Reponse to Stephanie's Post on Documentary
I agree with Stephanie's point about the positive reasons for not creating this film as a documentary. One reason for this is the wider audience this movie can attract. Like Stephanie said, if this were a documentary, the audience would be even smaller and this issue would not have caused such an uproar at the time it premiered. Another reason a Hollywood film was a good choice was the way Brandon's life was shown. Although Hilary Swank did a great job of becoming a male figure and blurring the line between male and female, she is still an attractive actress. This was an extremely safe representation of the violence of the incident. The rape scene was incredibly hard to watch, as was the majority of the movie, but it was still created in a way that made it easy for a wide audience to watch it. Because of Pierce's choice to create a Hollywood film, instead of a documentary, more people were affected by Brandon's story, and were not turned away because of something too graphic or uncomfortable.