Philadelphia Film Festival 2018: Best Documentaries

Here are the three best documentaries I saw at this year's PFF:

Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes

Making expert use of five decades’ worth of archival footage, director Alexis Bloom's Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes tells the story of how Ailes, best known for his long tenure as the head honcho of Fox News, helped shape America's media culture. It also details his efforts to install the last four Republican presidents. Ailes was Richard Nixon's ad man, later assisted Donald Trump with his debate preparations, and more.

The film, which concludes with Ailes's downfall (sexual harassment charges) and his death soon after, portrays the man as a grotesque, Mephistophelian villain. But it absolutely takes him seriously and aptly demonstrates the ways he used his power and the media to help make the current U.S. moment possible.

Bloom's film intersperses the footage with talking heads, the best of whom are a pair of crisis-communications consultants (recommended by Trump himself!) who assisted Ailes after the harassment story broke and are happy to stick the shiv into their own dead client.

Gabriel Sherman — the journalist who wrote an Ailes biography, was tailed by Ailes-hired detectives, and played a key role in the executive's downfall — is notably absent, probably because he’s working on his own Ailes-related film. There's also a bit too much of Glenn Beck, who gives a particularly self-serving take on his time at Fox News.

But in a year of quite a few earnest but mediocre political documentaries, Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes stands out.

Bathtubs over Broadway

Bathtubs over Broadway covers a different network-TV office just a few blocks away from Fox News's headquarters, but it's hard to imagine a more different story in either tone or mood.

The documentary, directed by Dave Whisenant and produced by Blumhouse Productions, begins in the waning days of The Late Show with David Letterman. Steve Young, a writer on the show for 25 years, was often tasked with finding material for the old "Dave's Record Collection" bit.

This introduced Young to the strange world of industrial musicals, full-on song-and-dance productions produced between the 1950s and '70s by corporations for their annual sales meetings. (Industrial musicals still survive; I recently attended a tech conference that hired a rapper to recite corporate talking points in verse.) Young soon became an obsessed fan of these musicals, trading rare records and in some cases befriending the shows’ writers and performers.

Some of the songs are legitimately great, and there’s also a bit of surviving video footage. Broadway stalwarts (including Kander and Ebb) wrote these tunes to hone their craft and make some quick cash, while actors such as Martin Short and Florence Henderson appeared in them.

This is a sweet and endearing film, a fun celebration of an extremely narrow subculture, and a rare example these days of obsessed fandom being wielded for good. Bathtubs over Broadway does one of the best things a documentary can do: it introduces you to a world you probably had no idea existed.

Shirkers

The PFF documentary that blew me away was Sandi Tan's Shirkers. It's a one-of-a-kind story about filmmaking dreams deferred and eventually realized.

Shirkers took over 25 years to create, making it the longest-gestating film at PFF that doesn't involve Orson Welles. Director Tan grew up in the early 1990s in Singapore, where she and her friends Jasmine and Sophie created a fanzine.

The trio had a deep love for Hollywood cinema and together produced a road film, also called Shirkers, shot on 16mm film. They got some help from an adult man named George with mysterious origins. But then George disappeared, along with the footage.

The documentary is a tapestry of many things: a chronicle of Tan and her friends as young people; how they made the original Shirkers; an update on Tan and the others; and an attempt to unravel the mystery of the Tommy Wiseau-esque George. We also see much of the original Shirkers film, although without audio.

This might be the year’s best-edited film, pulling in footage from all of the aforementioned episodes plus several of the films that inspired Tan and her friends. Somehow, it fits together seamlessly.

Palpable throughout is the great love Tan and her friends had for movies and the moviemaking process, as well as the heartbreak of that dream being taken away. We also get a good look at Singapore in the '90s. For all of Crazy Rich Asians' virtues, it often felt like a tourism commercial for Singapore, but Shirkers provides a more multifaceted view of that country.

One more thing about Shirkers: it's now streaming on Netflix. There are many unfortunate things that have happened to film culture in the streaming era — the sad news of Filmstruck's demise broke the very day I saw Shirkers. But it is pretty cool that a wonderfully idiosyncratic film like this can go straight from its festival run to your laptop in a matter of days.