Paul Mariano outside his old office, a former movie theater
"Nobody
sent them back!”
From
Public Defense to Motion Picture Storytelling
Documentary
filmmaker Paul Mariano
in
conversation with Jamie Jobb
Gravitas
Docufilms feature “These Amazing Shadows”
recently screened at the
Martinez Campbell Theater
Q:
You grew up in Boston, an East Coast person transformed into a West
Coast person. When did you make that transition?
A:
I came out to the West Coast in 1969 in the Air Force. I was
stationed at Mather Air Force Base in Sacramento, California.
Q:
So you were twenty-ish?
A:
Yeah. I was 21, I think.
Q:
Prior to that all your years had been Boston. That’s a diverse
place, in what part of town did you grown up?
A:
Primarily Roslindale and West Roxbury. The suburbs.
Q:
Streets full of two-story single family detached homes?
A:
Yes.
Q:
And you had a neighborhood movie theater?
A:
Yes! Twenty five cents, you could get in – get admission, a bag
of popcorn and a Coke. … What was it called? R-something ...
Q:
Not the Roxy?
A:
No. It was like Roxy ... I can’t remember the name.
Q:
… Rialto?
A:
Yes!
Q:
But it had Saturday matinees, and serials, and newsreels, and all
that stuff?
A:
Oh yeah!
Q:
So you grew up with that ... and television also was on the edges of
that time?
A:
It was. But I was always much more of a movie fan than I was a TV
fan. I love stories. I’ve always been a storyteller, which is why
I guess I became a lawyer.
Q:
You went to a special high school in Boston?
A:
I went to the oldest high school in the country, Boston Latin
School. It was founded in 1635 – a year before Harvard. The story
was Harvard University was created so that Boston Latin students
would have a place to go to college! And it was an all boys school,
and was until probably the 1980s when it became coeducational. It
was at one point – and certainly when I went there – one of the
finest high schools ... (chuckles) … My brother, who’s four years
older than I, went to Boston Latin School, flunked out after
a-year-and-a-half, then went to a different high school and found
himself to be literally two grades ahead of everybody who was in that
school!
Q:
Lot of emphasis on the classics, and literature?
A:
We took six years of Latin!
Q:
Wow!
A:
Nobody takes six years of Latin!
Q:
You probably speak it in your sleep!?!
A:
“Veni, vidi, vici …”
Q:
What were your extracurricular activities in high school?
A:
I was interested in golf, and so I was on the golf team. That was
about the only athletics I was into … Other than that, I would say
I was somewhat of a trouble-maker. We used to get guys, we were in a
“home room”, and actually my high school was from seventh to
twelfth grade – it was a long long period of time. So I would get
guys and we would go sneak down out of class into the weight-lifting
room, and we would play dice and cards.
Q:
Three-card monty?!?
A:
Right.
Q: But you don’t have a “Boston accent”?
A: I lost it after I came to California.
Q:
You never worked as a movie theater usher like lots of us back then?
A:
No.
Q:
And in school you weren’t involved in theater or any of that kinda
art stuff?
A:
No.
Q:
And storytelling was just …
A:
… part of my personality more than anything else. I always had an
interest in stories and film.
Q: You didn’t go to law
school right away, you went into the military, correct?
A: Actually I started college,
transferred schools, then (chuckles) got into an argument, a fight
with a woman in charge of the Draft Board. As another woman there
told me, after that my draft file went from Drawer 18 to Drawer One!
And so I got drafted …
Q: Vietnam era?
A: Yes. I’d been down to
the Air Force recruiter just to talk, had taken the test and had
tested well. So I went back down and said “I got drafted!”,
and he said “Well, you enlisted the day before you got drafted.
Don’t worry about it!” And he backdated my paperwork and I
got stationed at Mather. So because of that, I spent my time out
here.
Q: What were you doing in the
Air Force?
A:
I was an airborne radio repairman. I’d had very little mechanical
training, but my aptitude test said I’d be good at it. What
I really wanted
to do was be a chef or a cook! I love to cook. But
I started working on airborne radios for B-52s and KC-135s and was
part of the Strategic Air Command. I was a SAC-trained killer!
Q: Those were tube-based
radios, big pieces of equipment?
A: Yeah. But these were on
B-52s which carried nuclear weapons!
Q: Right! Then… ?
A: Afterwards I finished
college at Sacramento State College, and then applied to law school.
Got accepted at a couple of places and went to Hastings in San
Francisco, graduated from there.
Q: How did you end up in
Martinez?
A:
After I graduated from law school, I joined the Contra Costa
Public Defenders Office. I was assigned to Concord and then Martinez
office, where I worked for the last 20 years of my tenure there. I
loved the community and the environment, met Suzanne (his wife, a
Martinez native) and the rest is – as they say – history. I
always really wanted to be in the Public
Defenders
Office.
Q: Really!?!
A: Yeah, it had everything I
wanted. I wanted to be a trial attorney, I didn’t want to sit in
an office and make wills and trusts and estates. I wanted to
represent from a social/worker perspective …
Q: People who really needed
it?
A:
Yeah. I didn’t want to represent rich people, rich businesses.
When I worked in the Public Defenders Office for thirty years, I got
approached a number of times by private firms, I had a good
reputation as a trial attorney. And
I turned them down because I
was happy doing what I was doing. I
liked that you could practice law, be a good lawyer, and you also
could be a social worker to a
certain degree. And the other thing was, it’s kinda like
performance. You could be a gamesman. I always said that the best
lawyer is always one-third lawyer, one-third social worker and
one-third gamesman.
Q: And storyteller?
A: Well, that’s the
gamesman.
* * *
Paul and Kurt Norton took "Death off the table" inside this building
Q: How did you meet Kurt
Norton and what was the spark that indicated you were going to become
filmmaking partners?
A: Kurt was an investigator in
the Public Defenders Office. My daughter is deaf. His parents are
both deaf. That was a connection that bound us, we became friends.
He left the Public Defenders Office, went off into private practice,
was doing a lot of death penalty work. I hired him a couple of times
as a private investigator to work on a death penalty case.
Q:
And Kurt was a filmmaker, interested in filmmaking?
A:
Kurt had been accepted into AFI (American Film Institute) Film
School, but he didn’t go because of a death in his family. His
brother died. And that was a huge blow to the family, so he put it
off and just never got back there. Both he and I came from different
directions into a love of, and interest in, film.
Q:
But he wasn’t from Boston?
A:
No. He’s lived in California all his life.
Q:
So you both worked in the Public Defenders Office, a building that
used to be a movie theater?
A: After we retired, we
maintained our friendship and started to go to film festivals
together. We went to Toronto and Cannes and San Francisco and down
south, LA. So film festivals and the love of film is something that
continues to bind us. When I left the Public Defenders Office, I
started a company called Gravitas Docufilms. And the first thing we
started doing is what I refer to as “mitigation videos”
for death penalty cases. A defense lawyer presents mitigation
material to the District Attorney saying “Look, we know you’re
going to prosecute my client, but don’t try to kill him. Just take
Death off the table.” And therefore the severest penalty will
be Life Without the Possibility of Parole.
Q: And that video was meant
for only one specific set of people.
A: The DA’s office, yes.
The Death committee.
Q: A handful of people?
A: Correct. But I realized as
an attorney that we would present all these sheets of paper –
reports and letters from grandma, the social worker and the rabbi and
so on. And who’s gonna read all that material? So I decided the
better thing would be – given the influence and impact of movies –
give them a twenty-minute video. And it was so successful. We did
about fifteen of them throughout the years, and thirteen of them were
successful. The DA took Death off the table, they prosecuted them,
but they removed the Death Penalty because of the mitigation that we
presented on video. And it had such an impact on people. Because
we’re all human beings, and we all are influenced by the movies!
Q: That’s interesting
because it puts you in a judgment position, in a way. Who to select
to have those little shorts?
A: Well, that’s not true.
Q: How does that work?
A: Who selected them was …
we made our services available. No one in the criminal defense world
was doing this – no one in the entire country. You may see video
used by lawyers in ...
Q: … deposition?
A: Well, somewhat in
deposition, but more in medical malpractice cases. Little boy gets
hit by a bus, becomes quadriplegic. In that case, we see a video “A
Day In The Life Of ...” this young child. But nobody was using
video in criminal defense work. In criminal defense work there is
something called [Penal Code Section] 987 funds provided by the
State, so they had money that could be used to make a video and that
video could be presented to the DAs to say “You shouldn’t kill
this guy because his grandmother says you shouldn’t!” The
best part of it seemed so obvious to me: you get a letter as a human
being from somebody, and all you see is what’s written down on a
piece of paper, black and white. It could be artful, it could be
inartful. But most of the time you’re gonna have an inartful
letter written by somebody who really cares – the grandmother, the
mother, the wife. It’s impossible for the DA to judge how
impactful that witness will be to a jury six months down the road in
trial. You see that person for five minutes on a video, you know …
you can tell that person is going to be able to sway a jury. You can
see, no matter how inarticulate they may be, this is the Grandmother
of All Grandmothers! Everybody’s gonna love this woman. They’re
never gonna give this defendant the Death Penalty because of this
person.
Q: So film helps the system
overall because it doesn’t waste time on cases it shouldn’t be
trying?
A: Absolutely … So then we
decided to move past that. We wanted to do something other than
continue “practicing law” after we had retired from practicing
law! So we decided we would do documentaries.
Q: It seemed a natural step
forward?
A: Yeah.
Q: But it seems there’s an
“arrow” that continues through your work, with the continued
empathetic approach to the subjects.
A: I think so.
Q: And within that frame, you
are “the director”?
A: Right ...
Q: But you didn’t go to film
school to learn directing. And you weren’t directing people on
stage. But you have directed “real people/not actors”?
A: Correct.
Q: That takes some skill.
You just don’t coax somebody to do things like that, especially in
front of a movie camera. Especially when they’re shy.
A: I think so. When Kurt
and I started making documentaries, we interviewed a lot of different
people. From Christopher Nolan, the director, to Rob Reiner, the
director/filmmaker, to John Singleton…
Q; For “Shadows”?
A: For “Shadows” …
there was a wide range of people, from the Librarian of Congress to
technicians, audiophiles …
Q: … on purpose … that
cross section?
A: That whole group of people,
and one of the things that a number of people said to us was that
they’d been interviewed before, but that we were skilled
interviewers. And I’d say we came from that background -- I was a
trial attorney and my partner Kurt
was an investigator. So we were very accustomed to – and to a
certain degree – skilled in asking questions of people.
Q: The interview process …
A: Absolutely! We were not
intimidated – either one of us – by these people. And I’m sure
that they had been interviewed by people who had been intimidated by
them, scared by them, nervous around them, didn’t know how to ask a
question. And we would hone in on what we needed to find out by
asking them questions, being able to get to the crux, getting the
most information in the best way from them. And not being
intimidated by who they were.
Q: And not having them
be intimidated by you?
A: True. But because of our
backgrounds … I mean, it’s not just being a lawyer or being an
investigator, and knowing how to ask a question. It’s knowing how
to approach someone before you ask anything. We would always
start off for ten minutes, fifteen minutes talking to them about
themselves. Not talking about what it is we wanted to talk about.
“How’s your last film?” And “I read so and so” …
we’d always do our homework. I can remember when we were
interviewing The French George Clooney (Samuel Labarthe) in a French
dubbing studio. And I was talking to the gentleman about his wife’s
movie career, and he said “How do you know that?” And I
said, “Well, we do our homework. We know about people.” It’s
amazing how people are impressed by that. I’m no different than
anybody else. If someone is interviewing me, and knows about me and
knows about my background, or knows about my wife or my family or
something like that, I feel comfortable around them. I feel like
they’re interested. It’s not like “Tell me what it is I
wanna know … “
Q: It’s a conversation.
A:
It’s a conversation, exactly. When we got started making
documentaries, both Kurt and I were interested in – we don’t like
the phrase “how sausage is made” – but How Films Were
Made … The backstory of how do you make film. And obviously we
had read statistics about how many films had been lost through
deterioration and degradation and just pure neglect. No one was
interested in film. No one was interested in preserving
film. I mean, think about films back in the 1930s,
40s, 50s. Films had a certain circuit. They
would be made in Hollywood and then they would go to this state or
that country
and they might wind up in Alaska or Australia. Or Prague. And then
that was the end of their circuit. Nobody
sent them back!
Q: These were prints!
A: Often times this was the
ONLY print …
Q: … that remained?
A: … that remained! And it
would be shown again and again until the end. There’s a great
story in the DVD extras of “These Amazing Shadows” – a 20-plus
minute film called “Lost Forever” and it’s about the loss of
film. One story is about a town in the Yukon that was the last stop
on the circuit. And how they dug up an ice rink in order to build a
new one. They found all these old films, all these old prints,
buried under the building!
Q: Actually preserved in the
cold ground?
A: The ones that were
preserved they gave both to Canada and also to the Library of
Congress here.
Q:
The National Film Registry
is around thirty years old, and that’s about the time Americans
started getting serious as a culture about film preservation.
A: The National Film Registry
is nothing more than a list of films …
Q: … from the Library of
Congress?
A:
Correct. But the National Film Preservation Board is a board made
up of people from all aspects of the film industry who are selected
by the Librarian of Congress to come up with that list of 25 films.
They
came up with an arbitrary number – I don’t know exactly
how – of 25 a year that
are marked for preservation.
Now the reality, between you and me
and the lamppost, is that’s there’s a belief that
this preserves the films. A
lot of people at screenings would ask us afterwards, “Does
that mean that all these films that are listed there are actually
preserved?” And the answer is
“No!” The answer
is that often it’s putting the imprimatur
of importance on a film -- be it from the 1940s
or 50s or Silent Era, whatever. So the Library of Congress will try
to go out and get that film in whatever form it can find.
Obviously,
it’s on a long list that the Library of Congress wants to preserve.
Q: But they’re not
physically saving the films themselves?
A: Nobody doubts the
wonderful intentions of the Library of Congress to preserve film, or
their acknowledgement of the importance of film. But what they don’t
do is they don’t make the films they have accessible. Why aren’t
they putting them up on a website someplace, where people could watch
these wonderful films? Obviously if you choose a film from the 1980s
or 90s you can get a DVD or watch it on a blue-ray, Netflix,
whatever. But there are so many films – be they shorts, newsreels,
films from the 1920s, 30s or 40s – that are not readily available.
And The Library has a copy. So we would ask people on the National
Film Preservation Board why don’t you try to make these films
accessible to the public, to share with the public generally these
films that are out there. Some agreed with us, some did not.
Q:
Did you study film or theater or journalism in school?
A:
No.
Mariano is a self-made "film student"
Q:
But you’re interested in storytelling and you take a backstage
perspective, so what fired that interest in you? Because, I mean,
you didn’t initially recall the name of your local movie theater!?!
A:
I don’t know the answer to that question. When we were making
“These Amazing Shadows” we met a lot of people who are actors,
directors, producers – from the obscure to the famous, very well
known. And all of them universally talked about their fascination
with, and love of, film. Some were able to explain in either
intelligent or technical terms what it was about movies that so drew
them … We talked to (Martin) Scorsese, he grew up in the tough
neighborhoods of New York and for him the movies and movie theaters
were an escape. He went there literally to escape the “Mean
Streets” forgive the pun. But
that’s why he went to the
movies. That’s not
necessarily true of me, but I think that for different reasons,
myself and all the filmmakers we interviewed were attracted to the
storytelling of movies … that fantasy life, that world. I mean I
make documentaries, but it was not documentaries that I was seeing as
a kid. It was the swashbuckling, the westerns, the comedies, the
serials … that was all
fascinating to me. That you
could put this up on the screen. It
was a whole different world!
Q:
And as kids,
after we
left that theater, that experience resonated
out of the room with us. You
rode your “horse” outta there, or
some sword fight
you’re gonna have ‘till you get back home, right?
A:
As one
of our interviews pointed out, a film doesn’t take place in that
two-hour period on screen. It takes place after you leave the
theater and it’s you talking about it with someone at a restaurant
or a bar. It’s
you living, and re-feeling, those moments. Long afterwards, for days
even. That’s
the power of movies.
Q: In “Being George Clooney”
you concentrate on sound while in “These Amazing Shadows” you
seem to concentrate on the picture. Some of those “Shadows”
frankly didn’t have a sound track. And you beautifully start
“Clooney” off with us seeing that sound track before we realize
the sleight-of-hand, “That’s not him!” when you cut to
the dubbing actor. How does that sound-based approach play into your
work, you’re not musical … ?
A: No … Although I did play
trombone in the school orchestra!
Q: So you have some sense of
playing music with a group of people, and importance of sound on
film. For the music on “Shadows” you brought in Peter Golub, who
was able to take existing scores and meld them in a way that created
a coherence of the musical track. How was he discovered and brought
into the production?
A: Our producer, Christine
O’Malley, is from LA and is part of the O’Malley Creadon
Production Company. They make documentaries on their own. They knew
of, and had used, Peter before. And so she recommended him to us.
We met with Peter, absolutely adored him, liked his music, listened
to some work that he had done. He’d written the music to “The
Great Debaters” with Denzel Washington.
Q: A drama …
A: Peter wanted to go to
Prague and use the Prague Symphonic Orchestra to record a soundtrack
for the film. And the reason he did that is, he said “This is a
soundtrack about film. Film is big and it’s important. We don’t
need little bits and pieces, needledrops and stuff, we need big
music!” So he went very big with the score. And it was money
well spent. He was influenced and impacted by the soundtracks of
some of the big films that we were showing on screen. We did a
couple montages of big screen moments which move people. But those
big screen moments are also influenced by the music that’s in the
background. You might not remember the music, but …
Q: … it works because of the
music. You can’t just grind up those old scores!
A: Correct. Whether it’s
“Gone With the Wind” or whatever. So he was able to realize the
importance of a big soundtrack and to create that big original
soundtrack for “Shadows”.
Q: Is Peter a composer
generally?
A: Yes. He does mostly film
music, but he’s done a bunch of stuff. He’s done TV work, and
actually composed sonatas and Broadway scores. And he was talking
about how expensive it is to hire an orchestra in the United States
because they’re all unionized and the difference in price. I mean
we had to fly him and a music supervisor to Prague and spend four or
five days there doing this music. And that was a drop in the bucket
compared with what it would have taken to get San Francisco or
Seattle or San Jose orchestra to do it.
Q: Do you think that the music
itself was a major factor in getting your film to open at Sundance?
A: Absolutely! I think that
all of us would openly admit and attest to the fact that Peter did an
incredible job with the score. The success of the movie, be it on
television or in theaters, getting into Sundance was because of the
score. I mean the film itself I think reawakens people’s
attachment to, and love of, movies. We were asked to screen it to a
group of high school students in Salt Lake City when we were at
Sundance. There were five hundred students in this huge auditorium.
They absolutely loved the movie. And they were able to see humor
where there was humor, and they were able to see films that they
recognized. There were obviously films that they didn’t recognize
that were before their time. So that’s one of the attributes of
our movie. It appealed to a young audience too. Kurt had an
experience where we screened the film at the Tiburon Film Festival
and he was approached afterwards by a nine-year-old girl and a
90-year-old woman who both came up to him at the same time to talk
about how much they loved the movie. That was the great part about
the film, it had something for everybody.
Q: Let’s talk about your
editors. When the shooting is all done, you dump it all on their
laps, right?
A: Yeah!
Q: And you’ve worked with
the same editors – Doug Blush and Alex Calleros – from the
beginning. How did you meet them?
A: We were looking for an
editor, and we’d read about Doug Blush, seen some of his material.
Doug produces, writes, directs and is an editor extraordinaire! He
went to USC film school and has won Academy Awards. He also has a
musical background, so one of the things that we liked was how he
edited sound ... there was something about the rhythm of his editing.
Anyway, he lives in Los Angeles but he was up in San Jose working on
a film. We found that out and went down to San Jose, took him out to
dinner, bought him a couple of beers, told him about our project. He
was very interested in it. So we agreed that he would be the editor
for our film. But he wanted someone to help him because we got into,
as you often times will when editing – not in a fictional film, but
in a documentary – you’re creating something out of a block of
clay. And you get to points where you ask “What are we doing?!?
What are we trying to create here? We’ve got some great material
– we know that. But we don’t know exactly what it’s supposed
to look like.” We got to a point a couple of times in the
editing process where we’d kinda get to loggerheads. So we brought
in Alex Calleros, who is much younger than we are …
Q: The three of you: Doug,
Kurt and yourself.
A: Of the three of us, I’m
the oldest, then Kurt, then Doug. And Alex was twenty-something, a
Millennial kinda guy. He brought in a certain kind of insouciance
and youthfulness to the project. And it was funny. I can
remember him editing some things and me thinking “Eehhh, that’s
not gonna work!” And then in seeing it all cut together, I
thought “Now, that works perfectly”! Alex brought a lot
of humor. There are moments in “Shadows” that are funny,
irreverent and absolutely work perfectly.
* * *
Boston Latin School: "Veni, Vidi, Vici!"
Q: Your courtroom practice,
getting those stories, sometimes where life and death is involved ...
do you see that background working when you’re out there doing film
work? Do you see yourself drawing on that experience? Because you
call yourself “Gravitas” … I mean, you’re not making
screwball comedies!?!
A (chuckles): I don’t know
the answer to that question. I don’t think that consciously … I
do know that Kurt and I have had conversations about not making a
conscious effort to try to save the world. We know that
documentaries are different than narrative fictional films. We know
that they can be very influential and we try to tell a story. We try
to make it important. But we also try to make it entertaining. We
want people to enjoy it, and we want people to learn something. But
we don’t necessarily want people to leave the theater, as with “An
Inconvenient Truth”, and think “Oh! I have to save the
environment! I’m gonna go join this club and do this action!”
I mean, at the end of “Shadows”, there’s a title card that
says if you wanna nominate a film for next year’s Film Registry,
please go on to this website and do it. It’s important. But we
don’t feel like we’re on a mission, so to speak. And there’s
nothing wrong with that. I’m not minimizing or denigrating
documentary filmmakers that have a cause. I mean, there are
extremely important films be it “An Inconvenient Truth” or
whatever that attempt to do that and I think that those are valuable
and necessary. But that’s not what we wanna do. So we’re always
looking at the entertainment … so you’ll always find that there’s
humor in our films.
Q; But the “gravitas”
… that’s coming directly from both of your experience with the
criminal justice system?
A: True. We’ve been
approached a number of times and people have asked us, “Why
don’t you make films about the criminal justice system?”
Something we know extremely well. And there have been a couple of
instances where we have done some pre-production work on them, but
have never gotten around to it. And those are again,
valuable/important subject matters. I just don’t wanna do it.
Q: It’s
climb-on-the-high-horse kinda movie making …
A: I lived that life and I
lived it very well. And I thought it was an important thing … I
felt that what we did as a lawyer, as an investigator in the criminal
justice system was extremely important. We were, in a sense, saving
people’s lives. One life at a time, so to speak. But I don’t
want to save anybody’s life through filmmaking. I just want to
inform and entertain.
Q: … and still tell those
stories!
A: Yes! And tell those
stories. Tell people something they didn’t know. That’s why I
love movies about making movies. What I’ve learned about
filmmaking from behind the scenes has been extremely influential and
rewarding to me.
Q: But … you don’t see
yourself making fiction films?
A: No, no. We’ve thought
about that as well. When I watch TV or go to a movie, I’m always
thinking … “Oh! This is the way it should have been written!
It makes no sense whatsoever to have this plot line here. This was
distracting, this wasn’t helpful. What they should have done was
this!” So I always have that in the back of my head. I think
I know how to write better than some screenwriters, but at the same
time, that’s not what I wanna do.
Q: And you never know until
you’re there, in the middle of a project like that, this wonderful
thing you’ve dreamed up is gonna land anywhere near a secure place!
It takes a long time to make a movie, beginning to end. What do you
foresee ahead of you coming up?
A: Kurt is working on a
project right now, in fact he’s headed off to London with our crew.
He’s trying to get backing for a film on climate change/global
warming. A different approach to it. And one of the things we’re
working on also is the future of labor in America. And that is
something that is so rapidly changing. We went from an agrarian
society to an industrial society and now we’re changing to a
technological society. So I mean it’s everything from
technological mechanization and automation through robots, the use of
robots. What jobs are safe. What jobs are not safe. When people
lose their jobs, how do you incorporate … there’s a phrase in the
industry called “collaborative robots” where the robots are
working with humans and not replacing them. So there’s so much
subject matter. And what we’re presenting right now is a
presentation for our distributor to approach Netflix to do a five or
six part series. That would be an hour each. To do various aspects
of the changing face of labor in America.
Q: So that would give you room
to dive deep into it!
A: We had looked long and hard
into doing a self-contained, what’s called a “one-off” – a
90-minute documentary on it. It was just …
Q: … some subjects are just
too big!
A:
Yeah. On “Shadows”
I think what was most
important to us was the loss … the actual loss of this material
that was so impactful, if there is such a word. Or
important to our
culture. Movies
are not only important to us as individuals, personally. I mean we
talk about that two hours and all the time after that you relive and
re-feel the movie. But the
movies are
also important to us as a culture. Film moves culture and society in
various ways and to various degrees. That’s not true of every
single film, that’s made, but films reflect the nature and ethos of
our society.
Q: At the time!
A:
Yes! Exactly. And that’s an amazing thing for a medium to do, be
it the sound or the visual … Things move so technologically quickly
today, unlike forty years ago let’s say. But film was so important
to us as a society and that’s one of the things that the National
Film Registry tires to do, point out the
importance of these pictures.
* * *
Timeline of the State Theatre
Q: Not all of your Public
Defender years were in the building that was once the State Theater?
A: True. We were at 610 Court
Street.
Q: But you did move into the
State Theater building after it was refurbished, and you were aware
of what it was?
A: Yes.
Q: And what it was was a
vaudeville house that was huge! It had a fly above the stage and it
was built in the wrong year probably – 1926 – just before the talkies
were getting started and later it became the State theater showing
movies.
A: My wife’s father used to
be an usher there.
Q: It had fifteen hundred
seats, didn’t it? Pretty big house.
A: I think so.
Q: Did you ever poke around
the building to see what, if anything, remained of the original
theatre?
A: No. But when we toured the
building before moving in, the builders told us they had preserved
the original murals and other artwork before framing over it.
Q: Did you climb up into the
fly above the stage?
A: No.
Q:
You've used Kickstarter and other public-based funding sources as
well as private backing ... Is that now a necessity of the
documentary business? And do you need to line up distribution prior
to production, only after knowing your budget can be met?
A:
We were fortunate enough to have a distributor for “Shadows”
before we went to Sundance – a rarity in the business. Very few
documentaries have (or line up) a distributor prior to
filming/production. We proceeded with production on our films
through a combination of self-funding, crowd-sourced funding (e.g.
Kickstarter) and grants. We’ve been fortunate to find distribution
and sales after our films were completed.
Q: What other documentary
filmmakers inspire you?
A: There are so many people!
... I like Michael Moore’s work, but …
Q: … his advocacy?
A: I don’t mind the
advocacy, I mind the personal involvement … a little too much.
Q: Others?
A: Errol Morris. His “Thin
Blue Line” is an incredible piece of work.
Q: Do you know where his film
school was?
A: No.
Q: In the seats of Pacific
Film Archive!
A: He’s very inventive.
Q: In college, we invited
Jonas Mekas to talk to our film club. Mekas was The Village Voice
underground film critic and a “diary” filmmaker. Still active!
But his talk was the first time I’d ever heard of “non-narrative
film”. And his movies really stood out, they were these little
slices of life, each with a date. They were even less narrated than
most non-narrated film! But there is this thing he discussed about
the unveiling of the story, and there’s a non-narrative approach to
all of your documentaries, correct? There’s not a narrator there
saying “Hi everyone I’m going to lead you around by the nose
and tell this story” … I mean they story unfolds in all of
your documentaries, correct?
A: Yes, we know lots of
documentaries use narrators, but we’re not big fans of narrators.
We’re more concerned with presenting a story and having the
audience figure it out for themselves, basically. One of the things
that I found – not having a background in filmmaking at all – was
that filmmaking is one of the most collaborative art forms. And the
idea of working with editors and composers and producers and other
people in sculpting a story after film has been shot. I mean, Kurt
and I met today on a film he’s working on about climate change and
global warming, I’m producing. And he and I were talking how in
“These Amazing Shadows” we must have interviewed over a hundred
people. We didn’t know where to end! But part of it was ... you
know you’re looking for someone within the industry to talk about a
certain subject matter and you end up spending a couple of hours and
realize … “This is not the Best Person to do this.”
And other times you get lucky and it just meshes.
Q: But with no one person to
narrate the story …
A: We interviewed way too many
people. We used, I think it was 48 or 50 interviews. It’s always
difficult because you feel like they’re your children in a sense.
“Which one am I gonna send to college?” I
can remember in the first film I would send emails to people saying
“Sorry, you didn’t make the cut.” And even in
“George Clooney” there were people that we really liked, but they
just didn’t fit into the story. It wasn’t that they were bad …
in fact, what I specifically did was, when I was asked by our
distributor, Goldcrest, to do the DVD extras, I intentionally went
back and included a lot of people that didn’t make it into the
movie.
Q: When is that DVD coming
out?
A: It’s supposed to come out
in August.
Q: So you may have it in time
for your screening at the Campbell.
A: I would love for that to
happen …
* * *
State Theater shortly after it opened in 1926.
(historic image provided by Julian Frazer)
Gravitas Docufilms:
“These Amazing Shadows” on
line:
More Shadows Links!
National Film Registry listing:
Doug Blush links:
Alex Calleros links:
Peter Golub links:
Tiburon International Film
Festival:
