At the P.O.V. Blog, Tom Roston ponders an emerging trend of Hollywood distributors test screening documentaries, and subjecting non-fiction films to the same focus group motivated pre-release tweaks that used to be the province of big budget comedies and wannabe franchises. He notes that the version of Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? that opened on Friday is quite different from the version that premiered at Sundance:
Spurlock actually relied significantly on test audiences after the movie was shown at Sundance. I wrote a story for the Los Angeles Times in which I reported this fact, including how Spurlock removed a jokey, in-your-face animated sequence (which must have cost a ton of money) and changed a pivotal closing song, from the goofy “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” to the more thoughtful, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.” Both elements from the earlier cut of the film rang so wrong to me — they made a film that was supposedly about bridging differences between the Muslim and western worlds feel like a farce. But, thankfully, they were removed, and the film’s integrity, I think, restored.
Roston says he’s “becoming convinced that it’s not inherently a bad thing” for a filmmaker and/or a distributor to seek input from the audience in the final stages of editing. But we’re obviously talking about a very specific kind of non-fiction film that can be molded based on comment card suggestion––Spurlock’s performance art approach to reportage would seem to lend itself to the commercial testing process in a way that a lower-concept filmmaker’s work may not––and it’s also clearly a sign that certain distributors are placing high enough performance expectations on certain documentaries to make such pre-release market research seem worthwhile.
But is it? Osama made about $140k on about 100 screens; it might have been a wider opening than was wise, but that’s still a discouragingly low per-screen average. The film’s under-performance also might not have looked as bad had it not happened on the same weekend that the abysmally reviewed Expelled began what looks like a record-breaking run, but there’s no question that the film is far from a runaway hit. In the case of Spurlock’s film, testing might have made for a better movie, but there’s no indication that it made for a more profitable one.
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