Making the film: Part I

Part 1: Preproduction

That fall of 2005, I was at creative loose ends. I was doing some magazine pieces and some short-story writing, but was looking for something more sustained, having finished a long project: My novel Warp & Weft had been published and that April, it was awarded the PEN New England-L.L. Winship Award, with the ceremony for both the Winship and the Pen-Hemingway (won that year by the phenomenal Nigerian poet and novelist Chris Abani) held at the Kennedy Library in Boston.
Fortuitously, the master of ceremonies was the novelist Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog and son of the late, great short story writer Andre Dubus, a “writer’s writer” who’d lived a veering, tragic and finally triumphant life. When I’d begun writing short stories in the early 1990s after leaving newspapers for academia and freelance writing, the elder Dubus had been a model of writing for me. That I should win the PEN-Winship, given that he had won the first one in 1975 and given that his son was handing me that award, represented a really wonderful circularity to my efforts in fiction writing. It also occurred to me, driving home that evening, that Dubus would be a wonderful subject for a documentary.
I’d explored several other options, with middling results. This topic, however, seemed to fit for several reasons: originality, accessibility and affordability.
The novelist Toni Morrison, when asked why she wrote what she wrote, once replied that it was because “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”
In more direct terms, it helps if what you choose to do has not been done. The pack mentality of so much daily journalism often leads to endless variations on a theme; indeed, the two dominating topics of documentaries I see on the film festival circuit are 1) Some aspect of the Iraq War, and 2) Some aspect of global warming. If you are the person to make the best of these – say, the $2 million Academy-Award-Winning “No End In Sight,” no problem. But of you are an unfunded, as-yet-highly-skilled, otherwise-gainfully-employed would-be documentary filmmaker, it helps to fill a niche that doesn’t exist, but wants to.
I began to explore what had been done on Dubus. I found, to my surprise, that not only had no documentary film been done on the man, but no biography had yet appeared in the time since his death in 1999. But, conversely, three things had happened that were very positive: Two films had been made from his work, Todd Field’s “In The Bedroom” (2001) and John Curran’s “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” (2004); Andre Dubus III’s novel had become a best-seller, Oprah book, and acclaimed film, which had created interest in the elder Dubus’s work. I also knew that there was a subculture of college and high school writing teachers who swore by Dubus as the model of what great short story writing should be.
So my working theory was that even a rough-edged film about a good topic was going to have some legs. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, it was a film I’d pay to see, except that it didn’t exist.
So, having gotten on track with a topic, I found myself using two models of approach, one involving topic, and the other involving audience.
The first model was the 1995 documentary film “Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” by Don Was. One might not remember Was as half of the 1980s pop group Was Not Was, but most people born after 1980 seem to recall their one big hit “Walk The Dinosaur” (the YouTube version is here, but don’t hate me if you involuntarily find yourself humming it for the next two days).
I saw the film on VHS on the big-screen of a friend who by trade is a pharmacist but by avocation is a music aficianado. The film works, in my opinion, because a) the filmmaker knows music, and therefore brings intelligence to the proceedings, b) the film does not simply chronicle the meteoric Wilson’s struggles with mental illness but rather explores how it made his music what it was, and c) Don Was understood that his audience was not broadly general as “everyone,” not as narrowly specific as “musicians,” but was as “broadly specific” as my pharmacist friend who had insisted I watch it with him.
The second model was the Boston documentary filmmaker Mary Mazzio. Mary is a former U.S. Olympic rower whose production company, 50 Eggs, first produced “A Hero For Daisy (1999)” which explored female athletes and the landmark Title IX decision that opened up women’s collegiate athletics. But it was her most recent project, “Lemonade Stories” (2004) that intrigued me.
“Lemonade Stories” is about entrepreneurs, and her film, which runs 48 minutes, has a star cast – Richard Branson of Virgin, Home Depot founder Arthur Blank, Def Jam Records Russell Simmons and USA Network founder Kay Koplovitz, and others. The way Mary got these big hitters to sit for interviews was nearly genius. The film is about entrepreneurs and their mothers, and who of these people was not going to support honoring their mothers’ support and love? People who would not have otherwise picked up the phone gladly agreed to participate.
The second and more important element of Mary’s shrewdness was that of funding and distributing. She worked a partnership with Babson College, a Boston-area institution with special curricular interest in entrepreneurship. Babson paid for the project and then got the benefit of both having the premiere of the film on the Babson Campus, as well as future attachment when the film plays.
In terms of distribution, Mary has marked her film for classroom use. The 48-minute running time allows a one-hour class time to assemble, have the professor introduce, and press Play. Babson College has further created study guides that help instructors use the film more effectively as a learning resource. And Mary has become a well-paid speaker at colleges and universities, taking a fee to discuss what she learned on the topic of entrepreneurship.
So, with a topic and game plan assembled, I then began to try to figure out how I was going to gather the equipment I need.