Last Night I went to a screening of a friends film. This friend is a one-man band and after three years of working on the film he’s done- finished- kaput. However, I still have some notes for him….. It is a great film, but it could be better, and I believe, reach a much wider audience with a few tweaks.
After the screening I got into a discussion about his film (and the nature of filmmaking). She mentioned that it started to feel a bit long at one point but she realized that she was still interested so it was ok. I felt the same way, except that I would argue for trying to fix it rather than accept it. The film is well paced, the stories are nicely woven together, and it is a wonderful document of a place and time fraught with all kinds of difficulties. However, by tightening even a little bit I think it could connect with a much wider audience.

Over 15 years of working on films, I’ve learned the hard way to get rid of things that don’t move the story forward. When we made our film, “Horns and Halos” we followed an underground publisher as he attempted to re-publish a discredited biography of GW Bush before the 2000 election. For a long time during the editing, it seemed essential to the story to set up how he came to publish books and how he ended up as the super of the building. We had a great scene in which he was fixing a radiator as he gave us his back-story. People really liked the scene, but we realized that every scene in the film had to include at least two of the three main characters: the book, the publisher, and the author. Since this scene only focused on the publisher, it was excised. When we showed it again to the same people who insisted that we keep that scene in, we found that not only did they not miss it, but also that they couldn’t figure out what we’d done to make the film so much better.

Working on the cut of a film is a bit like working on a sculpture out of clay. At first you start with a mass of images and information. As you start to shape it almost any bit of footage seems to work. However, once you find the focus it becomes increasingly clear which bits of footage work and which bits don’t. Once it starts to take on a distinct look, even the smallest changes have a major impact. As the film gets closer to being finished, there will be many scenes where a character says three or four things but its clear that the scene is too long. At first every line seems important because they do different things. Once the focus of the scene is established, and the filmmaker understands what the scene is doing, it becomes clear that only two lines are needed. It is sometimes incredible how much better it makes the scene. With that single line gone, the audience knows what it is expected to walk away from the scene with.

Sometimes it’s hard to get rid of the things that we really like, but in the end it’s essential for filmmakers to find the spine of the story and get rid of everything that doesn’t move it forward. Even if a scene is good, if it doesn’t pay off in the end, raise questions that later get answered, it really needs to go.

Last night my new friend and I argued over the essential nature of story telling. I was trying to explain to her that film is very different than literature. When one reads a book, it is understood that the book will be read in many sittings, and that the reader will likely re-read passages to get back up to speed. There’s a freedom of movement inherent in the form (not so true for short stories- they kind of demand to be read in one sitting). In addition literature is a form that much more open to interpretation on the part of the consumer. A film on the other hand demands direct attention, because it is like a river flowing forward, and it is more clear cut in what it attempts to communicate. Any deviation from that course can have disastrous results.

In this scenario the filmmaker is sort of a river guide. They’ve been down the river possibly hundreds of times and it’s their job to lead the busy vacationers down the river in the clearest most efficient manner. If these “guests” are comfortable with their leader, then they get involved in the ride. However, if in the course of their travels they find that the guide wasn’t paying enough attention and took them down a tributary and they have to row their way back to the main branch, they can get a little bit frustrated. If it happens too often, then they might just give up and walk back. If the guide is ok but not great, they might just kind of stop paying too much attention.

Last night’s film was moving along in a fairly direct manner when it sidetracked into a sub story that didn’t have any dramatic force. It was a fine scene, well cut, and visually appealing. However, it was a total dead end. It didn’t really play a role in the narrative of the story that had developed. It was interesting, but it was an unnecessary digression that hurt the forward force of the story. It was a tributary that the audience had to find it’s way back from once it was over. If the filmmaker gets rid of that and trims a few other minutes – he might just have a hit on his hands.

Now if I take my own advice we might just finish our own film.

The revolving door between government and industry doesn’t just exist in the armed services and financial fields. A lot of the issues at play in our film, “A Battle in Brooklyn” (click on link to see discussion of title) have to do with the revolving door between developers and the government and the government/developers and journalism.

It’s difficult to find a way to get these facts into our film- because they are really the subtext of our story and not the “text”. As our story is a character driven narrative that follows several people as they fight the project it’s difficult for us to get this information in unless they talk about it.

We were just going through the footage on one scene and spotted a journalist who was asking the locals some questions outside a press conference about some of the purported benefits of the project. The locals had been kept out. A year later that journalist was working as a PR person for the Empire State Development Corporation - the quasi governmental agency that pushed through the project.

There’s another writer who shows up in the early footage who went on to work for another development agnency. The Borough President’s assistant left his position after helping to push through the Downtown Brooklyn Plan. This plan called for eminent domain to be used to take a row of houses that were used as part of the underground railroad. They were to be torn down to make way for a park (to cover underground parking) and a hotel. This gentleman is now helping to develop the hotel.

Bruce Ratner, the developer started his “career” working in the housing department under Mayor Koch in the 70’s. He left after a few years to start working for his family’s development company….. The vice president of Forest City Ratner also worked in government before joining the developer.

We’re trying to work on a way to get some of this information into the film, but it’s hard. We don’t have any talking heads, and cards that give this kind of info are too strong. In the end though, the film will hopefully shine more light on these issues and inspire a great deal of discussion about them.

As we get closer to having a finished film, we’ve started to focus increasingly on our plans for it. While strategizing about distribution, we are also thinking about presentation. The most important aspect of presentation is the name. For at least a year we have been working with the title “Battle of Brooklyn.” However, we have become increasingly dissatisfied with this title for a number of reasons.

We want a title that keys in on the themes of the film, but one that is open enough to allow people to have a broad set of expectations. The idea of “home” is important, but so is the idea of standing up for principles. Here are a few that we have tossed around:

No Place Like Home
Home Game
Home
A Home
We Live Here

In terms of distribution, we have to think of a broader set of problems. Films with names that begin with “A” do much better on VOD than others because they are the first ones that people scroll through. We also have to think of other projects with similar names; “Home Movie\” might have been a great title if there wasn’t an awesome doc with this title already. Web site availability is another big factor. As we brainstormed this morning we got a very rude awakening after typing in weliverhere.com - WARNING- it’s a porn site without a splash page. This actually makes it hard for us to consider this name. It would be terrible if the film began to get some press and people started searching for it and ended up on this page.

We look forward to your ideas and votes on the ones that we have come up with- as well as those that you suggest.

About 10 years ago, after making several narrative feature films, we decided to give documentary filmmaking a try. Now we’re pretty sick of documentary filmmaking and want to jump back into narrative. Through the making of Donor 67 we met Alana Sveta. We are currently working with her on the script called “Adam and Eva”. In the meantime we are working to finish:

Battle of Brooklyn: We are in the final phases of editing this film about Daniel Goldstein’s fight to save his home, and his community, from being seized for a developer. after 6.5 years of shooting and over a year of solid editing the end is in sight. Daniel has been forced to move out of his home on May 7th.

Broken Angel Rising: We shot for two years as artist Arthur Wood fought to save his home from destruction by the NYC department of buildings. Due to all kinds of litigation Arthur no longer wanted us to film. We had begun the process of cutting but have put the film on hold until the situation is resolved. We have an incredible amount of respect for Arthur and hope that we can one day finish this film.

Donor 67: This film is as much a mediation on the nature of family, childhood, parenthood, as it is about donor issues. Three months before our second daughter was born my father was hit by a car and killed. I started to work on something about his passing to help me work through my feelings and then we had our second child. When she was a couple of months old a friend of mine suggested that I had to “go for a boy”. I was immediately reminded of the fact that as a former sperm donor, I might have dozens. I started to explore the realities of that world. In the last few years i have done a great deal of writing and a little bit of filming. I have also applied for countless grants. I’m considering a kickstarter campaign to raise a little money to get it going.

Dr. Sarno; Battling Pain:
For years I have struggled with intermittent sciatica pain. When my younger daughter was about 2 years old the pain got out of control. It was so severe that my nerve went dead and i lost the ability to use my calf muscle. I was on the path to surgery when I finally went to visit Dr. Sarno.

I knew about Dr. Sarno because my father had read his books in the 80’s and my brother had gone to see him in the 90’s. Both had been helped by him. According to Dr. Sarno the vast majority of back pain is based on psychological factors rather than structural issues. When he began practicing medicine in the 50’s there was no such thing as chronic back pain. Slowly he saw the rise of an epidemic and felt powerless when treating patients. The conventional methods didn’t work- but he found that talking to his patients did. He quickly found that in almost every case patients were struggling with a stressful situation- a young child, a divorce, terrible work situation, etc. He found that once the patient was able to make a connection between the pain and the situation they were able to overcome the pain. Over the years he’s developed a highly structured treatment program that relies on information and peer support.

When I visited Dr. Sarno with mri in hand he scoffed at the pictures and gave me the information I needed to overcome the pain. A few weeks later, while on my road to recovery I approached him about allowing us to shoot a documentary with him. After watching our film Horns and Halos, he agreed. I shot a little bit over the next several months but there several issues that have thrown up stumbling blocks.

Dr. Sarno is incredibly protective of his patients and wouldn’t allow us access to them. Due to my unyielding respect for him I found it hard to challenge him on this idea. We tried to scare up some other patients but it was difficult. In the meantime we applied for several grants without success. We are working on cutting a trailer with some of the footage that we have.

This is the one that just kills me that we can’t get done. I feel like this film could change the health care debate. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently because for the first time in years my back is in good shape and I have finally gotten the strength back in my leg

After well over six years of shooting, and two solid years of editing, our latest film project, Battle of Brooklyn, is starting to become a movie.  Over the next three months we hope to finish post production and premier it at a major film festival.

The film chronicles the efforts of community activists struggling to save their homes, and their community, in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, from a massive arena development project that involves enormous government subsidies.  While our film deals with the larger social and political issues involved with the project including the abuse of eminent domain, and the lack of democratic process, it increasingly focuses on our main character Daniel Goldstein and his family.  While fighting to save his home, and stop the project, Daniel met fellow neighborhood activist Shabnam Merchant.   As the fight went on, they got married, and had a child.  On March 1st, 2010, the State of New York took title to their home and intend to lease the land underneath it (as part of a 21 acre project) to the developer of the Atlantic Yards project.

On Thursday, March 11th, 2010, we filmed the ceremonial groundbreaking for the project, as well as the vocal protest that accompanied it.  We hooked up with the New York Times Local neighborhood blog to get in our shooter in exchange for us cutting a short video of the event for them.

Usually groundbreaking ceremonies are opportunities for elected officials to line up and take credit for bringing a project to fruition.  In this case, not a single elected official that represents any community within miles of the project showed up.  The six brooklyn politicians in the tent all have financial ties to the developer and represent neighborhoods that don’t intersect with the site and are unlikely to be directly affected by the negative impacts of the massive project.  Inside the tent, while the crowds of press people and supporters of the project,ate lobster sliders and other fancy finger foods, hundreds of protesters took to the streets, struggling to get close enough to the tent to be heard.  They were.

With six cameras rolling for most of the day, we captured a lot of powerful footage that will help us close our story with a bang.  We recently showed a rough cut of the first half of the film to a crowd in Dallas.  Afterwards we explained that we hadn’t set out to make an activist film.  An audience member quickly disavowed us of the notion that we had succeeded in that goal.  It’s true.  There are so many things so egregiously wrong with this project and this process that no thoughtful documentarian could come to the conclusion that justice prevailed.  Still, the film is as evenhanded as possible.

In the end, the heros of our story lost their fight, and their home.  However, like George Washington after the first Battle of Brooklyn, it is quite likely that they will win the war.  It seems as if there is finally the political will to change the eminent domain laws in NY.

Support is still needed to help us complete the film. You can make a tax deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor MPI. You can also send a check to MPI - simply put BATTLE in the subject line and they will get us the money right away.

Moving Picture Institute
375 Greenwich Street
New York, NY 10013

Stay tuned….

The following is the second part of a discussion begun yesterday in regards to context and how information flows through the world in the age of blogs.

We have been shooting our film for 6 years now, focusing mainly on an individual who refused to sell his home to make way for the arena project because he felt that it was wrong for the government to use its power to sieze his home in order to transfer it to another private owner. He was also deeply upset by the process by which the area would be developed, with virtually no local input. While the subject of the Atlantic Yards has been discussed a great deal in the local media, the context of these discussions has primarily been driven by press releases about the process of the project, rather than the larger context of the story. There has been almost no in-depth coverage in the main stream media. As such, from the very beginning of our project we found that when we talked to other people they had almost no understanding of the situation. We also found that there was a sense of inevitability, and as such, people almost seemed reticent to learn about it because they had a sense that it was all beyond their control. In fact the vast majority of people in Brooklyn thought that it was simply an arena project and they were shocked when renderings were released nearly 2 years later showing massive skyscrapers.

When we started shooting the film, blogs were not a major part of our national culture like they are now. In some ways the development of these web communication/journalism tools have had a major impact on our story. The “legitimate” media has done an awful job of covering this complex story. In fact, we came to be interested because the NY Times story about the projects announcement read like a press release and it piqued our interest. We wanted to find out what was really going on. Since then, almost every story about the project has been led by the developer’s release of information. However, there are a couple of blogs that have had a major impact on the public and media understanding of the situation. Nolandgrab.org is basically a clearing house of every story that appears on the web, in print, and on TV. Including limited commentary that helps to contextualize the coverage from an anti-project point of view, this blog has done a powerful job of distilling the story as it moves through the media landscape. By compiling all of these stories in one place it’s easy to see how the information moves through the factory, so to speak. The other major force is a website called Atlantic Yards Report. This blog was started by a journalist named Norman Oder who lives near the project area. A little over a year after the project was announced, he too became increasingly frustrated by the NY Times coverage. He wrote a long critique of the Grey Lady’s coverage, and this morphed into one of the only sources of original reporting on the subject. As an editor at Library Journal, Mr. Oder has feet firmly planted in the august world of journalism. However, because his writing appeared on a blog, it took a very long time for the mainstream media to take his work seriously. Now anyone assigned to cover the story knows that they need to do some serious reading at AY Report so that they can catch up to speed. The stories that he covers are often not that “sexy,” but they deal with the real issues that are often hidden behind the massive PR machine that is pushing this story forward. In addition, the main opposition group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn has a site that also compiles news, breaks stories, and has detailed information about the project and the opposition.

From our perspective, Norman Oder is a “journalist,” and we are not. We don’t read through the documents, we actually never took a journalism class, and we don’t think about these stories from the perspective of a reporter. We’re more like William Hurt in Broadcast News than Albert Brooks or Holly Hunter.

On Wed Oct 14th, when 40 members of the community fighting the project gathered together to take a bus to Albany to witness a court hearing about the use of eminent domain for this project, it was important for our camera to be on the bus as we needed to capture the community as it gathered together. Today I was thinking a lot about the idea of community in light of last week’s hearing. At this point, 6 years into our story, much of the physical community of the project site has been decimated. Buildings have been torn down and hundreds of residents have been moved away. Yet the crowd that gathered to ride that bus is probably more connected now than before this fight began. These people constitute a very real and physical community despite the fact that they don’t all live in apartments and houses next door to each other. They are connected by the powerful belief that the government, like the medical profession, should do no harm. They are bound by their opposition to this project- they see each other at functions related to that opposition and they connect daily through email, blogs, and phone.

As stated above, we don’t consider ourselves activist filmmakers, setting out to make a film that argues for a specific point of view. We absolutely did not start this film project with a preconceived notion of what we would capture. However, after only a few days of following characters, and interviewing the major supporters of the project, it became pretty clear to us that the film would follow those fighting the project rather than those working to make it happen.

We are filmmakers, following a character passionately fighting for what he believes. If the film didn’t reflect his point of view, then it would be a very bad film. However, this film will not always show the main character in a positive light. He is human, and like all humans, he makes mistakes. Like any good character in a movie, he will be seen under extreme pressure, and it’s seeing how people act under pressure that make movies great and heroes heroic.