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

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I call it the thingie. The deal thingie.

I've gone back and forth on the deal thingie with Joe Cantwell of Bravo Networks/IFC, ever since South-by-Southwest. Which means we’ve been dicking around for over a year -- an e-mail here, a phone call there, with weeks, even months, of silence in between.

Now, halfway through the six-hour flight out to L.A. for the Yahoo! Internet Life Online Film Festival, I take out the letter of agreement one last time, wracking my brain for anything I might have overlooked. It's hard to believe it can all be wrapped up so tidily.

At a pay phone by baggage claim, I call Joe and verbally commit.

When I get to my hotel room an hour later, the press release is already waiting for my approval:

March 22, 2000 IFC today announced Doug Block's Home Page, the first film ever to be released simultaneously in theaters and on the Internet, as the newest addition to DV Theater (Digital Video Theater), IFCs new monthly multi-platform programming strand. In July, Home Page will premier on IFC and begin airing online at www.ifctv.com and on IFC Broadband. Internet users will see a serialized version of the film, while IFC Broadband will air Home Page in its entirety.

The latest phase of IFC's ongoing commitment to providing viewers with the most cutting-edge programming available, DV Theater takes the movie-watching experience above and beyond existing parameters with an innovative, multi-platform approach that reaches on-air, Broadband and Internet audiences simultaneously.

“Using cutting-edge technology is useless without providing the engaging and entertaining content that independent film fans demand,” said Joe Cantwell, executive vice president of new media for Bravo Networks. “Offering fans exclusive access to Home Page across all of our platforms is an important step in our evolution to indie film’s digital media leader.”

In addition to its on-air, online and Broadband release, Home Page is scheduled to also be released for home video viewing via video-on-demand (VOD), VHS and DVD, as well as to user’s online via digital download.

A coming of age story set in the exuberant early days of the web, Home Page was a hit at the 1999 Sundance and Rotterdam film festivals. It became a landmark in November when it began streaming in its entirety on the Internet, a week before its critically acclaimed theatrical opening. The film was called “groundbreaking” by Roger Ebert (who named it one of his favorite documentaries of 1999) and a “fascinating, provocative and witty personal exploration” by Entertainment Weekly.

Home Page focuses on cyber celeb Justin Hall, who gained notoriety in early 1996 for his obsessively personal and sexually graphic daily online diary, Justin’s Links from the Underground (www.links.net). Block’s camera follows Hall’s search for connection and community - both on and offline - from college, to a zany cross-country tour of web evangelism and to San Francisco, the nerve center of the digital revolution. There the film branches out to include the stories of other pioneering web publishers who cross Hall’s path, including his mentor, renowned author Howard Rheingold, Carl Steadman, the co-founder of Suck, Julie Peterson, an editor at HotWired, and ultimately filmmaker Block himself, who finds the lure of the web impossible to resist (www.d-word.com).

“The fact that all of the major characters in Home Page continue to write about their lives online gives the film an inherent interactivity that’s a natural for Broadband,” said Doug Block, director and producer of Home Page. “IFC has always been a great TV showcase for indie films and I’m sure they will be equally successful with Broadband. I’m really proud and excited that Home Page has found a home there.”

But I can't help it. I've begun working on my next film and, God help me, I think it's a sequel of sorts to Home Page. Or at least a continuation.

Instead of being about the web, it's about convergence, which is the big media story going on right now, and a story I've somehow found myself right in the middle of. Which means it’ll reek with dark humor.

It's about the convergence of media and the convergence of human beings.

It somehow involves my "Untitled NerveCenter Film Project," a series of interactive conversations where I ask folks all about their sex lives.

It somehow involves footage from some of the 50+ weddings I've shot over the past six years (a boy’s gotta eat, ya know), where I follow couples as they pledge undying fidelity and devotion to each other for the rest of their lives (or, as Kant defined marriage, the mutual, exclusive right to the use of each other's sexual organs).

It somehow involves being around Nerve, probably the sexist of web companies, at a time when everyone wants to get into bed with them.

And it somehow involves me.

Convergence?
On the Verge?
Man on the Verge?
Man on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown?

Ah well, shoot first, figure out how it all fits together later. The mantra of the digital video age.

And, so, at the crazy, chaotic Yahoofest, while all of Hollywood hustles to get on the net, I begin to shoot.

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