Gibney's documentaries keep turning into feature movies

By Sarah Sluis

Recently, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has gone from being a mere blip on my radar to a massive, extremely influential storm. Film Journal recently profiled the filmmaker here, and three of his films--yes,

THREE, were shown at the Tribeca Film Festival: an Eliot Spitzer movie, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, and his segment of the Freakonomics movie. But what's weirder is that the topics of two of Gibney's movies are also being developed as unrelated feature films.

First, it was announced in March that Casino Jack, a feature about Jack Abramoff, who was profiled in Gibney's Casino Jack and the United States of Money, had been picked up by Metropolitan for distribution. The movie stars Kevin Spacey as Jack Abramoff and will release this fall.

Yesterday, Kirsten Dunst was added to the cast of On the Road, a feature film about Jack Kerouac that is being spearheaded by Francis Ford Coppola. Meanwhile, Gibney has a documentary in the works called Magic Bus about the Merry Pranksters (whose members included the man who inspired On the Road, Kerouac's close friend Neal Cassidy. It's not that Gibney got there first, because Coppola's movie has been in the works for years. It's the fact that Gibney appears to have a knack for choosing red-hot subject matter.

One of the biggest challenges of documentaries, at least in terms of their appeal, is choosing what topic to follow. Most subjects have at least some level of a built-in audience, but interest can ebb and flow. Gibney has directed well-timed political and economic documentaries, such as Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and the upcoming Spitzer movie. For the Abramoff movie, he came in a few years after the dust had settled, and it opened last week to a so-so $3,000 per-theatre average. However, the movie will likely make more of a splash on DVD and TV. Magic Bus, depending on when it releases, could see a nice bump from the publicity for On the Road. However, the '60's aren't exactly hot right now, as evidenced by 80's-style fashions and the relatively cool reception to the movie Taking Woodstock. Finally, Gibney is also working on a documentary about Lance Armstrong. If half the people that bought those yellow rubber band Livestrong bracelets turn out to see the movie, it will be in good shape. I'm betting that the Armstrong documentary will make a bigger splash at the box office than the Spitzer film. And considering that Gibney filed a lawsuit against THINKFilm for mishandling his Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (it earned just a quarter of a million dollars at the box office, the distributor was in financial trouble and didn't have money to support it), I think this smart documentarian deserves a box-office hit. However, the people who create fictionalized accounts of these stories may have the last laugh--in Casino Jack, Abramoff emails Gibney the following missive: "Why bother making the film? No one watches documentaries. You should make an action movie!"