Documentaries

If you ever want to stump your movie geek pals with a barroom bet, just ask them who's the actor who appeared in only five feature films and all of 'em -- that's right, all five -- earned an Oscar nomination for best picture.

Friday's "20/20" finds Diane Sawyer in starkly different environs than the cheerily lighted Times Square studio she occupies each morning as co-host of "Good Morning America." In her latest ABC prime-time special, which examines poverty in Appalachia, Sawyer is scrubbed free of the glamour of morning television.

Ben Cartwright has been a passionate advocate for gay rights for 12 years. He is a regular at gay pride marches, has a pod-cast and writes for a gay newspaper in San Diego. The last thing he expected was to have to put a part of himself back into the closet. But if the military were to find out about his love for a sailor, a man with years of honorable service would face a dishonorable discharge.

Scott Weiss could barely suppress his panic. Perspiration glued his tuxedo shirt to his back. The forged all-access badge and tiny digital camera hung like weights around his neck as he approached the loading dock entrance. The theater at Hollywood and Highland crawled with local cops, high-priced security guards and federal agents: FBI, sheriff's deputies, LAPD bomb squad specialists and SWAT team snipers, all on high alert.

"Hillary: The Movie" had little effect on last year's election campaign, but it could have a profound impact on a century of election laws that restrict corporations from promoting or attacking candidates for public office. The Supreme Court took up a case Tuesday involving the 90-minute documentary that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was running for president. The dispute focused on whether the government can limit the use of corporate money in political campaigns.

Who could have foreseen what would happen between the Mormon filmmaker and the lesbian priest? Not Douglas Hunter, even after he took a leap of faith and trained his camera on the Rev. Susan Russell. And maybe not even Russell, who had undergone a remarkable transformation from onetime suburban soccer mom to priest and outspoken champion of gay rights.

When Lance Armstrong surged to third place overall Monday in the Tour de France, plenty of news crews recorded his heroics. But six of the video cameras trained on the 37-year-old cyclist's surprise breakaway weren't working for any newspaper, magazine, TV station or website -- they were sent by Sony Pictures Entertainment. Hollywood loves beat-the-odds stories, and Sony hopes that Armstrong's return to racing after a 3 1/2 -year absence could prove as enthralling as any make-believe film.

For his latest documentary, "Convention," filmmaker AJ Schnack wanted to examine the small-scale work that goes into mounting a large-scale event. He chose to focus on the behind-the-scenes stories of the countless people last summer who helped stage the Democratic National Convention in Denver, recruiting a dream team of colleagues from the world of nonfiction cinema to detail the massive effort required to put on the historic event.

Davis Guggenheim calls himself a "Behind the Music" junkie, watching every episode of the VH1 show chronicling famous rock stars' rise and fall and rise again amid triumph and self-destruction. He loves it, he says, but the Academy Award-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth" had other ideas for his own documentary on the electric guitar.

In his new documentary "South of the Border," Oliver Stone is shown warmly embracing Hugo Chávez, nibbling coca leaves with Evo Morales and gently teasing Cristina Elizabeth Fernández de Kirchner about how many pairs of shoes she owns. These amiable, off-the-cuff snapshots of the presidents of Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina, respectively, contrast with the way these left-leaning leaders often are depicted in U.S. political and mass media circles. That's especially true of Chávez, the former military officer turned democratically elected socialist leader, who has become the ideological heir apparent to Fidel Castro and the bête noire of Bush administration foreign policy officials.