"Who the hell are you?” isn’t usually a question that sparks partnerships. But that’s just how a political journalist and a renegade filmmaker teamed up in an attempt to change the nature of documentary media.
Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show and documentary filmmaker Andrew Jenks of MTV’s World of Jenks recently launched a production company that delivers “substantive, entertaining content that humanizes storytelling.” You might remember Ratigan as the fiery personality who angrily criticized the role of U.S. politics during the financial crisis during a live broadcast in 2011. His 2012 book, Greedy Bastards spent five consecutive weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers List.
Jenks, who had an overwhelming amount of success the last decade, focuses on sharing the stories of everyday people in ways that combine the personal and unfiltered nature of reality TV and the educational style of documentary film. His popular show, World of Jenks, centers on the lives of regular young people, capturing their tales through their own perspectives. Jenks goes in deep and lives with each subject for a week.
“Andrew is not just a filmmaker,” Ratigan says. “He is at the vanguard of a genre of filmmaking." As a sophomore at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Jenks filmed Andrew Jenks, Room 335. In it, he checks himself into an assisted living facility and films the lives of all the residents. The success of Room 335, which was distributed by HBO, propelled him to the national stage.
The idea for Jenks and Ratigan Productions, based out of a penthouse suite turned studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, came after the two were on tour around the country promoting job creation and education. But they first met on Ratigan’s MSNBC show, where Jenks was a guest. That’s when Ratigan says Jenks inspired him to leave MSNBC.
“I was sitting there after the first interview and he was like, ‘Who the hell are you?’” Ratigan says. “You seem like a really smart guy. What the hell are you doing here? Why don’t you do something useful? You’re just sitting here yelling at everybody in a suit.”
Today, Ratigan no longer feels the need to dress in a suit, and he certainly isn’t yelling. The duo is currently working on projects they hope will have a tremendous influence on the representation of different types of people in documentary films who do not regularly make it to the mainstream. The duo wants to make what Jenks calls “reality movies.”
“Documentaries are starting to slowly change,” Jenks says. “Whenever you say the word ‘documentary,’ people think a story in the past, potentially black and white footage, slow music, slow pacing, talking heads, voiceovers, educational, etc.”
One of the projects currently underway is It’s Not Over. It tells the stories of three young people —from India, South Africa, and Central America, respectively—who are affected by HIV. Jenks says there are currently 400,000 sex slaves in Bombay, about 75 percent of them living with HIV. One of the subjects of the film is a gay man with HIV in India, where homosexuality is punishable by law. Jenks contends that this issue is never covered in mainstream media.
“This film is very different because there has been some great entertaining stuff on HIV—Dallas Buyers Club, The Normal Heart, We Were Here, etc.—but I think most of them, if not all of them, take place in the past,” Jenks says. “I think we’ll be the first film that can capture where the epidemic is today and where it is moving forward.”
Another film they hope to wrap up in time for Sundance is about Ryan Ferguson, a 29-year-old man who was recently released from prison after spending a decade behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit. After being arrested at 17 and heavily interrogated, Ferguson’s bail was set at $20 million, the highest in U.S. history for one murder charge.
“A lot of the past similar documentaries have been about people who have been put behind bars for reasons that one can attempt to rationalize because of society’s inability to do what’s right, but you can kind of get where it’s coming from,” Jenks says. “By that I mean West Memphis, Central Park, even The Thin Blue Line. You’re talking about a lot of people who are either locked up behind bars because of racism, lack of education, or poverty.” Jenks says Ferguson’s story is unique because he’s a “charming, athletic, white dude,” not the typical victim of a broken criminal justice system.
In addition to these larger ventures, Jenks wrote, directed, and published the highly praised fiction series About A Girl, which follows a man in pursuit of a girl throughout New York City. The YouTube show has no dialogue, but uses gestures and symbolism to tell the story which plays out more like a dream than reality.
While Jenks and Ratigan Productions is still at the beginning of its journey, big things are in store for the duo as well as for people represented in documentaries. Between Ratigan’s political experience and Jenks’ revolutionary filmmaking philosophy, the pair’s enthusiasm about changing the world has the potential to breathe new life into documentary filmmaking.
Ramy Zabarah is a contributing writer. He tweets here.
