Is Hollywood Deep-Sixing January 6?

A long-awaited Jan. 6 documentary from a pair of Oscar-winning filmmakers sheds dramatic light on police and others whose lives were affected by the assault on the Capitol. But its absence from the website of its own studio, and from major subscription streaming outlets, have raised questions about just how America remembers that day — and about whether entertainment titans are pulling their punches as a potential second Trump term looms.

The Sixth, by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, is officially a collaboration between the award-winning Beltway-based duo and A24, the red-hot studio behind such sensations as Civil War, The Zone of Interest and Everything Everywhere All At Once. When the film was first announced, in early 2021, it seemed like the perfect pairing of talent and bankroll: Two of the capital’s best-regarded documentarians linking up with a rising entertainment-industry power.

The resulting film may be the Jan. 6 documentary most likely to flatter Washington’s self-image — a surprisingly moving portrait of public service rather than another adjudication of political culpability. Instead of focusing on the insurrectionists, the film depicts the day through the experiences of six people (a photographer, a Hill aide, a member of Congress and three police officers) who were trying to do their jobs as the mob descended. The film received a rapturous response at a standing-room-only D.C. screening last week.

But how much of the rest of the country will see it? Three years after the insurrection, with A24 sitting atop national box-office rankings thanks to Civil War, the documentary about a real domestic clash was unmentioned on the list of A24 films on the company’s website right before its release. Though The Sixth is scheduled to go public on May 3, the film is also weirdly absent from A24’s ordinarily robust social media accounts. Late on Wednesday, after I called to ask, the listing for The Sixth suddenly appeared on the site

A24, which steered general Sixth questions to an outside publicist, did not comment for the record about its marketing efforts for this column. Having rectified the website omission, it may well fire up the social media too. But the lack of advance publicity or other muscle is a strange posture for any business that has shelled out a lot of money to bankroll a movie — and presumably wants to recoup its investment. (The Fines declined to say what the total was, but said it was “a very robust budget, on par with high-end documentaries,” which would typically place it well into the seven figures.)

People who were interviewed for the film were also told that it would be streaming on its release day as part of Amazon’s Prime Video service. But now that’s not happening either, and may not happen until after the election. An Amazon Prime spokesperson told me that no date had ever been scheduled, and the issue would be determined in due course by A24 and Amazon. You’ll still be able to rent it as of May 3 on Apple, Amazon and a variety of other platforms, but the lack of a distribution channel like Prime tends to severely constrict the attention to a movie.

That, too, is an unusual fate for a big-budget documentary, where a more typical marketing effort would resemble the one for LFG, the couple’s 2021 film about the U.S. women’s soccer team, which debuted on HBO amid a major publicity push.

The apparent industry cold-shoulder has baffled some of the participants in the movie. And while there are plenty of politically neutral reasons why a marketing or distribution campaign might not work out the way someone wants, the combination of the divisive politics of Jan. 6 and the high-anxiety atmosphere of election season has some of them wondering whether something fishy is going on.

“The subjects were all told that the movie would be available on Prime starting at the beginning of May, and I was certainly telling that to people because the premiere was completely sold out,” said U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the six subjects. “I was telling people they’d be able to access it on Prime Video. And then the Fines told us that although that was the original understanding, it was now not going to be available for streaming on Prime Video and people would have to pay for it. That obviously will change by millions the number of people who will see it.”

“I don’t know exactly what is behind the sudden reticence of showing and promoting the film,” Raskin said. The national climate was on his mind: “I think it would absolutely sweep the country if it were made available to the public easily. But former President Donald Trump and right-wing forces in the country are on a daily basis trying to rewrite the history of what happened.”

“I’m very disappointed in the lack of publicity and the lack of promotion that’s coming from A24,” said Mel D. Cole, a photojournalist whose day among the crowds represents another of the film’s storylines. “I love their films and I think they always put their all into what they accomplish. I thought that this would have that same kind of push. To be honest, I turned down a few offers of being in documentaries. It was A24 that reached out to me initially and asked me to be in this film. It’s the reason I did it. The Fines are great, but I didn’t know them.”

Cole told me that he suspects politics are involved in the decisions: “What else could it be? They paid for a film to get made and then don’t even do the simplest things to promote it. It’s strange — like, not even Instagram or social media, but you have your logo in the film?”

In an interview, the filmmakers were more circumspect about the rollout, heaping credit on A24 for bankrolling the project and sticking with it even after numerous other documentaries appeared about that dark day. “We’re very grateful for the huge commitment A24 put behind this film,” Andrea Fine said. “It took a while to make, and they were committed.”

All the same, a duo accustomed to getting good play in the industry was clearly baffled by the comparative silence around this film. “We’re artists,” Sean Fine said. “You make something and somebody tells you it’s going to be in a museum — and then all of a sudden, it’s like, no, no, it’s only in this other room of the museum, and you have to pay more to go see it. You wonder why. Or if they say we’re going to keep your painting in a closet for a while and we’re going to bring it out when we think it’s good for people to see it. So it’s like, ‘Why is that?’”

Why that is, of course, could involve lots of banal reasons. Documentaries are not always top priority for marketers.

But the utter absence even from lists of A24 releases was odd. And in the current political moment, perhaps nothing is as polarizing as Jan. 6, an attack perpetrated by a group of people who are now ritually celebrated at Trump rallies — a backdrop that makes tough sledding for firms with a national audience.

In fact, the contrast with A24’s current runaway hit is telling: While Civil War reflects the vibes of a country on edge, the fuzzy specifics of the film’s fictional war appear unrelated to the familiar red-blue divide. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are apt to walk out of the film feeling like they’re being blamed. On the other hand, even though The Sixth is about workaday Washingtonians grappling with the riot, it’s hard to walk away from any Jan. 6 artifact without feeling the real divide over Trump. You can see why any big company might want to avoid something likely to enrage 40 percent of viewers (not to mention the man currently leading several presidential polls).

That’s a notion that ought to concern Americans of all stripes. A shared set of facts is pretty essential to a functioning society. We stopped getting our facts from the same place long ago, but burying something because it might anger people during election season seems bad in a new way.

When I called Amazon Prime to ask about the still-uncertain Prime launch, a spokesperson dismissed the idea that politics had anything to do with it, noting that the list of stuff available on Prime includes plenty of Jan. 6 material. Last week, Aaron Sorkin revealed that he was writing a Social Network sequel about the attack, for which he blames Facebook. So it’s hardly absent, even if significant chunks of the American political scene say they are done thinking about it.

Alexandra Pelosi, who made one of the previous Jan. 6 documentaries, told me she thinks the challenge is less Hollywood fear than entertainment-industry economics.

“I made a Jan. 6th documentary that came out last December, and I was on The View!,” she said. “I don’t think Hollywood is afraid of it. I think the people writing about politics are afraid of it. … The left says they’re all domestic terrorists. The right says they’re all tourists. There’s so much nuance that it’s really hard to find an audience for any Jan. 6 story. It’s just very hard to get anyone to write about it. There’s too much ‘but’ and ‘however’ and ‘on the one hand but then on the other hand.’”

Without people writing about something, it’s hard to launch it into the zeitgeist, which is usually a prerequisite to putting butts in seats.

“Over the last two decades, I’ve made 16 politics-adjacent films. It’s really hard to find an audience,” Pelosi said. “If you’re Dinesh D’Souza, you have a built-in audience. If you’re a full-fledged lefty like Michael Moore, you have a built-in audience. It’s very hard to find a mainstream audience.”

The irony is that the Fines’ movie works very hard to appeal on a human level rather than a political one. It’s not a freak show of horned protesters and QAnon devotees. The portion on Raskin is about him showing up to do his duty right after his son’s funeral — and worrying about the safety of his other child amid the attack. The portion on Democratic staffer Erica Loewe deals with her serving as caregiver to a parent with Alzheimer's. We learn about the gripping personal history of then-D.C. police chief Robert Contee.

“Every single one of our characters is serving the public in different ways,” Andrea Fine said. “And so we love that idea of, what if you’re just coming to do your job, and you’re saddled with that, and how they came through. And their jobs ultimately, unexpectedly in some ways, became hopeful for the end of the film, because every single one of our six characters are still going to work every day to serve the public in their own way. And I think that gives hope, because I think people have lost a little bit of a compass about thinking that anything good can happen in government anymore, or in law enforcement or journalism.”