***this post is a bit unfinished- but i wanted to get it up before going out of town***

I have been writing in general about the stages that we all go through in life. The stages of my adult life have been clearly demarcated for me through my artwork. I can visually track the transitions through my photographs. I was a prolific photographer in high school, and the images that I made during this time were all over the place. There’s nothing that really holds them together. When I got to college It took me a year to start to find my voice. A lot of my photos from that first year are about isolation. They are in themselves transitional photos. By the time I was a sophomore in college I had developed a more refined sense of what I wanted to do with my work. As an adolescent, music was a big part of my life. In NY it increasingly defined it. Almost all of my time not spent on school was spent on music, and I began to photograph bands. For the next 10 years my life was consumed by music and photography and they were intertwined.

When I started playing in a band I had an unconscious understanding that it would be for about 10 years. I didn’t consider myself a musician as much as I did ” a bass player” or “a member of a rock band”. To me these were distinctly different categories. To be a musician indicated that it was a vocation, or a career path, it would also indicate that I thought of myself as “musical”. I did not. Instead I considered myself a part of an artistic culture that was interested in creating work outside of established pathways. Bands didn’t sign to major labels, they started their own. Writers didn’t try to write for big magazine, they started their own, and photographers and filmmakers toured with their work just like a band would. For us our community wasn’t the neighborhood we lived in, it was the people that shared a vision for how art and life could be. (The world has changed a lot in some ways. Yesterday my daughter celebrated the culmination of a week of willie mae rock camp- which was created and fostered by friends who were a part of the community I speak of. The whole experience was extremely empowering for her and the other 84 girls in her camp)

I grew up in a loving and supportive environment. I don’t think that my mother could be classified as a helicopter parent, but instead an actively facilitating parent. she sought out classes, lessons, and teams, that my siblings and I might want to take or participate in. However, I can’t recall any sense of pressure to practice or excel at any of them. My mother was ceaselessly complimentary, and my father bluntly critical. I don’t mean to paint him as a mean bastard who belittled us. In truth he was just deeply, yet pleasantly cynical. He also tended to interact with children as if they were little adults. When he told me that I couldn’t sing my way out of a paper bag, he was just telling the truth. I couldn’t sing, and even I understood on some level that there was no sense in humoring me. I couldn’t trust my mom in that sense, but i could trust my dad. Unfortunately sometimes the truth hurts. And as Erikson would point out, and my father should have known, sometimes the young need a little help in building up their self confidence before it gets torn to shreds. One problem that I now face is that I am so much like him in many ways that it’s difficult for me to keep my own tendencies to act like him in check. It doesn’t help that my older daughter is way beyond her years.

The dissonance between my mothers unflagging supportiveness and his somewhat brutal honesty helped me to develop some issues that I’m still sorting through. As a child of the post 60’s social upheavals, I don’t think I’m alone. The touchy-feelly ideas of “supportive parenting” were still on the cutting edge of child raising when we were little, and as such there were a lot of stumbles as new parents tried to make this paradigm gel with their own ingrained expectations from their own childhoods. My mother sometimes talked of how harsh a parent her own mother was. In an effort to not repeat these mistakes she likely made some of her own. I appreciated and still do appreciate her support, and I do believe that it has given me a sense of confidence in my own abilities. However, the critical nature of my father’s responses did a lot to undermine that confidence leaving me with an underlying sense of doubt that has hampered me in many ways.

When my future wife (who was a film student at the time) and I met I had developed a large body of work surrounding the youth culture that I was a part of. This work defined this stage of my “emerging adulthood”. I suggested that she drop out of school and make a movie with me about that world. She replied that if the film looked anything like my black and white photos we’d be all right. When we wrote a script and sent it to my Dad he read it and gave us one main note. Across the front of the script he had scrawled, “Where the fucks the conflict??” He was right. We were so in love with our characters that it was hard for us to see flaws in them.

His comment was brutal, but it would be unfair to not point out that we then spent a lot of time discussing the script and his mentoring was invaluable in helping us make a film we could be proud of. More than anything I wanted him to be proud of me and the film, and he was. Still, it would be many years before I could fully believe that.

About 15 years ago, when I was transitioning from being a “musician” to being a filmmaker, I was having a very difficult time with my father. I loved my father deeply and in general we communicated really well. I was a passionate young man; passionate about music, about art, about opposition. I’m not exactly sure why, but I always despised norms and beaten pathways. Even though I knew that I wanted to be a photographer, I didn’t go to art school. That would have been too easy.

I think that some of this impulse had to do with growing up in a college town that was stifling in its calm coddling comfort; especially for the children of professors. Something about the University system seemed so…. wrong to me. I’m not sure why i felt this way, perhaps it was the crowds of privileged seeming frat boys and sorority girls that crowded the streets of the small university town. They didn’t seem too interested in learning. I also saw that in some ways that setting had taken away some of my father’s passion. He had gone soft. A lot of my friends ended up going to the local college but i had a need to get out. I wanted to learn about the larger world, but I didn’t know what I wanted to “do with my life”.

I ended up at NYU when it was still largely a commuter school with no sense of campus life. As such it was much less cloistered than the schools my friends went to, something I reveled in and suffered from. My mother is quick to remind me that I had a rough time the first semester. I had sought the energy of the city but was homesick for the comfort of a bosomy campus. As a photographer and observer I found myself exhausted from simply walking down the street. The details of the city were overwhelming. The classes were intense as well. On my first day I had an 8:00 am class and was told to read the first three chapters of Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” by the next class. I picked it up and then spent the next three hours trying to understand the first page- which was one of those half pages because it was the start of the chapter…. (this is not an exaggeration). I eventually understood the book and learned to notice less. This pained me on one level, but it was either adapt or die.

Over time I thrived intellectually and artistically at the school. I met some incredible people who took me under their wings and I focused on my photography and started a band. After college i wanted to continue to focus on these artistic pursuits. However, my …. juvenile resistance to doing things the “right” way made it difficult for me to turn these pursuits into a “career”. This is where the conflict with my father came in. Each week when we talked on the phone he couldn’t stop himself from ending the conversation with, “Write when you get work”. This drove me crazy.

My mother was a serial supporter. She was complimentary even when I had failed at something. As such her opinion didn’t mean as much to me. My father was supportive but critical; at times very critical. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut even when he was putting his foot in it. His painful honesty, coupled with my vast respect for him, made his thoughts even more powerful. My father was sharp, funny, and interested in everyone. He made people laugh and he made them feel special. Even the check out girl at the supermarket couldn’t escape his questions, and I witnessed how often it led to extremely “human interactions” that pulled people out of the furrowed habits of their lives. I wanted to be like him, so it was hard when he couldn’t see how much he hurt me.

I wasn’t making a lot of money, and I wasn’t having any great success with my work, but I was in a wildly creative period of my life. Almost all day was spent in some creative pursuit. Even when I was working as a messenger I was taking photos and observing how the “real world” turned. On the nights I wasn’t practicing with my band I was out going to shows and taking pictures of other bands, or at the darkroom printing them. I was part of a mutually supportive creative community and I felt completely on track. However, with his one simple jokey question he would derail my fantasy of a life lived creatively, and it certainly didn’t help to put me on a better track.

At 41, without the comfort of any kind of job security, I understand why he was trying to gently nudge me in the direction he was. At the time though, it was supremely undermining. While my father had a tendency to be an asshole in this regards, to his credit he was good at owning up to his failings. When I exploded in rage at his jokingly veiled put downs he always demurred and apologized and then did it again the next week.

In some sense I knew that he was right, but I also knew that if I didn’t follow my passions when I was young, I would never have the chance to follow them. I don’t mean to create the impression that he wasn’t supportive of me as an artist in any way, but instead that while he was was often complimentary he still left me with the impression that I would never, “make it” as an artist and that I better line up “real work”.

I was reminded of all these thoughts and emotions as I skimmed through this weekends NY Times magazine story on the 20 somethings. Even as my father was proud of the work that I made, he would point out that I would “never make it” as a musician. I know that as a parent he had strong feelings about helping to make sure that I would be ok. What he wouldn’t listen to was that I never intended to “make it”. In fact, my goal was to “not make it”, to find some way to be creative outside systems that I saw as hopelessly corrupt. I still see them as corrupt but i wouldn’t mind taking some kind of payoff to be a part of them now….

My father could be an asshole, but as a psychologist he was trained to listen, and he was good at it. Over many years we worked together to move past our antagonisms and we were able to communicate in a more supportive way. In working through our issues I realized that one of our problems was the lack of ritual in our modern non-religious lives. Rituals, like bar mitzvahs and communions used to pack a lot more meaning. The young entered the ritual a child and exited as an adult. That transition involved both the child and the adult and it changed the way that they related to each other.

In our current world, our young people travel far away to go to school where they have life changing experiences that their parents do not perceive. When the return in the spring they are changed, but since their parents have not been privy to the transition- because they haven’t experienced the ritual of change with the child- they often find it difficult to see them as changed. At the same time, because the child goes through this process without the adults of their community it is difficult for them to see themselves as a part of their parent’s adult community. There is no transition to a more peer based relationship.

One theory that I have, which has been somewhat borne out by being a parent, is that in some ways it’s important for younger children to see their parents as all powerful. When we believe that adults can do almost anything, then we are secure around them. In the safety cocoon, of our belief that our parents can and will take care of us in a “perfect way”, we have the freedom to experiment and test our own abilities. Adults rely on this sense of power to keep order in the community. However, if there is not formal transition, welcoming the young into the world of adulthood a certain dissonance arises. Intellectually we know that the adults are not perfect, but in an underlying way we still expect them to be, and that expectation causes all kinds of problems. On a basic level I believe that we expect too much from adults, and when they don’t live up to our idea of perfection we get unfairly angry with them. In addition, this idea, that they should be perfect, also gives us the idea that we too can attain perfection and we tend to be too hard on ourselves.

If instead both parties can see each other as peers they can forgive each other their transgressions, and forgive themselves when they make mistakes. Without some form of transition it is extremely difficult for them to have forward moving, productive relationships. My father and I realized some of these things together by trying to work through our own issues in these areas. I suggested that we write a book together, to kind of go the last mile towards being peers. He agreed, but it was tough. This was his provenance. I had no real training in it, so it was a little unfair of me to expect him to see me as a peer in this process.

We sent a series of notes back and forth but it was clear that we had different ideas for the book. I was looking at something that was more pop culture oriented, a series of tools to aid parents and children in reaching these goals. He wanted to quote other psychologists and reference their studies. We were never able to finish our work on the book as it started to cause more problems than it was worth. Still, the process did bring us to a better understanding of each other and ourselves. When he was hit by a car and killed a few years later one of my first thoughts was, “at least we were in a good place with each other”. I didn’t feel like I had missed an opportunity to let go of my anger with him, he had helped me to do it.

At his funeral a former grad student of his approached me with a folder. It was our notes. He had asked her to type them up and comment on the work. She told me how happy and proud he was to be working with me on it. Maybe it’s time for me to finish that book. Clearly the world needs it now more than ever.

I often think of that Talking Heads song that goes, “You may ask yourself, where did i get this beautiful car, where did i get this beautiful wife, how did i get here?” The older I get the more prophetic it is. Simple decisions, such as what neighborhood to live in have such profound impacts on our lives, who we know, and how we see the world. I really am often flabbergasted by it all.

I was just thinking of it as I worked on arrangements for my younger daughter’s afterschool program. All of a sudden I have a third grader and a girl in pre-K. How did I get here? It really does seem like yesterday that we were thinking about having a second child.

We are also in the midst of finishing a film that we have spent 7 years working on. 20 years ago the thought of working on anything for a year didn’t seem possible. How does everything end up taking so long now that I’m older? Our older daughter was 1.5 years old when we started. She wasn’t even in day care yet.

The other night I was shooting some video of a friend’s band. A 20 year old friend came to help out. Before the show I was talking to a friend and realized that we had gone on tour together nearly 20 years earlier. My young friend pointed out, “I was 2 or 3 then.” ouch.

I don’t mind getting older, and I have few regrets about the decisions I’ve made about how to live my life. Still the slow cold creep of age is tricky, and David Byrne understood that before I did.

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.