An Eye on the Past

Producers are using
different approaches to revisit historical events in a new slate of
documentaries.

By Bill Dunlap

October 2006

“The only thing new in the
world is the history you don’t know.” The truth of those words from former
American President Harry S. Truman is evident today on television screens
around the world, as documentary filmmakers dig up—literally,
sometimes—new pieces of history that reveal unknown stories and use new
techniques to explore and explain the events that changed the world.

Producers and distributors
of historical documentaries say demand for their wares is strong. The short
explanation, told before in these pages and elsewhere, is that cheaper and
better computer-generated imagery along with greater skill in staging elaborate
reenactments of historical events have made documentaries more attractive and
entertaining to mass audiences.

While both those
developments are true and important, they don’t tell the whole story.
Documentary filmmakers continue to find new ways to tell familiar stories. They
are working closely with researchers and explorers to uncover new angles on old
events. And they are mixing history with other genres like science and
archeology to tell fuller, more dramatic tales that reach back to ancient Egypt
and come as close as the events of September 11, 2001.

Here’s an example: three
of the world’s top sources of historical documentaries—the BBC and
Channel 4 in the U.K. and ZDF in Germany—all have current documentaries
on the Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, a figure whose place in history
has been well documented. But each has found a different story to tell.

Channel 4 took the
docudrama approach with Nuremberg: Goering’s Last Stand, building the story around the relationship
between Goering and his jailer, U.S. Colonel Burton Andrus. “It’s a strong,
human story that hasn’t been told, a rather compelling film that required
strong casting and a very good script,” explains Channel 4 International’s head
of programming, Richard Life. “There are interviews with surviving
eyewitnesses, but it’s very much a drama-documentary.”

The BBC’s approach is part
of a three-program observance of the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg War
Crimes Tribunal under the title Nuremberg. The three films focus on Goering, Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess. The
series draws on largely unpublished documents to bring the Nazi war criminals
back to life through dramatic re-creations and follows them in their own words
from their capture to their subsequent fates—suicide in the case of
Goering.

ZDF’s Goering: A Career takes a more standard documentary approach. “Goering has the traditional style with only a few
reenactments, but has a lot of very interesting archive footage which was
recently discovered,” says Nikolas Hülbusch, the project manager of documentary
co-productions for ZDF Enterprises. “It comes from Goering’s private archives,
color films shot in the late 1930s, some by Goering himself. It’s never been
shown before. That is a big selling point for this film. It still works even
though it has very little dramatization.”

NEW LIGHT ON OLD EVENTS

For many documentarians,
the holy grail of subject matter is a new angle on an iconic subject of broad
interest like the Nazis, Egypt, the Bible, the Titanic, 9/11 and so on.
National Geographic’s The Gospel of Judas is based on the discovery of a 66-page codex that contains, among
other texts, the only known surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas, which
portrays Judas in a more favorable light than previous Gospels. “That was a
high-end project and a new revelation,” says Ian Jones, the president of
National Geographic Television International (NGTI), “and because of that there
was huge demand across platforms worldwide. I would probably describe it as a
historical documentary, but it was history with science and archeology and
investigation. It pulled some of the highest ratings worldwide both for
terrestrial broadcasters and National Geographic Channels themselves.”

NGTI is uniquely
positioned to take advantage of the news value and promotional opportunity of
discoveries like the Gospel of Judas because of its ties to explorers and
researchers from the National Geographic Society. “I knew about that project in
some detail a year before the press release went out,” Jones says. “We tend to
get access to a lot of new discoveries way before they’re released to the
scientific community or archeological community and certainly well before a
general press release. We work with these explorers and scientists to produce a
high-end television project and then time [its] release to the market [to
coincide with] the press conference. The Gospel of Judas was announced earlier this year, but it was
already in production last September.”

Jenna Helwig, the head of
development for Engel Entertainment in New York, says she found the combination
of new and iconic with An Uncivil War, a two-hour documentary that will air on The History Channel later
this year. “A few years ago,” she says, “a book came out about new revelations
of state-sponsored terrorism during the Civil War. That’s exactly what we’re
always looking for.”

Often it is the
availability of affordable effects and re-creations that makes it possible to
reveal that new angle. Breakthrough Entertainment last year produced The
Secret Liberators, a film about
the SOE (Special Operations Executive) in World War II, which was a British
secret-service organization formed after the fall of France to foster
resistance among the civil population in Nazi-occupied Europe.

“Because it was a secret
war, there is no stock footage of spies in France,” says Paul Kilback, a
producer and director of factual programming at Breakthrough Films &
Television. “We went the re-creation route. We found there are a lot of people
who are re-enactors who do it as a hobby. They are the ultimate resource for historical
accuracy. They have all the uniforms and equipment. When you look at it on the
screen it could be occupied France in 1945. We shot it in Toronto.”

INVEST GLOBALLY, THINK
LOCALLY

Terrestrial broadcasters
with a home market to serve, like the BBC, Channel 4 and ZDF, take a two-tiered
approach to historical documentaries. They are placing big bets on lavish,
high-end documentaries to meet the demand of the world market while still
producing more traditional historical films on topics of domestic interest.

“Certain types of
historical programming are very successful now internationally,” says Laurence
Rees, the BBC’s creative director of history programs. “But a great deal of the
material we do doesn’t travel. A lot does, though, and it’s mostly different from
the stuff that’s made domestically. It’s different because it can attract
co-production money up front.”

Rees can trace his
department’s plunge into high-end documentaries back to discussions five or so
years ago. “Up until 2001 we had been making traditional documentaries for BBC
Two, and we hadn’t really broken through in terms of large numbers of viewers,”
Rees says. “The science department had made Walking with Dinosaurs a couple of years before and we wondered why we
couldn’t have a breakthrough like that. Can we employ some of that CGI
technology in history? Are we brave enough to start going into much more formal
drama?”

They were, and the result
was Pyramid, about the building
of the Great Pyramid at Giza, told from the perspective of a fictional worker
called Nakht. “We were able to get commissions from BBC One and Discovery
Channel,” says Rees, who recalls that the sales pitch for Pyramid emphasized that it was a different kind of
documentary. “For the first time we were going to show how they were built. We
see the pyramid at every stage; we dramatize the pyramid builders; you see the
spectacle of it being built. It was an information-driven piece that still had
some entertainment value. There was a lot of commentary, but there were no
interviews.”

The film attracted 11
million viewers on BBC One, more than any other historical program had reached,
and it spawned subsequent documentaries on the Coliseum, Genghis Khan,
Hannibal, a series on the great discoveries in Egypt and, starting this fall, a
series on the turning points in the history of Rome entitled Ancient Rome:
The Rise and Fall of an Empire.

ZDF in Germany, known
worldwide for its archive-and-eyewitness documentaries on World War II, also
has a slate of big-budget historical documentaries aimed at the world market.

Hülbusch explains that
while a discovery like the Goering home movies can trigger the decision to make
a film, there are certain topics that can be updated from time to time with new
approaches. “It’s simply the idea that certain topics are very popular and if
one of them hasn’t been covered for a couple of years, it’s good to make a new
film about it,” he says. “For example, we had a film about the first Chinese
emperor seven or eight years ago and just recently we’ve made a new film about
him, Tyrant and Visionary: China’s First Emperor, mainly because the style has
changed. There’s new access to Chinese partners. We had the opportunity to
shoot big reenactments in China with a lot of extras, and so on. It was to tell
a quite well-known story in a new, more emotional style and it worked
tremendously well for the German audience and we have high hopes to sell it all
over the world.”

ZDF will delve further
into Chinese history with The Chinese Wall. Also due next year is The Wehrmacht: Drawing a Balance. “For World War II topics, archives and eyewitness
accounts still work very well, mainly because the eyewitness accounts are so
gripping and emotional,” Hülbusch says. “But recently we also went in the field
of docudrama on World War II. We made The Last Battle: Berlin, April 1945, about the last days of the war, with 60 percent
dramatization, and also the Emmy Award-winning Drama of Dresden, about the bombing in 1945.”

C4I’s Life sees a two-tier
market. “Broadcasters here are
tending to commission more domestic history. There are a lot of shows we
[won’t] represent because. . .there’s no relevance to an audience outside the
U.K.”

To sell internationally
though, a film requires more than just lavish production values and
dramatization, Life believes. “I think that’s lazy, and the market and buyers
will notice it. Particularly if you’re trying to raise co-production money,
which we frequently are. The thing they’re still looking for is story. They
want to know what is new. Certainly you can refresh a story with some shiny
packaging, but in the end television is promoted and marketed, and how do you
do that if it’s a story that’s been told before?”

Life is currently selling The
Falling Man, a film from Darlow
Smithson Productions about some of the victims of the attack on the World Trade
Center in New York. “This is the story of the images of people who jumped from
the towers. It was a moment that was kind of airbrushed out of history, and
this film is investigating why and telling the story of the photographs and the
people who jumped and how their friends and relatives dealt with that. It was a
moment in history, and even though it was just five years ago, we defined it as
history.”

CROSS-GENRE DOCS

NGTI’s Jones observes that
demand for documentaries described as historical is up, but he says the
definition of history has broadened. “The one thing that I think has happened
over the past few years is there’s been an insatiable appetite for history
mixed with other genres. History and science, history and archaeology, history
and investigation. Pure historical documentaries have reached a plateau.”

Richard Propper, the
president of Solid Entertainment, says increased use of effects and
reenactments has boosted demand for historical documentaries, but he points out
that the highest demand is for the cross-genre films rather than pure history.
“Series like historical forensic investigations bring history alive,” Propper
says. “What you’re seeing now is people who are able to tell historical stories
with a lot more entertainment value, but still factual. They realize you can’t
tell the same dry, stale stories and expect audiences to respond.”

Propper says he takes on
only a few of the history programs offered to him for distribution or backing.
One he is offering demonstrates the innovative way filmmakers are presenting
little-known historical stories. “With a Right to Kill is a Danish production about how the Danish
resistance liquidated some 400 Danes suspected of being Nazi collaborators,”
Propper says. “They had not spoken to anyone since the end of World War II.
They realized in their eighties that they wanted to tell their stories, and the
producer went out and found an old 16mm film camera and he recreated the
assassinations they were describing. It looked so authentic you can’t believe
it. Having talking heads sitting around just doesn’t work.”

CGI AS A MARKETING TOOL

Alliance Atlantis is
leaning the other way with The Exodus Decoded, which has CGI maven James Cameron, director of Titanic, as executive producer. “Producers are thinking
theatrically,” says Stéphanie Röckmann-Portier, the VP of sales and head of
factual programs at Alliance Atlantis’ international television distribution
division. “They’re using some amazing special effects and CGI, which would
normally only be associated with a blockbuster movie, and this has effectively
energized the genre. The Exodus Decoded not only tackles the compelling subject of the Biblical Exodus using
‘investigative archeology’ to synthesize the work of top geologists,
archeologists and Egyptologists, but employs amazing special effects to bring
the film to life.”

Michael Katz, the VP of
programming and production of AETN International, agrees that the challenge for
an entity like The History Channel is to bring something new to those
well-known subjects that automatically get people’s attention.

“What you always want to
do is be relevant,” he says. “One of the things we’re becoming more successful
with is the portrayal of characters, the personal experience of individuals in
a situation or an event that seems to be bigger than life or to have a lot of
relevance to a lot of people.”

Katz points to the current
feature-length documentary The Egyptian Book of the Dead as an example. “We use CGI to re-create what it
was like there, but also we use a lot of new information from different
disciplines on the cultural and sociological interactions of people,” he says.
“We get into the personal lives of the scribes as well as the pharaohs and everybody
in between. It’s the oldest document in western civilization but we bring it to
life. We also try to tell the story of how we know about this now, the
discovery of the original piece and where it went and where it lives now, the
story of the theft in the 19th century of some of these things and the
intrigue. It’s not just telling the story from the primary source but making it
relevant to today. You start to build different layers on these programs, just
like a good movie.”

THE RECENT PAST

Like Channel 4 with The
Falling Man, other documentary
producers and distributors are looking to more recent historical subjects.
Canada’s Cineflix International Distribution has Jonestown: Paradise Lost, a 100-minute docudrama on the Jones-town mass
suicides in Guyana in 1978. “It’s a cracking story,” says managing director
Paul Heaney. “It includes the lost NBC archival footage where the cameraman has
been shot but is still filming. For us, that was a major unique angle. Plus
this had never been told in docudrama form.

“Post-Second World War
history, if told the right way, there is always demand for them,” Heaney says.
“They rate because they’re entertainment. They’re shows that keep the viewer
locked in. They’re subjects that will appeal to people everywhere. It doesn’t
have to be just for the country that the story happens to be in.”

Looking ahead, executives
see greater emphasis on more contemporary history, in part to attract younger
audiences, and, if not less dramatization, at least more careful use of
reenactments and CGI. “Demand is up for historical docs that inform us somehow
about the present,” says Channel 4’s Life. “The ongoing trend I think will be
people mining the history of the past 20 years, particularly things like pop
culture. Some say that’s current affairs, but if you look at the current crop
of documentaries about 9/11, what are they? I would argue they’re history
documentaries. They’re about new angles and investigations into what happened.”

Richard Bradley, the
managing director of Lion Television in the U.K., is growing somewhat wary of
reenactments and CGI. “I think producers are now using them almost as the first
resort, whether or not it’s appropriate,” he says. “You see some amazing
examples of CGI and dramatization; you see some used when it would be far
better to make a straight documentary. What we’ll see over the next few years
is a thinning out. I don’t think it will go away, it’s here to stay and that’s
a good thing because it does allow us to tell stories that in the past were
very hard to tell. But I also think that, hopefully, we’ll see less of it used
indiscriminately.”

Bradley also has a broad
definition of history. “What has happened, whether it’s a year ago, five years
ago, ten years ago, a hundred years ago, that all qualifies—history
commissioners will commission any of that,” he says. “The audience doesn’t
watch television in subjects—it doesn’t sit down and say, tonight I’m
going to watch a current-affairs program or a history program. The blurring of
those genres has happened. It’s about approach. A current affairs show on 9/11
might require a particular sort of analysis, a history show might be recording
the events.”

NGTI’s Jones says buyers
are no longer wowed by drama and effects. “The feedback we’ve had as a
distributor is that buyers are starting to think twice about drama
reconstruction and CGI,” he says. “They don’t necessarily pick up a historical
doc just because it’s got high-end CGI or reconstructions.”