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

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Now that it’s summer and our kids aren’t in school together, I only get to talk with Michel by phone. His new sci-fi doc is going well. It’s called Underground Robot, and it’ll screen as a work-in-progress at the IFFM this year. I report that a Variety article has singled him out as one of the celebrated filmmakers attending. Hail hail, helmer.

He'll also be in the No Borders program there and I advise him to make sure the buyers get his sample tape ahead of time. Last year I had ten meetings at No Borders, and since they were set up by the buyers themselves, I just assumed they would view the samples ahead of time, either at the formal screening or in the video library. Silly me. Ten meetings where I had to use 20 of my alloted 30 minutes explaining -- over and over-- what my project is about.

The very same IFFM called the other day to confirm I’ll be moderating a panel this year called, The Documentary Marketplace, or some such depressing notion. Could be a very short discussion.

There is no marketplace for docs, folks. Thanks so much for coming!

And scarce little marketplace for any ilk of small indie film, for that matter. A quick glance at this week’s Variety tells the story. Fall is traditionally the season for art films and specialized fare, but this year the studios are releasing “a fall harvest teeming with star vehicles and pricey pics.” Michel sez Sande Zeig (our theatrical distributor for Jupiter’s Wife) complained she can’t find theaters to book her films into these days.

So wait a second, lemme see if I've got this straight. Home Page is a documentary, which rarely get theatrical distribution. Strike one. It was shot on small format video. Strike two. Now you’re saying, even if it wins awards, makes a big stink and gets picked up, the distrib can’t get it into theaters? Strike three, I'm outta here!!!

I can practically hear you thinking: Why would anyone in their right mind want to make a documentary feature?

Very good question.

I read on. Variety reports that Good Machine just made a joint international sales deal with October Films. It’s a logical move. Smart indie production companies like Good Machine move up the food chain by making first-look deals with studios, or forming foreign sales divisions (or in this case, both). October’s first world-wide pickup is Year of the Horse, a Jim Jarmusch documentary that follows a Neil Young concert tour (I’d see that!).

I make a mental note. October is getting the financing and forging the “strategic alliances” to duke it out with Mirimax, but they’ll still pick up the rare documentary. Yeah, I know, it’s Jarmusch, it’s Neil Young, but, hey, Home Page has Justin. Not to mention, my mother.

Good Machine was intrigued by the Home Page sample but ultimately passed for now saying they wouldn’t know how to market it. A pretty standard answer. You can’t take rejection personally. If they can get past it being a doc it would be a good fit. I’ll go back to them later when I’m done.

Ya need blind faith to be a producer. A morbid sense of humor helps, too.

Our brand new Media 100 crashed all weekend and neither the tech support people there nor the ProMax techies (where we bought the hardware) could solve things, so we had to Fed Ex the computer and software back out to California. It’s still there.

Naturally, when the Media 100 arrived last week we immediately took our vhs edit deck in for a long-needed repair. It’s still there. So now we have neither system to edit on.

So Debbie and I turn our attention to story structure issues. We hash out my daughter Lucy’s role in the film. She’s the future, the bearer of the consequences. She’s also my reflection. We decide I don’t ever need to explain her, so I shouldn’t narrate her scenes to set them up. Just let them be.

We have tons of very meaty interviews with Justin back in his dorm room at Swarthmore, but how the hell do we use them? Over pork chops at the Bendix Diner, we get an idea. We’ll voice ‘em over images from his road trip. We have lots of footage of that but, because they were shot kinda amatuerishly by friends of Justin’s local hosts, they don’t play well as scenes. And Justin was constantly being grilled by his hosts and the media, so it fits the emotional experience of his trip... one long grueling interview. It doesn’t have to be linear. We can take his best comments, put them on index cards, toss them in the air and use them in the order they land for all that matters. It’s almost impressionistic.

Then there’s the matter of Julie’s affair. She never spoke comfortably or well about it, no matter how often I probed. I've always felt having all three of the principals telling the story is crucial, but now we’ll pare the whole subplot down, make it less central, and use Patrick and Jim to tell the story. It’ll be a case of less is more, and won’t derail the narrative momentum with a major digression.

What else? Oh, yeah, A Perfect Candidate was on POV the other night but I forget to tell people. It’s a really terrific film, and I’m proud of my contribution to it, so y'all be sure to see it when it’s repeated sometime this week. Caught the last half hour and note that they’ve given it the “film look” treatment. Think I’ll look into that for the Cinemax airing, if I have even a nickel left by that time.

I get to see Michel up close and personal after all. He came by yesterday to show me his ten-minute sample from Underground Robot for some feedback and because I’ll be doing some shooting on it over the next few weeks while he’s away on a two-week family vacation. It’s hard to tell how it’ll all work (as a sample, that is) because so much is dependent on Harmonic Ranch's sound design and the robot's narration for mood, and that hasn’t been done yet. But the images, shot with a digital camcorder, are spectacular. Lots of steam, machinery, anxious scientists racing the clock to save the Manhattan infrastructure before it collapses.

There's one particularly impressive shot of two scientists talking, their faces glowing like aliens. “How did you do that?” I ask Michel. The steam fogged the lens, he tells me. Old fashioned special effects a la Negroponte, brother of Mr Digital himself.

I make a mental note. I want to shoot an extreme close-up pan of Julie and Patrick’s e-mail correspondence, and I want it to glow just like that, to illustrate our feeling that the real erotic impulse came from their words.

How do I get the lens to steam up like that? The camera would have to be brought inside to my computer screen from a very cold place (like outdoors in winter or, say, a large meat locker). But I’ll have to wait til November or December, which is really pushing it. Or maybe After Effects has a fog effect. The words have gotta glow off that screen...

The IFFM just called again. They must have picked up on my vibe ‘cause they want me to moderate a different panel now. Featuring Documentaries, they’re thinking of calling it. It'll deal with the various artistic and business decisions involved in preparing a documentary feature for a theatrical release.
Well, I can think of one issue: There is no theatrical marketplace out there for documentary features, boys and girls.

Thanks so much for coming.

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