The first-ever feature-length mockumentary
In 1984, a little movie called This Is Spinal Tap was released.
Directed by Rob Reiner and featuring the improvisational genius of Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, it set the template for the mockumentary and set a benchmark that has arguably never been surpassed. Following a fictitious rock band called Spinal Tap as they embark on their American tour, it was chock full of infinitely quotable one-liners but was so scarily accurate in its portrayal of rock musicians that many audience members didn’t realise it was fictitious.
Spinal Tap laid the definitive blueprint for the mockumentary genre, but it didn’t invent it. For decades, filmmakers had been toying with the idea of framing a fictional story with the trappings of a documentary, often leading to surreal and not altogether coherent results. It’s hard to pinpoint the first because there were many short films and made-for-television movies that roughly fit the genre in the 1960s. The 1964 Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night is often cited as the first, but it doesn’t follow a familiar documentary style, opting instead to be a tongue-in-cheek day-in-the-life movie.
Several years later, in 1967, Peter Watkins released Privilege, a cautionary documentary-style feature that follows a pop star (Paul Jones) in 1970 who is used as a political pawn to keep the British masses distracted from the authoritarianism of their government. It’s more of a depressing satire about where pop culture could be headed rather than a raucous parody of the frivolous present, but it was groundbreaking. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival but was widely derided by critics for being melodramatic, moralistic, and poorly acted.
It wasn’t Watkins’ first foray into mockumentaries nor his most controversial. He began experimenting with the format in the early ’60s by making historical dramas about, among other things, the Jacobite Uprising and Edvard Munch. He earned widespread condemnation in 1965 with his pseudo-documentary The War Game, which followed the aftermath of nuclear war. Originally slated to appear on the BBC, it was pulled before its release for being “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.”
What is the highest-grossing mockumentary of all time?
Most mockumentaries have erred towards nicheness. There is a lot of gold to mine in the specifics of a particular subculture, a fact on which Christopher Guest has capitalised time and again. Whether he’s taking the audience inside the cutthroat world of dog shows or the roller-coaster of community theatre, he has shown that comedy is all in the details.
But subcultures rarely do well at the box office. By definition, if something is going to succeed financially, it needs to have mass appeal, and that usually rules out low-key, bone-dry comedy about a group of nondescript Midwestern theatre enthusiasts. That’s where Sacha Baron Cohen comes in. The British comedian made a name for himself with his clueless alter ego, Ali G, who interviewed various unsuspecting celebrities.
In 2006, he starred in the film Borat, playing the title character, a fictional journalist from Kazakhstan who travels to the US and has a turbulent time trying to get to grips with the culture and track down Pamela Anderson. It’s broad, crass, and often cringeworthy due to Baron’s signature move of inflicting himself on members of the public who do not realise he’s in character. As with most of his projects, Borat garnered a torrent of criticism for cultural insensitivity and earned a host of lawsuits from participants who did not realise the film was a hoax.
It was also extremely successful at the box office, raking in over $262 million worldwide. It remains the most profitable mockumentary of all time, even compared to Baron’s next effort, Brüno. The sequel, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, was released in 2020 but went straight to streaming. Amazon spent $80m for the distribution rights and more than $20m to promote it, suggesting that they expected a hefty audience. Without streaming numbers, though, it’s impossible to say whether it was more profitable than the first film.
