Joe Berlinger Looks Back on 30 Years of Brother’s Keeper and How the Documentary Genre Has Changed

Joe Berlinger remembers a time when it felt like documentaries were “the bastard stepchildren of the entertainment industry.” But a lot has changed in the 30 years since he and Bruce Sinofsky made their feature directorial debuts with their 1992 crime doc Brother’s Keeper.

The doc follows the events surrounding the death of William Ward, the eldest of four brothers living on a farm in upstate New York, and the ensuing murder trial that found one of the other Ward brothers, Delbert Ward, accused of suffocating William to death in a mercy killing. Delbert was ultimately acquitted of the charges.

According to Berlinger, the climate surrounding documentary films is so different now than it was when Brother’s Keeper came out, it’s like night and day.

“I started making films when, if you wanted your documentary to be released in a movie theater — which was a one in 100 chance of happening — it was not the industry norm,” Berlinger tells MovieMaker. “You had to shoot on 16 millimeter so that you could end up with celluloid. In other words, you had to shoot on film so that you would have a negative so you can strike released prints, so your movie could be projected in a movie theater because no digital existed — at a time when there was not a real tradition of documentaries in the movie theater.”

He and Sinofsky even had to shoot television commercials to supplement their income at the time.

“Documentaries were kind of the bastard stepchildren of the entertainment industry,” he says.

With a few exceptions, the concept of the docuseries barely existed, Berlinger says. Now, it’s a thriving medium that he’s has made quite a mark on in the true-crime space, with series like Conversations With a Killer, Crime Scene, Murder Among the Mormons, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, and many more.

The Paris Theater in New York City is putting on an event to honor Joe Berlinger from April 29 through May 3 called Crime + Justice Pioneer: A Joe Berlinger Retrospective. On Saturday, April 30, there will be a 30th-anniversary screening of Brother’s Keeper followed by a Q&A with Berlinger moderated by Variety’s Addie Morfoot. Following Brother’s Keeper, there will be a screening of Episode 1 of Berlinger’s latest docuseries Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes. You can get tickets on the Paris Theater website here.

Now a popular fixture on Netflix’s true-crime slate, Berlinger has come a long way in the 30 years since Brother’s Keeper.

Also Read: Joe Berlinger Might Have Just Revealed the Next Subject of Conversations With a Killer

“If you didn’t sell your documentary to HBO or PBS, you weren’t selling your documentary, because nobody else programmed documentaries other than HBO and PBS,” Berlinger said of the early 1990s documentary film scene.

“Largely speaking — because there are some exceptions to the rule — the idea of the docuseries didn’t exist. And even though Brother’s Keeper went to Sundance and won the Audience Prize and got the best reviews of films out of Sundance, all the distributors said ‘a film about four crusty farm brothers who slept in the same bed together? No one’s going to want to see that movie.’ And so we self-distributed the film ourselves.”

Back then, he said he would have been surprised to learn that one day, documentaries would be a hot commodity.

“We created six 35 millimeter release prints from our 16-millimeter negative, and we schlepped six prints around the country. If 400 People saw our movie that weekend, we [Sinofsky and I] would high-five each other like we died and went to heaven. That was the state of documentary at the start of Brother’s Keeper, and I have been lucky enough to have been actively working 30 years later, where unscripted/ documentary is a mainstay of mainstream entertainment, where the streaming revolution has propelled documentary to heights that I couldn’t have imagined.”

Now, Berlinger’s wildly popular docuseries like Conversations With a Killer and Crime Scene have the potential to be viewed by millions of people every day on Netflix.

“Everybody’s in the documentary business. You no longer have to shoot on film to get your movie out there. So I have seen a massive change and growth in the popularity. And I do think Brother’s Keeper, along with Roger & Me, Thin Blue Line and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning — there was a group of filmmakers in the late 80s/early 90s, all of whom — it’s not like we met and we’re in a club and all decided what to do together. Obviously, we all were doing it in our own way. But I think Brother’s Keeper, along with other films, helped. That was kind of a watershed moment in documentary — Steve James’ Hoop Dreams — again, Brother’s Keeper isn’t the sole film, but there was a group of films in the early ’90s that redefined what a documentary can be. It’s not just talking heads and archival footage. Obviously, there was a massive movement in the ’60s with the original vérité filmmakers,” Berlinger said.

“By the ’80s, documentaries weren’t really that popular, and there was a bunch of us who, each in our own way, kind of were saying, hey, documentaries can be much more than they currently are. And that has proven true. It’s just been this massive growth, and I’m glad to have been a part of it.”

Main Image: A still from Brother’s Keeper directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky.