Cinema Verite

Forty years before The Real Housewives of Atlanta was An American Family, which aired on PBS in 12 installments in 1973. The brainchild of Craig Gilbert, who had made a film about anthropologist Margaret Mead, he thought that the typical American family would be just as interesting as Samoans.

The resulting film about the Loud family was a media sensation. The family, whose almost every waking movie was filmed by a camera crew, were criticized and pilloried. The film captured the end of the marriage between Pat and her philandering husband, Bill, and their eldest son Lance was the first openly gay person on television.

Sharon Springer and Robert Pulcini, who made the very good American Splendor before succumbing to hack work in things like The Nanny Diaries, tell this story in the 2011 HBO film Cinema Verite. It's pretty good, but I think just skims the surface of the impact the film had on the family and the country.

Diane Lane is the star as Pat, and she's very good, with Tim Robbins as the oily Bill. They had five kids, and the part where they accept Gilbert's offer (he's played by an overly hirsute James Gandolfini) is done quickly--I can't imagine how a sixteen or seventeen-year-old would agree to this, as at that age privacy is sacrosanct. They are not paid, and the proposal is pitched as something historical. But it's clear that Robbins accepts because of his ego--why else would a man managing several affairs invite a camera crew into his house?

I haven't seen An American Family--apparently it's not easy to find--but we see several bits of it with the actual Loud family. It is amazing how people let their guard down and forget they have a camera pointed at them. But while shows like The Bachelor and The Jersey Shore are incredibly manipulated, An American Family was not--largely. But the ethics of the whole thing is brought into question. Gandolfini falls a little bit in love with Lane, and tells her of one of Bill's girlfriends, which of course is a huge journalistic no-no. But then he wants his camera crew (Patrick Fugit and Shanna Collins) to film every ugly moment, which they are reluctant to do.

It would be more than twenty years before the strategy was tried again with MTV's The Real World, but none of the shows that have come since have had the style that An American Family did--The Real World, etc. is basically a collection of freaks and fame whores.  Seeing this film makes me want to see An American Family.