Dear friends,
I’m writing this from the back of a van driving north to Maine, my mom having taken the wheel from me in New Haven, my dad now riding shotgun and making various lane-changing suggestions that Mom systematically ignores.
We’re on the way back from the Tribeca Film Festival, and I’m thinking about film festivals. For the first half of my life, I did not know they existed. Most people never go to one. This is not an unreasonable choice: the passes are expensive and the aura pretentious. (I’ve been told that being a documentary filmmaker is synonymous with being pretentious. This is also not unreasonable, but we’ll crack that chestnut another day.)
Let me tell you what a film festival like for me. In the days leading up to yesterday’s premiere of Shelf Life at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, I grew increasingly nervous. Nervous about what? Here’s a list:
- Was the final movie I sent to the festival flawed in some way?
- Would people show up?
- Would the projection look good?
- Would my colleagues be happy, especially that one colleague who I can never tell if they are happy or not?
- Would there be a power outage or a tornado, or would I feel when watching the film that I had wasted my life?
- Would reviewers write mean things about the film and reveal, finally, we all knew it was coming, that I am naught but a loser and a nitwit, and that everyone knows that I haven’t actually seen many movies, and prefer reading books anyway, so I don’t belong in the company of proper cinephiles and true artists, and should be stripped of my cameras and my old film festival lanyards, and perhaps given a bit of a public whipping with one of those red velvet ropes from the stanchions outside the theater, as if the theater were some sort of nightclub?
- Or would the festival decide at the last minute that there’d been some mistake, and they had meant to invite someone else’s cheese film, maybe a cheese film made by my former best friend in high school who betrayed me by making out with my high school girlfriend, a betrayal that was quite unenjoyable in those otherwise enjoyable years of the 1990s even though the relationship was doomed anyway and well he doesn’t even make documentary films and I haven’t thought about him or this ridiculous and inconsequential betrayal in years but what if somehow our showing was cancelled and my parents and I, after driving 7+ hours from Maine to New York City in a 1984 van would have to just turn around and drive back, and then what if the van broke down or I had to change a tire with my father watching, or what if I got a migraine?
Which is to say, in the days leading up to a premiere, an irrational anxiety sets in and there ain’t a whole lot getting round it. It’s entangled with excitement too, the sort of thrill of public performance that I first experienced appearing on stage in plays and rock bands through high school and college: you gear up for it. It spins you up, it steals your sleep, but I cannot quite imagine living without it. I have premiered 15 films in film festivals over the last two decades, many of these films having multiple premieres — the World Premiere which is your first showing, anywhere, the International Premiere which is your first showing abroad, then all sorts of regional premieres… and eventually the word premiere loses its meaning, see above about the aura of pretension.
Anyway, on the day of this particular premiere, which was slated for 5:45pm in Manhattan’s East Village, I left midcoast Maine at 6am, in the fog and rain, first picking up our associate producer Sara who had come north for the week to help with a shoot, then picking up our producer Manette who had worked on the cheese film from its infancy, and then my parents, who have come to many of my movie premieres and enjoy an opportunity to get outta dodge.
By the time we crossed into Manhattan, the day was hot and humid. Tribeca had booked me a room at a hotel in New York’s financial district, a few yards from Wall Street and as far as I could tell nowhere near the neighborhood called Tribeca, but a free hotel room is a glorious thing, if they’d booked me a room in Denver I would have stayed there. We got there around 3pm and the hotel told me that my van was too big to park anywhere. I drove around to a few parking garages staffed by nitwits who had probably betrayed their high school best friends and who would not accept my beautiful oversized van, finally finding a friendly fellow who suggested I pay him $92 for the pleasure of parking in his vacant lot for 18 hours. This was on Pearl Street, and I love the word pearl, so I went with it, and after checking into the hotel and declining the free prosecco, I donned my jogging costume and ran around the seaport for a while, driving off the spleen so to speak and weaving among the tourists lined up to see the Statue of Liberty. On the wind I caught the strange sparkling smell of New York Harbor which I remembered from my years in Red Hook — a scent memory. After a shower, I put on some of my only clothes that do not have paint on them, and took an Uber uptown with my parents to the theater.
The sidewalk outside the theater was crowded with people and photographers. The marquee announced the “Tribeca Festival” in big letters, and I mused briefly that they’d dropped the “film” part of the festival’s name, perhaps hedging against some future world in which the pretentious filmmakers are finally deposed and publicly whipped, our movie showings replaced by branded trade show expositions, podcast listening stations and tech talks.
I loved seeing our whole crew there on the sidewalk. They were all dressed up and radiant and didn’t appear to be worrying about public whippings or imposter syndrome, so we fell in together and greeted friends before wandering over to the red carpet, where we’d been instructed to appear 30 minutes before our showing. Another film team was there, even more fancily dressed, with much gold, and there were photographers and press interviewing them. Once they cleared out, we took a big team picture on the red carpet, and even though our film hadn’t attracted the attention of the Cheese Film Paparazzi, there’s something about standing on a red carpet, no matter how small, that makes you feel like your doggone movie is finally done.
Ninety minutes later, as the film’s credits began to roll in this beautiful theater about 90% full of friends and strangers, and as I rummaged in my tote bag for the hotel stationary upon which I’d written the names of crew members I wanted to thank, and as I prepared to walk up on stage with my executive producer Robyn, who had come up with the idea for this film in the first place, and with a cheesemaker who had flown in last minute from the Pyrenees after watching a preview cut of the film and deciding he had to be there to celebrate with us in person, and as I looked across at my parents who were not only still awake but seeming genuinely moved by the experience, and as I realized that 24 hours later I’d be home with my own family, my amazing wife and kids and the seacoast fog and my still-under-construction-office where I hoped to make more movies, more and more and more, because I learn so much making them, and grow so much, despite the films often being impossibly hard to fund and finish, in a media environment that I don’t even pretend to understand, and with the pivot point of a film’s life being a strange festival attended by hardly anyone, statistically speaking, but which nonetheless provides those of us who make these films a sense of completion, an opportunity to mark time, to share our work, to briefly convey something of what is inside us to others, and which might lead to broader distribution, these films eventually reaching tens of thousands or sometime millions of people, many of whom I’d never meet, never sit elbow-to-elbow with in a movie theater listening to their laughter and their puzzlement and all the other tiny reactions I listen for as I watch our movie go public for the first time — as I thought about all that, there in the dark, with the credits winding down, with not a typo in the lot, I exhaled.
thanks for writing this one.
I love you!