Double Play is not a documentary by Richard Linklater and/or James Benning. It’s about them, directed by Gabe Klinger for the French series Cinema de notre temps (Cinema of Our Times). It features old friends Linklater (Dazed and Confused) and Benning (One Way Boogie Woogie) as they “talk about sports, art and friendship over the course of a leisurely weekend in Austin, Texas.” There’s also a lot of archival material of the duo, who met in the mid 1980s at the Austin Film Society and eventually went very different ways with their filmmaking careers.
Today, VOD distributor FilmBuff announced it had picked up the 70-minute doc ahead of its Venice Film Festival world premiere (the first screening is on Tuesday) for digital platforms. They don’t have a release date yet, but Indiewire’s report says sometime next year. The full title is Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater and it’s a project that had a successful Kickstarter campaign for post-production funding earlier this summer. Here is the trailer video from that site, where you can also find outtake clips: