Why don't people watch documentaries?

I recently had to write an essay on the cinematic representations of the Holocaust, this is, fictional and documentary forms.  And it got me rather interested in the documentary ‘genre’ as a whole, (in fact, I developed a bit of an obsession with documentary films and watched one a night for a good few weeks).   For my project, I had to watch several Holocaust feature films and documentaries, including the 9-hour documentary ‘Shoah’.   And through my research, it became glaringly obvious that the majority of people would much rather watch a fictional, arguably entirely fabricated representation of the Holocaust, like The Boy In the Striped Pyjamas, and have a good old cry over the melodramatic, fictitious events, than watch actual shocking footage, or real witnesses bear their testimony.  And it just baffled me.  I mean, if you’re gonna cry over it surely you should be crying over the real thing?  So it got me wondering, why are documentaries rather neglected?

Perhaps the most obvious answer is that when it comes to cinema, people want to be entertained, not educated.  After all, cinema is synonymous with entertainment.  But what perplexes me is that a large part of the time, these fictional stories are based on truth, or have documentary versions of themselves.  Like with Schindlers List, (I challenge you to find a person who hasn’t seen it).  Spielberg’s Oscar-winner is indisputably the most ubiquitous of all Holocaust representations, but now I bet you didn’t know that there is an arguably more moving documentary version about Schindler that was made by Jon Blair years before Spielberg’s.    But perhaps when it comes to such horrendous events like the Holocaust or 9/11, people would rather have a fictional story with all the Hollywood clichés to detach themselves from the event, or make the horrors less real.  Watching Meryl Streep describe her (character’s) time in Auschwitz Is far less harrowing than watching a real survivor like Kitty Hart-Moxon recite hers. 

But what about the less melancholy documentaries, the entertaining ones like ‘The Imposter’, ‘Supersize Me’ or anything by Michael Moore, these are still not as appreciated as they should be.  Is it the fear that because it is a documentary it runs the risk of being educational and thus boring? Perhaps it is as simple as that, as Annette Insdorf puts it, “film-goers will not pay to see documentaries”.  Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is the highest grossing documentary of all time, with a grand total of $119 78,393, now that’s not a bad gross intake but when you take into account that the Nutty Professor sequel gained $4 million more, and that the second highest grossing documentary only managed $77 million, it kind of puts it into perspective. 

I hoped in writing this I would come to some great, notable conclusion, but really, I think that fact of the matter is, documentaries generally have a stigma attached to them, a warning if you will, of education, and unfortunately the modern film-goer usually just wants some entertainment.