Harmontown, a documentary thats not always so kind to its subject

Chances are even if you’ve never watched “Community,” the wildly inventive meta sitcom formerly on NBC, you know that its creator, Dan Harmon, was unceremoniously fired as show-runner and then rehired a season later. In that ensuing time, he took his podcast, Harmontown, on a tour around the country.

When he tapped filmmaker Neil Berkeley to document the experience, Harmon envisioned a mockumentary that was silly, lighthearted and mainly for diehard fans. Berkeley had something different in mind. “I made him a deal that it would be my tour but his film,” Harmon remembers. “I could look at cuts of it and offer advice, but I wouldn’t have final cut — and we’d split the profits. I kind of knew when I made the agreement that there would be moments when I would look less than gorgeous, but I also knew if that weren’t the case, it would be a truly bad movie.”

“Harmontown” is that rare, darkly compelling documentary that shows the unsavory traits of a person next to the loving and witty ones, forcing viewers to reconcile any contradictions. Harmon, who’s talked openly about having Asperger’s, wanted to make a great film more than he wanted to have control over it. “Once I realized we weren’t doing a comedy piece then I knew this thing has to be sufficiently dark and negative towards me, otherwise my name being in the credits makes it a really farcical project.”

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Scenes in the film capture raw arguments where Harmon, 41, verbally eviscerates his then-girlfriend, now fiancée Erin McGathy, who hosts the comedic relationship podcast, This Feels Terrible. He says the kinds of things to her that are pulled straight out of the darkest and ugliest recesses of his soul, and then instantly and genuinely regrets having said them.

It’s the kind of footage many people would fight legal battles to keep out of a film, but for Harmon, searing honesty is just his modus operandi. “I think it’s a fear thing. It’s a cowardly instinct for me. I’m following my fear by saying what’s on my mind all the time because what’s terrifying and unacceptable to me — something I’ve tried at times in my life — is thinking something and not sharing it. It always leads to worse trouble. As much trouble as you see me getting into for speaking my mind, it’s always emotionally worse when I’m trying to be strategic.”

His troubles are well documented in the film, but through that footage an intimacy forms between subject and audience. “I think with my mouth,” he explains of the experience of living with a film crew. “When I was being followed around and asked to share what was going on in my head all the time, it was kind of the most natural phase in my life because if I did that normally — which I’d like to do — I’d look crazy. It’s probably not a healthy sign, but I kind of took to people filming me brushing my teeth like a fish to water. It should always be like this,” he half jokes.

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The first cut of the film was a pretty standard document of Harmon going on tour and spending time with his friends. At the screening, Harmon remembers Dino Stamatopoulos (who played Starburns on "Community" and was one of the show's writers) stood up halfway through the film and said, "Eh, I thought it would be more like 'Crumb,' the uncompromising 1994 documentary about the renowned cartoonist Robert Crumb. "So Neil made it more like 'Crumb,'" Harmon remembers. "I didn't think it would work. ... There's nothing you can look at. I'm not Crumb. I haven't had any historical impact on anything, and I'm not that interesting as a personality. I was a little worried. Is this going to be a narcissistically indulgent and boring movie about myself?"

Harmon is known to be impossibly stubborn about ideas in the writer’s room and has an unwavering sense of vision, but he seems to be lacking of the kind of ego that clouds one’s sense of self. In a way, he still sees himself as the outsider instead someone who’s been credited with redefining the American sitcom.

“I thought I was going to be a novelist as a kid, but I was really bad at describing things,” he says during an interview in mid-October at New York Comic Con. He wrote comics in the mid-’90s, dabbled in sketch comedy work and eventually found screenwriting. “No description or discipline. All you have to do is understand diehard structure and you can do this. I moved to L.A. thinking I was going to write movies,” he recalls.

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He and writing partner Rob Schrab instead came up “Heat Vision and Jack,” a gleefully bizarre TV pilot directed by Ben Stiller and starring Jack Black and Owen Wilson that was not picked up.

Less than a decade later Harmon helped create Sarah Silverman’s eponymous Comedy Central show with Schrab. (Harmon and Schrab’s falling out is well documented in “Harmontown.”) And just a few years later he introduced the world to the deeply flawed but lovable students of Greendale Community College.

“We think of movies as being more real than TV, but the truth is ancient Greek mythology is more of a television show than it is a movie,” Harmon posits. “It’s an interconnected soap opera. There are several episodes — several different franchises with your favorite celebrities. Ulysses is doing this and then he does that, and it’s all part of a larger franchise. It’s primarily episodic. When you’re looking at a Grecian urn with the latest exploits of some Greek hero on it, you’re kind of looking at a lunchbox for a TV show, not a movie.”

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Expectations are high for the upcoming season of “Community,” which was canceled on NBC before being picked up by Yahoo TV. Harmon couldn’t be more thrilled to get away from the studio execs and is excited by the freedom of the new medium but wants to assure his fans that it’s not going to be a destabilizing change for the show. “I’m not going to have the characters all start smoking and showing their boobs. People fall in love with a tone and rhythm. It won’t feel like the same sonnet if the syllables change.”

“Harmontown” screens Wednesday, Nov. 5 at the Avalon Theatre and Thursday, Nov. 13 at the Arlington Cinema & Draft House.

Kompanek is a freelance writer.

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