’s murder victims. Noguchi was also responsible for making his reports public – and therein lies the rub.

The public is fascinated by the details of celebrity deaths, and the news media eagerly panders to that need, however prurient or ghoulish. Official records in California, including coroner’s reports, are public. Noguchi did not shy away from the media spotlight, which triggered controversy. He was clearly fulfilling his legal duty, but did he enjoy it too much? Was he a publicity hound? Can an official be transparent without being unseemly? Indeed, Coroner to the Star’s tag line is Fame kills.

Writer-director Ben Hethcoat and Keita Ideno, in the first feature for both, present an extraordinarily well-sourced, credible and insightful documentary. Noguchi is still alive at age 98 and appears in the film to speak for himself.

Dr. Thomas Noguchi (right) in CORONER TO THE STARS. Courtesy of Journeyman Pictures.

Noguchi’s work (and style) stepped on some influential toes – the families and friends of the deceased, the major Hollywood studios and bureaucratic/political foes. Whenever he came under attack, the subtext was his race and the public perception and acceptance of Asian-Americans. Noguchi was a post-war immigrant who didn’t experience the Japanese-American internment during WW II, but Japanese-Americans traumatized by the camps would organize to defend LA’s highest ranking Japanese-American official.

Noguchi was also an internationally recognized pioneer in forensic science. Coroner to the Stars reveals his determination, in the RFK autopsy, to avoid the mistakes that resulted in the continuing, unresolved contention about the JFK assassination. Coroner to the Stars, without sensationalizing it, also touches on a key finding of the RFK forensic evidence.

Rock-solid in its exploration of race, science and history, Coroner to the Stars thoughtfully considers the challenge of acting professionally with what is sensational. I screened Coroner to the Stars for its world premiere at the 2025 Slamdance. It’s opening at the Laemmle theatwrs in LA: the Royal on June 23, the NoHo on June 24, and the Glendale on June 25-26.

MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN: the first casualty of war is truth

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Photo caption: Pavel Talankan in MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN. Courtesy of the SLO Film Fest.

Nothing has changed since Aeschylus observed that the first casualty of war is truth, as revealed in Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the blistering exposé of Putin’s outrageous domestic propaganda about his Ukraine War.

Pavel Talankan is an unassuming, goodhearted guy with a small-time job as the events coordinator at the school in a remote Russian industrial town. That also makes him the school videographer, so no no one notices that, as he films school assemblies, award ceremonies and performances, he is also capturing the blatant Big Lie propaganda. It’s a surreptitious documentary filmed in plain sight.

Pavel is an unlikely muckraker. He is a free-thinking nebbish who loves Russia and loves his hometown of Karabash in the Ural region, putrefied by a noxious copper plant and called “the most toxic place on earth”.

More than anything, Pavel cares about his students, and he is increasingly disgusted as Putin ramps up the propaganda. First, a cadaverous party hack, whose heroes are the most vile Commie hitmen in history, spreads empirically false information about Ukraine being the aggressor in the war. Then, horrifyingly, Wagner mercenaries are brought in as classroom guest speakers. Silently, Pavel continues to film, letting the propagandists defile themselves for history.

Pavel is a hero, albeit a non-violent one, who risked his life to gather this material. David Borenstein exquisitely formed Pavel’s footage into a searing exposé of Putin’s soul-crushing impact on Russia. The secret audio from the funeral of a former student killed in Ukraine is heart-rending. The film begins with video of Pavel’s midnight escape from Russia,

Mr. Nobody Against Putin has been Oscar-nominated as Best Documentary Feature. I saw it at the SLO Film Fest; it’s now available to stream from Amazon and AppleTV.

COVER-UP: muckraking back in the day

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Photo caption: Seymour Hersh in COVER-UP. Courtesy of Netflix.

Cover-Up is a biodoc of the hard-charging investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib abuses, and reported on the Nixon-Kissinger secret war in Cambodia and Watergate. These were important stories, and Hersh demonstrated remarkable resourcefulness and determination in his work.

He was a hyper-competitive practitioner of gotcha journalism, who himself was once gotten when duped by a salacious forgery

In Cover-Up, we hear about Hersh’s life and career, chiefly from Hersh himself, so we get a flavor of the man. I thought I was familiar with the My Lai massacre, but we hear about details that emerged after the initial sensation – details that I wish that I still didn’t know.

Today, we have a 24-hour news cycle, publication of gossip and fabrications, facts denied as fake news, media empires that are essentially propaganda, infotainment and so-called news obsession with celebrity. Seymour Hersh is an important figure in an era of journalism – the Woodward and Bernstein Era – that we have have moved past., IMO for the worst So, his story, while a notable episode in US political history during the Vietnam War, just isn’t that relevant today.

Cover-Up, which may interest some Baby Boomers, is streaming on Netflix.

KISSINGER: he sought to justify the means

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The exceptional American Experience biodoc Kissinger brings a balanced perspective to one of the most visible and important figures in 20th Century US history, Henry Kissinger. It neither canonizes or vilifies Kissinger, but presents a clear-eyed, unsparing look at his career. That’s important, because Kissinger’s genius at public relations may have exceeded his formidable diplomatic skills and distorted his image during his lifetime.

Kissinger is solid, well-sourced history. We hear directly from several former Kissinger staff members with an intimate, inside view of Kissinger the man and his work, We also hear from Kissinger’s son, who adds insightful personal stories about his father. And, of course, we hear and see archival footage of Kissinger himself, although perhaps never candidly. Kissinger is told in two parts over three hours.

Kissinger emerged into American public consciousness seemingly fully-formed in his mid-forties, a Harvard brainiac with a heavy German accent. Kissinger brings us his German childhood, family emigration to the US and the WW II and college experiences that molded him.

Naturally, Kissinger details the two great foreign affairs triumphs of Kissinger’s partnership with President Richard Nixon. First, there was the historic opening of relations with China, a hitherto mysterious and sinister closed society, The story of Nixon’s original idea, of the ping pong diplomacy and Kissinger’s secret trips is still exciting.

Second, once Nixon and Kissinger had established a relationship with China, they had outflanked the Soviet Union. That resulted in detente with the USSR and the SALT negotiations leading to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the first limitation of the proliferation of nuclear arms.

These were real, groundbreaking achivements that sprang from Kissinger’s brilliance, but also his sense of realpolitik. He was all about superpower positioning, which he prioritized above other considerations. Along the way, Kissinger found tradeoffs acceptable that had undeniably momentous consequences.

In the decade from 1965 though 1975, American society was torn apart by the Vietnam War. Taking responsibility for the war in 1969, Nixon and Kissinger based their policy on “peace with honor”, which meant they wanted to avoid the unpleasant optics of Vietnam falling to the Communists. But, from 1968, at the latest, it was always apparent that the Republic of Vietnam would fall to North Vietnam as soon as the US abandoned their South Vietnamese allies. Wanting to avoid the PR consequences of South Vietnam’s ignominious collapse, Nixon and Kissinger extended the war for another six years. That six-year extension of the cost 38,094 American and countless Vietnamese lives, all to achieve exactly the same outcome as a withdrawal in January 1969.

Kissinger references, but does not emphasize something even worse – that Kissinger and Nixon encouraged the Vietnamese Communists NOT to settle with the US in 1968, but to hold out for a better deal with Nixon.

Kissinger does document, in the greatest detail I’ve seen, the Kissinger-Nixon secret war in Cambodia, and their paranoid and unconstitutional concealment of it. And it covers Kissinger’s role in the overthrow of Chile’s leftist, but democratically elected government, leading to decades of human rights violations by the repressive Pinochet regime. Kissinger also presents voices from Cambodia and Chile, pointing out how, over fifty years later, the two nations remain traumatized by Kissinger policy.

And then there’s Watergate. Kissinger shows how the Nixon Administration’s secret wiretapping of Americans was started b.y Kissinger, wiretapping his own staff suspected of leaks to the press. Of course, the paranoid and vindictive Nixon took it from there. Ironically, this led to Nixon’s downfall, while Kissinger remained at the heart of US foreign policy in the successor administration. Of course, Kissinger was always Teflon to Nixon’s Velcro.

While in government, Kissinger’s public image was shaped by his sickening manipulation of the press, who made him popular celebrity. The public thought of Nixon’s War in Vietnam and Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, while ,lauding Kissinger for diplomatic wins with China and the USSR. It culminated with Kissinger actually winning a Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that he had extended for six years. The guy with whim Kissinger negotiated, Le Duc Tho, turned down his Nobel, rightfully noting that the war was still going on, albeit with Americans having left.

So, Kissinger lays out the history and lets us connect the dots and assesses the legacy of Kissinger’s pragmatism and opportunism. We are able to talk with the Chinese government today, although the relationship is wary at best. We were able to avoid a nuclear showdown with the USSR up to the disintegration of the Iron Curtain in 1991, although Russia remains our most volatile foreign enemy. But at what cost?

If your goal is to project American influence around the world, it’s a fair question to ask, just what does America stand for? If you think that America stands for democratic values, why destroy a democratically elected government? If you think that America stands for freedom of thought and expression, why persecute Americans for their advocacy?

Kissinger is currently airing on PBS’ American Experience. You can watch on PBS, on the American Experience website and on its YouTube channel.