An interview with media researchers Joshua Glick and Nora Stone on documentary platform politics in the Netflix Era
“Cameraman filming an iceberg in
Antarctica” by fivepointsix
is under standard Adobe Stock license.For the fifth volume of the documentary journal World Records, media researcher and historian Joshua Glick examined the impact that streaming platforms are having on nonfiction production and distribution with his article “Platform Politics: Netflix, the Media Industries, and the Value of Reality.” Less than a year later, the industry seems even more in flux, with the formerly monolithic Netflix cutting costs and employees after just a single underperforming fiscal quarter. To gauge the evolving state of the documentary landscape, I reached out to Glick and media scholar Nora Stone over email.
Stone’s current work concerns “how fiction filmmakers … interface with documentary filmmakers, who generally work independently or on the margins of Hollywood. Some have adapted documentaries freely … [while] others license the documentary for adaptation and bring in the original filmmakers to help.” The central question of her work is: “Who owns the story when it is based in reality? It is an ethical question, but it is also a question of industry norms and intellectual property law.” That question becomes increasingly pertinent as nonfiction work becomes fodder for the arsenals of various media companies and their boutique streaming platforms, which prioritize their own libraries above all else.
On that note, Stone observes that “The explosion in docuseries is another part of the streamers’ and conglomerates’ strategy to own content rather than rent … This has resulted in a glut, and in consumers needing to subscribe to a greater number of services to access it all.” As Glick puts it, “These properties, along with the characters and story worlds they contain, can be mobilized to engage new audiences now and in the future. Additionally, making things in-house allows these companies to invest in exactly the films and series they think will make money and garner prestige, and grants more control over the creative endeavor.”
Another side of documentary acquisition is the potential cultural clout a platform can accrue with a hit. Stone explains that Hollywood views nonfiction as “IP with built-in social currency, because it is about events and people in the real world. When a documentary like Tiger King captures the conversation, you see multiple people trying to cash in with their own fictionalized versions of it. The huge amount of content being made, along with the popularity of documentaries over the past 15 years, means that there are also projects based on older documentaries, like The Eyes of Tammy Faye and The Staircase. Adapting a documentary is also an opportunity for major actors to take on meaty roles, oftentimes an outlandish or grotesque character.”
Amidst this new paradigm, the older procedure of independent documentaries finding audiences and buyers at film festivals is falling by the wayside. Stone believes the surge in streamer-original productions has hurt distributors, particularly those that specialize in documentaries, because “Netflix and others would rather license films exclusively. American Factory is a great example of this. Bought by Netflix out of Sundance, it had an awards-qualifying run in theaters but otherwise was only on streaming.” Glick elaborates: “Acquiring documentaries at the point of festival exhibition definitely has its advantages, as it offloads the production-related risks to the filmmaker and subjects. Still, it makes programming slates unwieldy and harder to predict. The big streamers feel that the data they have gives them special insight into what will attract viewers to sign up and then keep their subscriptions.”
Neither Stone nor Glick think that recent economic downturns within the media industry will change these trends too much. Stone believes that “The cost and risk are much lower than producing scripted programming. Plus, when a doc breaks out, the audience engagement is incredibly valuable.” Glick predicts: “there will still be an extraordinary amount produced by the big streamers going forward. It’s just a question of what kind of projects will see the light of day, and for how long they will be made available. I suspect there will be more films and especially miniseries created that are formulaic and based on established, tried and true genres. Don’t expect true crime to slow down anytime soon. Same with the reality-TV-ification of all aspects of daily life.”
“At the same time,” Glick continues, “there is a narrowing pipeline for independent filmmakers who make challenging projects that might have more easily been acquired by distributors at festivals in years past. The big streamers are consistently resistant to experimentation with form and style, and are all too quick to want to separate ‘political’ films into clearly defined categories based on how a liberal or slightly more conservative audience might enjoy something. It’s rare that we get prolonged moments of silence, a lack of central protagonist, or even a non-narrative doc.”
Much as he writes in his World Records article, Glick says to expect films with such characteristics “on the boutique and arthouse platforms such as MUBI, OVID, the Criterion Channel, and PBS Passport. They are responsible for making incredibly pertinent works of documentary art accessible online. My hope is that there are more partnerships between these outlets and public institutions like schools, libraries, faith organizations, and community centers.” One of the streaming industry’s few consistent qualities is its unpredictability, and as the business hits new waves of volatility, the documentary landscape is sure to fluctuate in turn.
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