What could be more quixotically modern than a movie about the making of a film version of Don Quijote de La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes's novel about stories and storytelling? One answer to this question is Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's Lost in La Mancha (2002), purportedly the first documentary in the history of cinema about the unmaking of a movie, Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. My article presents a comparative discourse analysis of Lost in La Mancha and Don Quijote de La

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... cha to investigate, in part, whether Fulton and Pepe's documentary is generically the first of its kind. More important, I will argue that the distortion of reality and fiction in the lives of the subjects of Lost has a direct impact on its generic categorization and the unmaking of film itself. Codirectors Fulton and Pepe's postmodern activity-the self-conscious, metatheatrical act of documentary filmmaking-is very much in keeping with the blurring of discourse and genre in Don Quijote, which itself is a self-reflexive, metaliterary text. 1 There are primarily three discursive areas in which Don Quijote and Lost in La Mancha (Lost) overlap: intimacy with both literary and popular forms of discourse (that is, high and low cultural practices); reliance on perspectivist narrative techniques; and the objectification of their respective heroes' forms of madness. Both Lost and its filmic object, the irreverently eccentric filmmaker Gilliam, are progeny of Cervantes's novelistic legacy and part of the quixotic tradition of storytelling. The "unmaking" of a story can be used as a reading strategy for furthering the analysis of literary discourse and genre. The negation of a film genre-movies about the making of movies-is a way of interrogating quixotic storytelling's relation to the many interruptions of its own narrative. 2 Donnell, Sidney. 2006 Spring. "Quixotic Storytelling, Lost in La Mancha, and the Unmaking of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote." Romance Quarterly 53(2): 92-112.