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

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I'm drowning
in footage. It washes over my waking hours, seeps into my dreams...

100 hours. That's what a damn Hi-8 camera does to you. You shoot and shoot and it costs nothing, practically. But some day you have to pay the piper. You realize that simply logging and screening this footage will take 8 hours a day for 6 weeks. Or that transferring it to betacam SP and making window dubs costs about $100/hour with tape stock.

Glug, glug.

But the good news is the footage is very exciting. It's not like I didn't sort of know this as I was shooting it. But now I have Debbie's reactions as a barometer. And she's like truth serum. When she laughs it's because something's genuinely funny.

She's been laughing a lot.

I've been coughing a lot.

Had the flu for the past 8 days. Serious stuff. Still coughing, but I feel half human now.

Debbie comes over to my apartment and we screen footage here, punctuated by phlegmy wracking coughs that send my ribs into spasms. Alternately shivering and sweating. By Friday, Debbie's starting to exhibit her own flu-like symptoms.

Good material, though. In the end, what else matters but the material? The past few days we mostly screen stuff I shot at the Digital Storytelling Festival last October. Abbe and Justin, and Rob Bottorf in the mountains. Rob had hosted Justin on his summer tour stay in Wichita. Had driven for most of a day to meet up with him again. With his flat midwestern affect, he reads to Abbe and Justin from a Rolling Stone article about the Death of the Web Dream. Abbe and Justin, transfixed on their computer screen, too busy with Minds, work to dream, crack up.

An interesting character, Rob. Many years older yet inspired by Justin, he now writes a daily online diary. Trying to stay wired from the hinterlands. I had someone shoot for me in Wichita, but the footage was skimpy and he never got anything with Rob. Still, he'll be a presence.

When not screening or sleeping, I read John Seabrook's new book, Deeper, and watch videos:

• Before The Rain (never watch a gloomy Macedonian war film with tiny sub-titles when you have a fever)
• Heat - with Pacino and DeNiro (on the other hand, a great flu film!)
• Something Wild (my favorite Jonathan Demme film and a riot on basic tv, as Ray Liotta charges Jeff Daniels screaming "Gosh darn it!")
• She's The One, a valentine's concession to my wife, and the worst film I've seen in years and years. Ed Burns, a genuine no-talent writer and feeble-assed director, is the embodiment of everything that's wrong with the Next Big Thing feeding frenzy of indie filmmaking today. What the fuck was Good Machine thinking?!?

Until then... I screen and log, screen and log, screen and log. Even in this state I recognize there's a real film here.

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