Morgan Spurlock, long known for socially conscious documentaries like Super Size Me, his look at the fast food industry, or war on terror exploration Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, is taking on a more personal passion in his latest movie. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope follows aspiring comic book artists taking their portfolios to publishers, costume-builders preparing for the masquerade, comic book vendors facing down an age of digital publishing and declining paper sales, and even a couple heading into an engagement at Kevin Smith’s Hall H panel. And Spurlock talked to geek icons ranging from Stan Lee to Joss Whedon about what it means to come to one of the largest geek gatherings on the planet—or as Whedon put “My tribe! I have found my tribe!”

I spoke to Spurlock about the cultural capital of geekdom, the rise of digital comics publishing, and whether the geek community needs to think harder about sexism and racism. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How long have you been going to Comic Con? How has it changed since you’ve been there?

The very first one I ever went to was in 2009…The comic book conventions when I was a kid, it would be some crusty old guys selling comics, and there would be some collectibles there, and a guy from Star Wars signing autographs in a corner…It’s 180 degress and ten miles away. There’s beocme mainstream success in all of these genres. Video games are now as big as movies. You have comic books that have become number one franchises…It’s become cool to like these things…before, you were the weirdos, the nerd, the freak. Now the weirdos and the freaks are running the franchises. What’s happened is there’s a tremendous cool factor that’s settled in around liking this stuff. It’s cool to wear that out loud.

One thing I noticed about the documentary, which I quite enjoyed, was while you’ve got some women in the mix, there wasn’t a lot of discussion of institutional sexism at Comic Con. You’ve got a guy wrangling slave Leias, but no look at how booth babes are treated or the fact that Comic Con doesn’t have a sexual harassment policy.

There’s tons of things that people would love for this film to talk about. And I’ve made a film that’s what I feel is about the heart and soul of Comic-Con. For me, I made a film that was about the fans. We made a film that has a very strong female character talking about what her passion is, breaking in to this design field. I just wanted to tell a story that got to the heart of fandom.

But given that fans have become so powerful and there’s so much cultural capital you get for being a geek, is it time to stop acting like we’re marginalized and start looking at ourselves as a community internally, particularly at how women and people of color are treated within it?

Sure. I mean, I think that anyone who goes to Comic-Con today will see that there’s a tremendous amount of women at Comic-Con today, as fans, as well as creator. This idea of it being a kind of geeky boy’s club isn’t relevant anymore. I feel like these are things that are kind of transitioning away automatically. I don’t think you need to kind of turn them into a story of their own. For me, as someone who goes there as a fan, I feel like it’s still a place for people with talent to find opportunities. The idea of Comic-Con as geek job fair, we met tons of young comic book artists who were going there to try to pitch their work…male or female, black white or otherwise.
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The Special Program that Rescues Inner City Children From Their Plight movie is an ancient staple, whether it’s the summer pre-calculus class in Stand and Deliver, the flash and flair of Mad Hot Ballroom and the Step Up franchise, or the off-screen phenomenon of the P.S. 22 Chorus. And while the wonderful documentary Brooklyn Castle, which I saw at SXSW, about the nationally competitive middle school chess program at Brooklyn’s I.S. 318 follows the same basic formula, it’s a much more sophisticated take on the genre:

The movie follows the team at I.S. 318 during a year while they try to reclaim their national junior high chess championship. But adding another banner to their already-impressive display (the team had won 26 national championships going into that season) is only part of the drama. The team is threatened by massive recession-induced budget cuts and some members are taking the exam that will determine which competitive high school they’re able to attend next year. In addition to those larger political arcs, there are smaller ones: Rochelle, a ninth grader, is working to become the first black female chess master, as well as win the scholarship that would let her go to college; Justus, a gifted sixth grade player who transferred to I.S. 318 to take part in the program, withers under the pressure; Pobo, an outrageously personable eighth grader, is running for school president; and Patrick, struggling ADHD, simply wants to win a tournament match.

These are staple tropes of Afterschool Activities movies, but Brooklyn Castle‘s bright insight is to treat its students not as passive actors who are worked on by the system until a teacher comes along to save them, but as political actors in their own rights. Pobo bases his campaign for president on a promise to push back against budget cuts—and he’s not living out a 12-year-old’s fantasy, he actually organizes letter-writing campaigns and walkathons. Alexis, one of the best eighth-grade players, struggles with how to prioritize his school preference list, suggesting that he should include the training program for the FDNY on his list so he’ll have a path to steady work if the economy continues to tank and his other options don’t work out well. Patrick’s progress helps turn his mother into an advocate as well. Brooklyn Castle doesn’t suggest that everything will be fine because I.S. 318 has a chess club. It makes the much more realistic and important argument that something like the chess club can help prepare students to be their own advocates in a world that shows no interest in saving them.

There’s no question that Ethel, the documentary about Robert F. Kennedy’s wife that premiered here at Sundance, is a less-than-nuanced view of RFK’s opportunism and some of the less admirable moments in his career, ranging from his work for Sen. Joe McCarthy (who I didn’t know had dated two Kennedy girls) to his manipulativeness on civil rights. And given that Rory Kennedy is making this movie about the mother who bore her six months after her father was assassinated, the movie may be gentler than one produced by an outsider would be, though such a film would certainly have gotten less access to everything from home videos of the Kennedys to Ethel’s reflections about her life as a political wife. But Ethel is an intriguing look on a less-discussed subject: what did it mean to be married into the Kennedy family? And what lessons did one generation of Kennedys teach the next that made the family a liberal political dynasty?

Mostly, it seems, Robert and Ethel did it by treating their children as if they were old enough to understand and participate in both the issues of the day and Robert’s work. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend reflects that when her father was chief counsel for the Senate Labor Rackets Committee, “rather than take me to the playground where we could go on the see-saw, [Ethel] took me to the Senate Rackets Committee,” where she learned to refuse to give comment lest she perjure herself. Kerry recalls on a visit to the FBI that Ethel dropped a note in the agency’s suggestion box recommending that J. Edgar Hoover be replaced at the height of his power. During the height of the fight to integrate southern colleges, Kerry and the other children spent time in RFK’s office, occasionally chatting on the phone to Justice Department officials in the field, and Kennedy told them he hoped the issue would be resolved by the time they made it to college. When his brother was assassinated, Robert wrote to Kathleen that she must take responsibility for her cousins, closing his letter with the words “Be kind to others and work for your country.” Kathleen remembers him shaking on his return from his anti-poverty fact-finding trips, telling his children that he’d met families who lived in homes the size of their dining room. The children campaigned with him, including on the night of the California primary — Kerry found out her father was dead when she turned on the cartoons in the morning, and got the news instead.

All of this may sound twee or precious, but it’s clear that Robert and Ethel were sincere in their belief that their children could understand the events unfolding around them and deserved to be shown the respect of being expected to understand and engage. After Robert’s death, Ethel sent her children to live and work in settings that let them understand more deeply the issues that informed their parents passions, whether with Cesar Chavez, on Native American reservations, or on Western ranches. “That really comes from our mother,” Kerry insists of the family’s commitment to politics after RFK’s murder. “Those are her values.” Ethel demurs, insisting “I just don’t feel I can take the credit. I just don’t feel it.” But her influence is clear.

On a more light-hearted note, it’s fun to see the Kennedys beyond the standard football-and-the-Cape playfulness, and to understand how their sense of whimsy informed the family’s politics and campaigning style. There’s no question that Ethel was genetically destined to be a cut-up. “My brothers would take the train to Boston, but they never rode on the inside of the train,” Ethel reflects of her Skakel mischievousness. In school, she bet on horses and stole and burned the demerit book so she could go to the Harvard-Yale football game. The family had a seal at the farm on Hickory Hill, established a tradition (stopped by President Kennedy) of pushing cabinet secretaries into the pool, and Ethel got busted for speeding — and horse theft, when she discovered starving and mistreated animals on a neighbor’s farm and simply took them home, leading her to a court trial where she had to defend herself against a hanging offense. That same sense of humor made her a great campaigner, nailing it on the Jack Paar show when the host declared that “This lovely little girl, mother of seven children, has given birth to her own precinct.” There is a real strength in fun, and the ability to be self-deprecating that I think our politics loses sight of sometimes.

Almost every documentary I’ve seen at Sundance so far has ended with an explicit call to action, whether it’s a website to visit for more information or a petition to sign. Robert Redford kicked off the festival by talking about the intensely difficult times we’re in, and that urgency is embedded in both narratives and the drive to give audiences momentum that will carry them out of the theaters and into the streets. Precisely how to do that was the subject of a panel I attended on Sunday with some of the festival’s most pointedly political filmmakers and subjects. ProPublica managing editor Stephen Engelberg asked them how to do with movies what he does “at ProPublica [where] what we try to think about every day is how to do journalism that brings change,” saying, “it’s great to preach to the converted”–but that it’s not enough.

Raj Patel, the writer and food activist who is interviewed in food insecurity documentary Finding North, gave what I thought was one of the best answers. “In the U.S.,” he pointed out, “It has always been the movements’ dialogue on the ground with movies and books that make change happen. It’s hard to imagine a single movie emerging like a ray of light from the heavens and illuminating people’s consciousness” in the absence of an existing way to mobilize and engage. There are a lot of good reasons for documentaries to try to hook up with existing movements rather than trying to create them from scratch. Movements have ready-made characters and narratives, as well as a sense of authenticity. And rooting a movie in them means audiences can walk out of the theater with some place specific to go. Fahrenheit 9/11 may have made serious bank for a documentary, but it didn’t exactly come with an action plan.

And Dr. Steven Nissen, the cardiology chair at the Cleveland Clinic who is featured in the health care documentary Escape Fire, said he thought movies could do the activating work of making audiences angry.

“We have to shock the public to get change,” he said. In the fight for health care reform, “we allowed the opposition to organize in ways e didn’t organize. We didn’t create a movement…I hope [the movie] makes people angry…I have patients who have strokes because they can’t afford decent blood pressure medications. That ought to make decent people angry.”

And Kelly McMasters, author of the nuclear plant memoir Welcome to Shirley, reminded the audience that their experiences may be different that those of the people most affected by the issues portrayed in the movie. “Activism is a luxury,” she said. “When you’re thinking about where your next meal is coming from, you’re not listening to Democracy Now…it’s a luxury until it’s not…because it has damaged you or your child.”

When Mitt Romney Came to Town, the short documentary about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital being touted by the Newt Gingrich-backing and Sheldon Adelson-funded Winning Our Future Super PAC, has raised questions about everything from the clout of those organizations to the accuracy of the charges of job-cutting against Romney, the Republican frontrunner. But it’s also a good example of the tension between good political ad-making and good documentary-making. And as Super PACs and well-funded candidates increasingly make and release long specials, whether for the web or television, as President Obama and Vice President Biden’s campaign did in 2008, it’s worth examining this odd marriage, to see what works as argument and what works as art.

It’s disappointing how heavily When Mitt Romney Came to Town relies on dog-whistles. The documentary fans flames of elitism, noting of Romney that “he had a Harvard pedigree and he was on a tear,” and closing out with footage of him speaking French as if it’s an indication of something sinister. There are stock images of bearded men gleefully smoking cigars that don’t land nearly as hard as Romney and his Bain colleagues posing jokily with bills. When it comes to its section on the fate of Kay-Bee toys, there are even scenes of sad-eyed children staring mournfully at televisions.

That lack of specificity is a larger problem with the movie. One of the earliest segments is the most interesting, in part because the workers talk in some detail about the changes Bain made to their work processes. “One of the first things that they did when they started, when we became part of the corporation, was to start cheapening the product,” one of the interviewees complained. “You’d have to hurry faster through your work,” Tommy Jones says, explaining that the rushed production times meant that the company sometimes shipped out equipment without parts. Those kinds of details make the case against corporate raiding even more damning. It would be one thing if companies were just finding inefficiencies and improving production with layoffs and reorganizations. But it’s worth making clear that layoffs are part of a larger philosophy of stripping down companies to their constituent parts and extracting the value from them. And it might have helped to identify the people interviewed for the movie more clearly by their job function, providing a sense that they had more expertise than the people who took their companies out from under them.

Slogans are powerful, of course, and the documentary relies heavily on them. But sometimes reaching for rhetorical force means the movie gives up a chance to explain how systems work, as when the movie declares that a tech start-up was “helped by a favorable rating from Bain’s Wall Street friends,” but doesn’t bother exploring those connections and processes. When a worker named Shannon explains that “I was pregnant at the time, and at the meeting they told us we were all fired, that we had to reapply for our jobs,” it’s incidentally powerful, but it might have been more so if the movie could demonstrate a pattern of terminations of people whose insurance was about to get expensive.

When Mitt Romney Came to Town may founder on its factual errors before it truly takes off. There’s no question that there’s a story to be told about Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital, and that story may well damn his presidential ambitions. The only thing at issue is how to tell it in every format from 30 seconds to two hours. Fact-checking and specificity to back up the sound bites seem like they’d be good places to start.

The requirement that after this year’s ceremonies, to qualify to be nominated for an Academy Award, documentaries must both screen in Los Angeles or New York and be reviewed by a theatrical reviewer by the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times are obviously wildly restricted. But this is downright puzzling:

According to Academy COO Ric Robertson, the new requirement is a further step in eliminating docs that have no real intention of gaining distribution or having a legitimate theatrical run. A common practice in recent years has been for faux theatrical docs (and even some animated feature and VOD entries) to attempt to skirt the rules by quietly ”four walling” a qualifying run on an obscure screen — often on the outskirts of the city. In some cases, it is the last movie screen these movies play on their way to TV. The new rule will confirm the credibility of a legitimate contender by requiring a movie (not TV) review, tied to the opening of the film, in one of those two major newspapers. Trade reviews out of a film festival would not meet the requirement.

Perhaps someone can enlighten me, but it seems pretty strange that someone would go to the work of making a documentary without hoping that it’ll find distribution and a home in theaters however brief the run and however long the shot. Is there some sort of epidemic of people making Bowfinger-like documentary productions, or fooling people into participating only to get their hopes up and crush them? That seems…strange. And the end result will be super-vindictive to movies that are struggling to find distribution that might well be worthy. The movie business is not precisely what I’d call a meritocracy. And increasing the link between awards and commercialism is a less-than-inspiring prospect.