'Truth' about feature docs good news

December 07, 2006 At May's Festival de Cannes, Paramount Vantage's newly installed president, John Lesher, celebrated the rebirth of the specialty division with two films screening at France's premier cinema showcase: "Babel," Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's complex narrative about the boundaries that divide us, which played In Competition to rave reviews, and Davis Guggenheim's global-warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," which not only made science compelling but made former Vice President Al Gore seem prescient -- and turned him into a rock star of the environmental movement. Months later, "Truth" has earned about $24 million, making it the year's highest-grossing docu and a front-runner in the Academy Awards' feature-length docu race. With the continued creative and commercial renaissance of the feature-length docu format, more people are paying to see nonfiction films on the big screen -- maybe not as many as paid to see, say, 2004's "Fahrenheit 9/11" or last year's sensation "March of the Penguins" but enough to make them good business for just about everyone in the industry.

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