The network's attempt to qualify the film for Oscar consideration — by burying it for a week in the farthest reaches of L.A. and Manhattan — denied it the "true release" Academy voters are fond of; a later theatrical run grossed less than $60,000 and hastened its fade from Oscar consideration. Religulous pulled the same stunt prior to premiering at Toronto in September; it fared better with Lionsgate behind it, earning $12.5 million since its release Oct. 1.

But that's about all the gold it'll get. On the bright side, Werner Herzog is a step closer to his first Oscar nomination; the Bavarian maverick was shortlisted for his quirky Antarctic adventure Encounters at the End of the World. Any fan of his jilted 2005 classic Grizzly Man will agree justice delayed remains justice denied, but every bit helps. He'll face old pal and '04 winner Errol Morris, whose Iraq doc Standard Operating Procedure was shortlisted as well and whose vying against Herzog for an Oscar is itself the surreal, cerebral stuff of a feature-length doc in the making. Or at least we hope so; those guys film everything.

• Oscar's feature doc list down to 15 [THR]

Evidently feeling the need to clarify (if not defend) himself, Morris responded today to Hollywood Elsewhere:

"As documentaries have become more and more mainstream entertainment, people are aware that there is money involved. The more successful documentaries become, the harder and harder it is to get people to do them for nothing.

"People [are] aware of my success and respond accordingly. I never paid people for the interviews in The Thin Blue Line, but Stephen Hawking was paid a lot of money for the rights to his book and his participation in A Brief History of Time. ... It is difficult to ask people for such an investment of time without taking care of them in some way — and that may involve paying them.

"I paid the 'bad apples' because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise. Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know their stories. I can live with it."

In other words: "Without these extensive interviews, I wouldn't have had a movie." We don't generally look to Errol Morris for these glib oversimplifications, but there you have it. The whole thing gets us wondering who else has commonly been paying their subjects over the years; we can envision Morris's old friend Werner Herzog wandering into the jungle with a camera and a checkbook as he retraced Dieter Dengler's steps in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, or... Wait, what? That version was called Rescue Dawn? Never mind! As you were, Errol. We just know that Ben Stein would damn well never pay off a source — and God knows he can afford it.

• As Long As it's Truthful [Hollywood Elsewhere]

"I'm not necessarily the person with the answers, but here's my theory," Morris said. "It's actually one of the reasons I made the movie. And I haven't actually seen all of these movies, so I'm not really in a position to comment on them as a block. But I remember when the photographs came out, immediately there was a political spin put on them. The left would say, 'It was because of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush. They made all of this happen. The right would say, 'It was seven bad apples.' Everybody said these are really bad guys — beyond the pale. 'They're rotten.' I didn't want to make something that was just that political kneejerk response again. The country's so politicized and polarized. People don't even want to talk about it."

Well, that's kind of what we're worried about. People don't seem to want to watch it, either. (Alex Gibney's extraordinary Afghanistan torture doc Taxi to the Dark Side, for example, just won an Oscar — and it still tanked.)

"I don't think that's what this movie is about," Morris continued. "It's not a movie about torture or about whether the Iraq War shouldn't have been fought. I have strong opinions about that myself. But I made a movie about people like yourself or myself trapped in the middle of this — people we never would have seen or would have forgotten about, who we just would have assumed are really monsters. And I've brought them back across the line back into humanity. And I think it's an interesting story — and a human story."

That it is, pairing revelatory perspectives from the majority of the Abu Ghraib "bad apples" with typically impressionistic, Errolesque reenactments that make for the most intoxicating (if grueling) depictions of torture we've ever seen. Only Cpl. Charles Graner, the operation's still-imprisoned ringmaster, is not interviewed; Morris acknowledges the loose end. "I don't know how much energy I have," he replied when asked if he'd return to the subject. "It's so draining doing this. But I keep calling people, I keep talking to people. I keep investigating. I was doing it on Sunday." Only time — and box office, we presume — will tell what turns up.

Standard Operating Procedure opens May 2 in Los Angeles.

[Photo Credit: SOEREN STACHE/AFP/Getty Images]