Anthony Kaufman polled industry folks about Michael Moore’s announced Doc Night plan in his excellent indieWIRE article today. “Reactions to the plan are largely split between documentary filmmakers, who welcome any initiative that helps get their work out to the world, and industry insiders, who are skeptical about the plan’s feasibility and disturbed by what they see as a further ghettoization of the documentary form.”

As I was reading the article, I was feeling like some of us (myself included) come across as quite snarky about the whole thing. I can’t hold back when it comes to Moore; in a typical fashion, he couldn’t bother to comment for Anthony’s article, which just adds fuel to my snark about the man. But as Thom Powers says at the end of the article, “When you have a curated event, you’re building a relationship with the audience. When they have a couple of good experiences, then they don’t have to be sold on each title individually.” I was a season pass holder for Thom’s excellent Stranger Than Fiction series in New York and would gladly promote something similar in cities across America.

Sean Farnel, the programmer for Hot Docs, the fabulous Canadian doc fest in Toronto, shared his positive experience building a theatrical program in Canada like the one Moore suggests, on AJ Schnack’s blog (see comments section). “There are several models for such a circuit around the world. In fact, my first job out of film school was running one, which started in Northern Ontario and became the Film Circuit, which now stretches across 100 cities/towns in Canada. Its run by the Toronto International Film Festival Group.” He goes on to describe the details.

When I was at The Center for Social Media, we programmed a Human Rights Film Series each fall. One thing that struck me with each screening of usually 5 or 6 films playing one a week, was that each film drew a different audience, as opposed to the audience at Powers’ screenings. The films would draw out folks who were issue-oriented, not documentary oriented. It was a great feeling to be sharing films I loved with a new group each week. But it is perhaps also partly this experience that leads me to be pragmatic about the idea of a national doc night at multiplexes. We had a 100 seat theater situated on the American University campus in Washington DC. We would get around 60-80 folks at each of these screenings, which were really excited about but those kinds of numbers won’t excite theater owners when you consider the effort (and cost) it takes to cultivate that audience, even in a metropolitan area.

As Anthony says in his article, we all want more information and I’d argue that it would make sense to gather the folks quoted in Anthony’s article into a room and start brainstorming with Moore. I bet something really great could happen if they could all play in the same sandbox for one day.