Still in Motion

Thom Powers Hosts New Docs-in-Progress Series

Last night, I attended the inaugural screening of Rough Cuts: Documentaries in Progress hosted by Thom Powers at the beautiful Burns Film Center in Pleasantville.  Yes, there really is such a place.  And it is very pleasant, thanks for asking.  Programming Director, Brian Ackerman and team, put on fantastic programs, showcasing both foreign and domestic film classics, as well as brand-new fare hot off the slopes of Sundance and other major festivals.  Go here to see what they have on tap this summer. 

This was the first in a series of works showing for the first time to a paying audience--more to follow in the fall.  Audiences get to participate in a Q&A/discussion with the filmmaker(s) after the screening, moderated by Mr. Powers, and weigh in on thoughts they have about the film, their likes and dislikes, etc.  An unusually sophisticated film-going population shows up for things like this, so it's always lively and thought-provoking.  This evening was the first time one of the filmmakers had seen this assembly, which I wouldn’t really classify as a “rough cut.” It was a very polished, accomplished, quite comprehensive film that will probably have its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival this September.  (But I didn’t hear that from Thom.)

In his introduction, Powers spoke of his role as programmer of Documentaries and Mavericks at the Toronto fest.  He says that the “work” of watching movies all day (admittedly a dream job, if there ever was one for a film lover), comes when he has to deny a film a slot in the fest—“It’s like breaking up with a girlfriend three or four times a day.” In the course of viewing the thousands of submissions that came to him this past year, he watched Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor’s Barney Rosset vs. Our Way of Life. He says he’s always a bit dubious before viewing a film made by first-timers about an obscure figure or subject.  He says that, “More times than not, it involves more love than craft.”  But upon viewing Ortenberg and O’Connor’s film, he said that he felt like he was “in the hands of people who know what they’re doing.”

The filmmakers, who have both made careers in the publishing world, weave together the biography of Barney Rosset, maverick publisher of Evergreen Review and Grove Press (now Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press), who fought key First Amendment battles in the 1950s and 1960s to publish works of literature (at the time, deemed works of “obscenity”), such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and to distribute the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), among other ground-breaking works.  This was a time, remember, when one could be sent to prison for buying and/or having in one’s possession a copy of one of these subversive books.

Over the years, Rosset exhausted a family fortune pursuing his passions, “publishing dirty books,” and never backing down from controversy, or a court battle. Due to this, he eventually lost control of his own company. This documentary uncovers an invigorating chapter of American cultural history, making lively use of Rosset's personal film collection.  Ortenberg and O'Connor's film is an extremely rich tapestry of still and motion archival materials and wonderful interviews with great storytellers like filmmaker John Waters and writer Gore Vidal, and an extensive roster of the writers, poets and artists of the 50s, and the people who worked beside Rosset in breaking the cultural, political and sexual barriers of that repressive decade. (I’ll know when the planet is about to crack in two because Vidal will actually have something nice to say about his native country.)

This will be a must-see for anyone who cares about literature, books, movies, and freedom of expression.  And, oh yeah, sexual “debauchery.”  As we know, one man’s debauchery is another man’s. .  . . Never mind.

In a lovely moment of kismet, I just stumbled upon an ad for “a mind-blowing, must-see exhibition” at the Whitney called THE SUMMER OF LOVE: Art of the Psychedelic Era through September 16, organized by the Tate Liverpool.  Feed your head. 

Here are some excerpts from the lively Q&A with Thom Powers and co-director, Dan O’Connor following the 100-minute film:

Thom Powers (TP):  So, Dan, this is your first film with co-director Neil Ortenburg.

Dan O’Connor (DO):  First and last.  (laughs)

TP:  You said that you don’t even know if you would call yourself a filmmaker.

DO:  No, I’m sure I can’t call myself a filmmaker.  I just want to make that clear.  Really, though, this film was made by four people: myself, Neil Ortenburg and husband and wife editing team, Alexander Meillier and Tanya Ager Meillier.  I was telling Thom on the way over here, that the film would not be in the shape it is if it weren't for those two.

TP:  You and Neil come from publishing backgrounds.  In the credits, it says “in memoriam” of several people and companies, one of which is a publisher for which you used to work.

DO:  Thunder’s Mouth Press, recently acquired by Perseus Books who have announced that they will disband the imprint after publishing the most recent slate of books out this fall.  And Don Allen, who worked very closely with Barney at Grove died in 2004 and we, unfortunately, didn’t get to interview him—he was extremely close with Barney and was an incredibly influential figure in American letters.  And Roy Kuhlman, the pioneering graphic artist and book cover designer also passed away before we got a chance to meet with him for an interview.

TP:  I guess it’s somewhat of a haunting reminder of how important it is to get these things while you have the chance.

DO:  Absolutely.  Even before making this, and certainly during, we would always wish that someone had done this before us.  For all kinds of reasons, I wish somebody else had done it!  But certainly I wish that somebody had approached the Grove oeuvre before—it’s frankly kind of surprising that someone did not.  Many of the significant Grove writers were still alive up until a few years ago and now they’re gone.

TP:  That’s perhaps the documentary filmmaker’s obsession—thinking about all the things that you missed.  But still, you managed to capture quite a bit.  Every time I watch it, I’m taken by the incredible amount and quality of footage you dug up.  Can you talk about that part of it, that research phase and the archival work that you did to piece this together?

DO:  As part of my publishing career, I had several projects that were archival in nature.  We did a book of Jack Kerouac’s paintings, and through the archives in the New York Public Library, we looked through boxes of Kerouac’s notebooks that no one had looked at before because they had been packed away.  My life’s been spent going through people’s personal archives, books and papers and I just find it fascinating.  For me, that was one of the best parts of this.  These things were literally packed away and had never been looked at, never even developed—complete reels of raw footage and other materials that hadn’t been viewed since they were filmed in the thirties and forties.  A lot of that stuff just gets thrown away.  The process of getting rid of that is actually accelerating today in the film world, and every other medium, as digitization comes to the fore.  Archives and libraries are going to be losing vast amounts of information—there just aren’t the resources to salvage all of it.

Read more in a future post about this film and the talented team that created it.  And read up on your Barney Rosset—he’s an incredibly important figure in mid-century modern American history and a national treasure.  He’s part of the reason you and I can read and see what we want and can even express (and publish) our opinions and thoughts about what we read and see.

As complacent as we might be about this “right,” depending on who’s in power, this can change “our way of life” shockingly quickly. See Agnes Varnum’s recent blog entitled, Trifecta: USA vs. Freedom for some good (and disturbing) reading on this very subject.

Interview: Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, Directors THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK

Filmmakers, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, have been producing and directing movies together since meeting in 1993.  As they talk about their latest project, the two women communicate with one another in a kind of shorthand, sometimes finishing one another's sentences and constantly validating and checking in with one another with lots of eye contact, nods of the head and other non-verbal signals that they are both engaged in the same conversation, that both individuals are equally invested in their common purpose.  I first saw their multiple award-winning film, The Devil Came on Horseback, at The Full Frame Festival in April and ran into them last week in the Cinema Lounge at Silverdocs after their screening there.

During what proved to be a horrendously busy day making various preparations for the New York theatrical run of their latest nonfiction collaboration, Sundberg and Stern joined me for a quick lunch in the Chelsea district of New York City at The Antique Cafe, an eatery they frequent since it's right down the street from their production offices.  We talked about this unique partnership and the experience of making this extraordinary film, the story of one man's very personal, life-changing journey as an eyewitness to the horrors of mass genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

Still in Motion (SIM):  Tell me about this wonderful creative partnership you have with one another.  It’s so difficult to find and hard to sustain.  Describe the way you work together.  I would imagine it informs a lot of the ways you approach each project that you do.

Ricki Stern (RS):  Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it; it might fall apart.  (laughs)

Annie Sundberg (AS):  Well, we are very lucky.  And basically, we both have enormous drive and commitment to what we’re doing and we’re willing to stick through things.  Given the realities of documentary, that’s hard.  I mean, even with The Devil Came on Horseback, there’s been a lot of excitement and attention, but it’s still a struggle to bring out to the market or even to get it done.  We’re talking about a new project right now and it’s nice to have that support.  For this potential project on which we’re working now, Ricki wrote up the treatment based on an idea I’d had.  It’s so nice to have someone help vet a proposal and put something together and, also, to help push the other person to deliver.  It’s so easy to lose steam if it’s just you doing everything on your own.

SIM:  Yeah, it’s overwhelming, the amount of work that needs to get done to keep the machine moving. 

RS:  I think it’s the sheer amount of work that needs to get done with any of this, that’s true.  But in giving one another directives that are task-oriented—get the proposal down, write the script—I think any one of us could do that.  It’s just that most of the time, you’re juggling so many other things and so after working together for so long, we can fluidly take on what needs to get done.  For example, today, we need to get a trailer done for the IFC [where the film will have its New York theatrical debut in July].  So that’s what I need to make my priority as of this moment, getting the trailer down there.  I mean, there are times when Annie probably takes on more business stuff than she wants and I’m probably happy to let her do that.  (smiles)  She doesn’t really want to  and so I vow to take it on next time, that kind of thing—constant negotiation like any day-in, day-out relationship.

AS:  What I’ve also come to appreciate is that we do really trust and respect one another, so then you can get through those challenging periods, like a good functioning marriage.  You get through what needs to get done and you each contribute to taking care of the “family,” which is the film project happening at the time.  And we’re pretty good at talking about when things aren’t working so well.  “This is where I was frustrated” or “This is an area where you have more strengths and why don’t we play to those strengths?” and so on.  And again, particularly in documentaries, there’s just so much work because there aren’t usually the budgets to bring in the staff—it’s a blessing to have this kind of partnership, it really is.

SIM:  What are you noticing about the ways in which you worked together on this film?  Like a lot of projects for documentarians, this story found you.  You’re both very experienced producers, directors, filmmakers—how did this project change you personally?  Considering the subject matter and the way the story is told through the eyes of one person, did you feel like you were just being carried along for the ride and sort of blind as to what was going to transpire?

RS:  One thing I’m constantly trying to figure out is, how does making a documentary happen?  And when can we get to the place when someone pays us to do a documentary?  And I realize, as we travel to festivals and do the circuit year after year, the really good, incredible documentaries are those where the people just passionately got on board and just did it.  No funding, initially, maybe that came later or they managed to sell it, but if what we want to do in many ways is to make art and tell a story, we’re not going to be given the money to do that.  We have to save the money we make on a project to make the next one, and so on and so on.  And we try to  take on bigger-paying projects in the interim to sustain ourselves.  And that’s sort of what we’re facing now—there’s a job we might get which would be great.  Because, then, it would give us the time to be developing stuff.  You know, honestly, with this project, I would not have jumped into the pool had Annie not been here, because Annie really jumped into the pool first. She had the focus and the drive while I was finishing something else.  I just told her to go right ahead when it came across our radar, but I just couldn’t really invest in the initial emotional phases to be there like she was.

AS:  That’s another thing that’s great about having a partnership—when an idea or story comes up and timing is of the essence, as it was for this.  I think any film you take on has to “carry you along for the ride,” as you said, because it’s so much work to make a film.  And sometimes that story comes with just absolutely lousy timing.  We were finishing up The Trials of Darryl Hunt and we were deep in it, trying to get a print ready for Sundance and that’s when Brian [Steidle] had just come back from the Sudan.  This was spring of 2005.  We were still trying to raise money to finish Darryl Hunt.  It was insane to think about trying to take on another project at that point.  But it was the right story.  And I remember thinking at the time, “If we’re going to want to have this done, it’ll be about a year cycle after the other film releases.”  Because we wanted to be able to nurture that film when it came out into the world.  Darfur was so compelling and no one was doing a story on it at the time.  How could we pass it up?  It was a combination of something that sort of forced your hand and the partnership allowed us to actually do it.

SIM:  And it did specifically come to you. 

AS:  Yes.  However, had we passed on it, they [Brian and his sister, Gretchen] would have searched for other filmmakers to do the project.  We were, thankfully, the first people that they trusted enough to ask.  Ricki’s uncle, who is a mentor of Brian’s, was the connection and so it’s kind of miraculous that it found us that way.  And as is often the case, the film that got made tells a very different story than the one initially presented to us.  Gretchen, Brian’s sister, really wanted to have a film about the work she was doing on the ground in Africa.  She really wanted to have a documentary made that looked at social development and the impact on the female population of these areas that had been the hardest hit by this genocide.  And Brian was consulting because he had had a lot of on-the-ground experience looking at these women, particularly in Darfur.  And we basically had to have a conversation with Gretchen saying, “Brian’s story is the film.  Your work will come out and be reflected through Brian’s story and you can use the film to ultimately promote your work.  But it's his story we need to tell."

SIM:  How and when did you come to that conclusion?

RS:  Well, it was very clear.  I had a conversation with her basically advising her about how to make a documentary about her work in Africa.  And it’s not something that I was going to produce or direct.  Her project was much more of an advocacy-based thing and I wasn’t really interested unless there was some money to do it.  But she’s telling us that her brother had been in Darfur, and that’s what really got me excited.  And then we saw the photographs and thought, well, that’s the documentary story right there.

AS:  We weren’t interested in doing an advocacy piece.

SIM:  I think the major strength of the film is the character of Brian Steidle and his journey.  As a film watcher, I want to witness a personal journey.  The subject matter is the subject matter—a devastating, hard-to-fathom event occurring in another part of the world.  We need a guide, a journeyman to take us into that place and help us to see clearly the landscape and what’s happening in it.  That’s the only real way to garner emotional heft—otherwise, the possibility for emotional detachment is too great.  That’s really one of the more powerful scenes I’ve seen—his emotional breakdown in the car near the end of the film and the realization of what kind of cost, psychologically and emotionally, the guy’s paid.

AS:  Brian was a really tricky character from a filmmaking point of view.  He’s actually still pretty damaged by all of what he’s done and seen.  There was a lot of anger and disappointment when he came back and saw how futile the work that he had been doing was in the reaction, or non-reaction, of those to whom he spoke about his experiences there.  He was tired of going out on the road and basically saying the same damn thing over and over.  So for us to basically compel him to do this film--there was some convincing that was necessary.  His attitude was, “Prove to me that it’s worth it.”  We wanted to see how fast we could make this film.  I think we made it really quickly in terms of a documentary’s life cycle, but it still wasn’t quick enough for Brian.  He’s a Marine!  He had hopes that the film was going to come out at the end of 2005.  It took a year and a half, which is fast for this kind of story, almost unheard of for an independent documentary of this scope.

RS:  And the other thing is:  to be quite honest, and they know this, I kept insisting on asking the question, “Well, what’s the story?”  When we finally get to Rwanda and he acknowledges guilt, it’s like okay, great, there’s the crux of the story.  But until then, it was a guy who was being an advocate and it didn’t have that emotional arc that was needed to be compelling story-wise, as we had hoped. If you’re given the luxury of following a subject for three years, you usually find the personal struggle and the obstacles somewhat organically.  But in his case, we really couldn’t stop filming until we had the end of the story.  When he went to D.C., we knew  we could show him bringing the story “home,” and when he went to the ICG (International Crisis Group), that moved things along, as well.  Thankfully, during that time, he also went to Rwanda and that was the point where he breaks.

AS:  We felt really lucky to have captured that.  We needed enough time for him to get to that place.  Being in Rwanda was really key in that regard.  It was a place where people had also really suffered and there was a chance to talk to other witnesses, and Gretchen, as his sister and someone who knows him better than anyone, just kept needling him.  He had shared a lot of the stories of what he had seen and been through and felt with her privately.  She was enormously instrumental in getting him to that place emotionally on camera.

SIM:  How did your relationship with him change in the course of filming?  Was it difficult to distance yourself from the huge amount of emotionalism involved and step back enough to see the bigger picture, so to speak?

AS:  Well, with Brian it was easy to step back.  He’s a professional—sort of like a trauma surgeon.  When he was there, he dealt with what he saw as a professional; he was documenting.  What we had to navigate as filmmakers is relating to someone who’s tired of being on the road, tired of talking about these things over and over.  And there was a certain wariness and a question of whether he should trust us or not.  He comes from a military background.  It was definitely a hand in hand process.  He was to have approval on everything presented in terms of it being factually correct.  He wanted to make sure that people featured in the film, whom he felt could be potential targets, were presented correctly and accurately.

RS:  We usually really like the people we make movies about.  We’ve always had a friendship with the people that are subjects of our films--you spend so much time with them.  You hope you have a personal relationship with them—there’s downtime when the camera’s not on and you have dinner together.  You’re not just saying, “Okay, thanks, see you tomorrow at 7:00!”  But we’re never at a place where we also can’t be critical about the story—the story comes first.  We’re careful that we don’t do anything to hurt our subjects, but I think sometimes you have to expose something about them that “on paper” they might object to.  But once they see it in the context of the film, they’re okay with it.

AS: It’s a process.  And it’s important that they see that we wouldn’t do anything that would intentionally hurt them.  So, yes, there’s a personal relationship but with always a bit of distance—you’re always talking about them in the third-person.  You’re sort of a "forced" family.  You can be very, very different people from your subjects.  You can have very different goals.  It’s interesting.  I think Brian’s agenda with the film was a very particular one.  He really felt that his story was bringing the photos back. As Ricki put it, though, he hadn’t yet experienced the emotional reaction that would make him a really viable character for a film.  He hadn’t had that change in his nature yet.  That was an interesting standoff.  Because Brian felt we had everything we needed for the film.  We kept interviewing him.  And he would say, impatiently, “Well, I’ve already given you fourteen interviews.”

RS: Literally, we probably interviewed him about six times on different occasions, which isn’t even that much.  And he would say, “But I told you my story four times” or whatever.  And we said, “Brian, we’re probably going to interview you ten times by the end of this.”  You can say to the subject of your documentary, in terms of letting them know that you’re going to be living with them for three years, that you're going to want to be with them on Sunday morning at 6:00 a.m., and you say, "I just want you to know that this is a path we’re taking together."  And they’re like, “Of course, sure, sounds great.  Yeah, I’ll have pancakes ready!”  And after a year of doing that, then you get, “Why are you still here?”

SIM:  Well, they’re just living their life and as non-filmmakers, at least at the inception, don’t really understand anything about the filmmaking process.  And it’s always interesting to see how their knowledge grows as you stay with them—how savvy they become about technical and other aspects of making a film of this nature.

AS:  Well, the best is when they start picking up the lingo.  Brian kept talking about, “Well, okay, is this a verite moment?”  (laughing)  So I’d jokingly tell him at certain points, “Okay, we’re going to go get a little verite now.”  I remember going on a Texas tour with him and he had been frustrated that I hadn’t been there from the beginning.  Brian’s evolution is so interesting.  He felt such an urgency about the story of what he had seen and people were inviting him to come and speak at synagogues and universities based on his press.  He kind of bankrolled that on his own.  Then, Save Darfur Coalition realized that he would be a really effective advocate, and so they said they’d organize a tour for him.  So the end of 2005, beginning of 2006, they sent Brian to twenty-eight cities.  And he asked me at the beginning of this why I wasn’t filming.  Then, when I joined the tour and we were on the road together for almost three weeks, he got tired of us and said, “Man, can’t you guys take a break for a while?” 

RS:  And he’s aware more than most film subjects.  He’d ask us on certain occasions why the camera wasn’t there, why aren’t we filming something he thought was really important, the “good stuff” in his words.

SIM:  Did the film end up being crafted a lot differently than you anticipated or were you just really clear from the beginning what it would look and sound like?

AS:  Well, in the initial stages of just sitting with Joey [Grossfield], our editor, we decided that we really wanted to make a film that played more like a political thriller rather than an academic treatise on what’s going on in Darfur.  We did a lot of interviews with experts to ground ourselves and to also give ourselves legitimacy because we knew we wanted to stick solely with Brian’s perspective.  We didn’t want to be called on a lack of legitimacy about the larger issue, though.  What was interesting, was that we sat and watched old Godard films, we watched City of God, we looked at sections from The Year of Living Dangerously.  We looked at films that had a certain aesthetic, a certain ethos because we wanted to have something fresh and Joey always felt that Brian’s time in Africa, and the Africa sections, should be more impressionistic, should be more emotionally associative, the rest of it playing more like a straight documentary.  And even in our rough cuts, the Darfur section used to be much longer.  But when Brian's back in New York on his sailboat, a lot of people felt that that was when the story really takes off.  It was much more traditional storytelling with clear plot points that moved the story forward so it had some impact on how we reshaped the Darfur section.

RS:  And we went through this process, like everyone does, where you have all these other interviews, part of doing our homework.  We knew we couldn’t make a movie on Darfur without interviewing “X” and we tried to break away from our narrative in a creative way, but it’s such a personal narrative, it was hard to bring in any outside opinions that directly related to Brian’s experience.  And even when people knew him personally, it was so detached, so third-person, and ultimately drew away from the immediacy of this particular person’s experience.  And so we decided that we weren’t going to go there—if it’s not going to work once, it’s not going to work at all.  We found footage from Darfur of what was happening there, and in a way, it limited us a bit in exposing Brian’s experience there and so we had to find the right footage, which we did in about a month’s time.  But it took a while to figure all that out.  We went back and forth about deciding on whether or not it should be chronological.  We resisted that obvious structure, telling it that way, in “real time.”  Looking at it now, it’s obvious, but at the time we struggled with that.  But that’s the stuff that really works.

AS:  Darfur, itself, is a very complicated story, so how do you do that effectively?  Is it all through Brian’s voice?  Ricki did a lot of work with archival news services and radio newscasts, Voice of America.

RS:  This was an evolution, too.  We decided that we wouldn’t have a narrator, so how do you give information about Darfur, without Brian saying, “And then, blah, blah, blah,” in a very contrived way?  It became a task of weaving different sources of audio to get that effectiveness, that urgency, that pacing.

SIM:  It’s so easy to sit back and intellectualize something like Darfur, a protective mechanism of sorts.  But if you’re going to bother to make a film like yours, film being a visual medium, then that impressionistic, saturated color palette, sharp-shooter type of editing becomes a way to inform a viewer intuitively what’s going on there.  The care you took to really think about those things is so apparent in this piece—it has to become visceral, that’s imperative.

AS: Ultimately, the subject has to become a greater social issue beyond the film itself.  The balance between making it a personal story and telling the larger story of Darfur is important.  We needed to tell enough about Darfur so that people really understood the story of what's happening in that place and why.

RS:  That’s also a process.  Annie was very focused on providing context, focusing on al-Bashir [President of Sudan, Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir], focused on the sort of bullet points we needed to provide that context about Africa, about Darfur.  I was a bit more focused on Brian’s journey and so those two directions informed how the piece came together.  It would have been a longer process if I had been doing this by myself to figure out what was missing, what was essential, how to weave and dovetail those two things.

AS:  I think the hardest thing is, that when you take on a subject like Darfur, you’re going to be held to task.

SIM:  You’ve been shown a lot of love for this project from festival audiences, from the nonfiction filmmaking community, at large.  Where has the backlash come from?  I’m assuming there’s been some.

AS:  Well, the only backlash we’ve experienced was when we showed the film at the Arab Film Festival where there were Sudanese National Islamic Front members in the audience and, it was just as it was in the film when Brian spoke at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and encountered an audience member who, like the one in our Q&A, basically said that he believed that every interview of the refugees was scripted,  he believed that the film was not trustworthy in telling the truth about the situation, that it was serving as propaganda against a certain group of people.  We’re investing the whole film in Brian’s story.  Another critical comment we did receive happened when we showed it at South by Southwest.  There was an Irishman who came up to the microphone and said, “Don’t you feel responsible for creating this jingoistic, ‘America will go save Sudan’ attitude with your film?”  And I said, “No, I feel that we were very honest and truthful in depicting Brian as a character.  And Brian believes that America has a responsibility.”  As filmmakers, we were documenting Brian’s particular journey as a witness and that’s always been my feeling about this film.

RS:  It’s true.  I mean, people have said that Brian believes in military action.  And yes, he does believe in it and whatever you’re sensing from the film is him, in the moment of anger, saying, “I wish I had a knife.”  As a filmmaker, I don’t always agree with everything our subject might say or do, but as Annie says, we’re telling his story from his point of view.  It’s not always exactly what we might feel or think.  But that’s not our job to tell you how we feel or think.  What I like about making documentary films is that you get to be in people’s lives, lives you wouldn’t normally get to be in.  And you get to, as best you can, tell their story.  It’s not my story.  I can do a story about a conservative, anti-abortion person and I could fundamentally not believe in what they say or do.  But as a screenwriter, as an actor, I’d want to understand their particular motivation.  I’m not interested in demonizing them.  What is it that drives them to have these beliefs?  I need to respect that in order to make a good movie about that person. 

SIM:  But what’s your opinion, then, on filmmakers who might not respect their subjects that much and do depict them in a negative light, who make fun of them in  a way where the audience becomes complicit in the “joke.”

AS:  Well, here's the thing about filmmakers like Michael Moore and Robert Greenwald who do that kind of thing--in my mind, what these filmmakers are doing is presenting these social arguments.  They're using a medium, just as writers do in the op-ed pages in the back of the New York Times.  But these filmmakers I'm talking about are not just creating op-eds with films. They’re very indicative of the documentary medium—films like Manufacturing Dissent and The Corporation, these are films that have a very different agenda.  I think our films have been traditionally much more about getting inside a human being and trying to understand human behavior.  I felt in doing a film about Darfur, if we can bring enough people to an awareness, then a more academic approach or the op-ed approach can be written based on that awareness.  Those things will organically flow from the emotional experience of seeing the film.  I didn’t feel a need to do an op-ed on the Sudan.

SIM:  Do you think a film like this can change things?

AS:  It’s going to happen more and more with other documentaries, but I think something like An Inconvenient Truth broke the mold in a lot of ways in terms of making direct impacts on people’s perception of an issue and has directly resulted in putting the issue of global warming on the map.  It engaged viewers at the house parties where it was shown, it changed behavior--the Prius is now the top-selling car.  With our film, I feel we're  using the same kind of power of “shaming.”  The power of photographs and the power of documentary to compel action, that’s vital.  One, it can inspire viewers to actually take on an active role in an issue, but it’s also part of the public shaming that apparently needs to happen before people wake up.  An example is the China-Darfur connection:  there were these photographs that were released by a Security Council member that showed how Chinese-donated aircraft carriers were being painted white, the UN insignia was then painted on the side of them and they were loaded with arms which were then shipped to Darfur.  As soon as those photographs became public, Bashir relented to Stage 2 of the U.N. military operations to support 21,000 ground troops there.  I think there’s a power to the visual medium that can actually have tangible impact.

SIM:  Many in the documentary community feel, on the whole, that as filmmakers creating powerful, investigative, artfully done pieces, we might be stepping into the shoes of a very lazy news media—the supposed “watchdogs” that are keeping an eye on government, elected officials, big business, etc.  Many filmmakers I’ve spoken with sense that that void is begging to be filled with substantive content, with" instruction" or guidance on how to stage an action-based movement by and for average citizens.

RS:  Well, we started making films years ago, before there was the Internet.  There weren’t as many avenues to disseminate and distribute documentary—there was PBS, HBO, some television, maybe a short theatrical run, and then it lived in some educational library.  Since the  advent of the Internet, you have no excuse to not create some kind of accompanying agenda in terms of social action based around your film, whatever the subject.  It’s so much easier now to get it out there.  There’s so much opportunity—even something as easy as posting it up on YouTube  or creating a myspace page.

AS:  With that, I think there comes a sense of responsibility and a power for filmmakers to know you can create awareness, create change, to further an agenda. Or, in this case, to bring awareness to what’s going on—this is certainly our agenda.  And to give people concrete tools for doing something with that awareness.

SIM:  That’s quite a big chunk for a filmmaker to take on.

RS:  It is!  There’s a whole new role for outreach being formed.

AS:  We both gravitate towards this medium because it can be so beautiful.  Sometimes it’s just the power of shooting a quiet human moment.  It doesn’t have anything to do with changing the face of an issue or anything on a grand scale, but with our cameras we can create really beautiful moments that say volumes without words.  One of my favorite shots ever, was a shot that Ricki directed from The Trials of Darryl Hunt.  We see Darryl from behind as he’s walking out his front door and it’s at a point where no one’s sure whether he’s going to have to return to prison the next day.  Maybe it’s one of the last nights this man will ever spend in his home.  It’s a lingering shot of his face at sunset and that, to me, is a beautiful moment in the film that allows you to share that particular man’s experience, to be in his shoes.  I think, as artists, that's always what we’re trying to do, whether we write literature or make film. 

RS:  I do think that with every film you learn.  I really can’t look back at old films I’ve done; it’s difficult. The medium’s changed so dramatically in the past 10 or 15 years, that it’s so easy to say that if we had been working with the kinds of tools we do now, shot the way we shoot now, the choices might have been vastly different—working in film versus video, editing on a truck bed versus on an Avid system using a laptop—there was only so much back-and-forth you could get away with creatively with those tools.  It was a nightmare to have to change your structure.  Editing now, in this way, really opens up the opportunity for any kind of storytelling you want to create.  Especially in documentary, that’s not scripted, you can be so much more creative than you used to be able to be.  It really is a luxury.

SIM:  And the distribution scenario for this film?

AS:  Well, it’s kind of been an interesting mix since we didn’t sell to a major distributor right away coming out of Sundance in January.  We’re actually going with a much smaller distributor, so we do have a good deal of control since we’re working in a very hands-on way with Wendy Lidell of International Film Circuit.  She just has an awful lot of integrity and really good relationships with theatre owners.  To be honest, I think theatrical really matters with this film because I’ve seen what happens when audiences see it together.  It’s like a shared commitment to walk out into the day and do something.  It can happen with house parties, but it takes so much more initiative to get people to put that together.  We saw this weird viral response during our qualifying run [for an opportunity to be short-listed for an Academy Award nomination] in Los Angeles (June 1 – 6), where the numbers just went straight up and by the end of the week, we became the top-grossing film in the independent market.  And in talking with people about this response, they told us that they went home after seeing the film and emailed, like 150 of their friends, and told them that they had to go and see it.   And, Wendy has also worked with NGOs before; she had a film that had a partnership with Oxfam and so she knows how to work with groups that are already issue-based.  So we brought in a really wonderful publicist out of D.C. who knows how to really get in front of key leaders and knows how to rally constituents who, in turn, rally others in the surrounding communities.

RS:  I think the whole notion of these mega-distribution deals out of the major festivals, like Sundance, is quickly going to go away.  Those companies aren’t really marketing and distributing in a way that can really sustain a film like this one.  There’s this one-week opportunity in New York and/or L.A. and if it doesn’t kick it there, it’s over, you know?  We need to get to the people.  It’s the filmmakers who are going to become these really good outreach coordinators and distributors on top of making films and that’s what I don’t like to do all that much, but. . . . So yeah, the temptation to make that big deal is strong but you have to ask, “But how much do you really love our movie?”  We can’t afford to throw this movie away.  It’s too important.

AS:  Netflix is acquiring films now and that’s also a different level of support.  They have seen really great results with films that they helped market to the public.  Even though they have no stake in the theatrical, they want to be aware of what we’re doing and help us to maximize certain press opportunities.  It all benefits everyone in the end.  They just want people to see the film.  For us, it’s piecing the deals together—foreign sales here, domestic TV there.

RS:  It’s so much more work but it seems to be the best way to go.  You need to get a good sales agent, definitely.

SIM:  You open your New York run July 25 at IFC with a fundraiser that night.  That's just a couple of weeks from now.

RS:  Yeah, we have to figure that out and figure out the venues and all that.  As you can see by the flying fingers over our Blackberrys, we have many full-time jobs between the two of us.

SIM:  Well, go do your thing.  And congratulations!

Playing Pin the Tail on the Oscar

There's a great podcast available, recorded at Silverdocs on June 15 by Joel Heller of Docs That Inspire and Silverdocs.  The discussion entitled Oscar in the Future: New Qualifying Rules for Docs, was moderated by Executive Director of the International Documentary Association, Sandra Ruch. The panelists participating in the discussion are producer, Julie Goldman of Cactus Three, AJ Schnack, director of Kurt Cobain About a Son (a film that will be qualifying this year), and Marco Williams, director of Banished.  All participants had films screening at the festival.  Take a listen--interesting stuff. http://www.documentary.org/#PODCAST

Filmanthropy: An Attempt to Figure Out Just What the Heck That Means

I’m very proud to say that I was part of a nonfiction blogging community that did some stellar reporting from the incredible Silverdocs festival in Silver Spring last week.  Because of the jam-packed program, it was a good thing to have all hands on deck to catch everything.  The folks at indiewire, of course, have some of the most comprehensive coverage and plenty of links to other blogs (under the On the Web section) for more specific information on the films, attendant conference sessions, awards ceremony and other special announcements from the Silverdocs camp.

I attended the DocAgora event on Friday.  Peter Wintonick, an all-around brilliant guy who reminded me of the great Mexican artist, Diego Rivera, is the co-founder of this process on new forms, new platforms and new ways of funding socially engaged documentary content for the Web 2.0 world.  Structured on the model of ancient Greek public debate, the afternoon was given over to some of the most forward-thinking minds in this “wild west frontier” of new media. DocAgora is a community debate that has been staged at major documentary festivals and conferences around the world in the past year, places like HotDocs in Toronto and IDFA. It’s a formal conversation staged to create a forum to showcase and think about strategies for using media creatively for public knowledge and instilling action-oriented solutions for creating change in the world. 

The proposition was as follows: “Given that New Media has redefined the meaning of Public: the wall between public and commercial media no longer exists.”  The latest Technorati report on the blogosphere indicates that there are over 70 million blogs living on the World Wide Web, impacting the reach and scope of social media companies and the overall media marketplace.  Independent press and media makers are banding together to create a public-driven distribution space for content.  But it’s the value of that content and its quick availability that will continue to determine what serves the marketplace, as well as the public.  How does the public trust what it’s getting?  The documentary community continues to be concerned with producing content that contributes to learning on a cultural and global level and wants to continue to believe in a value system that contains core values such as “substance,” “idealism,” “civility,” “generosity,” and “cultural inspiration.”  Sounds quite lofty and idealistic, eh?

While intellectually appealing, my thoughts kept turning to all the documentary filmmakers I know, including yours truly, who still have the onus of relying on ourselves to find and raise money for projects. I agree that there needs to be a shift in terms of public consumption of media.  How realistic it is to depend on the big media companies, all of whom have bottomless funds to produce any kind of content they desire, to truly support the values that we all hope are paramount (“public media used for public knowledge and action” in the words of Professor Pat Aufderheide) remains to be seen.  It’s pretty thick going for the independent filmmaker and we all realize to a person (even those filmmakers with high-visibility award-winning projects) that DIY distribution and marketing are vital to getting your film seen by those audiences for which you made the piece in the first place.  Peter Broderick has been a huge proponent and “godfather” for many filmmakers on this front—one person who’s been ahead of this wave for quite a while. Even in the guise of making the most of the World Wide Web in marketing and distribution scenarios, it seems like the same models are being applied to a platform that has unlimited possibilities.  In speaking with other filmmakers throughout the fest, the same frustrations about finding money to make a film and finish it and finding financial support for a sales and distribution strategy that makes sense still exist.  Becoming savvy in the ways of DIY everything is more essential than ever. 

We’re talking, I think, about a “Public” that’s one big social network—a universal myspace without the schlock and worthless personal pandering that doesn’t really contribute anything except a bit of titillation and a YouTube gang bang for a millisecond. Distracting, to say the least, in a world that really could use some focus on “media that matters.”  It’s just really time for that to become important, not in conversation or intellectual debate, but in practical, artistic expression.  This is what continues to inspire me.

In its Special Edition on Africa issue back in September 2005, National Geographic Magazine's cover headline read, “Whatever you thought, think again.” Now, in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair, the continent of Africa is being celebrated--literally.  With the leadership, vision and work of the famous folk featured in the issue, the world is re-thinking its view on this continent, that just by virtue of the sheer heft of its landmass, has become the litmus for what the world needs to focus on right now—universal health, the eradication of poverty, the eradication of genocide, and the children--always the children, the future of the planet.  The reason I’m bringing this up in the context of what I’ve been writing about is this:  I think whatever your stance on the issues inherent in rapidly changing ways of creating, using, disseminating and absorbing media, Bono’s Guest Editor’s Letter “Message 2U” should be required reading.  In just two columns of text, I think he speaks to how we all share a common purpose.  And because we have the privilege of living in this technologically magical era, now is a really good time to step up to more creative, more artful ways of communicating with one another.

It’s just not possible for me to absorb another cover story on Britney or Paris.  I’m sure they’re lovely girls, but I really want them to go away.  And I want the media and the public to stop caring about the shenanigans and neuroses of those girls and their ilk—it’s a waste of our precious time and energy.

So it is with the documentary community and why these are the people I want to hang out with.  There is a theme, a pattern, a common thread in the things we talk about when we talk about making movies.  To a filmmaker, the subjects we find (or more times than not, find us) and the ways in which we discover we can make a difference through our art, is the gateway through which we can pass on a more positive legacy, one filled with hope and true human progress—the type of progress that starts from the inside out. 

Lofty and idealistic?  Yeah, let's go there.

ANGELS in South Africa

Um, still trying to finish up my report from SILVERDOCS and my impressions of what I saw and heard there, but life is moving way too fast--that's what I get for moving to NYC.

Anyway, wanted to report that I heard from the director of Angels in the Dust, Louise Hogarth, who's currently living and working in South Africa.  She writes that audience festival reaction to the film has been fantastic and that the limited theatrical release, distributed by Cinema Libre, is coming up in New York this September--I'll keep you posted on locations and dates.

At the Seattle Film Festival, the film won a Special Jury Prize for Best Documentary and, as I reported here from an earlier post back in April, the film won the 2007 Full Frame/Emerging Pictures Audience Award. 

Look for my extensive interview with Hogarth on this blog in the next month or so.

Billy the Kid Public Service Announcements

Billy the Kid is going to the Los Angeles Film Festival!

View the Billy the Kid Public Service Announcements on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sitJEF9ASZo

Pitching Critters, Demme's Home Movies and Partying at the Moose Lodge

As the weekend approaches, downtown Silver Spring gets busier, as more folks arrive for the jam-packed AFI SilverDocs festival and conference.  There are more sold-out performances, than not, and even press folk have a hard time securing a ticket for several screenings.

Never having been to a live pitch session before, and seriously considering taking the plunge and applying to pitch a project of my own at Amsterdam this year, I decided to start my day at Discovery Communications headquarters where ACE: Animal Content in Entertainment was sponsoring a panel of television and film commissioners and programmers to listen to the six finalists present their projects for the $10,000 prize.  SilverDocs Associate Director, Amy King, moderated a panel consisting of Laura Annalora of National Geographic Channels International, Patrick Keegan of Animal Planet, Kathryn Lo of PBS, Doug Zwick of Porchlight Entertainment and Julie Lofton of ACE. The audience was small but the finalists were, understandably, nervous as they moved up to the podium to present their pitches for their animal issue-centered projects.

I was particularly impressed by Don Bernier and Rachel Buchanan’s presentation of their Concrete Jungle project—they tag-teamed quite gracefully, were extremely organized, articulate and used their 7 minutes efficiently.  Others, I thought, either let their nerves get the best of them or were inadequately prepared—probably lack of practice, which is key in preparing to do any kind of verbal presentation.  When the brain waves slow to a crawl due to sensory overload, it’s good to have the sense memory kick in—I remember this from my ballet recital days; if you practice enough, your body will “remember” what to do.  After the presentation, the panelists come up and ask questions, offer guidance and advice, probe deeper into the filmmakers' motivation and purpose and offer insight into what they look for when listening to a pitch for a TV or feature project.  The winner will be announced Saturday afternoon at the Sterling Awards ceremony at the Silver Theater.

My afternoon was spent in the charming company of Mr. Jonathan Demme.  He’s the real article in every way—as a human being, as an artist and as a filmmaker who jumps from documentary to feature work with equal amounts of passion, conviction and artistry.  I felt privileged to be a member of the first audience to see the feature cut of his new documentary New Home Movies from the Lower Ninth Ward. He says that he felt compelled to “contribute somehow to the audio-visual record of what these people were going through in their heroic efforts to jump start their lives in the face of this epic, tragic event.”  Lives, which as anyone in this country is aware, are still in disarray, in shambles, close to two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated a large swath of that part of the country, and in particular, the city of New Orleans.  Two hundred hours of footage were shot by Demme and Daniel Wolff over the course of five seasons.  We follow the stories of these brave and humble characters as they rebuild their lives despite the cold shoulder treatment of their own local, state and national governments. They are black, they are poor, they are proud, they are faithful.  And Demme’s love and undying respect for these people (“they are heroes to me” ) is palpable in the attention he lavishes on them as they tell their stories.  Demme was in the audience watching this cut for the first time, too, and everyone followed him across the street to the Discovery building after the screening for a Q&A with AFI Executive VP, Jonathan Estrin. 

There, Demme talked about his hopes and dreams for producing a larger project (12-15 hours) and about his wishes for the way in which this footage might be added to the “universal archive,” i.e., the Internet—more on these issues and my thoughts on the DocAgora session I attended Friday on a future post.  His insights into why someone would become a documentarian in the first place were fresh and insightful and it became clear to me that this man was being honored not just for his body of work, but for his vision, passion and humanity.

After this, caught a screening of Doris Dorrie’s How to Cook Your Life (Wie Man Sein Leben Kocht).  A Zen meditation of a movie, the director mirrors her main subject in her deliberately-paced, gorgeously-shot film as we follow master chef and Zen master, Edward Brown, as he journeys through the spiritual realms of cookery and shares life lessons on the intensely flawed human condition.  Author of the celebrated Tassajara Bread Book, Brown teaches generations of people about balance in the way they cook, the way they eat, the way they share love and live their lives.  As an imperfect practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism, I laughed out loud at the scenes where this Zen master loses his shit because he’s having trouble opening a package of cheese or attempting to get a stubborn stopper off a bottle of olive oil.

Having to eat something delicious after that viewing, I headed to the cocktail party at local restaurant, Ceviche, and shared a super-garlicky seafood appetizer with a friend, had a glass of superb wine from Chile and relaxed a bit before heading back to the Silver Theater for the program at which Jonathan Demme was honored with the Guggenheim Symposium prize.  Following a tribute to the director and a spirited conversation between Demme and NPR blogger Michel Martin, he was presented with his prize by Charles Guggenheim's daughter, Grace, producer of many of his films.  The Charles Guggenheim Symposium was created in 2003 to commemorate the late, four-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker who made over 100 documentaries during an internationally acclaimed career.

Zipped to a screening of photographer and journalist, Gwendolen Cates' first feature Water Flowing Together, an intimate, moving portrait of her friend, Jock Soto.  Soto lent his stunning presence to the stage of the New York City Ballet, where he was a principal dancer, for 20 years.  As befits her subject, Cates' camera work and editing are energetic and graceful and she gets wonderful interviews with his dance partners over the years.  To a woman, they all go into emotional raptures at the memory of dancing with this handsome, sensitive, charming man who gave his life to the art and discipline of dance: hundreds and hundreds of hours of rehearsal and tendon- and muscle-numbing work to perfectly perform the work of the greats of dance choreography week after week, year after year.  We saw a slightly shorter version of what will be shown next week at San Francisco's Frameline Fest.  Soto and Cates were in attendance for a wonderful Q&A for an admiring audience.  And Sujewa will have an extended interview with filmmaker and subject posted on his blog very soon.

Passing through the Silver Plaza where an outdoor screening of Demme’s Talking Heads concert doc Stop Making Sense was playing to an ass-shaking crowd, I went to dine at Jackie’s, a popular local restaurant with lovely food and a friendly staff and capped off the evening attending a filmmaker party at the Loyal Order of Moose Lodge 658, replete with trophy animal heads on the walls, pool tables, dart boards, and a scuffed linoleum dance floor where inebriated filmmakers and industry folk boogied to the sounds of DJ Brian Liu, aka Yellow Fever, until the wee hours.  I think I saw a picture of my 5th-grade teacher, Mrs. Steel, on the wall.  And this is the place where I finally met in person the darling (“gee, you look taller on your blog”) Agnes Varnum, blogger mentor and new friend.  We decided to dub ourselves the “bluts”—bloggers who put out for a festival press pass.  Don't be jealous.   ☺

Deep in It

Still at SilverDocs and thought I'd have more time to write but my schedule is so packed and each day filled with so much, I'll have to wait 'till I'm back on the train tomorrow to catch up and write on things I learned, people I met, interesting conversations overheard, movies seen, new friends made, etc.  I'll also have a report on the Burns Film Center up in Westchester where I'm staying right now--hoping to do some work for them.  Meeting with the exec director, Steve Apkon Monday afternoon.

Off to a fundraising workshop this a.m.--thank you, Amy King, for getting me into this.  More later.

Mashing It Up at AFI SILVERDOCS

I arrived via Amtrak from Penn Station to the Baltimore Airport station mid-afternoon on Tuesday.  It was a smooth relaxing ride—between reading a bit and gazing out the window listening to my iPod, I pondered my busy schedule for the next few days and was excited at the prospect of seeing new films and attending some of the seminars in the incredibly packed International Documentary Conference program expertly produced by Diana Ingraham.

I also found out yesterday that I’ve been invited to attend this summer’s Sundance Producers’ Conference with one of my documentary projects and my mind was whirling with preparation plans for this incredible opportunity—more on that later.

I didn’t manage to get into the sold out opening night film, Jim Brown’s Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, but instead after doing my festival check-in, toodled around the town of Silver Spring, home of Discovery Communications, to check out the local scene. It was fairly quiet, but the kind of quiet that precedes a much-anticipated event.  I discovered a wonderful coffee house called Mayorga near my hotel with strong, aromatic coffee, plenty of comfortable seating and free wireless—my festival “office.”  I also sat in the lobby of the Hilton for a while and watched as people arrived, everyone, to a person, on some electronic device, pushing buttons to text, checking email, eyes riveted to whatever small screen they carried in their hands as they maneuvered through check-in, barely glancing at anyone to whom they were “speaking.”  I find this ubiquitous behavior bloody annoying and rude as hell.

I took myself to McGinty’s Pub for dinner and sat outside drinking my wine and eating my food safely under the cover of the outdoor patio as a pissing-down rainstorm raged through town for about 20 minutes, thunder crashing, lightning crackling, soaking everyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the downpour.  This would be a regular occurrence throughout the fest.  I guess it’s monsoon season in Maryland.

The next morning, I woke early and was at the Silver Theater by 9:00 to grab some coffee and get settled for the opening session of the conference, The Future of Real 2.0—From Music to Mayhem Plus Fair Use and Copy Right/Copy Left.  Moderated by Diana Ingraham, panelists included David Garber, President/CEO, Lantern Lane Entertainment, Brett Gaylor, Filmmaker, Open Source Cinema/EyeSteelFilm, George Rush, Attorney, Max Segal, HBO Archives/Co-President of ACSIL: The Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors and David Sheehan, ABCNEWS Video Source/Co-President of ACSIL with Max Segal and Larry Mills of Pump Audio.  The discussion included the legal implications of Internet film and music distribution, rights clearance issues and the costs of that, both monetarily and legally.  As filmmakers, financiers and distributors struggle with defining the terms and dealing with the implications of digital rights, a new way of thinking about content creation is creating a paradigm shift in how films are made, marketed, bought and sold.  Is creativity being damaged due to this new remix culture?  The issues of intellectual property are murky to begin with.  Garber of Open Source Cinema has created an entity where he literally gives away everything he shoots to let other people use it to remix scenes, submit their own material and to become a co-creator of new media.

One doesn’t need to use traditional distribution models to move one’s product over the Internet.  You can self-distribute both theatrically and over the net and different residual models can be created depending on the download model—download to rent, download to buy, download to watch for free.  The terms of licensing need to be redefined to bridge the gap between “old” and “new” media.  Most of the panelists agreed that those terms themselves don’t really mean much anymore, thus the term “mashing it up.”

David Sheehan said in relation to re-licensing content, “You [filmmakers/producers] should make sure that you get all the rights you need and have all the clearances you need to get—guilds, artists, music clearances, etc. and to know in advance (as part of your initial treatment) how your film will be distributed.  One needs to define carefully and accurately how your content is going to be used.  Be very clear about your material’s context to avoid getting hit by walloping expenses you didn’t anticipate and/or delays in distributing your project.”  Licensing content is only the first step—there are a lot of underlying rights issues for which one needs to be cognizant.  This can greatly (and negatively) impact your Errors and Omissions Insurance (E&O) and delay the release of your film.

Mills talked about what’s gone on in the music industry as a cautionary tale—the record companies erred greatly, in his opinion, by giving product away for free.  He felt strongly that this de-values any art/media being created and strongly advised against it.

With ACSIL, Segal and Sheehan are working hard to find a middle ground with fair use issues and everyone continues to make it a top priority to keep defining and refining terms of usage to benefit the creators of content and those that will use that content in the future for their own projects.

Filmmakers, particularly those working independently, need to educate themselves and keep abreast of these issues at every phase of the process.  Or at least have a good producer who’s paying attention to these things during production.

After the session, I hung around the lobby of the Silver Theater to chat a bit with staff and volunteers about the upcoming days.  I ran into filmmaker, Pernille Rose Gronkjaer, who screens her debut feature The Monastery here.  (You can read my April interview with this enormously talented storyteller on this blog.)  I’m looking forward to meeting with her again when Film Forum screens her film in New York this August.  She also wrote a wonderful article about her days as a film student at the National Film School of Denmark in the July/August issue of documentary available to IDA members and also on newsstands.

I caught an afternoon screening of Weaam Williams’ Hip-Hop Revolution, from South Africa, the film’s North American premiere.  I made a film on the same subject matter in Cuba in 2003 and so was curious to learn about the street art scene there—spoken word, graffiti and the hope and uplift music and art provide to a youth culture without much else at their disposal except a life of crime, drugs, marginalization and poverty.  Williams is a partner in Shamanic Organic, a company with a mission to merge multi-media and healing.

I quickly zipped by local wine emporium, Adega, for a special wine tasting party they were holding for the festival before catching another screening.  Losers and Winners, is an entry in the Sterling Award Feature Film Competition.  German directors Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken have made a wonderful film about one of the strangest culture clashes I’ve seen. 400 Chinese workers break down the Kaiserstuhl coke factory in the German Ruhr Valley into manageable parts and ship them back to their homeland.  As they break down the plant piece by piece for reassembly in the Far East, the relationships between these Chinese laborers, (away from their loved ones for over a year) and the German men who are being “retired” from a place they’ve worked their whole lives, create a community of displaced people who do the best they can to bridge abounding misunderstandings, often to great comic effect, and just as often with very moving moments of loneliness, isolation and loss of identity.  The Chinese supervisor is one of the weirdest characters I’ve encountered in film—a boorish man who speaks in silly Haiku-style and goes into raptures of ecstasy over his new Mercedes Benz, while his workers struggle to support their families back home in China. 

I ended the day having a nice Indian meal with local filmmaker and blogger extraordinaire Sujewa Ekanayake.  After dinner, we wandered into the Cinema Lounge where the Conference Kick-Off party was in full swing.  I was so pleased to finally meet and say hello to filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern.  I saw their multi-award winning, stunning film on the Darfur genocide, The Devil Came on Horseback, at Full Frame in April--it's also playing here to typically packed houses.  I'm thrilled to report that they've agreed to be my next interview subjects in my continuing series on female nonfiction filmmakers.  I'll be meeting with them in New York in the next week or so.    

I ended the evening with a great conversation about world-changing film with local designer, Brian Liu, one of the three Music Documentary Competition jury members (along with Joe Berlinger and Rosanna Arquette).  Brian is a designer and photojournalist who has published in the New York Times and Rolling Stone, among others.  His documentary work includes an award-winning feature about the global landmine problem, and he is currently editing down a decade of footage and photography for a Thievery Corporation DVD.  He is also the founder and creative director of ToolboxDC.

So now it's 2 a.m. and tomorrow will bring another full day of conference seminars, screenings and parties.

Interview: Jennifer Venditti, Director BILLY THE KID

Since her early 20s, Jennifer Venditti has worked with the superstars of the fashion world—photographers, designers and stylists whose work appears regularly in high-end publications like Vanity Fair and W Magazine.  Well before her days as a 16-year-old working at Saks Fifth Avenue, Jennifer was cultivating an eye for detail. Ever since then, this businesswoman and casting maven has made it her mission to find and showcase “beauty” in the most unlikely places.  Inspired by filmmakers like Claire Denis and John Cassavetes, and due to an insatiable appetite and curiosity for people’s stories, she brings an assurance and a confidence rarely found in first-time filmmakers.

Billy the Kid has already garnered accolades and awards this year, and is consistently an audience (and filmmaker) favorite wherever it plays.  Winner of the Jury Prize at SXSW, the film and its director have also made fans (and collected many offers) at Hot Docs in Toronto and at its sneak peek at Full Frame this past spring. Its next stop will be the Los Angeles Film Festival at the end of this month where it is also in competition for the top doc prize.  You can go to the film’s website to stay informed about other fests and venues in the near future, both in the U.S. and abroad.   

At first glance, the eponymous subject of the film and its director wouldn’t seem to have too much in common.  But as we spoke at her spacious and light-filled JV8INC offices in Soho last Thursday afternoon, it became apparent that she and Billy turn out to be soul mates on many levels.  The film is intimate, emotionally powerful, humorous and inspiring.  Watching and listening to this extraordinary 15-year-old kid as he experiences painful and triumphant moments in the small Maine town where he lives with his mother, Penny, I knew I had to meet and talk to Jennifer about the journey she took making this small masterpiece.


Still in Motion (SIM):  Tell me a bit about your background and how that led to filmmaking? Was it something you always thought about doing?

Jennifer Venditti (JV): Since I can remember, the way that I’ve lived my life has been practicing the process of just being open to what I feel, to what interests me and intuitively finding ideas that inspire me.  Now that I’m at a place where I’ve accomplished some things, I’ve taken some time to ask myself to think about how this has all worked, and to reflect on how things have happened and why.

As a child, I was one of these kids that, when left with the babysitter when my parents would go out, called the number wherever they happened to be and started asking a million questions.  I was so curious to know what was going on where they were, what everyone was wearing, what the house looked like, what the conversations were about.  My mom had to stop leaving the contact info with the sitter!  But when they got home, I’d grill her on all the details, what everything looked like—and I would get very frustrated at her lack of recall.  I’d want to know, “What color was so-and-so’s dress, tell me every word of the conversations you had or heard.”

SIM:  Well, it seems at an early age then you had a very cinematic, a very visual sensibility.

JV:  Yes, and very detailed, too.  I’d want to know every word and who said what and to whom—almost like a transcript, in a way.

SIM:  So you’d drive people crazy.

JV:  Yeah!  And I still do.  In my everyday business dealings, I do that.  And I think people misinterpret that as me not trusting them to get all those details right because I ask so many questions.  I have an insatiable appetite for knowledge and bottomless curiosity.  My parents still talk about that.

And then, of course, from the time I can remember, I’ve been an avid, avid people watcher.  When I was a kid, I remember it as a visceral thing, watching people at the airport—as if I were watching a film.  This was when you could actually see people off and greet people at the gate.  I remember watching people re-uniting, the long, emotional goodbyes.  I remember seeing people crying, or observing their excitement or their anticipation.  There are also memories from the emergency room—I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I was mesmerized by the things I saw and heard there, the pressure the doctors felt doing their job, the stories of the people that were brought there. . . . I never understood it when people said they were bored.  There’s always so much to see and experience just sitting on the sidewalk, you know?

SIM:  That explains a lot about the way you shot this film and the way Billy’s story was told.  It goes beyond the verite style of the camera just hanging out and recording what’s happening.  As a viewer, I felt absolutely ensconced in that world, invested in every moment of what was happening.  And now I know that it’s because the woman making the film experiences the world that way.

JV:  What really came out of that way of seeing the world was my “career” in casting.

SIM:  Why didn’t you pursue something along the lines of journalism?

JV: You know, growing up, I was an awful student; I hated school.  And, I think it was my way of rebelling.  My parents were very conventional, there was a certain way of doing things, a formula one should follow.  As a young person, I always felt different from everyone else and I never had an outlet to express that difference.  I wanted to fit in and, to a certain extent, I did.  But I wanted to go my own way so much, it was hard to totally fit in.  So my way of rebelling was to do nothing, to be lazy. I didn’t want to conform but I didn’t really know what kind of options I had. 

After struggling to find myself, knowing I had to do something, I took a stab at communications and psychology.  I hated that environment, the structure of it all.  I had always been interested in fashion, so I started researching fashion schools but knew I didn’t really want to be a designer, per se.  At 16, I got a job at Saks Fifth Avenue in Troy, Michigan and I soon became the assistant manager—at 16, among all the old ladies in hosiery and handbags!  There was a woman there whose job description was “fashion director,” and she was responsible for putting on the fashion shows and coordinating all the PR stuff for the designers and the store and I decided I wanted to do what she did.

After high school, I wasn’t ready to come to New York so I went to Chicago to the Academy of Fashion Design and Merchandising.  It was my first experience away from the suburbs.  And I blossomed.  I basically took over the school and started running all the shows and everything else going on there.  I had found my thing.  I had this boyfriend at the time that modeled and was going to Milan for the summer and so I wanted to explore going to New York for a summer internship.  This was at the time when Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui were doing this whole grunge thing, this was ’92, and I became obsessed with that and getting into that whole scene.  And I heard that Anna Sui was coming to a mall in Chicago.  So I stayed up all night doing my resume and the next day, my boyfriend and I turned up in our garb at this mall.  Once we were there, of course, I was too shy to go up to her, but she noticed us and came up and started talking to us and I told her that I really wanted to come to New York City.  She asked me what I wanted to do and I told her I didn’t really know.  She said that she, herself, had a really small operation but that there was this company called Keeble Cavaco Duca that produced all the big fashion shows and did the PR for every designer of note.  It sounded very corporate to me, but I did my research and found out that they repped Calvin Klein, Versace, Marc Jacobs, everyone.  Anna said I could use her name and the woman there called me and told me there weren’t any promises but that I could come for an interview.  So my parents drove me from Chicago to New York and I landed the job.  My first gig was doing a show for Karl Lagerfeld and then I did a show for Calvin Klein.  This was when Carolyn Bessette, John Kennedy’s wife, was there.  And it was all so wonderful but somehow, I didn’t feel like I was really ready for all that.  You had to dress a certain way, everyone was super wealthy.  I was this indie kid from Chicago not ready to be that regimented and work that hard all the time.  But at the end of the summer, they told me they wanted to offer me a job. 

There are certain points in your life when you know you’re facing an important decision and this was one of them.  But it just wasn’t what I thought I was looking for at the time and it frankly scared me, a Mid-western kid, moving into that world.

SIM:  Well, I think a lot of young people, not knowing themselves as well as you knew yourself, even at 21, would have had their heads turned, no question.  But rather than stepping into that foreign, intimidating world, would have turned tail and gone back to something safer, more secure.

JV:  I think a lot of my success is due to looking fear in the face—I know that fear is the ticket to all the good things that come in life.  It seemed like I had a chip planted in me.  Once I felt something for certain, there was no going back, no matter how pressured I might have felt to go another way.  I wanted safety, to feel protected, more than anything!  So I knew I had to take this job that was offered, even though I didn’t feel like I really fit into this world.  And it was, indeed, a sort of boot camp and I went through so many insecurities.  But, it also was my first-class ticket to education and culture and art and fashion.  Everything that I implement in my business today, I learned from these people—how to organize, how to run things efficiently and professionally.

But after a while, I quit, not really knowing what it was I was going to do.  I had been working for Lori Goldstein who works a lot with Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Avedon, we worked a lot with Madonna and people of that stature, worked a lot of Vanity Fair shoots—high-calibre stuff.  And one day, we were shooting the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue and I remember sitting there and feeling that it just wasn’t enough, there had to be something else I was meant to be doing. I loved all that stuff—the clothing, the photography, the traveling, staying at the Ritz in Paris hanging out with Madonna in her room watching Mario Testino work, it was incredible.  And I remember I didn’t want it to mean a lot to me.  I wanted to be too cool to be dazzled by it all.  But I was a hard, hard, hard worker.

What did strike me, and was something I thought a lot about during that time, was the exploration of beauty and the lack of innovation in that exploration.  There was a certain, very strict geometric interpretation of beauty, and as an observer of all this I would see all these other things that I thought were beautiful, too.  There was a whole other range.  And I knew it was time for another leap, even though I didn’t know where it was I was supposed to go from there. That’s how I live my life, I don’t really know any other way of doing it.  And I know that I’ll figure it out because I’ve always had to, even as a kid.  And consequently, I just don’t take “no” for an answer—that doesn’t exist for me.  I know anything is possible. I just knew I wanted to get away from all that, that was the end of the road for me there at that point.

At that time, my friend, Carter Smith, was becoming an up-and-coming photographer and got this assignment for W Magazine.  He directed a film called Bugcrush, which is where I found Billy. W had given him this story idea to run with and he was going to shoot this kind of Bohemian, street thing and asked me if I was interested in helping him cast it.  He knew that I had done that kind of thing where I found street people and mixed them with “real” models for a fashion or advertising shoot, and so I found all these amazing looking people.  We shot it and submitted our piece and the magazine credited me as the “casting director.”  And that led to jobs for the big advertising agencies, companies like The Gap, and on and on and on.  W Magazine has been my source for creativity, they’ve sent me all over the world, I’ve gotten to work with all the great photographers and travel just about everywhere there is to go, places like Brazil, Scotland, the small mountain towns of the West Virginia coal-mining country, to explore and then translate what I find there into beautiful photographs, which, in turn, are featured in a beautiful fashion magazine, accessible to people who might never travel to these places or meet these kinds of people.

And I remember thinking, “Oh my god, this is a job?!”  As a rabid people-watcher from the time I was little, it was amazing to think I could make my living getting to walk into these worlds and say to the people I found there, “I think you’re beautiful and interesting.”  That was a very powerful revelation for me.  If we’re meant to be the light that leads other people to their own ambitions and dreams, then I wanted to be that force within my own environment, wherever I happened to be.  I believe in being the force of what you want to see reflected in the world and creating that.  That’s how it’s possible to make a change—it’s very powerful.  This was my opportunity to expand people’s ideas of beauty.  This industry has such power in the messages that it disseminates, the voice that it has.

And so that’s how I started JV8INC—we do commercials, fashion editorials, shows, campaigns, films—and the whole ethos behind it is to counter the typical way we’re taught to see beauty.  The thing is, I’m always looking for role models for myself—I’m no different than anyone else who’s concerned with aging, beauty, how to be graceful and true to yourself no matter how you look, no matter your age or station in life.  I want to live in the world of those people that Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon shot.  And yet I can also live in the world of perfection and beauty.  It was about finding that inspiration where one doesn’t expect to find it.

SIM:  Well, I think that's what's key in having an extraordinary film watching experience—I may think I recognize and can parse easily what I'm seeing, who these people are, what they’re all about.  And then I'm surprised, shocked, deeply moved despite my preconceived notions.  And this film definitely led me to a place of emotional depth that I didn't expect at first glance.

JV:  When I first started thinking about film, I did think of all those “alternate” worlds I would see on my journeys.  I was in Budapest working for Yohji Yamamoto and we were in this art school there—he was doing a book project about gypsies and artists.  And I remember going into this place and feeling so uncomfortable, so guilty.  Here were these dedicated artists diligently doing their work in the most unglamorous of settings and in we come to do some kind of “fashion” thing.  I struggled with feeling comfortable with what I was doing.  There was someone actually filming me for a show during this shoot; it was a show that documented people in their process, how they created their projects.  And by being under that microscope, so to speak, it made me really focus on what my intentions were in all this, focus on my own struggle of how to reconcile my discomfort with where I found myself and what I happened to be doing there.  It forced me to get really clear about who I was and what I believed in and to be able to get what I needed in a pure way.  This informs my eye, my talent in street casting.  Because if I’m not clear about what I’m about, then I’ll miss everything I’m looking for.  It’s not an exact science and there are deadlines, you have a finite chunk of time to do this—it can’t just be aimless wandering until you stumble upon what you're looking for by accident.  That’s why, I think, I was able to make this film so quickly!  [The film was shot in eight days.]  And people respond to you intuitively when your mission is clear and uncompromising.  You’re genuine, open, present; when you’re not, people sense that immediately.  I have to be able to instill trust this quickly [snaps fingers], especially when I meet someone on the street and a minute later am asking them if I can take their photo.

I’m dedicated to celebrating people and their individuality—that is my larger purpose.  Consequently, I’ve had extraordinary encounters with people whose language I don’t even speak, whose world is so foreign to my own it’s like entering a storybook.  Yet that world makes sense to me.  And, somehow, my presence there makes sense to them.  It’s deeply moving and very, very emotional.  I realized that I wasn't someone who just wants to play the role of the observer. I’m the type of person that wants to get “in there.”  But as I started to experience this and actually videotape and collect some footage, the idea of filmmaking still didn’t really occur to me.  I just had this box of tapes—that stayed in the box.

So then I started meeting people who were making films and thought that maybe someday I would make something or do something with this box of tapes. I believe that you do put yourself in an environment, whether it’s conscious or not, of where you want to be, where you want to go. I decided to take a class at NYU with Thom Powers.  And I remember when I went, I thought, “Well, I have this business, I don’t even know how many times I’m actually going to show up for this. . . .”  And as we went around the room and everyone shared their elaborate, detailed ideas for their films [laughs], well, when my turn came I said, “I’m a casting director and I have this box of tapes.  Maybe something will come out of it after this.”  So I was still the same kind of student that I’d been as a kid—not really wanting to do the work, not wanting to do the assignments, really.  And I didn’t!  My favorite part of the class, though, was listening to guest filmmakers' stories of how they made their films, their own journeys of discovery.

And this was the time that Carter was doing his film.  We cast it and went to Maine—where I started filming Billy and his story.  After we returned, I remember being at my place with my friend, Donald Cumming, the actor who starred in Bugcrush, and the person I decided to use to shoot my film. He knew that I wanted to make films but just didn’t know how. He showed me these experimental art films he had made, one on photographer Ryan McGinley, some other narrative stuff he had done, and after viewing his work, I went out to get us something to eat. And I had the most visceral emotional response—cried like a baby! And I realized that that emotional response was due to this kind of jealousy in a way, because I had this thing in my throat that was my creative urge to do something like that and it was suffocating me. I felt like I was going to just explode if I didn’t allow myself to release that.  It literally felt like I was being strangled by not letting that creative urge out.  I was waiting for that perfect idea to show itself.  And Donald made me realize that I just needed to jump in—he told me to go film a tree for two minutes and edit something on my laptop, to exercise that creative muscle, to “unfreeze” myself.

And the irony, of course, was that when we were in Maine together, we were filming Billy the whole time!  I’d go to his house, we’d sing together, I’d go interview him, I was filming, I was doing it.  But I was so focused on waiting for the “perfect” thing—I wasn’t really paying attention.  I didn’t see it.  I thought what we were getting might be a part of a larger project but never really a film unto itself with Billy as the main character.  But I knew when I left Billy and that love story happened. . . . 

You know, we’re all here to learn from each other, we’re reflections for each other. Through Billy’s experiences, I was having all these feelings, reflections on my own life.  I feel the same way about casting.  The people that I find, that I respond to, help tell the story of where I am in my life.

SIM:  Did you ever think of putting yourself in this film?  I mean, of course, on the other side of the camera.

JV:  No, because I’m interested in creating the experience that I’m having and wanting to get out of my own way to do that. I’m interested in films that leave space and leave unanswered questions, that leave room for one’s own feelings and interpretations.  I just saw the film Once.  The two characters in this “love story” never really even touch and it just made it so much more powerful because of that.  There are certain things that I left out in my film, intentionally, such as Billy’s official “diagnosis,” or more details on his father.  To me, the most successful pieces of art, no matter the form—whether it’s music, fine art, whatever—are those that make you a participant, almost a co-creator, if you will. That’s the point of art to me and the thing I want people to experience when they watch my film.  Because, as a viewer, that’s what I’m looking for.

SIM:  Historically, it seems, that’s how you intrinsically operate.  You were making a film on Billy before you even knew you were making a film about Billy—it was that visceral and intuitive on your part, you didn’t even consciously understand it at the time.

JV:  I could describe my whole life that way!  I’m always doing these things and not fully understanding what I’m doing or why.

SIM:  But as you said, you make sure your intentions are pure and clear, that they’re well-defined in your own mind.  Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, that’s cropping up as a common theme for filmmakers that are making these incredibly moving films where one does walk away changed somehow.  At least for me, my world seems fuller, there seems to be more possibility.  And you’re right that that is a gift, an important one.  It goes beyond biography—what film school one attended, the people one met along the way, one’s resume, etc.  It’s uncovering and trying to illustrate, in a way, the creative impulse—that’s the fascinating part.  As we know, we’re all capable at this point of picking up a camera and shooting something, editing it to music and throwing it up on YouTube.

JV:  My two secret weapons are curiosity and intention—that’s my ticket.  You can’t teach someone how to have those things.  Those things move you along and make whatever journey you embark upon possible.

SIM:  I keep flashing on Alice in Wonderland a lot as we talk—those two things led her down that rabbit hole, that’s how she ended up at the Mad Hatter’s table.  And nothing in her life really prepared her for that except this insatiable curiosity.  That, of course, can get you into terrible trouble if you’re moving through with some twisted agenda.  But you’ve said that Billy became and is a hero for you, and that’s how he’s portrayed—heroically. You didn’t really even use a traditional DP to shoot this—but Donald’s emotionalism and personal involvement with the subject is quite palpable.  There’s no hiding behind the lens for him.  It reminded me almost of a dad lovingly filming his kid. And Billy plays for that person behind the camera because he intuitively knows he’s admired and loved.  That’s really beautiful to me. 

What you have in common with Billy is how well defined your personal vision is about how you see the world and your place in it, proper ways of doing things be damned.

JV:  Yeah, but unlike Billy when I was his age, I never was really speaking my truth—I did belong to the popular group, I was accepted and my wacky inner voice was suppressed in favor of that. I still struggle to do that today.  I think we all do.  And here’s this kid who’s wired in such a way, that that’s not even an option for him. 

SIM:  And the other thing that’s so beautiful is that he’s teaching the wonderful woman who’s parenting him how to accept herself and heal all the hurt that she’s been through.  Their relationship is so complex and rich—it’s almost as if they’re parenting one another.

JV: Yes, they speak a common language that belongs to just the two of them.  This is one thing this girl, Heather, Billy’s love, couldn’t even begin to do.  That was way too much for her to handle.  And I knew that about her before Billy did—I interviewed her before he really realized she was, with the encouragement of her grandmother, disengaging from him.  That was painful for me and I really didn’t relish going over there and having to experience the kind of pain I knew he was going through.

But we were leaving for West Virginia and I had to get that one last interview with him. And, when I got there, he just blew me away.  He was able to sit and talk about all the things that he was grateful for in his life; he was really strong.  He understood the notion that if you really love someone, you need to set her free.  He totally got that.  I put some of his musings up on YouTube—Billy holding forth on politics, the environment, his thoughts on his mom and how they saved one another’s lives, all kinds of things—there’s this wisdom and depth in him that’s uncanny.

SIM:  You would have to be a pretty closed-off individual not to respond to that. Which brings us to John Anderson’s review of your film in Variety.  It seems he experienced a different film than most of us did.   I first read about that review on Agnes Varnum’s blog Doc It Out, followed the link to the review and read it.  And I remember that was the first time I ever wrote to her because I had just seen your film at Full Frame and was gobsmacked at what he had to say about it.  I basically said that his take on the film said way more about him that it did about the filmmaker and her subject!

JV:  Yeah, the fact that he accused me of setting the whole movie up, my extensive manipulation of whatever happened to be going on, how stupid and ignorant my subjects were to not realize they were being exploited, that that was the only way I could have shot this in eight days, blah, blah, blah—unbelievable!  I’ve been laying the groundwork for doing a project like this for almost a decade through my work, what I’ve built. I was actually kind of flattered in a perverse way. [laughs]  And it helped that everyone, from my editor [Michael Levine] to people in the documentary community, begged to differ with his interpretation.  Filmmaking is changing, that’s the bottom line.

We have a distribution offer from someone right now—I’m very flattered, considering the heavy hitters that are interested, but I’m having such reservations that this company just isn’t innovative enough to get this film out there the way I think it could be, and should be, marketed.  The model I have in mind doesn’t really exist right now, I’m still a bit ahead of the curve and that’s giving me problems with people who still want to do things in a traditional way.  There’s no cooperation yet between the entities that could work together to create what I want to happen with this film. 

And after the film plays in L.A., we’re thinking about trying to qualify for the Academy shortlist. But then that has to happen before August—there’s a lot of pressure, rules and regulations, and it’s very expensive, as well.

SIM:  Well, I know that AJ Schnack is on this track, too, with his film and writes extensively about these issues on his blog All These Wonderful Things.  These issues are becoming increasingly important to the documentary community, now more than ever.  What is construed as a “socially relevant” film is changing.  I think it has to because of the innovations and creativity in how people are crafting nonfiction.

JV: That’s a very narrow definition of documentary, that it needs to inform or teach people something about an issue in some sort of didactic fashion.  This was the struggle with defining Billy’s “condition” and my refusal, ultimately, to buckle under to the pressure of including this stupid end card explaining about Asperger’s Syndrome and making him this poster child for it.  I couldn’t do it, I won’t.  I will never include that.  That’s not the film I set out to make.

SIM:  Let’s go back to your ideal distribution scenario—I’m interested in what that looks like for you. 

JV:  What I’m looking for is a company that is willing to reach that huge demographic out there that isn’t being reached for traditional documentary.  It goes beyond the college or university audience or the festival audience that might have a better chance of being exposed to films like mine.  Viral marketing is so key—that needs to be addressed by these more traditional distribution companies.  The online community is building steam like no one’s business and that needs to be recognized.

SIM:  This will actually be one of the bigger topics at the upcoming AFI SilverDocs fest in Maryland next week.

JV:  These companies don’t yet have this kind of infrastructure in-house.  And working exclusively with these new scenarios would be a huge risk for me, at this point.  There needs to be a more cooperative spirit, new models need to be created.  The music industry’s going through very similar issues.  I just don’t want that potential audience for this film to miss out—it’s very frustrating.  So while all these calls from all the major studios are wonderful, and I’ve gotten so much love about this piece from so many different circles, I can’t find the right people to help sell my film!  But this is the way it’s been ever since SXSW—the film is about an underdog who, ultimately, triumphs—people respond to that, they love that.  It’s how everything that’s happened on this journey has worked, thus far.

SIM:  It seems to me that that might be your typical scenario for everything you’ll do.  Being on the crest of a new wave—well, most of the time one’s concentrating so hard on staying the course.  There’s intense focus on what’s right in front of you and you are feeling your way along, just like you did with your project.  Considering your sensibility and the kinds of projects you’ll do, it will always feel a bit scary because you’re facing the unknown.  It seems to be the way your life works.

JV: Yes, I live for that kind of experience—I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I trust myself; I trust my eye and my heart implicitly.

SIM:  Billy apparently did, too.  As he does his own.  Let’s hope it’s catching.  Thank you for making this film.


END

 

Click Your Heels Three Times

As you would know if you've ever taken a header from your day-to-day life into realms unknown (and lived to tell the tale), being in free fall, while a bit terrifying, can be exhilarating.  Those exhilarating moments come when you know you're where you're supposed to be.

After a weekend reunion at my alma mater (Latin for "nourishing mother"), Sarah Lawrence College, I do, indeed, feel nourished--and inspired.  When I matriculated into SLC, I was 28, quite a few years older than your average college junior.  I was there with purpose, my singular goal to finish my BA by the time my 30th rolled around.  With stacks of reading material, papers and poems to write, poetry readings and a boyfriend in Brooklyn, I wasn't the most high-profile person on campus and didn't really get to know too many people in my class.  So it wasn't a surprise that I didn't recognize too many faces, nor did many know who I was.  It didn't matter.  I felt I was home again.

I, unfortunately, missed the opening day due to all-day apartment hunting in  Manhattan, but Saturday morning I got myself to the campus and it was just as beautiful and serene as I remembered.  And hilly--muscle memory kicked in as my thighs burned trekking to my seminar after scarfing down 8000 calories of breakfast carbs in the Bates dining hall.  Called "Making a Career Change Dream a Reality," a small group met conference roundtable-style in the Dudley Lawrence living room.  And what a group it was--articulate, brilliant, accomplished, passionate, present, each of the participants shared his/her story of transitions both big and small, and shared experiences of re-birth, the road less traveled and bon mots like, "leave time for the miraculous," "learn how to play," "cultivate a sense of gratitude," "worry less."  All this from Joanne (Jody) Braxton, class of '72, now the Frances C. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of American Studies at The College of William and Mary.  Lawyer, pianist and teacher, Stephanie Cooper (class of '65, MFA in chamber music '76), said, "Rewrite the end of the fairy tale if you don't like the way it ends." 

That's it--I'm in re-writes.  'Till the end of time, let's hope.

There was a stellar party atop the United Nations Secretariat Building that night, after a private tour of the General Assembly chambers, the Security Council chambers and a gander at some beautiful artwork, such as the Norman Rockwell Mosaic and the Chinese Ivory Carving.  You can take a virtual tour of the UN here.  With a warm breeze off the East River, we saw fireworks exploding over the Brooklyn Bridge, and all the surrounding buildings in their vertical glory glowing in the setting sun.  Even the wait staff was on the dance floor by the end of the evening.

And, as is appropriate in this kind of crowd, I managed to meet my very own (self-appointed) Virgil into the New York art world in Conrad Vogel, class of '77.  I'm going in deep, so I suppose I'll need a guide who knows the terrain.  ;)