The Next Big Thing - Los Angeles
2003 · 54m · Canada
Directed by Murray Battle
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Three Toronto comedians reach Los Angeles, the final stage of their bid for a breakthrough, where only one of them finds success.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the doc about struggling comedians to be either inspirational or devastatingly sad—Battle does neither, which is infuriating and exactly why it works; he lets the camera sit with failure and success as equally banal outcomes, refusing the narrative comfort we came for.
A formally austere observe-and-wait documentary that trusts the architecture of real time and three parallel arcs to do the heavy lifting; Battle's restraint and compositional clarity situate this squarely in the verité tradition while never once feeling beholden to it.
The genius move is holding the three comedians at the same visual and temporal distance—no privileged POV, no intercutting for drama—so the one success lands not as triumph but as statistical inevitability, a single editing choice that reframes the entire premise.