As a producer (among other titles) of the Outside the Wire documentary series, people often ask me the difference between our documentaries about Iraq and other documentaries.

I tell people that JD embeds long term with our troops...he never just goes in, gets some soundbites and goes somewhere else. I usually add the story about the News Director who told me, after we sent him a tape, that JD's footage should have been shot using a tripod...yeah, like JD's going to set up a tri-pod in the middle shootout in Nasser wa Saalam.  The News Director didn't get the whole 'this is actual combat in Iraq' thing.

But, just the other day, I found another answer to that question people often ask me. The difference is neatly summed up in a quote from this GQ article about Errol Morris' documentary about Abu Ghraib prison, Standard Operating Procedure .

As well as doing interviews, Morris looked into the possibility of visiting Abu Ghraib itself if only to film the perimeter (he was quoted a fee of $50,000  for safe passage to and from Baghdad), and he also consirdered shooting images in Amman, until he discovered that there were no buildings like Saddam Hussein's showpiece jail in Jordan.  Instead he and his team re-created parts of Abu Ghraib in Hollywood, on the same soundstage where I Love Lucy was once shot.

Errol Morris considered going to Iraq, but instead decided to have a model built on a Hollywood soundstage. What the hell kind of sense does that make?
 
JD on the other hand, did go to Iraq and has footage of the exterior of Abu Ghraib prison.  He was with Marines who were engaged in a fire-fight near Abu Ghraib prison and has the footage.  He has footage of people who wound up in Abu Ghraib being captured and observed Iraq's Central Criminal Court where terrorists were sentenced by Iraqi judges to a term of incarceration in Abu Ghraib prison.


Perimeter of Abu Ghraib prison the morning after an attack by insurgents.


So...what is the difference between the documentaries directed by JD Johannes and Errol Morris?
 
Nothing in JD's documentaries are staged, scripted, rehearsed or 'based on a true story.'  As we state in the opening credits, all the bullets, bombs, blood and bad guys in these documentaries are real.
 
JD doesn't merely "consider" going to Iraq, he has been to Iraq and back multiple times. When he first contacted me about starting this project at the end of 2004, the decision to go was already made.
 
Morris' documentary, which is probably all slicked up Hollywood style, seems pretty typical of Hollywood--four years after the fact and largely irrelevant to what is happening on the ground now.
 
After reading the GQ article , one thing that bugged me the most is that a documentary like Morris'--a bunch of interviews and re-creations—doesn't seem to break new ground.
 
Janice Karpinsky, the commander of Abu Ghraib prison during the prisoner abuse era, has been working with MoveOn and Soros backed filmmaker Robert Greenwald .
 
The stories of the others were mostly spelled out for the public during the Court Martials.
 
What exactly is Morris documenting that hasn't been documented in court transcripts, and by every major news organization in the country?
 
JD's documentaries are real, true-to-life documentaries because he is right there capturing things on film as it happens, and in places few others will go...you will get more of the story that way.

Marines JD was embedded with during his first embed in 2005.

 
A documentary like Morris' compared to Outside the Wire is the the difference between talking-head news shows where everyone gabs about events after the fact based on someone else's work, and the old school reporter working the crime beat.

JD was working the Abu beat when the Marines blew up a warehouse rigged with explosives.

 
Anyone can have an opinion and bloviate after the fact--but very few will do the hard work to get the initial facts.  Anyone can debate the Anbar Awakening, but JD got the facts on tape before most people noticed what was happening.  Anyone can debate the success of the Surge, but JD documented how the Surge worked by spending a month on the ground in Baghdad.
 
That is the difference between the Outside the Wire documentaries and most of the rest.
 
Morris recreates the exterior of Abu Ghraib prison on a Hollywood stage.  JD has stood outside the walls of the prison while the remains of a suicide truck bomb burned just yards away.

Remains of a VBIED outside of Abu Ghraib prison.

The other difference is: creating an after-the fact documentary irrelevant to the current situation in Iraq gets you profiled in GQ.  Spending time on the ground in Iraq documenting the relevant situations as they develop got JD serious sunburns, emersion foot, some scars, intestinal viruses and an aversion to man-hole covers.
 

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