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

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Six weeks after the press release goes out and the deal thingie with The Independent Film Channel still isn’t finalized.

I’m told the premiere of DV Theater and the first broadcast of Home Page is scheduled for mid-July. I’ve been sent a four-page fax with delivery requirements. But no communication from Joe for weeks and now he’s in Cannes. Nothing from the promotion department. And, worst of all, nothing in writing from their legal beagles.

According to an insider, this isn’t unusual for IFC. “It’ll all come together at the last minute,” she tells me. “Or it won’t.” She laughs, probably because it’s not three years of her life at stake.

Luckily, I’m too busy multitasking to fret.

After considerable sweet-talking, not to mention, a healthy dose of filthy lucre, I’ve been hired as an advisor and consultant by the streaming media company, Eveo. I’ll primarily be working with Jason Thompson to develop their documentary channel, True Life, make it the place on the net for streaming non-fiction video, and to spread the word in the d-word community.

My first suggestion to Jason is that they lose the company slogan: “Everyone’s a director.” It’s a nod to this era of affordable digital camcorders, firewires and desktop editing systems, but it’s more like everyone’s a potential director.

Everyone’s a potentially godawful director, too.

To his credit, Jason chuckles. I'm being tongue-in-cheek.

But a big part of my role is to attract quality filmmakers to Eveo and make sure their work gets featured. Which kind of flies in the face of the slogan.

The concept behind the site is that viewers of streamed video on the web have the attention spans of knats, and they won’t watch anything longer than four minutes. So until the bandwith pipes get wider, or the plan changes, everything streamed there is a short, or “eveo,” of -- you guessed it -- less than four minutes.

Part of the deal is for me to submit five original eveos over the next six months. And I’m excited by the idea of playing with my camera again and finding an outlet for my creativity.

The fact is, though, that limitations can actually be extremely liberating. So I’m just as excited by all the other exhibition possibilities at Eveo.

For instance, taking already completed films and streaming them in eveo-length sections.

Or showcasing works-in-progress to help filmmakers get funding.

Or serializing longer works as they’re being edited to promote the finished film.

Or inspiring directors to break out of the box completely and reconfigure their films into bite-sized, non-linear pieces where the viewers determine the story –- supported by links to discussion threads or the websites of the filmmakers or the subjects of the film.

In other words, sparking a reconsideration of the very nature of how we tell true life stories in this still new, still thrilling, still revolutionary medium.

Okay, I go a little bit off the deep end sometimes. But it’s not like this stuff has to be all that complicated.

Take the Nerve project, for instance.

I’m sitting in my office with Dan, watching the four interviews I’ve shot, along with three more that interviewees have submitted. The idea is that the interviews are part of a casting process to find four to six “stars” from among the NerveCenter community for a kind of sex-laden virtual soap opera.

As you can imagine, it’s fun to be able to ask total strangers absolutely anything that pops into your mind about the intimate details of their sex lives. Educational, too.

Swerdloff, for instance, admits to masturbating three to five times a day. “Sometimes more,” he adds. “I’m amazed I haven’t whittled myself down to nothing.”

I can’t let this remark go, of course.

“So what’s your favorite jism receptacle?” I ask, with a straight face.

“Oh, paper towel. Spill it on a paper towel, clean it up, throw it away, go on with my day, go to class…”

“What brand of paper towel?”

“Bounty, maybe? I honestly don’t know. My parents buy them in bulk and drop them off. Prices are much better outside of Manhattan.”

“Uh, don’t your parents ever wonder why they’re dropping off so many paper towels?”

“Nahhhh, it’s hard keeping an apartment in the city clean.”

Fast-forwarding and randomly watching bits and pieces of the seven interviews, three things become really clear:

1) No one has the buck-naked need to reveal that made Justin such a riveting documentary subject.

2) Each interview is fascinating, anyway, because what's more interesting than real people talking openly and honestly and intelligently about their sex lives?

3) The power of the material is in the variety and range of the people we’ve interviewed, and contrast between them.

Afterwards, we're convinced that the project should go in a very different direction. Instead of limiting our choices to a few characters and building a traditional documentary around them, we should stream interviews with as much of the NerveCenter community as possible. They should be exhibited in a special area of the site that’s like a village unto itself. A cyber village where the residents drop their guard and talk freely about what others are too inhibited to disclose.

A name for it suddenly comes to mind.

Nervana.

It seems so simple, but it’s really a far more innovative and interactive use of convergence media than simply replicating what’s already being done, and far better, in old media. Rather than taking a passive model—the soap opera—and trying to squeeze it onto an active new medium, this allows the viewer to create the juicy drama themselves. The video clips let them go deeper and deeper into the cast of characters. The interactivity and drama can then play out, either asynchronously or in real time, on the discussion boards, chat areas, homepages and personals. In other words, don’t use the video to replicate what they already have, but rather to compliment it.

Nervana could be big, I think. Very very big. But then, what do I know?

As we pitch the Nerve staff on our new concept, I continue to shoot behind-the-scenes footage there, including the packed-to-the-gills launch party for their new print magazine. As I’ve said, shoot first, see where it fits later.

Speaking of seeing where things fit, I spend a few days holed up in the edit room to watch the 9-hour assembly of Love’s Story (tentatively retitled The Long Way Home, though nobody’s particularly keen on that, either).

The material is raw and powerful, and every scene goes on two or three times longer than necessary. My notes are like a broken record— this can be cut down... this can be cut out… do you really need this?… too long… repetitious… less is more… After a while, all I have to do is put pen to paper and Mona, the intrepid editor, moans. And the producer-director, Jennifer Dworkin, who’s devoted ten years of her life to the film, shoots not-so-silent daggers at my back.

There’s clearly an extraordinary film nestled there, like prime fillet mignon surrounded by fat. But it’ll take a lot more hacking and carving to get it out, and every flick of the knife will cut out a piece of Jennifer’s heart. I know the feeling all too well, and glad I won’t be witnessing it on a daily basis.

Last weekend, I shoot the wedding of Cicily Wilson, one of the daughters of the couple featured in Jennifer Fox’s epic documentary series, An American Love Story. Jennifer, herself, was one of the subjects of my first film, The Heck with Hollywood! and we’ve stayed friendly.

It’s a lovely, low-key event, capped by Cicily’s musician father singing a special song he’s written for the occasion. I pan over to the bride to film her reaction and capture her mother with head buried on Cicily’s shoulder, dissolved in tears.

Jennifer’s giving the footage to Cicily as wedding present, but she also has it in mind for part of a follow-up film to the series. Another case of shoot first, figure out how to use it later. I want to talk with her about doing some shorts for Eveo –- it might be just the thing for her after spending 8 years on the series -– but it’s not the time or place.

That night, I lie in bed, too exhausted and exhilarated to sleep, thinking about convergence.

I think about both Jennifers in their editing rooms, trying to make sense of hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage shot over the years.

I think about Nervana, and the possibilities it affords.

I think about my own semi-formed documentary, and all of the seemingly disparate elements I want in it – weddings, sex, Nerve, the convergence of media and the web… and me right there at the nerve center.

I wonder if it will all converge into a coherent narrative.

I wonder if I’m so up to my eyeballs in email and community and multitasking that I’ll ever get the isolation necessary to focus on another feature film.

I wonder if my attraction to non-linear storytelling and eveos isn’t just an excuse to get around the pain and torture of carving the fillet from the fat.

I wonder…

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