[Peter Knegt] Aaron Rose's "Beautiful Losers" and Steven Sebring's "Patti Smith: Dream of Life" both scored with sole screen debuts, as two artist-centered documentaries found themselves high on the specialty box office chart. "Losers," produced by Sidetrack Films and uniquely self-distributed, details a group of do-it-yourself artists who rose to art world fame in the 1990s, while "Smith," released by Palm Pictures, is a portrait of poet, painter, musician and singer Patti Smith.

"Losers" grossed $10,607 at New York's IFC Center, while "Smith" grossed $9,993 at NYC's Film Forum. Their grosses are quite high for musician or artist focused docs. This weekend saw a third example, Camille Guichard's "Louis Bourgeois" (about the artist of the same name) gross a much more modest $3,846 on one screen (which remains reasonable considering both "Losers" and "Smith" are much higher profile releases). Other examples include last December's "A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory" which grossed $2,523 on one screens its opening weekend, while this past April, "Glass: A Portrait Of Philip In 12 Parts" took $5,546 on the same.

While both "Losers" and "Smith"'s financial tales will become much more telling as they expand in the coming weeks, two recent docs expanded this weekend to mixed results. James Marsh's "Man on Wire" rose to 59 locations after two weeks of success on a few screens. "Wire" grossed a decent $274,040 for Magnolia Pictures, averaging $4,645 and bringing its total to $435,943. Its expansion continues in the coming weeks, and it remains positioned to become one of the year's highest grossing documentaries if it can maintain a steady average.

Nanette Burstein's "American Teen," on the other hand, is already in its second weekend of expansion, nearly doubling its locations from 39 to 76. "Teen" grossed $138,203, actually dropping 17% despite the additional screens. With its total now standing at $466,362, "Teen" could still become an exceedingly rare example of a $1 million grossing doc, but likely by a slim margin, which must be a huge disappointment to the folks at Paramount Vantage, who mercilessly marketed the film after purchasing it for $2.5 million at this year's Sundance.

On a related note, Alex Gibney's "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" joined that $1 million club this weekend, bringing the 2008 total to 5 (The others are "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," "Shine a Light," "Young@Heart" and "Up The Yangtze" - whose total gross is noted as $647,036 on most box office charts, but is actually $1,228,486 if one counts its Canadian grosses, which they don't because it has a different distributor in each country, but since all the other films include both countries, and it is a NORTH AMERICAN box office, I'd like to get out of that habit at indieWIRE).

That's already two more than 2007.