LOS ANGELES - Capt. Richard Phillips was bobbing in a boat full of Somali pirates on the Indian Ocean four years ago when Hollywood recognized an Oscar moment.
Film producers who were glued to the news sensed the stuff of next-wave nonfiction - an action hero, in a real-life global drama.
Things turned out well, from a cinematic point of view. Navy SEALs flew to the rescue, three of the pirates were shot dead, and Phillips was freed unharmed.
The resulting movie, Captain Phillips, directed by Paul Greengrass, will arrive in October with Tom Hanks in the title role. It is one of a dozen nonfiction narratives that are promising to shake up the coming awards season, and perhaps to reinvent a reality-based movie genre that only a few years ago seemed moribund.
While Hollywood still loves the summer escape movie, sophisticated real-life dramas are filling up the latter part of the year, attracting top-flight stars and directors and finding a niche with audiences continually wired into unfolding news events.
Almost everybody knows something about the tales behind the new films, giving them a recognition factor that serves as a built-in marketing motor.
“The story already exists; everybody around the table says, ‘Yeah!’” Hanks says, describing the current preference of studio executives as they sift through scripts and proposals.
Hollywood is quick to adopt a winning formula, and the critical and box office success of films like The Social Network and Moneyball has proved that reality-based narratives can make moneyand win awards - something beyond the ability of most blockbusters.
At the same time, executives and film historians say, media fragmentation has made studios more wary of jumping into purely fictional drama, because they can no longer rely on best-selling novels, original stage shows, or even the reputation of master filmmakers to supply a mass audience.
“It’s quite possible thatwe’re in a golden age for this type of film, and we’re just not aware of it yet,” says Robert Birchard, editor of the American Film Institute catalog of feature films.
Since long before Gary Cooper played Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees (released in 1942), the nonfiction genre has tended to “come and go,” Birchard notes.
It seemed to be fading in early 2010, when a 3-D fantasy, Avatar, was all the rage,and - despite the real underpinnings of fictions like An Education and The Hurt Locker - only one nonfiction film, The Blind Side, figured among 10 best picture nominees at the Academy Awards. But The Social Network, which got eight Oscar nominations in 2011, set the film world abuzz with its close examination of Facebook and its founders - even as an oldstyle historical drama, The King’s Speech, took the top honors that year. Then, three inventive, reality-based dramas - Argo, Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty - unexpectedly turned the most recent Oscar contest into a rousing political brawl.
This year, nonfiction is back with a vengeance, with the July 12 release of Fruitvale Station, by the Weinstein Co., about the 2009 shooting of a young man by an Oakland, Calif., transit officer.
Some of the more notable entries that follow will focus on events or people still prominent in the public consciousness: The Fifth Estate, about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, from director Bill Condon; Jobs, about Apple founder Steve Jobs, from Open Road; and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, from the Weinstein Co.
Others examine subjects in the recent and distant past, including Rush, about Formula One racers Niki Lauda and James Hunt, from Ron Howard; Twelve Years a Slave, about the 19th-century abduction of Solomon Northup, by Steve McQueen; and The Monuments Men, about those who saved great art from destruction by Hitler, with George Clooney, who directed, in a starring role.
Nonfiction is erupting not just because of its marketing power, but also because filmmakers are using realitywith increased sophistication. That can involve an unusual amount of original investigation, as with Zero Dark Thirty, or a detail-minded approach that might have been jarring before cellphone cameras turned everyday life into one big documentary.
Captain Phillips is a case in point.
Hanks, Greengrass and the writer of Captain Phillips, Billy Ray, described how they turned the complicated story of the April 2009 pirate attack on the freighter Maersk Alabama into a stripped-down drama.
Within days of the first news reports, Phillips, who became a hostage when the pirates backed out of an exchange deal, was safely aboard a U.S. destroyer, and one watchful producer, Dana Brunetti, was off to New York in pursuit of rights.
Brunetti and a business partner, actor Kevin Spacey, soon cornered the story over dinner with the captain. At Columbia Pictures, the pair aligned with Michael De Luca and Scott Rudin, with whom they were then producing The Social Network.
As the film came together, unusual choices followed, driven largely by Greengrass’ belief that “the culture thirsts for authenticity.”
He decided to cast four unknown Somalis as the pirates, pitting their sheer believability against the star power of Hanks. The four had showed up together foran open casting call.
“They knew each other,” Greengrass says. “You’re always more comfortable with your mates.” The hiring choice, he added, was intended to humanize the pirates and their leader, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, who survived but is serving a prison term in the United States.
Bucking a post-Sept. 11, 2001, trend, Ray, meanwhile, argued against telling a political tale, as Greengrass did with his 2010 film, The Green Zone, about the failed hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“I always felt this was in some way a cop story, a crime story that had no politics to it at all,” says Ray, who put aside Greengrass’ concern that the SEALs’ decision to shoot the pirates was less a triumph than a failure of diplomacy.
A pending legal dispute involving claims that Phillips had ignored warnings to keep a safer distance from Somalia does not figure directly in the film, which became closely focused on the personal conflict between two very different men, Phillips and the pirate Muse.
By all accounts, it was Hanks who advised some final surgery that eliminated scenes - portraying media frenzy, and family hand wringing - that audiences might have recognized from one of his earlier films.
“I might have said, ‘Are we going to do an Apollo 13 redux here?’” Hanks recalls. He referred to the 1995 film, directed by Howard, about the return of a crippled Moon flight. It received nine Oscar nominations but traded on home-front moments that Hanks thought would be too familiar for viewers in a completely wired world.
So none of that appears in Captain Phillips. Instead, the final product is an unusually austere action film that peaks with an improvised scene in which a real Navy medic examines Hanks, exactly as she would any other damaged sailor.
“Paul’s willingness to do this quite frankly blew me away,” Hanks said of the impromptu scene.
Style, Pages 31 on 07/25/2013