The D-Word's life is one of glamour and riches, as only a documentary filmmaker can live it

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Director's Vision
December 16, 1996

I should be working
on my proposal. Jane keeps bugging me for it.

She wants what's known in Europe as a Director's Vision statement. They want to know what my film is about and how I intend to realize it stylistically. Don't you love that-- a culture where they actually care about things like content and style.

It's vital, she tells me. This vision thing. Commissioning Editors over there just don't hand out money to people like me whom they don't know, even if they know the films I've helped produce. They know Jane, though. Jane was my producing partner on Silverlake Life and Jupiter's Wife, and now, hopefully, on Home Page. She lives in Paris. She knows all the players in television land.

The internet is really starting to take off in Europe and I thought we'd get a lot of interest. Problem is, we're running into a bunch of Web luddites who don't understand what all the hype is about. What's a home page, they ask. What do you mean browsing the Web with a Hi-8 camcorder? Will you be shooting anything else besides computer screens?

Three or four pages is all, but I'm having a hard time getting to it. Had the same problem with The Heck With Hollywood! Never ever came up with a synopsis I liked, that captured not just the underlying seriousness of the themes but also the bemused tone. In fact, it was only when some of the reviews came out that I went, huh, so that's how I could have described it.

Anyway, I'm doing major avoidance. Doing more browsing than usual. Checking out some of the hotlinks at the bottom of Justin's daily journal entries. Most impressed with Gabby's site and told her so in an e-mail. Also impertinent enough to suggest she make it more personal. Sensed she wanted to do so but was doing major left-brained fence-sitting. Maybe just needed encouragement.

My words clearly had an effect. It's what I love most about the Web and yearn to capture on film. The links. How closely we're all linked. How easily we can eavesdrop on people's lives and choose to connect.

Gabby and BillW inspired me to get off my ass and get back to my own entries.

And now I'm doing this instead of writing my Director's Vision.

I have the vision, alright. Editor Debbie and I are primed to attack the 96 hours of footage to-date. I already see connections, links, thematic threads...

The home page as metaphor for identity, for our need to make a mark on the world. Utilizing the metaphor to assess myself in midlife. A life observed behind a camera lens. Am I my work? Memories kept alive and real in video images.

I have a wife and child and stepson. Closer to retirement age than my teenage years. Why am I so attracted to these kids in their 20's doing their geek thing? Have I grown up yet? What is Justin to me? A surrogate son? The kid I wish I was again? The seeker I never was? The genius I'll never be? Well, clearly a life force I want to tap.

To focus so intently on another is a funny way to make an autobio. But it feels right to me. The home page metaphor allows it.

When you first decide to put up a home page what do you do? You think about how you wish to portray yourself to the world at large, right? Then you kind of obsess. Then you look around at what other people are doing for ideas, inspiration and stuff to flat-out appropriate (thank you, Maggy).

In the guise of this private person, someone privileged to enter other people's lives and tape pieces of them, observing all the while on a tiny video screen inside the camera eyepiece, I search the web for inspiration. And find Justin. He's incredibly well-linked. He seems the physical embodiment of the internet. He becomes my guide, my guru, the grinning Cheshire cat to my Alice in Wonderland.

Will they understand this in Europe? Understand my search for community and connectedness in an age when both are increasingly precious commodities? I'm not alone in my longing, of that I'm sure. Isn't everyone looking for home?

I know this much about the internet, knew it from the moment I hit my first hypertext link. For all of the media's gold-rush mentality and obsession with technology, the real lure for people like me is the desire to connect with other people. It's that simple. And that universal. That's my director's vision.

It's close to 1am. The clock ticks loudly. My loved ones lie asleep in the dark apartment. I gaze out of my 6th floor Manhattan window barely able to make out the shape of the Stuy Town high-rises surrounding me. 50,000 people live in this complex. How many are sitting up right now pondering their place in the universe?

How many are on the Web?

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