I’ve seen a ton of good movies this year. While I’ll admit feeling shame for not yet catching Indiana Jones, Kung Fu Panda, Wall-e, Wanted, Hulk, The Happening, Hancock, or Hellboy, I have watched some of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. Although I twitter about most of them, 140 characters is just not enough room to wax film with friends. Last night I proposed an online Documentary Club and started seeing interest right away, so I decided to move the conversation to somewhere that we could all hear each other on (in the comments of this post).

The basic purpose of having a Documentary Club is to be able to find and watch new documentaries, and then discuss them with friends. To run a group like this, we would need to figure out a few things;
1. where the group is located on the web and how we communicate
2. selection process
3. how can we ensure that everyone can see a film
4. what is the best way to get enjoyment out of the whole group process

I’d like to hear suggestions and ideas from everyone interested in the comments below, but here is one way I see this going; We create a yahoo group as a hub for conversations. Anyone in the group is allowed to suggest any documentaries for the whole group, if anyone else seconds a suggestion we add it to a poll. At the end of each month the two highest polled films will be the films for the following month. Each month we have two suggested films for discussion, but nobody is expected to watch both films. Then at the end of the month we start sharing our thoughts on the films (production, story, charm, filmmaker’s bias, etc). An alternative to the yahoogroup thing would be doing a live chat thing once a month and discussing the films on there. Somebody please give out some better ideas on what they’d like to see for a documentary club. If there is still enough interest, and we all seem to be on the same page, then I’ll start the process up and we’ll pick some movies.

edit: Thanks to the work of Scott Stead and many others, The Documentary Club is no online. Stop by DocumentaryClub.ning.com to sign up!