The Sweatbox

The Sweatbox is a fascinating look into life cycle of a Disney production. I knew that Disney was extremely focused on story, but I didn't know that they were so focused that they would throw out an entire score, twice, and completely rewrite a story that had been in production for over a year.

The basis of this makes a good foundation for a documentary. You get to see a world you don't normally see, and there are continuous conflicts.

I make film essays on YouTube, which means I sometimes make mini documentaries. Deep into the research process, you often have all these threads and tangents that need to be sewn together. You need an overarching narrative. And it helps if that overarching narrative has some kind of emotion tied to it because that emotion creates an attachment in an otherwise purely informative piece. You could create this emotion from the interviews with your subjects, or you could decide on your own, and guide the narrative of the film there.

The Sweatbox doesn't pick a particular emotion. Its narrative is that we're going to watch where the production started and where it ended. There's this really interesting emotional thread where the first director of the film gets his initial vision destroyed. And then he leaves the production, presumably. This is the strongest emotional thread in the film. How did he feel about the film that was finished without him? How did his life change after that? This is the emotional story behind a troubled, completely overhauled film production.

Instead we get footage of responsible adults who accept their jobs are sometimes to create things that change or die. They reflect in logical, unemotional ways. And we march to the end of the film in an orderly fashion.