The prolific company founded by producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory became synonymous with elegant literary adaptations in the 1980s and ‘90s.

There’s often been unfair snobbery about the films of Merchant Ivory, the production banner founded in 1961 by producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, which gives Stephen Soucy’s entertaining documentary study its title. The British costume drama was widely considered a wheezing genre — fusty, middlebrow and too calcified in its literary sources to acquire much cinematic vitality — when A Room with a View came along in 1986 and became a global art-house crossover hit. At their best, notably in Howards End and Remains of the Day, Merchant Ivory’s films stand the test of time as influential works that removed the starch from the stodgy period piece.

As observers point out here, the trademarks of the production company — which folded in 2007, two years after Merchant’s death — were incisive casting, elegant compositions, exquisite scores, lush locations with an eye for the physical beauty in both nature and architecture, complex characters and a worldly sensibility that informed their smart scripts. Respect for the writer, whether the original novelist or the screenwriter, was a constant.

Where Soucy’s doc transcends hagiography to take in the more renegade side of the Merchant Ivory operation is in the many forthright, funny anecdotes about how those films came together. Sam Waterston describes the principals as “pirates… charting their own course.” Others are blunter in their assessments, painting a picture of Merchant as a charming con man, a suggestion Ivory laughs off but doesn’t dispute.

Merchant was known for plowing ahead with production without a complete budget in place, cajoling money out of investors along the way and deferring payments for as long as possible, a practice that often left cast and crew disgruntled. Fending off creditors was a full-time job on the Merchant Ivory phone lines. Regular collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala jokes affectionately in an archival interview that she always expected to be visiting Ismail in prison one day.

On the last of his four collaborations with the company, Anthony Hopkins (represented in pre-existing interviews) sued for unpaid wages. Costumer Jenny Beavan, who won her first Academy Award for A Room with a View, concedes that the intervening years tend to smooth away the rough edges of experiences in which time and money were invariably “tricky.” She’s one of several lively interviewees to do an affectionate impersonation of Ismail: “Jenny, Jenny, I got you your Oscar. Why do I now need to pay you?”

Much is made also of Merchant’s canny ability to soothe frayed tempers. Greta Scacchi recalls the caterers on the Indian location shoot of Heat and Dust threatening not to come to the set before bills were settled. She then describes a cast-and-crew excursion organized by Merchant to a magnificent palace seldom open to the public, where the producer had organized a sumptuous picnic spread.

The prevailing view of Merchant appears to be that while his methods were unorthodox, he was a rascal whose appeasement maneuvers were impossible to resist. “He could charm the birds out of the trees,” notes Hopkins.

The doc breaks down the yin-yang symbiosis of the two company founders. Ivory on film sets is known to be calm and composed, with a meticulous attention to detail and a tendency to trust his actors, keeping directorial guidance to a minimum. (Emma Thompson says she always found the lack of cosseting on his shoots refreshing, laughing as she remembers him leaning into a carriage after a scene to say, “That was boring.”) Merchant, by contrast, was a dynamic force in constant motion, frequently a screamer, but always adept at swiftly finding solutions for every problem that arose.