Documentaries' popularity on rise

PARK CITY, Utah — The possibility of plunking down $9 to see a documentary at the mall multiplex was until recently a rare opportunity. On the big screen, movies about real people in a real world were like exotic creatures — you had to hunt them down at midnight on college campuses and in stuffy little art houses with bad seating. That is changing.

With the remarkable financial success last year of Michael Moore's Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine" — a $3 million movie that grossed $40 million worldwide — and the visibility of this year's awards contenders, such as "The Fog of War," "Spellbound" and "Capturing the Friedmans," moviegoers are now getting a chance to check out fresh, challenging and often funny documentaries at a theater near you.

And for the first time a documentary opened the Sundance Film Festival, the annual independent-flick fiesta: "Riding Giants," Stacy Peralta's piece about the birth of surfing and the mythological hunt for the perfect wave.

"Riding Giants" was quickly snapped up by Sony Pictures Classics for general theatrical release this year. This follows Peralta's 2001 Sundance success, "Dogtown and Z-Boys," his documentary on the gritty stoner kids who transformed the skateboard into a sport, an art form, a lifestyle. That film reached theaters in 2002.

This year's Sundance is showcasing 137 full-length films — 91 features and a record-setting 46 documentaries. Sundance founder Robert Redford said he and his team were bowled over by the quality and new techniques of storytelling that the documentarians are bringing.

Of course, a handful of dramatic films have also broken out at Sundance and are being gobbled up by distributors and studios — films such as Walter Salles' "The Motorcycle Diaries," about the young pre-revolutionary Che Guevara, and Zach Braff's "Garden State," about a lithium-zoned Gen-Xer getting in touch with his feelings. But the films that are generating fest-buzz are the docs, which are as punchy as any of the dramas.

There's a "beyond the shoes" look at "Imelda," the wife of onetime Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. And "Word Wars," about the lives of semipro Scrabble players who try to memorize the entire dictionary. In "The Control Room," the filmmakers probe the worldview and journalism of al-Jazeera, the Fox News Channel of the Arab world. "Dirty Work" concerns the kinds of jobs that parents warn their teenagers they are destined for unless they cram for the SATs — the strangely well-adjusted wage-slaves who collect bull semen, empty septic tanks and apply lipstick to corpses.