Stranger Than Fact?

Those who know me know that I have a problem with a lot of the conspiracy theories going around today. I believe that the 9/11 Commission Report is accurate, or at least that they didn't intentially mislead people. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. I don't think the government is hiding aliens in Area 51. And despite all of the known recorded oddities surrounding the Ohio election of 2004, I don't think there was an top-down conspiracy in play.

That being said, I love conspiracy theories on their own. And it's time for me to offer one to you. One with no evidence other than my pure speculation.

Grizzly Man is fake!

Watching this movie tonight, there was a strange feeling I got during it. Not so much the footage of Timothy himself amoung the bears, but whenever Herzog interviewed family members, friends, coroners, pilots, and the other folks who explained Timothy's life (and, spoiler alert, death), they all seemed like they were acting. There was something off. Their emotions. Their crying. The way their voices cracked in perfect places. The strange construction of their sentences. Basically, it felt like a scripted movie performed by bad actors.

How would you go about doing something like this? Technically, it wouldn't be a problem. Every whose seen Waiting for Guffman, Reno 911!, Blair Witch or any porn movie knows that it's easy to blur the lines between fiction and reality. And with the technology available today, you could fake anything. All you'd need is an actor willing to act on film this one time, and never be seen again. (Maybe using a bright blond wig would help disguise him post-movie.)

All you need left to do is somehow leak the story of his death a few years before you release the movie. Then, when the movie finally comes out, the media will have news stories to reference, proving the accuracy of the documentary itself. And that, as any conspiracy theorist would advocate, is pretty easy to do. All news organizations need is a few sources (easily faked), some visuals, and a nice story and they'll print anything.

And that's really the only important part. After leaking the story, your job is done. Just work out a story, complete a script, videotape some adlibbed footage, edit it together, and you're done. You have an ultra-acclaimed blockbuster documentary.

Herzog himself has been known to blur the lines between fiction and reality for his entire career as a filmmaker. In his movie Fitzcarraldo, about a man who wants to pull a steamship over a mountain, uses no special effects. In essence, Herzog made the actors actually pull the steamship over the mountain.

And just a few years ago, he wrote and starred in Incident at Loch Ness, a funny mockumentary about a group making a film about the Loch Ness Monster who stumble on the actual monster itself. In fact, at the end of his three-star review of that movie, Roger Ebert had this to say:

Rather than say exactly what I think about the veracity of "Incident at Loch Ness," let me tell you a story. A few years ago at the Telluride Film Festival, Herzog invited me to his hotel room to see videos of two of his new documentaries. One was about the Jesus figures of Russia, men who dress, act and speak like Jesus and walk through the land being supported by their disciples. The other was about a town whose citizens believe that a city of angels exists on the bottom of a deep lake and can be seen through the ice at the beginning of winter. Wait too long, and the ice is too thick to see through. Crawl onto the ice too soon, and you fall in.

Herzog has made many great documentaries in his career, and I was enthralled by both of these. He's a master of the cinema, with an instinct for the bizarre and unexpected. After I saw the films, he said he only had one more thing to tell me: Both of the documentaries were complete fiction.

Is it too much to wonder if these "documentaries", never released to my knowledge, were just practice for his greatest trick of all time, Grizzly Man?

Final Note: Now again, I don't really believe anything I just typed. There's obviously no evidence. But it's a fun theory. Now all of you crazies, forget about 9/11 and JFK. Go do something worthwhile, like find evidence to back this one up. And then give me credit. And money.

(Oh, and after doing a Google search, I found this interesting, yet short article.)