Reality Films As Documentaries
Some reality films, such as those based upon the Jackass television series, have been called documentaries. Jan Krawitz, director of Stanford University's prestigious master of arts program in documentary film and video, teaches not to make a reality film if you want your documentary to be real. In his article in Time, Stein raises the point that "If the movie is shot like a documentary, we're willing to pretend it's a documentary no matter how staged it is.... And unlike documentarians, the producers, who have to work with MTV in their day jobs, felt it prudent to edit out the more controversial scenes, such as the one in which the twins have an angry, cursing fight with rapper Snoop Dogg in his post-concert trailer after, they say, he tried to get amorous with them." Correy Herrick raises a similar point about Cancun in Hybrid Magazine:
This is by no means a documentary. Everything that happens is real, but you are only seeing what the producers want you to see, in the order they want you to see it, with the music they want you to hear. And they go even further here by splicing in non-reality cuts from time to time to accentuate the plot a little further. They need to turn these normal people into characters in order to achieve an entertaining experience and they are very crafty in the ways they do this.
James Ronald Whitney, whose films have won multiple "Best Documentary" awards, distinguishes between documentary and reality film. In an interview about his reality film Games People Play: New York, he said the difference was filming a staged scenario versus filming actual events that would have happened regardless of the camera's presence:
"A documentary is reality, but is its own animal. It's when you go back in time and you do a film about an election, an Olympics, a war, or something in the future that would organically happen anyway. Even Real Cancun, spring break was going to happen. Spellbound's spelling bee was still going to happen. Those are not events that were created by a writer who then decided, "I'm going to make a movie about this event that I have created." That's how this is different to me than a documentary.
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