research on docmentry presenters Louis Theroux and Michael Moore

Louis Theroux

Theroux was born in Singapore, the younger son of the American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux and his British first wife, Anne Castle. His elder brother is the writer and television presenter Marcel Theroux. He is the cousin of American actor Justin Theroux. Brought up in the UK, he holds dual USA-UK citizenship. His surname is of French Canadian provenance and originates from the region around Sarthe and Yonne in France.
His first journalism job was at Metro Silicon Valley, an alternative free weekly newspaper in San Jose, California. In 1992 he was hired as a writer for Spy magazine. He got his break in television working as a correspondent on Michael Moore's TV Nation series, for which he provided segments on off-beat cultural subjects, including Avon ladies in the Amazon, the Jerusalem syndrome, and the attempts by the Ku Klux Klan to rebrand itself as a civil rights group for white people. When TV Nation ended he was signed to a development deal by the BBC, out of which came Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. He has guest-written for a number of publications including Hip-Hop Connection and he continues to write for The Idler.
In these special programmes (2003–2006), Theroux returned to American themes, working at feature-length, this time with a more natural tone. One, Louis and the Brothel, takes a sympathetic look at the prostitutes working at a legal brothel in Nevada. Other programmes include Louis and the Nazis, and Louis and Michael. In March 2006, he signed a new deal with the BBC to make ten films over the course of three years.

Michael Moore

Michael Francis Moore (born April 23, 1954) is an Academy Award-winning American filmmaker, author and liberal political commentator. He is the director and producer of Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko, three of the top five highest-grossing documentaries of all time In September 2008, he released his first free movie on the Internet, Slacker Uprising, documenting his personal crusade to encourage more Americans to vote in presidential elections. He has also written and starred in the TV shows TV Nation and The Awful Truth.

Moore is a self-described liberal who has criticized globalization, large corporations, gun ownership, the Iraq War, U.S. President George W. Bush and the American health care system in his written and cinematic works. In 2005 Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people.In 2005, Moore started the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Traverse City, Michigan. In 2008, he closed his Manhattan office and moved it to Traverse City, where he is working on his new film.

Moore was born in Flint, Michigan but raised in nearby Davison, a suburb of Flint, to parents Veronica, a secretary, and Frank Moore, an automotive assembly-line worker. At that time, the city of Flint was home to many General Motors factories, where his parents and grandfather worked. His uncle was one of the founders of the United Automobile Workers labor union and participated in the Flint Sit-Down Strike. Moore has described his parents as "Irish Catholic Democrats, basic liberal good people.
Moore was brought up Roman Catholic and attended St. John's Elementary School for primary school. He then attended Davison High School, where he was active in both drama and debate, graduating in 1972. At the age of 18, he was elected to the Davison school board.
Roger & Me (1989)
Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint (1992) (TV)
Canadian Bacon (1995)
The Big One (1997)
And Justice for All (1998) (TV)
Lucky Numbers (2000) (as actor)
Bowling for Columbine (2002)
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) "Palme d'Or" in Cannes
Sicko (2007)
Captain Mike Across America (2007)
Slacker Uprising (2008)
Untitled project (2009)

Nick Broomfield

Nicholas Broomfield (born 30 January 1948, in London) is an English documentary filmmaker. He studied Law at Cardiff, Wales, and political science at the University of Essex; subsequently, he studied film at the National Film and Television School. Broomfield films with a minimum of crew, just himself and one or two camera operators, which gives his documentaries a distinctive style. Broomfield himself is often in shot holding the sound boom.

Broomfield's early style was very conventional Cinéma vérité: the juxtaposition of observed scenes. He would not provide much explanation by way of voice-over or text, rather letting the film talk for itself.
It was not until Driving Me Crazy (1988) that Broomfield, already a known filmmaker, appeared on-screen for the first time. After several arguments regarding the budget and nature of the film, he decided that he would only make the documentary if he was able to conduct a sort of experiment by filming the process of making the film—the arguments, the failed interviews and the dead-ends.
This shift in filmmaking style was also heavily influenced by Broomfield's experience in attempting to release his earlier film Lily Tomlin, which chronicled the star's one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Once completed, Tomlin claimed the film was a spoiler for the actual show and she filed suit for $7 million against Broomfield. The documentary was shown on public television but not widely released. Eventually the footage of the stage show shot by Broomfield was used in the video release of the one-woman show.
It is for this reflexive filmmaking style—a film being about the making of itself as much as about its subject—that Broomfield is best known. His influence on documentary is clear: Michael Moore, Louis Theroux and Morgan Spurlock have all adopted a similar style for their recent box-office hits. Filmmakers who use this style have been referred to as Les Nouvelles Egotistes; others have likened his work to the gonzo reporting of Hunter S. Thompson.
Broomfield is an alumnus of the National Film and Television School; he co-wrote the documentary Kurt and Courtney (1998) with American filmmaker Joan Churchill.
In 2006 he completed a drama called Ghosts for Channel 4 inspired by the 2004 Morecambe Bay cockling disaster when 23 Chinese immigrant cockle pickers drowned after being cut off by the tides.
His 2006 project on the Haditha killings, Battle For Haditha, was shot in a documentary style although the events and characters were all dramatized. Instead of a detailed script, the actors were only given an outline of each scene and where the story was going. The outline is reportedly based on rumours, as the trial had not even begun when the filming began.


Proud to be British (1973)
Behind the Rent Strike (1974)
Juvenile Liaison (1975)
Whittingham (1980)
Fort Augustus (1981)
Soldier Girls (1981)
Tattooed Tears (1982)
Chicken Ranch (1983)
Lily Tomlin (1986)
Driving me Crazy (1988)
Diamond Skulls (1989)
Juvenile Liaison II(1990)
The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife (1991)
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992)
Monster in a Box (1992)
Tracking Down Maggie (1994)
Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1995)
Fetishes (1996)
Kurt and Courtney (1998)
Biggie & Tupac (2002)
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)
His Big White Self (2006)
Ghosts (2006)
Battle for Haditha (2007)
A Time Comes (2009)