Aug 13, 2015​

 

As an editor, I often pour through hours of documentary footage to find tiny nuggets of truly great material. Everyday life on film is occasionally revelatory, but more often than not it’s just plain dull.

 

Not so with the raw material for The Bad Kids, a documentary feature by Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe that I have had the pleasure of working on since February. When I sat down to watch a long compilation of selects on the first day of work, it wasn’t long before I had tears in my eyes. The stories from the students at Black Rock High School, a continuation school in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park, were poignant, revealing, hilarious, heartbreaking. What’s more, the directors were approaching their subject in a subtle, patient way, letting the film build a picture of lived experience with cinema verité material rather than with formal interviews or voice over. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to get started.

 

It’s now mid-August and we are deep into it.  Storylines have solidified and a strategy for shifting back and forth between our principal characters and the little vignettes that make up the tapestry of everyday life at the school is well in hand.  Hugely helpful in finding these things was a week spent at the Sundance Documentary Edit and Story Lab in Provo, Utah.  

 

I will not disguise my enthusiasm here.  It was amazing!  Imagine a week solely devoted to the workshopping of your project where your advisors are some of the most experienced and talented folks in the field--and you add in the idyllic setting of the Sundance Resort--and you get a picture.

 

But a vacation it is not. Pretty much every waking hour is spoken for on the schedule, as you move from presentations by advisors (Geoff Richman talking about his editing of The Cove, Murderball, Sicko, and God Grew Tired Of Us, Mary Lampson doing the same with examples from Harlan County, USA and old Emile DeAntonio films) to screenings of the invited films to intense workshop sessions with said advisors.  

 

One thing I greatly appreciated about the ethos of the workshops (even as a chafed against it from time to time) was an emphasis on process over product.  The idea here is that your everyday life in the editing room leaves plenty of time for the solving of problems in specific scenes, so why not use the isolation of eight days in the Utah mountains as a way of discussing deeper issues like tone and intention? Sundance Documentary Project Director Tabitha Jackson would helpfully steer discussion back to the big picture whenever we got too far into the weeds, and there was always plenty of time at meals to hash out ideas over a meal.

 

Perhaps my favorite parts of the 8 day marathon were our individual sessions in our edit trailer with advisors.  In one picture here you see Bad Kids co-director Lou Pepe with our Contributing Editor Katie Turinsky, and advisors Ra'Anan Alexandrowicz (The Law In These Parts) and Tom Haneke (Where Soldiers Come From and a zillion other films) as we discussed our film.  In another you also find co-director Keith Fulton an the aforementioned Mary Lampson).  In these moments, I got to see how the minds of these great directors and editors worked, and took away some terrific insights about how our film was being perceived and digested.

 

As August is now here, I'm spending my last couple of weeks on the film before handing it over to Mary Lampson, who agreed to take the film into the final stretch as I return to my teaching schedule at the University of Arizona.  I can't imagine anyone better for the job. I'll be viewing the major milestone cuts but she'll be working with Keith and Lou to get us into good shape for our October submission to Sundance.

March 7, 2015

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One of the most satisfying things about teaching is watching young filmmakers grow and make their mark on the world. That’s been happening a lot lately, as films by several of my former students screened at this year’s Berlinale and at South By Southwest.

 

The New York Times just featured a complementary write-up on Shannon Sun-Higginson’s new film GTFO, a documentary about the harassment faced by female video game enthusiasts that is screening next week at South By Southwest. It’s a solid, timely piece of work by a really smart young artist who I first met in my documentary history class at Wesleyan and who I have continued to advise since then.

 

SXSW is also featuring the talent of cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt, another Wesleyan alum who I ran into in Tucson a few months ago when she was shooting for a unique documentary called Disaster Playground. A highly stylized film about the little-known work of scientists who investigate future outer space catastrophes, it is sure to be a great follow-up to the work she did on last year’s 20 Feet From Stardom.

 

I was thrilled to hear that Joanna Arnow had won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the 2015 Berlin Intl. Film Festival for her provocative short film Bad At Dancing.  Joanna’s documentary I Hate Myself is a must-see film of the cult variety, and she brought that raw sensibility to this short dramatic piece that will soon show at many more festivals around the world. I will never forget the evening when she came to New Haven to get my thoughts on the rough cut of I Hate Myself. I figured it might be cool to invite my 8 year-old son to watch with us, and she calmly suggested that maybe the subject matter was a bit too adult. Little did I know I would squirm in my seat as I watched her navigate a strange sexual relationship on camera.

 

I started teaching at the University of Arizona in the fall of 2013, and my first class of thesis students is already having an impact.  One such filmmaker is Christopher Nataanii Cegielski, whose terrific short film Bloodlines also made a splash at the Berlinale. A subtle, understated film about a simmering conflict between a Native American father and son on a remote ranch, it’s gorgeously shot and elegantly put together. With almost no dialogue, one senses the tension between the two central characters in a film that feels both highly specific and universal at the same time.