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Authors: Joe Berlinger, Greg Milner
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to this crass Hollywood exercise.
The irony of my involvement was that, although I thought Artisan would respect my vision of Blair Witch 2, I didn’t have much respect for Blair Witch 1. In fact, I hated what the movie represented. From a storytelling standpoint, The Blair Witch Project certainly had a lot of merit. It was highly engaging and original. My scorn came from the message I thought the film sent about people’s relationship with the mass media. As someone who considers himself as much a journalist as a filmmaker, I have observed, with great concern, how the blurring of the line between fiction and reality has increased over the years. TV news has become much more oriented toward entertainment. “Reality” TV shows, although unscripted, depict completely contrived situations. Blair Witch went one step further. Artisan successfully marketed the film as a real documentary A guerrilla marketing campaign, including a fantastic Web site packed with “facts” about the legend and the doomed filmmakers, was enough to convince huge numbers of people that they were witnessing real life. The film generated $140 million in ticket sales in the U.S. alone, much ofthat money spent by people who were essentially tricked into buying tickets to something they thought was an actual documentary
To my surprise, I couldn’t find one article, amid the reams of glowing press, that criticized the way the film’s marketing campaign toyed with journalistic values. The clever marketing plan was even celebrated on the cover of Time and Newsweek. But what was even more disturbing was the fact that even after the “trick” was revealed in countless articles and TV shows around the country, a good 40 percent of the audience, according to Artisan’s market research, still believed the movie was nonetheless real. The film, and the reception that greeted it, spoke volumes about the power of moving images to convey “truth.”
The fact that this poorly produced, grainy film was accepted as real by many people also bothered me on an artistic level. One of my biggest aesthetic pet peeves is that fiction films, from Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives to The Blair Witch Project, often wallow in the worst clichés of bad documentary making in order to sell the idea of “reality”—excessively grainy footage, shaking the camera to the point of absurdity, and disjointed editing. Somehow bad shooting has become a visual reference for real life. (Sometimes this reality style is done well. For example, the TV show Homicide knew how to execute it with some artful restraint.) In addition, our society simply accepts video as real—the more amateur the video, the more we accept its credibility without questioning its provenance.
Why does this bother a real documentarian like me? Because most documentary makers don’t purposefully shake the camera or try to impose jump cuts in the editing room. Bruce and I pride ourselves on paying as much attention to craft as any fiction-feature director. We shoot our films in a very cinematic way and we make sure we have sufficient coverage so we can avoid jump cuts and incongruous editing whenever possible. Instead of purposefully shaking the camera, we aspire to a very lyrical, highly evocative cinematography. It’s offensive to those of us who pride ourselves on craft that bad shooting and jarring editing has been equated with documentary making—and that the American public buys it.
Prior to my arrival in the Artisan corner office, the studio’s development brain trust had simultaneously commissioned three different scripts for Blair Witch 2, a highly unusual move for a studio. They sent me back to New York, asking me to read all three, pick the one I like best, and tell them why. They wanted a decision by Monday. I would then immediately start prepping the movie, which was to begin shooting in February 2000 on a rush schedule. The film would be released worldwide on Halloween later that year. I
The irony of my involvement was that, although I thought Artisan would respect my vision of Blair Witch 2, I didn’t have much respect for Blair Witch 1. In fact, I hated what the movie represented. From a storytelling standpoint, The Blair Witch Project certainly had a lot of merit. It was highly engaging and original. My scorn came from the message I thought the film sent about people’s relationship with the mass media. As someone who considers himself as much a journalist as a filmmaker, I have observed, with great concern, how the blurring of the line between fiction and reality has increased over the years. TV news has become much more oriented toward entertainment. “Reality” TV shows, although unscripted, depict completely contrived situations. Blair Witch went one step further. Artisan successfully marketed the film as a real documentary A guerrilla marketing campaign, including a fantastic Web site packed with “facts” about the legend and the doomed filmmakers, was enough to convince huge numbers of people that they were witnessing real life. The film generated $140 million in ticket sales in the U.S. alone, much ofthat money spent by people who were essentially tricked into buying tickets to something they thought was an actual documentary
To my surprise, I couldn’t find one article, amid the reams of glowing press, that criticized the way the film’s marketing campaign toyed with journalistic values. The clever marketing plan was even celebrated on the cover of Time and Newsweek. But what was even more disturbing was the fact that even after the “trick” was revealed in countless articles and TV shows around the country, a good 40 percent of the audience, according to Artisan’s market research, still believed the movie was nonetheless real. The film, and the reception that greeted it, spoke volumes about the power of moving images to convey “truth.”
The fact that this poorly produced, grainy film was accepted as real by many people also bothered me on an artistic level. One of my biggest aesthetic pet peeves is that fiction films, from Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives to The Blair Witch Project, often wallow in the worst clichés of bad documentary making in order to sell the idea of “reality”—excessively grainy footage, shaking the camera to the point of absurdity, and disjointed editing. Somehow bad shooting has become a visual reference for real life. (Sometimes this reality style is done well. For example, the TV show Homicide knew how to execute it with some artful restraint.) In addition, our society simply accepts video as real—the more amateur the video, the more we accept its credibility without questioning its provenance.
Why does this bother a real documentarian like me? Because most documentary makers don’t purposefully shake the camera or try to impose jump cuts in the editing room. Bruce and I pride ourselves on paying as much attention to craft as any fiction-feature director. We shoot our films in a very cinematic way and we make sure we have sufficient coverage so we can avoid jump cuts and incongruous editing whenever possible. Instead of purposefully shaking the camera, we aspire to a very lyrical, highly evocative cinematography. It’s offensive to those of us who pride ourselves on craft that bad shooting and jarring editing has been equated with documentary making—and that the American public buys it.
Prior to my arrival in the Artisan corner office, the studio’s development brain trust had simultaneously commissioned three different scripts for Blair Witch 2, a highly unusual move for a studio. They sent me back to New York, asking me to read all three, pick the one I like best, and tell them why. They wanted a decision by Monday. I would then immediately start prepping the movie, which was to begin shooting in February 2000 on a rush schedule. The film would be released worldwide on Halloween later that year. I
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