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43 F A L L Q 3 I S S U E F E A T U R E Picture" (2002) was based on Hollywood producer Robert Evans's autobiography. Viewers watched to see how he succeeded in Hollywood. "Three Identical Strangers" (2018) asked what happened to triplets separated at birth. "Crumb" (1994) profiled an oddball cartoonist who hit it big with one particular "Keep on Truckin'" comic. Quest documentaries like "Roger and Me" (1989) and "Searching for Sugar Man" (2012) end when the filmmakers find the sought-after person or don't. Filmmakers Malik Bendjelloul and Simon Chinn fol- lowed two obsessed Sugar Man fans who tracked down the once-celebrated Sixto Rodriguez. Michael Moore failed to get to his target, Roger B. Smith, chairman and CEO of General Motors. Moore solved his story-ending problem by interviewing an empty chair. Davis Guggenheim was presented with a challenge when Participant Media asked him, "Can you make a film about public education?" Guggenheim declined, not seeing an obvious story inherent in the subject. But then he read an editorial by Thomas Friedman about the SEED School of Maryland, which had an admissions lottery. They used a random bingo selector, and if your ball rolled down the chute, you got into the school. That was a breakthrough for Guggenheim, who saw conflict and stakes: "Suddenly, I knew my third act. It was a plot device, but it was also a thematic container for the idea that a child's future is decided by how a bingo ball bounces. I constructed the narrative of 'Waiting for Superman' backward, building to that point." I n t h e wo r l d o f vé r i té, ge tt i n g to a satisfying ending can be harder. In Albert and David Maysles's "Grey Gardens" (1975), the audience watches to the end to find out if two apparently delusional women will survive living in a decrepit house (and world) that is falling down around them. Frederick Wiseman has no checklist that he goes through. "I'm sitting there and looking at the screen, and I try various alternatives, and I say to myself, 'Well, I think this one works.' Someone else might make a differ- ent choice." As subjective or random as his process may seem, Wiseman acknowledged there is always a specific meaning attached to his endings, representing his choice of how to end the film. Wiseman found a mem- orable ending for "Titicut Follies" (1967) by closing with a musical performance, where the inmates at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Mas- sachusetts, put on a talent show. Once Sam Pollard has completed a first assembly, he asks himself: Now, how do we make it into a film? How do we make it engaging? He said, of his first cut of "The League" (2023), about the Negro baseball leagues: "It was all there. But was it excit- ing? No. Was it really engaging? No. It was: Here's the history of the Negro Leagues. And so we went back in to reshape and re-edit, and change music, move things around, add and subtract voices, to give it more dynamics and drama." When he showed the next cut to his executive producers, they pushed him to make it even more dramatic and exciting. "The documentary process is collaborative. You lay out the foundation of the house, and then you build the house, but then you've got to figure out how to make it into a beautiful house." A documentarian thinks about editing while shooting. Nothing but talking heads gets old fast. Will there be B-roll, stock footage, photos, newspaper articles, re-en- actments, animation? To be able to shape a story, the editor needs cutaways: insert shots, close-ups, establishing shots, exte- riors, and portrait shots. A portrait shows a subject walking, standing, or sitting, looking to the lens, maybe doing and saying nothing. It could be used as an interstitial shot or an introduction the first time you see them. These options will be needed later. When a moment feels dull during shooting, Frederick Wiseman pans over and picks up cutaways of people making notes, turning their heads, sharpening a pencil, or scratching their heads. He protects himself against missing interesting conversations by keeping the sound recorder running. If the action suddenly gets interesting, he pans back, without missing the audio lead- in to the moment. Begin an edit by putting like with like. Collect all the pieces on similar topics into one bin, and soon these coalesce into chunks, and then segments, and maybe polished chapters. One of the challenges to creating an elegant flow is finding the links, the transitions from shot to shot and from segment to segment. The footage is a puzzle where all the pieces do not necessarily fit, but you must find a way to combine them. One way to lay the groundwork for the links is to ask theme questions so you can inter- cut answers, building sound-bite trains, where interviewees finish each other's sen- tences. Or juxtapose opposing statements for maximum contrast. Pacing is deciding when to reveal the next plot point—and the answer is probably sooner. Lead the audience and keep them from getting ahead of the story. If they can predict what's next, they will lose interest. The audience needs to fully understand why you presented something, but at the same time, you have to move fast enough to surprise them with your next cut. Ken Burns loves nothing better than an edit session that makes a scene better and more complicated. Although Burns has the ultimate say, the editors are at the frontline, choosing the images. "Yelling is forbidden," Burns said. "It's hugely important to me that the process be joyous as well as hard. Sometimes we've got a scene that works, and we don't want to touch it, but then we learn new and sometimes contradictory information, and we dismantle it. If you find out information that makes a scene less stable, you've got to figure out how to make that instability part of the story. S o m e t i m e s t h a t s c e n e e n d s u p n o t a s good as it once was, but it's truer to what actually happened." Burns's writing and editing process is somewhat unique. He and his team begin by interviewing scholars and experts. The writers usually do not participate at this point; they might look at questions and suggest things, but the filmmakers shoot without a script. Then, the writer reviews the interviews and begins researching and writing a script. "We might have 50