In 1996 McGovern wrote a TV film called HILLSBOROUGH, which you can find here. It's a documdrama about a horrible disaster that befell the community of Hillsborough. In 1989 as residents piled in for a soccer match, they were sent the wrong way and ended up trapped in an area far too far for their number. 97 people were crushed to death, and then in the aftermath the police -- who were entirely responsible for the disaster -- made up stories about the attendants being drunk, pissing on bodies, stealing wallets. Horrible, horrible stuff.
McGovern set out to tell the stories of three of the families who lost someone at Hillsborough, as well as to some extent of the police who were involved -- both the men at the top who created this disaster, and those at the bottom, who were forced to witness this horrifying disaster without being able to stop it, and then were asked to lie about what happened.
The film's an interesting watch for the way that McGovern and director Charles McDougall went out about telling the tale. There's no soundtrack, nor any main character. We shift back and forth among the families and the officers as the story warrants.
At times it even feels like you're stumbling into scenes rather than watching something that has been crafted. And even in the second half when we've moved from the actual incident and aftermath to the journalists and the court cases and the families trying to survive, there's still very much a "found" quality to the story. So for instance one of the main characters, who lost both his children in the disaster, in the second half seems to have a more authorial role vis-a-vis the families. And there's no explanation given at the top. You just see it happening and wonder, okay, is he a lawyer representing them, or somehow connected to the city, what is going on.
It's not a major element, it doesn't distract from the story. In fact it doesn't take long to find out that oh, he's the spokesperson for the families. But just that choice to create a little gap of information gives the story a very verité quality.
There's another choice like this that the film uses repeatedly. One or more of the characters will be in a position where they have to interact with someone official, or a group. And McGovern and McDougall make the choice to have those arguments pretty much impossible to follow, both because of the speed of what's being batted around and the chaos of people talking over each other. Other than a key phrase here or there, someone begging that his wife not be told or a copper telling one of the leads that his [deceased] daughter is no longer his property, she's the property of the Crown until their investigation, you really don't follow the dialogue at all.
Fom some writers' point of view that might seem terrible. But I gave you such beautiful pearls! But we're so used to everything being so scripted, and with it to dialogue always having this privileged place of clarity in a movie or TV show, just this small kind of disruption of the paradigm, that sense of not being able to follow this, grants the story another feeling of realism. (The audio levels are kept low, as well. We're literally not meant to follow this.)
It also matches the writing to the experience of the charaters. Life in those kinds of moments (and so many others) is chaos. You don't follow it all, and you're not heard, and it's overwhelming. So even as it makes the storytelling feel more realistic, that choice also quietly lets us into the families' point of view.
Really throughout the film McGovern and McDougall find ways of playing both sides--objectivity and subjectivity--like that. So at one point the camera moves through a room of police quiet and completely lost after what they've witnessed. It's very documentary-like, no authorial sense to the shot. And yet that moment absolutely tells me everything I need to do know about what's going on inside those coppers' heads.
Documdramas are such a big business today. If you're looking for ideas on how to do yours in a documentary-style way, check out HILLSBOROUGH.
