Film's success does not boost directors' careers

The year starts with your movie winning the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. By midsummer, the film, borne by intense word-of-mouth support, begins slipping into theaters.

Critics, even those with hearts of stone, become enthusiastic acolytes of your movie's cause. And - big drum roll here - the box-office take is a pleasant surprise.

So the phones should be ringing off the hook, right? Big stars should be making desperate "can-we-talk" phone calls at odd hours, right?

Well, no, say Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen, producer-directors of "On the Ropes," the acclaimed boxing documentary.

The film's absorbing 90-minute narrative tracks a year in the lives of those who work and train at Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy Boxing Center, situated in one of the city's most forbidding neighborhoods.

The focus is on four magnetic people: Harry Keitt, an ex-convict and recovering drug addict who built the center and dedicates himself to helping neighborhood kids avoid his mistakes; Noel Santiago, one of Keitt's teen-age pupils, whose ingratiating bravado shields a potentially crippling streak of self-doubt; George Walton, Keitt's prized prodigy, whose move to the professional ranks leaves his mentor abandoned and depressed.

And, most poignantly, there's Tyrene Manson, a bright-eyed, ebullient young woman whose clear shot at a Golden Gloves championship is threatened when she's implicated in a drug bust.

Manson's subsequent travails moved New York magazine film critic Peter Rainer to write, "It's one thing to read about the injustice of the criminal-justice system ... But hearing Tyrene's harrowing defense of herself, of her life in an atmosphere of such stark indifference is almost unbearable."

Rainer's reaction reflects the near-unanimous acclaim received by "On the Ropes." Audiences have likewise been roused by the film despite its departure from the customary ascending (or descending) arc of boxing films.

You know how it usually is in those ring epics: Either Sylvester Stallone wins or Robert Ryan loses in the end. In "On the Ropes," the conflict within the ring is subordinated to the process and caprice of life itself; the stone being rolled uphill and rolling back down; dreams born, dying and looking for more fertile ground in which to take root.

Still, the film is a documentary. And there's only so much that a documentary can do to boost a filmmaker's profile. Which is acknowledged - and accepted - by the "On the Ropes" directing tandem.

"It's funny," Morgen, 30, said at a Park Avenue coffee house not far from the pair's Manhattan distributor's office.

"If we'd made a fiction film that got the kind of reaction on a par with the way our film has been received, I think we would be inundated with offers.''

"The only thing this film has done," Burstein, 29, chimed in, "is that, ever since Sundance, we're able to go into meetings with people who can green-light our projects. But that's the way things always are with documentaries. No one pays you to develop a documentary. You have to come up with the ideas yourself."

If the above reads like sour grapes, it's misleading. The experience of making "On the Ropes" has, if anything, committed both these New York University film school alums to the documentary genre, even though both claim they were first drawn to filmmaking by the same Hollywood product everyone else knows and loves.

(Burstein made fictional shorts in her apprenticeship, while John Ford and Bernardo Bertolucci are Morgen's heroes.)

Yet it's their predeliction for traditional movie genres that defines their aesthetic for non-fiction film. "We wanted to tell stories," Burstein said. "And the challenge for both of us was to find a real-life situation and fashion it into a compelling story. We have our favorite documentaries and learned a lot from them ..."

Morgen, as each of them often do, completes his partner's thoughts. "But really we tried to take everything we know from dramatic filmmakers and apply it to non-fiction film."

Burstein takes the ball. "I know people see our movie as a social document and an indictment of the criminal-justice system. But that wasn't our intention. We just found this interesting place with these very interesting people with stories that had their own drama to bring out."

"Sort of what people call the new journalism," Morgen said. "'In Cold Blood' (Truman Capote's 1966 true-crime nonfiction novel) was as much an influence on us as any movie."

Several documentary projects are on the horizon for the pair, including two potential TV series, "American High," about a Texas high school, and "The Searchers," which tracks real-life private investigators.

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