Re: Editing biographical documentary - creative advice needed

You can tell it strictly linearly, or you could hop around. Some novels alternate chapters between characters and/or time periods, so one chapter/setting puts the next one in context. You could perhaps cut it like that too; putting parallel stories together even though they are not chronological, organizing them by themes rather than dates. This also gets you into talking about the "star" right away.
This is one possible example...

Subject: new neighborhood. Bits about when main character moved to zxy street after college, what the neighborhood was like, it's history. Cut to segment on grandparents, recently immigrated, trying to find a home and to decide whether to settle in a matching ethnic neighborhood, where it would be easy and comfortable, but somewhat self-limiting, or to reject the old world and try to assimilate into a completely alien communty, with alien values, where they were only Italians, Poles, Chinese, etc. in the area. Did they subsume their heritage, deny it, or celebrate it, even if it sometimes made life harder? Stories about identity, personal and cultural, are very gripping.

The idea is to draw parallels and compare/contrast how the ancestors dealt with each theme and how that guides or contrasts with how the main subject of the doc deals with that issue... if they learned anything from it. Views on work, religion, family, politics, art, love... you have many choices here. When you do this, I think it can also draw the audience in, because they want to put themselves in the same situations and ask themselves what they would do... if they could do the same or better.

You could tell all that with a pure linear style, to be sure, but that assumes the audience will have the patience to sit thru a lot of set-up to get to a conclusion that may be too obvious. Like an anecdotal joke that takes too long to tell, because each stage has to first be carefully explained to someone who doesn't already understand all the terms, versus a short joke that you keep calling-back to with other short jokes, to build up a funnier situation.

No question that this is a harder way to go than a straight linear narrative. Harder to organize, anyway. But depending on the story you want to tell, it may work better. The key probably is finding a narrative device, like real-world props, or a central referencing location, as a "home base" from which the sub-stories radiate out, but always return to that base before going out in another direction.

And you need to have the overall shape of this program in your head before you go too far, or you may get so caught up in one of the better "spokes" you forget to relate it back to the "hub" and other spokes. The power of this approach is in the overall picture, how those elements all give each other context.

I suppose you could tell the story completely backwards as well, that would be somewhat different, but I think you'd need a compelling reason to do that. Something like the "Rest of the Story" anecdotes Paul Harvey does on the radio, where the twist is in how everything changes perspective when you reveal the one key name or fact or date you were holding back. This is really hard to do becuase you are telling a joke punchline-first, like Johnny Carson used to do with his "Karnak" mentalist routine.