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QUIZ

Trivia-Vérité

Test your knowledge of documentary filmmaking

By Kevin J. Siu

Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival is sitting pretty as it opens its 13th edition on April 22. Not only does this year’s slate cast its eye on South African voguing, love-doll infatuates and rubber fetishists (as well as more somber fare), but North America’s largest doc fest is also basking in the golden age, at least commercially, of documentary filmmaking: eight of the top 10 grossing feature-length docs in history were released in the last three years. No. 1, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, even broke the $100-million US mark last year, putting it on the same hallowed ground as feature-film releases Dodgeball, 50 First Dates and Van Helsing. No kidding: truth is stranger than fiction.

1. In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore famously, and somewhat erroneously, finds that Canadians don’t lock their doors. His appreciation for Canada is well established: almost a decade before Bowling, he wrote and directed this John Candy vehicle, his only non-doc to date:
	Canadian Bacon
	The Great Outdoors
	Planes, Trains & Automobiles
	Uncle Buck
	Spaceballs

2. What Canadian cult doc was parodied last season on The Simpsons — in the episode “The Fat and the Furriest” — when Homer built a full-body suit of combat armour?
	The Corporation
	Comic Book Confidential
	Manufacturing Consent
	Project Grizzly
	Talk 16

3. Joe Berlinger, who co-directed (with Bruce Sinofsky) the heralded docs Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, also helmed what ill-conceived Hollywood sequel?
	2 Fast 2 Furious
	Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
	American Psycho 2: All American Girl
	Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol
	Porky’s Revenge

4. In 2003’s Go Further, Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann follows actor Woody Harrelson and his Ken Kesey-esque posse on a road trip down the Pacific Coast Highway via bicycle and a tour bus powered by what alt-fuel?
	Electricity
	Hydrogen
	Bacon fat
	Hempseed oil
	Human waste

5. In the 1995 doc Unzipped, what fashion designer is inspired by seminal Canadian documentary Nanook of the North to create the Hollywood Eskimo look?
	Donatella Versace
	Karl Lagerfeld
	Isaac Mizrahi
	Issey Miyake
	Kathy Lee Gifford

6. In 2002’s Biggie and Tupac, muckraker Nick Broomfield — whose oeuvre includes Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, Kurt & Courtney and Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer — posits what theory about the murder of Tupac Shakur?
	The Notorious B.I.G. did it
	The LAPD did it
	Death Row Records founder and CEO Suge Knight ordered it
	Shakur faked his own death
	If you play All Eyez On Me backwards, it all makes sense

7. Before directing the The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Jonathan Demme compelled audiences to dance in the aisles with what rockumentary?
	Stop Making Sense
	Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll
	The Last Waltz
	The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
	Stepping Razor Red X: The Peter Tosh Story

8. What fast food spokesperson makes a cameo appearance in Morgan Spurlock’s Golden Arches cautionary tale Super Size Me?
	The Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” lady
	Colonel Sanders
	Dinky, the Taco Bell chihuahua
	Subway’s Jared Fogle
	A&W;’s Great Root Bear

9. What director’s jazz band did Barbara Kopple — who won Oscars in 1976 and 1990 for her labour strike movies Harlan County, USA and American Dream — follow on a European tour in 1997’s Wild Man Blues?
	Woody Allen
	Martin Scorsese
	Francis Ford Coppola
	Ivan Reitman
	Kevin Smith

10. In 2002’s Spellbound, 14-year-old Nupur Lala of Tampa, Fla., wins the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., by spelling “logorrhea.” What’s logorrhea?
	The study and science of timber
	An abnormal compulsion for mathematical exponents
	The irrational hatred of corporate names, symbols and trademarks
	Pathologically excessive and often incoherent talkativeness
	A prolonged irritation of the bowels