It is my sincere and admittedly futile hope that by the end of this century Morris will replace Flynn as cinema's most accomplished Errol. Sure, Errol Flynn was film's first real action hero, but Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris, in my opinion, was the first documentary filmmaker to successfully merge style with credibility and establish reality-based film as a mainstream art form.

And through the lens of his camera (or, more precisely, his "Interrotron," a teleprompter-style interrogation device that allows Morris to capture his signature directly-into-the-camera interviews), Morris has plumbed the depths of human character and of conflict, as they relate to some of the most contentious issues of modernity -- the death penalty, the Big Bang, the Holocaust Revisionism, the Vietnam War, and, most recently, man's capacity for cruelty.

This final theme is the subject of Morris's latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, which opens in the theaters this week. In the two-hour film, Morris was able to negotiate unprecedented access to the players in the Abu Ghraib scandal, to the men and women involved in shooting thousands of photographs of Iraqi detainees who were undergoing a horrifying series of humiliating variations on torture.

Not only was Morris able to arrange interviews with the main scapegoats like Lynndie England, but he was able to persuade these people to open up and talk frankly, sometimes in alarmingly casual language, about what they saw, what they did, and how they found themselves capable of cruelties they would never have considered in the outside world. The film explores the photographs that ran above the fold in most major newspapers, revealing the figures just outside the reach of the frame. In that light, he has crafted a film not only about degradation, which is not only an autopsy of one of the greatest Bush administration blunders of the Iraq War, but a thorough evaluation of photography as a means of documentation.

But the film also represents the culmination of Morris's meandering path, which began with a friendship with Werner Herzog (who would one day famously eat his shoe because of Morris) and the same independent producers who made Michael Moore, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's first films possible. Over the course of a prolific career, he has polished his style to something immediately recognizable and easy to mimic (self-promo alert: I, too, copped some of his techniques in my own short doc, Residual Doubt). These methods and stylistic cues include not only the probing interviews produced by the Interrotron, but beautiful recreations and reenactments, archive films clips, investigative journalism and the ability to visually represent difficult abstract concepts.

And, through his back catalog of films, it becomes very clear how he developed this style over nearly three decades.

Gates of Heaven (1980)
Morris's first film, while slow at times, is a compelling story of the characters behind a financially troubled but well-intentioned pet cemetery in California. While not investigative or as influential as his future films, Gates lays the groundwork for Morris's ability to goad his subjects into revealing their true personalities and openly discuss their sometimes obsessive relationships with their pets.

The Thin Blue Line (1988)
In his 1997 memoir Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, indie producer John Pierson describes how this film about a convict on death row was never revealed as a documentary in its promotional posters. Instead, the studio attempted to market the film as a true-crime suspense thriller. That gambit was less successful than the film as a whole: through his investigation and interviews Morris proved that the convict was actually innocent.

A Brief History of Time (1992)
For laymen interested in physics and the origins of the universe, Morris's treatment of physicist Stephen Hawking's seminal book provides a visual guide to the concepts and combines them with the biographical history of Hawking, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. However, at this point in Morris' career, A Brief History plays more like an especially well-crafted PBS documentary (think Nova) than a feature film.

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)
In my opinion, this is Morris's most accomplished film: a meditation on obsession and manhood through the eyes of a topiary gardener, a robot engineer, a circus big cat tamer, and the world's foremost expert on the naked mole rat. Combining bizarre archival footage with gorgeous cinematography of their habitats, Morris presents the viewer with both surreal eye candy and satisfying food for thought.

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
At first watch, Mr. Death seems to fall short of Fast, Cheap, mostly because it focuses on a single character, an engineer responsible for building state execution machines who eventually becomes a central star in the Holocaust Revisionism movement. Yet, the film marks a sharp turn in Morris's interests. Instead of focusing on quirky, humorous characters, he turns his camera on to quirky, dark characters whose conflicts cut to the core of the human experience.

First Person (2001)
For a while, Morris produced a TV show of half-hour mini-docs about characters ranging from death row lovers to creepy museum curators. Each is a little gem and provided perhaps the best experiment ground for Morris's craft.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
When Fog of War came out, political junkies went nuts pointing to similarities between the falsified Gulf of Tonkin incident that launched the Vietnam War and the Bush administration's false WMD case for war in Iraq. Although the film earned Morris an Oscar, I've always felt it was weak, justified only by the former Secretary of State's willingness to participate, and perhaps symbolic of Morris's shark jumping. But, as Standard Operating Procedure proves, that wasn't the case; instead, Fog is what earned him the ultimate political cred and opened the doors to the national stage.

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