Yee-Ming
Senior HTF Member
If this is such a problem, why did they wait until the documentary was assembled before they put the hack job to it? Surely the doc was being approved before it was put together, why couldn't legal have said before the process started that it would be best not to use this footage to avoid a law suit. Sure, I'll even say that I don't know for sure that it didn't happen that way but I have my doubts that they were told not to use something, used it anyway and had it yanked out from under them.Easier to ex-post facto deal with it and edit out stuff, than pre-emptively tie your documentarian's hands. If Charlie had been told, for instance, "we won't allow any potentially libellous stuff on the documentary", that puts the onus on Charlie to become a lawyer and judge for himself what's libellous, what's not. That's not his job, it's the job of the black suits in the counsel's office.
Put another way, the suits can't always predict what sort of material is going to turn up. As long as they're willing to pay for the cost, let the documentarian turn up whatever he turns up, produce a documentary as he sees fit, and then hack later. It's only a problem if they're not willing to incur the cost in the first place. To use a movie analogy, if you're going to make an R movie then don't waste film shooting very explicit hard-core sex scenes, but if you're looking for an edgy R, let the director shoot what he will and pare it back until you get that R as opposed to the outright X. I'm sure Fox didn't start off with the intention to totally whitewash everything, but when they saw the final product, some of the stuff was, to them, a bit too much.
Another point, why have expensive lawyers view lots and lots of footage which might not have been used anyway? If SW:Ep1's Beginning is any indication, that 66 minute documentary was distilled from 600 hours of footage, how much footage did Charlie go through? 600 hours at $400/hr is a lot of legal fees...