My Time as a Human

It had been a long time since I had been around old school guy guys. Despite the amount of time spent discussing sex around my house, it’s usually in mixed company and of a certain flavor. I climbed into the van full of filmmakers and they paused long enough to say hello before launching back into the continuous outpouring of raunchy patter and boob jokes that had already been in full force. To his credit David did turn to me and say, “oh, right, I probably should have warned you.” By the end of the night, as we left our first dinner together, I found myself in a group hug with this same crew, talking about opening our hearts to the experience before us and giving Jef the space and support to be truly vulnerable. Somewhere in this mix, this seeming dichotomy, was the essence of our next few weeks of filmmaking.

The idea was to create a film that was a mixture of storyboarded narrative, documentary style interactions and improvisations. The structure from which the film hung was that “David” (the character) had just turned thirty and was writing a letter to himself on his deathbed. Knowing that this future self must have worked his way through the existential crisis he was now facing, he continually asks questions and describes his process as he surfs along on borrowed couches, pull out beds and floors through Portland and Seattle where the stories that shaped him once played out.

In practice, this meant that we had a thin skeleton of a film and a whole lot of space that might, through the act of placing ourselves into the hands of god and the universe, be filled with amazing moments. Or go nowhere. We frequently made reference to the moment in Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, where the film has degenerated into a slow slog upriver through the jungle and the cast and crew are given daily shot lists containing only the words, “scenes unknown”.

We did have a daily list of locations and people for our lead actor, Jef, to interact with. Many were people with incredible stories about spiritual awakenings, tragic war stories, or personal loss, like a man who’d lost his twin baby girls just weeks after they were born. Others were representative characters from David’s personal history. Having just watched, Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s latest ultra-meta film, I was well primed to enjoy the beauty of watching Jef, the actor, playing “David”, the character, based on David, the writer/director, who sat watching as Jef kissed David’s former crushes and ex-girlfriends, who were often playing the roles of other, different ex-girlfriends from David’s past. Most of the people Jef was to interact with were non-actors and so through their interactions, they would ask questions probing into who he (David, the character) was. This would prompt Jef to improvise and feel out the character that was emerging, and occasionally ask David (the director) to give him a story or talk about how he would respond to a given situation.

While I (and many others) originally questioned why it was that David didn’t simply play himself in this journey, it quickly became clear that he had made the right choice. Jef was unburdened by David’s ideas about what he could and couldn’t discuss with the people who had great personal weight in his life. There was also room for David himself to step back from the situation and see the interactions in a new light, as well as have enough distance to make decisions about what to cut and where to dive in deeper.

To Be Continued…

Next Episode: It Begins!

Mark Gill (former president of Miramax) is the most popular prophet of the end of the indie film world with his now famous sky is falling speech. What he said was nothing particularly new or surprising, but it sums up what has been happening of late. Where once there was a dim hope of having a career of some sort as an independent film producer, that dim hope has become the candle that just went out: if I close my eyes and focus I can still just maintain the illusion. In many ways struggling to become a filmmaker has become more like fighting the odds to become a rock star.

I’ve previewed enough film submissions to know that even though 5000 feature length films were entered into Sundance this last year, it’s doesn’t mean that many were, despite their two million dollar and up budgets, even watchable. Statistically only about five of those have a chance of making money. But it does mean that there is so much noise in the system that it’s almost impossible to be noticed.

Admittedly, I spent far too long working on other people’s projects before doing my own. This has put me a bit behind the curve, but what I’ve seen is that many of those friends who’ve produced a lot more and better work, have had successful festival runs, and even received small theatrical releases still aren’t bringing in any more food money than I do. In a quick informal survey after a recent shoot most were living off of about $9k a year. I felt like a wealthy baron with my $13k and health insurance.

This is the moment when you wake up and realize that you are not building a career, but are in fact living much more like a painter. (Although, sadly, the brushes are far more expensive.) It doesn’t make me want to quit making films. On the contrary, I feel liberated. If I don’t have to fuss about the potential commercial success of projects I work on, I can focus instead on making things I care about. Their value is determined entirely by my own metrics, and not where they might take me.

I’ve also been repressing my other artistic outlets, like writing and music, so that I could focus on film projects. This shift also means that taking time to work on music, either for one of my current film projects or an album of children’s music, becomes more viable. Without profit there is only art.

Kevin Bewersdorf comes from a different world. Despite his work in indie film, he considers himself to have been in the realm of painters and installation artists from the beginning. We exist in a new era wherein individual copies of an artwork have no inherent value. Everything digital is immediately pirated and available for free online. So borrowing from the world of prints, he made limited edition DVDs of one of his recent video installation projects and sold them, with certificates of authenticity, for extremely high prices. The buyers know they can get a copy of the work itself for free online. What they are buying instead is a piece of the artist’s work that may increase in value as a collectable over time and, more importantly, they have the opportunity to support a valued artist’s continued productivity.

I should also note, for the record, that Kevin’s deadpan, playfully sardonic artwork has been hugely inspirational to me lately. Highly recommended are his photographs and his Four Sacred Logos bit.

So while the road may have become rough with the remains of broken dreams fallen to earth, it doesn’t mean that I have to stop and turn back. If the sky really is falling, I can finally take my head out of the clouds and realize that what remains to be seen is just as beautiful.

The story sounded simple enough. Four filmmakers drive down to San Antonio to shoot a story about ghosts in a crumbling old mansion… just as a massive hurricane begins sweeping across Texas. It was as we began loading the van that I first noticed something odd. “Gee Bryan, I don’t see any lights,” I said. “Of course not,” he replied, “There’s no electricity”.

The house had been falling apart for many years. The massive grecian columns were shedding the last of their sun-bleached paint to reveal the cracked wood beneath. The old chain link fence that wrapped the front of the place was completely overgrown with an ivy bursting with purple flowers. Bees swarmed around and through them and danced about the metal sign that read, “No Trespassing”.

The porch was a nest of rotting teeter totter boards that groaned and cried quietly beneath my feet as I heaved camera equipment to the door. Just inside I swung the sound mixer off of my shoulder and dropped a handful of sand bags. The owner of the neighboring restaurant had bought the house out from under the previous owners after the trouble started. Now he seemed to be using it as a storage space, as I was surrounded by tall, thin metal mushrooms of the sort used to heat an outdoor patio during the winter. Stepping through the little forest I had to climb around a pile of fat CO2 canisters squatting in the corner and past a huge rolling metal storage container.

The modern tools of the restaurant trade were loathe to extend any deeper into the house than the front room and I left them behind to explore. The railings had all been removed from the massive staircase and I could already see the evidence of the young woman’s chainsaw work. She had stripped the house of all drywall or plaster and left only the bare skeletal structure. Next to the stairs the floor had been torn away as well, and I could see through the lines of boney ribs to the earth below. Under the stairs, protruding only halfway up through the remnants of a floor was a sink, still installed and complete with copper pipes running off into the bowels of the house. It was as though it were designed for babies to crawl across the floor to the bowl to bathe. Equally as mysterious, a toilet sat resting, isolated, on top of the exposed floor supports.

I climbed up past the outline of an archway to the second floor where the damage was much the same with the exception of one room. Some of the ceiling and three of the walls had been covered with new drywall and painted a bright pink color. The remaining wall was no more than exposed studs, and light shone up past the ends of the floorboards. At the center of the room a brand new ceiling fan hung down into the room. It was like a guest in a tuxedo showing up for a barn raising, dangling from on high to survey, with nose held high, the piles of old nails, rat feces and raw wood thick with years of dust.

I left this odd oasis to climb a metal ladder into the attic. Here the low roof sagged inwards towards me like a wet blanket. Instead of supporting or repairing it, they had popped in a new skylight that protruded from the tired wood like a pimple. Again all of the wood structure was exposed with the exception of but a fragment of original plaster, from which a tuft of pink insulation dripped towards a hole in the floor. Despite this, absurdly, to one side was a set of sliding glass doors that opened onto a tiny, exposed portion of the roof.

The dreamers who had come to this house years ago had arrived with great vision and little skill or money. The tall bamboo helped hide the eyesore from afternoon diners, but at some point the little mexican restaurant next door couldn’t play their music loud enough to cover the screaming as the young couple began throwing each other’s clothes out onto the street. Their fights grew louder and more frequent. It was the chainsaw being taken to the walls that finally lead the restaurant owner, fearing for his business, to buy them out.

No one really knows what happened to bring them to that point, but anyone who has tried to rebuild an old house (including Wendy Spies and myself) might have a few ideas. Our fearless director Bryan Poyser had a few ideas of his own, and you can see how they play out when he completes this next film.

Sadly it didn’t turn out, as I’d hoped, that a big budget reality film was being shot of us. I kept waiting for the moment that the door wouldn’t open and we’d be forced to spend the night in the place, or for something to grab my leg. Instead we had absolutely incredible natural light that made each shot look like a million dollars. At one point, watching Kevin walk up the staircase into golden light filtering through light clouds of dust, we all swore we’d just seen him ascend into heaven.

Soon this old house with all of its history and mysteries will be rolled off into another young couple’s dreams and the land left behind will become a parking lot. Even then, it could well be the place that a pair of future newlyweds emerges from a romantic dinner at the restaurant next door to share a first kiss. I’m glad we were able to add one more piece of history, and capture a bit of the soul of this place before it moves on.

All photos by Kevin Bewersdorf

When I met Andrew Berends a few years ago at the Silverdocs documentary film festival, he had just finished two films about Iraq. He was the tall crazy guy who had worked his way into the country and braved gunfire to follow the personal stories of Iraqis. I immediately gravitated towards him and we hit it off and had lunch together in a field that, for some reason, became the center of a football game. We decided not to move and sat eating and talking as footballs and angry flying teenagers flew over our heads. I made fun of him for the likelihood that it made him feel right at home. Later, when we were going around a circle of filmmakers talking about what we were going to do next he said simply, “Nigeria. You know. Oil. Rebels.” He was just arrested and detained as a spy by the Nigerian military.

AP Wire

New York Times

The documentary and journalist communities are doing what they can to get the word out and get him freed. For the moment, things are looking positive and while he has at times been denied food and water, the hope is that he will be released soon and this was simply a tactic to apply pressure on foreign journalists. I hope the same can be said for his translator and the local who was traveling with them.

Curiously enough, I was in the process of researching a pet project of mine about a man who’s freed hundreds of Chinese dissidents when I got this message. I had just about reached the point that I was going to give up on the project, as the situation had changed quite a bit and I wasn’t sure I could see the documentary angle that would work. I was also in the process of writing a blog entry about my experience playing guitar this weekend. Now all I can think about is what am I doing sitting here in the US wasting time?!

It’s not that I’m excited about being tortured. (I also listened to some of the grueling torture details touted at the Republican Convention earlier.) But what am I doing with myself here? This weekend I spent a day or two working out PHP’s new object based database system. Today I tweaked security on a system that allows students to check out microphones. These jobs are for someone else, someone who can’t swing a camera and sleep under the stars in a foreign land. There is something bigger I need to be doing.

I hope Andrew is OK. I do know that he’s doing what he loves and that he knew the risks going in, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Good luck. You’re doing it right.