The fact that documentaries are being focus grouped is, at once, both understandable and concerning. The studios obviously want to ensure that the film will be well-received, if not profitably, and test screening is one way of gauging audience reception. But at what point does the documentary film maker lose integrity?
I spent two summers working for Nielsen NRG's Movieview, the branch of VNU/Nielsen responsible for both gauging interest and awareness in new films, testing film titles, casting choices, and possible scripts. We also did test screenings of films for the studios. POV describes the type of focus grouping we did at Nielsen (weighted demographics, long questionnaires) and says this is the same type being employed for documentaries.
What I am talking about here is the movie industry standard, the sort that Hollywood uses, in which random folks fill out formatted cards that are then tabulated by marketers.
One exmaple that sticks out in my mind about the type of changes that came from Nielsen's focus grouping is the backlash against Tom Hanks' hair in "The DaVinci Code." I also remember finding out that
In my mind, and call me naive, documentary films are supposed to present an objective "truth" based a reality. Ideally, documentaries would present this truth free of any distortion from the director's personal opinions or embelishments. Documentary films often fall short of achieving this goal, but that is understandable: one can never fully know the experience of another, but that does not mean one does not try. In this sense, documentaries will always be interpretations striving towards objectivity.
Documentaries advance a narrative--a record of the subject's experiences, for example, as shared through the perspective of the director/producers--but there's still that fundamental truth-telling component, that eye towards objectivity.
My fear is that when we begin focus grouping documentaries, we begin to move away from authentic story-telling. Changing scenes of a documentary in response to focus groups does not necessarily change the "facts" of the story, nor does it necessarily obstruct the filmmaker's vision--her purpose for telling this compelling story)--but it certainly can lead to distortions of both.
Is the movement towards making another's reality more attractive to test audience a microcosm for our own unwillingness (read: inability) to confront our own? I don't know. But at some point, the creation of factitious narratives in documentaries is troublesome.