My Movie Suggestion

I like-- not love, like-- to watch documentaries. I have never had an interest in making one mostly because they rarely make money. When they make money, it's usually to the tune of a few thousand dollars. It amounts to a massive workload with very little reward. There are very rare exceptions: the last time I checked, Bill Maher's "Religulous" had made $1.5 million.

So I don't have a dog in this hunt, and I'm willing to offer suggestions to aspiring documentary filmmakers who have such a passion for their craft that they don't care about such depressing details.

Last night as I watched yet another recent documentary that is about stand up comedy, I saw many of the same famous and semi-famous comics who are featured in other documentaries. A couple of them even retold the stories and repeated aphorisms that I had seen in other comedy documentaries. It was a shit show.
It's time to revolutionize that genre-- stand up is far too interesting for such mundane rehashing.

I recommend that a director follow the lives of five to ten open mic comics who have either just started to perform stand up comedy or have done it only a couple of years. Yes, as I have stated on this blog in the past, the dropout rate for the open mic scene (in L.A. anyway) is probably 80% within the first few years. But I can tap my psychology education to state that if there is a camera in their faces and they feel as if they have buzz around them-- and they gather crowds of other lemming comics who are drawn to any limelight-- the dropout rate in that group will be much lower.
Film them for five years-- "Hoop Dreams" set a good template for this time frame. If you doubt that anyone would be drawn to a film that features amateurs rather than the same A list comics who we've seen repeatedly in other documentaries, again, just research the success of "Hoop Dreams." I believe that it's profoundly overrated, but it has an 8.3 rating on imdb and a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics rave about it constantly.

So obviously it's a model that works. And it's long overdue.

Like Hoop Dreams, most open mic comics have tumultuous or even hellish personal lives that are more interesting than the lives of professional comics. Many of them sleep on an air mattress in a living room or a friend's couch or even an old car. Aren't their struggles far more intriguing than listening to famous comics whine about their five star hotels that are "in the middle of nowhere?"

Get on it, guys. Let's make it happen. And if you get pre-production underway for it, I will contribute to your Kickstarter campaign.