Long before reality TV cashed in on our desire to see the pain of others, there was the documentary. Reality shows do it the easy way: put people in a situation in which there is bound to be conflict (e.g. make people with big egos and pronounced prejudices live in the same house) and just let the cameras roll.

The documentary filmmaker, though, must hope that conflict arises in a pre-existing situation. He shows up with his camera and hopes something interesting happens, or edits the footage to at least make it seem like something interesting happened.

When director Terry Gilliam started pre-production on his project "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote," documentarians Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe were on hand to film the proceedings. The two were friends of Gilliam's and had made a documentary about the production of his film,"12 Monkeys." Almost as soon as their cameras began rolling, they found themselves in a documentarian's dream and Gilliam's nightmare.

"I think it's the classic conflict of the documentarian," Fulton said. "You go into something hoping for conflict because conflict is what makes a good story. And at the same time, you always get attached to your subjects. I think if you're making a good documentary, you sympathize with your subjects. In this case, Gilliam was a friend before we even started this project. So it's difficult, but at the same time you're telling yourself, ÎYeah, I've got the stuff to tell a great story.'"

"Lost in La Mancha" works the same way as any screwball comedy: You watch the protagonist (Gilliam) try to get his film off the ground while everything (in the film, literally everything) goes wrong. There is a morbid kind of comedy inherent in the film, almost the same kind of laughter that comes from watching Jim Carrey take a pratfall. However, the laughs always come with an edge of unease because this is real. And the look of agony on Gilliam's face doesn't have the plastic edge of the comic actor.

Essentially, Fulton and Pepe (and anyone watching "Lost in La Mancha") watch Gilliam lose his mind as his adaptation of Don Quixote gets washed away.

"Obviously, for the sake of the movie we were making, we play up (the Don Quixote) analogy quite a bit," said Fulton, "It's a rich metaphor. You've got a director who has a dream, and he's battered by reality like Don Quixote. That's a convenient metaphor for us to push."

But of course, documentary isn't a "true" depiction of reality. It may be "more true," but there is still someone behind the editing console.

"(Gilliam) is actually an enormously practical filmmaker," Fulton said. "I know a lot of film directors, and unlike most of them, he knows very specific things about every aspect of filmmaking. The man could have been a production designer. He could have been a cinematographer. He's really informed about filmmaking. I think it's actually unfair to say he's a dangerous filmmaker or a dreamer or any of that. That is a bit of a convenience of our storytelling."

Still, "La Mancha" saved Gilliam's film, in a sense. The final irony in the documentary is that it turned out to salvage a disaster by employing that same disaster as a primary subject. Fulton and Pepe turned the nightmare into a dream.

"La Mancha" will be screened for free at 7 tonight in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering building, Room 202. Directors Fulton and Pepe will be there to answer questions after the film.