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

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Debbie shows me the Cyborganic Halloween Party scene she’s been cutting. Justin, dressed as an old man, sits in the upstairs office with Abbe Don and Marjorie Ingall. Marjorie is teasing Justin about his boy-like tendency to run from intimacy. Abbe pipes in that Justin’s been complaining at the office about how his ailing hands have put a crimp in his sex life. “Yeah,” says Justin, “ya can’t finger pussy with carpal tunnel.”

Debbie and I agree this should be the new tag line for the movie. I can see the poster now: an image of Justin with his hands bandaged and underneath: “Ya can’t finger pussy with carpal tunnel.”

Maybe then people won’t take us so Siriusly.

Since we’re on the subject, it’s time to set something straight about how Debbie and I work together. I’m the director, she’s the editor. But it goes well beyond that, as we’ve been close friends since the days we first collaborated on the editing of The Heck With Hollywood!

Back then, she was a novice editor, I was a novice filmmaker. She’d been an actress, a tv producer and, before that, a rehab counselor. I was a cameraman and had a background in editing, but mostly as an assistant. Craftwise, we’ve both come a long way since. Even from the beginning, though, Debbie was brilliant about story and character. Craft can be learned, but an intuitive understanding of where the heart of a scene lies is something else.

Another thing I noticed from the beginning: we share the same sensibility. We laugh at the same things, we’re moved by the same things and we both strive to tell a story that combines both elements.

When we were screening and logging the 100-plus hours of footage last January and February, we had interviews transcribed and xeroxed in advance and we’d read them independently and come to my office with certain key phrases underlined. On more than one occasion, over the course of some thirty-page-plus interview, we'd have the exact same things underlined. Same in-points, same out-points.

Sometimes my wife and I complete each other’s sentences or think of things at the same time and we joke about wasting a brain. Debbie and I often waste a brain (when our brains aren't wasted, that is).

And sometimes my wife, ahem, jokes about my having two wives. And that I take them both way too much for granted.

It’s true. My own boy-like tendency, perhaps.

It's also true that Debbie has an obsessive-compulsive personality that can be maddening. Everything on earth must stop until the scene-at-hand is completed. More often than not, no matter what time I call, even if it’s returning her own call, I’m greeted with: “I can’t talk now!” It makes it difficult to plan anything. And she’s always late.

On the other hand, she’s fiercely loyal, dedicated, hard-working, funny as hell and, in her inimitable fashion, kind of a genius.

She’s deferred all her pay since March because we haven’t had enough money. She went in halfsies on the edit system. The “edit room” is her apartment.

Luckily, her husband is a doctor. (Not just any doctor, either. Amos is the Director of Maternal Fetal Medicine at St. Luke’s- Roosevelt Hospital. That was him between Marisa Tomei’s legs in The Paper. He’s got a terrific web site, too.)

Anyway, since we finished screening and logging the footage sometime mid-March, Debbie’s been squirreled away uptown making the first pass at the scenes. While we'd talked endlessly about how it all might fit together, even made rough paper edits, Debbie basically re-screened the material as she went and let it guide her editing choices.

Every week or so, I’d come uptown and critique what she’d done. Since I have more of a handle on the overview, and where my story will ultimately fit into the final film, she’d usually cut sequences long, allowing for room to fine tune later. I'd almost instantly see where things were working or not. Usually, it just took a slight adjustment.

Little by little, mostly in that fashion, the scenes have accumulated. It’s only in the past two months or so that I’ve begun spending long stretches in Debbie’s domain working with her to flesh out the structure, noting each scene on index cards and shuffling around the order.

I’m happiest when I’m in there. Who the hell wants to spend his days writing endless proposals, making endless phone calls, sending endless faxes and e-mails? That’s producing, of course. And even there I have a partner, Jane Weiner, working with me in Europe.

So just remember folks, The D-Word may get all of the attention, but there’s no way he can do it alone.

Repeat after me:
film is a collaborative medium
film is a collaborative medium
film is a collaborative medium

And Debbie is my prime collaborator.

She’s my artistic soulmate. If I’m (God help us!) the brains of the operation, Debbie is the heart and soul.

I hope Jared appreciates how much he can learn from her.

If the film winds up being any good, it’s because it comes filtered through her razor-sharp bullshit detector.

And because we both agree on the fundamental things. Such as, you can’t finger pussy with carpal tunnel.

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