Morgan Spurlock in Where In the World Is Osama Bid Laden? Photograph: Reuters
Forget about the writers' strike; what would really scare the Brylcreem out of Hollywood moguls is the idea of documentary film-makers staging a little industrial action of their own. As this year's Sundance film festival has already shown, US distributors aren't prepared to go on panicked buying sprees to stockpile original stories in the eventuality that the dispute will drag on for a thousand years. They've learned that for every over-hyped and disappointing narrative film in Park City there is a perfectly good, affordable doc waiting in the wings.
And that's exactly what's been happening here over the first four days of the festival. Bored by creatively barren offerings like What Just Happened, The Great Buck Howard, Sunshine Cleaning and The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh, buyers have shelled out on films of the non-fiction variety - the historical sleuthing of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the cultural chronicle that is The Black List, and the universally appealing tale of the Homeless World Cup in Kicking It.
One or two narrative features have also been generating interest, however. One of the most popular has been Hamlet 2, in which Steve Coogan portrays an inveterate luvvie who cajoles his drama students into acting in his self-penned sequel to Hamlet. Focus Features has just bought the worldwide rights for $10m, but the film itself is disappointing, given Coogan's genius. If only they'd allowed him to write the damn thing with Armando Iannucci, or advised him to be like Ricky Gervais and keep the English accent, or got Edgar Wright to direct ... or simply made it funny. Will Coogan ever choose the right US project? I suspect that's a question for another day.
Meanwhile another two narrative pictures have just been sold: the Chuck Palahniuk adaptation Choke, which stars Sam Rockwell, has been bought for $5m by Fox Searchlight; while Overture has taken up the US rights of the Luke Wilson picture Henry Poole is Here for £3m. Several other narratives remain unsold, including Transsiberian, Brad Anderson's follow-up to The Machinist, which plunges Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson into a web of drugs and deceit on the Transsiberian Express. Jonathan Levine's The Wackness, which stars Ben Kingsley as a compromised therapist who buys pot from a young client, and Lance Hammer's Ballast, a well balanced Deep South tale that explores the ripple effect of a suicide, are also both to find a buyer.
Morgan Spurlock's latest doc, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, received a warm welcome at its world premiere on Monday night, and is an entertaining romp through the Islamic world under the pretext of searching for the planet's most wanted man. He doesn't come anywhere close to finding Bin Laden, by the way. Harvey Weinstein already owns the film, and we can only hope it will reach cinemas rather than going the way of many Weinstein acquisitions and ending up in a vault somewhere. At this stage I have no desire to see Where in the World is Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden.
