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Filmmaker's Diary:
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A five hour plane ride from Los Angeles, California to Jacksonville, Florida. I spent the flight listening to all the PopCanon music over and over and reading all of their personal history downloaded from their website (actually this website). Cramming for my final. I arrive in Jacksonville and immediately jump in a car for a 90min drive to Gainesville and my first meeting with the band. As luck (or Ned) would have it, I'd be able to shoot their final practice together. My driver is Manny Martinez, another old high school buddy who now teaches video making at Santa Fe, the local community college. He's also agreed to be one of the camera operators for the concert shoot. He gets me to G'ville at about 8pm, and the practice is already underway. It's at Michael Murphy's house, where the band's rock room is located. I'm very nervous as I walk down the sloping driveway, up the brick steps and to the front door. I almost don't want to go in. But in that moment, I decide that I'll treat this as an acting assignment. I'll PLAY the ROLE of the confident and experienced documentarian, the guy who knows exactly where to put the camera, and what questions to ask.
And the suckers bought it.
The band welcomed me warmly and I shot the practice. Getting that first shot on tape settled me down and allayed my fears. By the time I finished shooting, I'd covered the entire thing from many different angles, composed some nice pictures, and gained a lot of confidence. Now the practice was over and they were packing up to leave. I just dove in with questions. This proved to be a little too much, too soon. As Ned pointed out, the band couldn't really reflect on it all coming to an end. They still had a show to play. Their focus was on that.
After the practice though, I sat down with Ned, Alyson and Michael and eased into the first of many, many interviews I would conduct during the next couple of days. They were funny, and forthcoming, and I was off to a great start. And my earlier impression that Ned was the only one who cared that the band was breaking up was blown out of the water. They care, all right. Exhausted, Ned and I headed to his house to crash.
[Oh, wait! Shit! I forgot, we didn't go home afterward. Ned and I had an adventure. While we were heading to get something to eat and meet Don at a bar (it was his birthday), we saw what I thought was an attack. Some drunk college kid with a pudgy face was grabbing and throttling some girl dressed in a pair of jeans and what seemed like a hand towel. I had just been commenting on all the drunk college girls just walking down the street, in the middle of the night, with 'victim' signs on their asses in, like, the date rape capital of the world, when I see this shit. So I just reacted. With all the events and mistakes and unforeseen happenings that I was trying to plan for as I arrived in town, the very last situation I expected to find myself in was slamming some dumbass' face into the asphalt as he shouted "Ask her what she did to me!" Turns out the girl was not in any real danger (despite her "shriek that pierced the night", as Ned put it). The guy was like her boyfriend or something, and she was just playing him. And me. People in the street start yelling at me to let him go. I go from being the hero saving the damsel in distress to the thug beating up on some poor kid. Ned and I jump in his car and split seconds before the cops show up, and that's the end of that story.]
The next night was the band's last dinner together. I thought it would be more
'Big Chill-y', with everyone sitting at a large dining table and I could just
get controlled shots.
Nope.
I thought it would just be the band and me.
Nope.
I thought they'd be a little more able to talk about what they were going through.
Hell nope.
I shot about three hours of footage that I can't really use. Not just because of them, Ned included, avoiding my every query, but this was the moment when I'd realized I'd made a terrible mistake. Against my better judgment, I decided to record sound not with a boom or otherwise external microphone, but with the camera's own internal mic. If anyone reading this is intending to glean from it some piece of wisdom on the practice of digital movie making, let it be this: USE AN EXTERNAL MIC!!!
Sound, believe it or not, is much more important than picture in the documentary form. An audience is willing to forgive some questionable camerawork, when the event they're witnessing is interesting. But if they can't hear or understand what's being said, you've lost them. The last dinner party is a mess of overlapping conversation, further muddied by music playing in the background. Couple that with the way everyone was spread out from each other (and their reticence to talk anyway), and you've got my first fuckup of the project. [Neditor: well, besides agreeing to do the thing in the first place...]
Actually, I overstate the matter. The footage does suck for the most part, but the frustration eventually lead me to a better way of working, which helped down the line. And at the end of the evening I came up with the idea of having all the members of the band play around with a strange statue that Michael keeps in his front room. The statue appears on their last and best album d'art. I don't know the origin of the statue, who made it, what it's supposed to be, and I don't want to know. But it served as a major ice-breaker, allowing the gang to cut loose and have fun with something silly. They love stuff that's silly. They each got to introduce themselves, play little improv games, and eventually (and these are the best ones) give their individual answers to the question "What is PopCanon", in nonverbal form. It's a little piece of gold on videotape. It represents them at their most playful, and it salvaged a hard night.
