10 Bullsh*t Documentaries That Aren't Worth Your Time

10. Chang: A Drama Of The Wilderness

So there's not a huge chance that you'll have come across Chang before unless you're a film history student or something, but this silent film about a poor farmer in Thailand and his daily struggle for survival in the jungle is notable for being the first example of a feature film documentary... and the first one that was entirely built on bullsh*t. Start as you mean to go on, and all that. Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness was made all the way back in 1927 and is pretty impressive in its use of a lot of the genre tropes we're still seeing in documentaries years later. It was shot on location, with handheld cameras at times, and includes €œnarration€ (albeit in the form of title cards, since we're still in the silent film era at this point), and tells a true story. Or, well, what the directors thought the true story should be. Yep, Chang is almost 100% staged. Directing partners Ernest B Schoedsack and Merian C Cooper called it a "melodrama with man, the jungle and wild animals as its cast," which rather belies the conceit of it being a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the lives of the Lao tribesman Kru and his exotic surroundings. Clearly Kru's life wasn't exciting enough for them, since they frequently threw the poor sod into a series of increasingly dangerous situations - over the course of the film he does battle with leopards, tigers, and even a herd of elephants - all of which supposedly cause a constant threat to his livelihood. Yeah, only when those two sadists from Hollywood turn up. Sadists who, not so coincidentally, later went on to make King Kong...