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

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Jane is in from Paris for a week. Between MIP this and Sunnyside that and a $500 air fare, we’ve managed to squeeze some time in for transcontinental producing.

Yesterday, poor Jane looked at footage with bleary, jet-lagged eyes. Debbie has amassed about 40 minutes worth of scenes, mostly of Justin at HotWired and Howard Rheingold’s house last summer. Good stuff. Needs trimming, but then we’re intentionally keeping it long for now. We’ll cut for pacing when we go to the non-linear system. Then we came downtown to my office and screened a ton of raw footage to give her a sense of the wider cast of characters.

Jane says she’s getting strong interest in Home Page from European tv. They love the proposal and the sample, but want reassurance that it'll focus on Justin and pals rather than yet “another middle-aged guy ruminating on his navel.”

Rest assured, the last thing I want is to expose my navel to the world. Justin’s is far more attractive.

On the other hand, what's a middle-aged docu guy like me to do when Justin pulls my shirt up?

Speaking of navel gazing, the other night DocuClub featured the master of cinema verite, Albert Maysles, showing some clips from his films and ruminating on docu filmmaking. It’s awesome to behold the body of work he created with his late brother, David: Salesman, Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. He also screened short exerpts from a doc being made on him (great idea!), a short unreleased doc the Maysles made with the Beatles when they first came to America (which heavily influenced A Hard Day’s Night), some footage with Marlon Brando goofing on some interviewers, and more.

The 70 year-old Al strikes me as amazingly youthful, warm and open to people, yet curiously close-minded, even bitter, towards current cultural fashions. “Photography is dead!” he claims. “Cinematography is dead!” I mean to challenge him on this assertion, since I sense he’s exaggerating to make a point, but our Magnificent Fearless Leader, Susan Kaplan, is videotaping for posterity and asks me to take over after a while. It’s hard to debate from behind the lens.

Interesting that Al remembers every bad review (30 years later he can quote them verbatem), and goes out of his way to lambast Walter Goodman of the New York Times as the single most incompetent critic in America. I couldn’t agree more. More on that someday soon.

Meanwhile, I’m awaiting word from the good folks at Media 100 about getting a system donated to the cause. Avid has been unresponsive to my ardent courtship, without even the good manners to say no. Well, a pox on them, I say. I’ve heard good things about the Media 100 and they seem to actively want to get the word out about their system to the indie film community.

Well, indie film folk are my devoted readership. I mean, every last person making an indie film reads The D-Word religiously, or so my marketing and research people tell me. A match made in heaven, yes?

Jane’s due in 20 minutes so I’ll keep this mercifully short. Today we work on budgets. Dream budget, get real budget, what-if-we- get-no-more-money-at-all-what-will-it-take-to-finish-it budget. Fun stuff like that. I’ve been putting it off for months. It’s time to look the tiger in the face.

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