Beyond the Multiplex

Bowling, genocide and one man's strange blimp dreams: A new wave of documentaries offers great tales and impressive variety.

By Andrew O'Hehir

May 25, 2005 | As Walter Ray Williams Jr. surveys the inadequately oiled surfaces of New York's Bowlmor Lanes, he is not pleased. He can tell, he says in a confidential tone, that no serious bowling occurs in this venerable Greenwich Village establishment. He's right, of course. Bowlmor is mainly a site for kids' birthday parties by day and retro-hip cocktail hangout parties by night, rather than a temple for serious practitioners of America's most popular recreational sport.

"This is entertainment bowling," Williams sighs as we watch a guy in a fake-'70s polo shirt roll at -- and miss -- a 2-4-7 spare. "To a professional like me, that's just sad."

Why am I hanging out with a bowling legend, one of the Professional Bowlers Association's biggest stars over the last 20 years, in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon? Because I write about independent film, that's why.

As other critics have begun to notice, the default setting for indie films these days is basically nonfiction. It's increasingly rare for a conventional scripted drama or comedy, when released by a small distributor without significant promotional dollars, to break out of its tiny niche audience, absent extraordinary word of mouth. (We'll have to wait and see whether Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings and Queen," the best and most adventurous film I've seen in the last two years, can accomplish that.)

As I've written previously, I'm unsure whether to call this new wave of nonfiction films, following the trail blazed by Michael Moore and the makers of "Spellbound," documentaries. Most are a long way from the cinéma-vérité strictures of Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers. Instead, they tend to be carefully structured entertainments whose characters exist in the real world, with a sensibility and craft drawn more from cable TV than the stringently gritty documentary tradition.

One thing these movies definitely offer is impressive variety. It shouldn't be shocking to learn that films about real people can be as different from each other as the people are, but the documentary genre -- or whatever you want to call it -- has definitely broken free from its earnest political-ethnographic origins. In addition to "A League of Ordinary Gentlemen" (the film in which Walter Ray Williams plays a starring role), this week also offers a troubling return to Rwanda, 10 years after the genocidal massacres there, and Werner Herzog's latest poetic and tragic voyage into the South American jungle with a fallible, doomed dreamer (who isn't even him).

"A League of Ordinary Gentlemen": The fall and rise (sort of) of pro bowling
A couple of hours after competing in the finals of the Professional Bowlers Association's world championship, Walter Ray Williams Jr. is on top of his motor home with a shovel, trying to chip off enough ice so he and his wife can set out for Florida. That about sums up the portrait of the pro bowling world in Chris Browne's audience-pleasing film "A League of Ordinary Gentlemen," which follows the PBA's 2002-03 season as the league and its bowlers try to crawl out of the entertainment industry's basement.

If you're somewhere north of 30, you probably remember when bowling was a quasi-major television sport, with Saturday afternoon broadcasts hosted by ABC's genial Chris Schenkel and a gallery of stars who looked like your neighborhood's dads -- and, as the '70s and '80s progressed, like your neighborhood's mullet-head muscle-car drivers. In 1997, the PBA was driven off the air after years of declining ratings, and while bowling has rattled around the weekend schedule of ESPN since then, the league came close to folding entirely.

In 2000, the PBA was purchased lock, stock and lane oil -- along with, most importantly, its mounting debt -- for $5 million by a trio of former Microsoft executives. They installed Steve Miller, a marketing guru whose résumé included Nike and the National Football League, as the PBA's CEO, with an eye toward solving bowling's demographic crisis. While recreational bowling remains hugely popular, especially in the heartland, pro bowling has near-zero advertiser appeal and not much coolness among the ardently desired market slice of males aged 18 to 35.

Next Page: "They were like, screw you. They couldn't give a shit about the older guys"

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