'It was during this unsettled time in the American heartland that America's most graphic horror film was released, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three months later, Robert Kleasen arrived in the same city."
This one line of script, slipped quietly into the first five minutes of The Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is the only link made between a recent hour-long British documentary and its fictional American-slasher-movie namesake. Not, "This is the crime that inspired the movie" or even, "This is a crime inspired by the movie," just, "Our protagonist arrived in Austin around the same time their movie came out." One line of script, a title and a release date timed to coincide with a new remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and bzzzzt! you've got The Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Welcome to the next level of reality as defined by TV: factual programs based on fictional films based on factual events. Call it based on-based-ons, fact imitating fiction imitating fact, or simply life imitating marketing.
Sales racks at the last MIPCOM, the TV world's major market in Cannes, were bulging with a spate of glossy one-sheets for such fresh programming ideas as The Real Dirk Diggler: The John Holmes Story, Really Bend It Like Beckham and Moulin Rouge: Behind The Curtains..
As usual, the Brits are leading the charge (as they tend to do in both quality programming and its opposite), with the French following close behind and everyone else starting to catch on.
In Canada, based on-based-ons have appeared on History Television ( The Real Spartacus), Bravo! ( Moulin Rouge: Behind The Curtains) and the CBC ( City in Ruins, which followed the dramatic miniseries Shattered City), with more on the way. They range from docs that actually incorporate scenes from the original movie, Discovery Channel's Uncovering The Real Gangs Of New York (now included on the Gangs Of New York DVD) to Moulin Rouge: Behind The Curtains, a doc apparently unrelated to the feature film Moulin Rouge except in the fact that it mysteriously shared the same pressing need as Baz Lurhmann's cinematic spectacle to rediscover the Montmartre dancehall in precisely 2001.
The British hit movie Bend It Like Beckham, meanwhile, has inspired everything from Really Bend It Like Beckham, an instructional soccer show for children hosted by David Beckham, currently in production in the U.K., to Caught Between Cultures, a recent CBC news special that, according to the CBC website, examines intergenerational culture clashes "captured in such recent feature films as Bend It Like Beckham and My Big Fat Greek Wedding." One way or another, based-on-based-ons aim to plug a factual product into the buzz of a feature-film hit.
"From a programming perspective, it resonates very well with our viewers," says John Gill, senior vice-president of programming at Alliance Atlantis (which owns History Television). "We found some years ago that pairing up a doc in our inventory and a film in our inventory did hugely well for us. It's a way of cutting through the clutter of TV today. People say, 'Oh, I'll watch The Killing Fields,' then they stick around for a documentary on Pol Pot and the real Killing Fields."
So History Television has taken the next step and commissioned a based-on-based-on of its own. Canadians Of The Great Escape is due to air in March on the 60th anniversary of the Second World War event that spawned not only the Steve McQueen classic movie but at least one previous British documentary called The Untold Story of The Great Escape.
"Few people know there were Canadians in the real great escape," says Steve Gamester, an associate producer at History Television who conceived of the doc. "In the movie, they were recast as Brits or Americans. Of course, there were all sorts of other nationalities that weren't mentioned either. I was joking with the producer that you could now franchise our documentary into 'Poles of the Great Escape,' 'Lithuanians of the Great Escape'. . . ."
"But it clearly adds value to piggyback on a really well-known story and the millions that Hollywood has already spent marketing it."
It adds marketing value, to be sure, but with major entertainment conglomerates already determining so much of what is seen, read, eaten and worn, do they really need to steer the commissioning of documentaries, till now one of the few remaining bastions of relative creative freedom and intelligence on TV?
"I would never do it," says Rudy Buttignol, creative head of network programming at TVO. "With documentaries, there's this rare opportunity. You can create a hit -- The Corporation, Dying at Grace. . . . If anything we like to lead, not follow."
But according to History's Gill, it's a perfectly justified commissioning choice "provided the rigour is still there, and you make sure the story is told right."
As DVD makers know all too well, part of the meta-entertainment experience of pairing docs and features comes from seeing a documentary that lets you know how much Hollywood played with the truth.
Of course in some cases, with based-on-based-ons hitching little more than their title to Hollywood's star, the gap between fiction and fact can gape rather widely.
While the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for instance, is the story of five young friends on a road trip who come up against a chainsaw-wielding maniac called Leatherface, The Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre (made for Channel 4 in the U.K., not yet sold in Canada) is about Robert Kleasen, a man long suspected of shooting two missionaries in Texas and disposing of them with a taxidermist's band (not chain) saw.
What The Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre neglects to mention is that the movie from which it borrows its title is in fact based on another case altogether, that of Ed Gein, a Wisconsin farmer who in 1957 was suspected of killing 33 people, none of them with any type of saw, and whose story also formed the basis for Psycho and Silence of the Lambs.
That said, based-on-based-ons are not necessarily bad films. A snappy piece of British documentary making, The Real Dirk Diggler: The John Holmes Story, with its clever script and ironically cut "gotcha"interviews with former lords and ladies of the Los Angeles porn world, is arguably a far tauter film than the flaccid, vacuous feature Boogie Nights that gave it life.
And watching both feature and doc does make for an interesting if somewhat nerdy evening of compare and contrast. But in spite of finding out who Burt Reynolds's porn director was based on and the harsh truth of what Julianne Moore's character really looks like, at the end of the night, there's still one nagging question. Do you really need to know this much about a character who, in the words of The Real Dirk Diggler's brother, one of the more sympathetic voices in the doc, "was basically just a drug addict with a big dick"?
Jamie Kastner's documentary Free Trade Is Killing My Mother, based on nothing, airs on TVOntario on Wednesday at 10 p.m. and Knowledge Network BC on March 22 at 10 p.m.