This is Not a Film

As I’ve mentioned, a few months back, I launched a sister company to Cyan Pictures, called Long Tail Releasing. Cyan is a production company – we make movies (and are, in fact, currently shooting our next, around Manhattan and Brooklyn). Long Tail, on the other hand, is a distribution company – trying to change the way smaller, quirkier films are released to global audiences.

Each year, there are over a thousand films that screen at top-tier festivals (like Sundance, Cannes, TriBeCa or Toronto), yet are never more broadly distributed. After the festivals, they simply fall off the face of the earth, never seen again aside from by the directors’ grandmothers. We’re trying to fix that, by releasing a large number of these films (eventually, as many as 150 a year) for very small theatrical runs, for DVD sales and rental, online and off, for digital download, and through a number of other usual and unusual channels.

I’m emailing today because we officially launch Long Tail’s first release, This is Not a Film, a week from today. But we’re hoping to build some early momentum by pre-releasing it, today, to family and friends.

While This is Not a Film is quirky, it’s also quite good. It won three festivals, and scored an ‘A’ from Entertainment Weekly, which quipped: “Actually, this is a film, and a surprisingly good one.”

You can learn more about This is Not a Film, read reviews, watch the trailer, and pick up a discounted copy, at helpmefindmygirlfriend.com.

In short, however, This is Not a Film is a first-person documentary by Michael Conner, who made the movie in an attempt to find and win back his ex-girlfriend Grace McKenna. As Michael puts it, the movie is sort of a ‘modern day message in a bottle’; he’s hoping that someone will see the film, know Grace, and put the two of them back in touch. So the film itself is Michael, with the help of his actress friend Nadia Dajani, recreating scenes from his relationship with Grace, to prove to us that it was a good relationship, that he’s a good guy, and that he’s worthy of our help in his quest. And, along the way, as much as we’re learning about Michael, he’s learning about himself.

So watch the film because it’s smart, quirky and funny. Watch it because you want to help build a new model for getting great festival films to broader audiences. Or watch it because you don’t want me to have to move into a refrigerator box in Central Park.

Whatever the reason, it’s www.helpmefindmygirlfriend.com.

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Blimp Pilots

I spent most of last week with Rob Barnum, a new hire who’ll be managing the West Coast office of Cyan Pictures + Long Tail Releasing, who was in town to get up to speed on both companies. While still in college, Rob served as an exec at EscapeHomes, helping to take the company through several large venture capital rounds and a recent merger. He then started a production company to escape from the world of tech and into the world of film. Plus, he screenwrites, and blogs, and drinks heavily.

So, in short, I hired him because, in true narcissistic style, I like people like myself.

It wasn’t until Friday night, however, that I realized how dangerous having both of us in the same room would be. Because Friday night, we headed down to the West Village, hit the first crowded bar off the subway steps, and decided it was imperative that we spend the evening picking up random women.

Now, picking up women in bars is a chump’s game. It puts you into competition with every single other guy in the bar. Worse, it puts you on par with every single other guy in the bar, makes you the sketchy sort of guy who spends Friday night hitting on random women.

Sure, the girls are ostensibly there because they want the attention, having layered on makeup and cocktail dresses. But, deep down, every girl would much rather date a guy she’d met at the park or through a friend or in the yogurt aisle of the supermarket. The Fat Black Pussycat just lacks tell-your-grandkids-about-how-you-met charm.

So, if you’re looking to meet women at a bar, the main thing is to not be like all of the other sketchy guys surrounding you. You’ve got to be different, in a good way. You’ve got to think outside the booty box.

Rum and Coke’s in hand, Rob and I sat down at the first bar to discuss that conundrum, and to scope out the options. To our immediate right was a group of three girls, sitting together, dutifully brushing off a chain of successive hopefuls coming over with their smoothest entrances. They seemed as good a choice as anyone else.

Before I had the chance to reason my way out of it, I excused myself from Rob and headed over. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said, receiving icy stares. “But I was wondering which you think are cooler: blimps or hot-air balloons.”

“What?”, one of them asked.

“Blimps or hot air balloons – which is cooler. You.” I pointed to the one in the middle.

“Blimps, I guess,” she said, slightly confused. I got another blimp vote, then one for hot-air balloons.

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s all I needed.” I walked back to Rob, sat down, and checked my watch.

Thirty-four seconds later, the most intrepid of the three walked over.

“Now we’re curious,” she said. “Why did you want to know that?”

“It’s not that important,” I replied, and went back to talking with Rob.

“You can’t just ask us that,” she continued. “You have to tell me why you wanted to know.”

“Well,” I started, then looked to Rob, who nodded approval. “We’re going to be racing from New York to Chicago. Either in blimps or hot air balloons, and we wanted to see if one was cooler than the other.”

“Racing to Chicago?” the girl asked, dubious.

“Well,” Rob jumped in. “My grandfather passed away recently, and gave me an old hot-air balloon in his will. I was thinking about repairing it, and then I thought, if Josh buys one too, we could race.”

“Right,” I continued. “But I figured Rob could probably get some trade-in value on the balloon if we wanted to switch to blimps and race those instead.”

Rob and I nodded nonchalantly, like that pretty much summed it all up.

“You have to come with me to tell that to my friends,” the girl said. We were in.

Over the course of the evening, at several bars and with several groups of women, we worked our way through variations on the theme. Perhaps Rob was going to be in a hot-air balloon and I’d be in a blimp, and did they think that would put one of us at a disadvantage? Or, we had already bought the blimps, but we were in town to see if Blimpie would be a corporate sponsor of our race.

While we’d come in totally deadpan, we tried to slowly edge the story over the top, to let the girls in on it. The good ones got it, and played along, happy to be inside a shared joke. The slower ones never seemed to catch on, but remained credulous and interested.

Either way, after a while, we’d excuse ourselves, bow off invitations to join them at subsequent bars, decline phone numbers. We weren’t really there to pick up women. We just wanted the thrill of the chase.

Which, I would guess, is almost as exciting as racing hot-air balloons.

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Cheap Trick

You see what I’m doing here? I’m making it seem like I’m jumping whole-hog back into self-aggrandizing by putting up a lot of little postings, which will clutter the front page and at least look vaguely like content until you read them and figure out, holy crap, he’s just writing long, long run-on sentences without an actual point which is like the cheapest blogging trick in the entire world.

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Reconsidered

Maybe this whole shaving thing will make my writing worse, because now what am I going to do instead of thoughtfully stroking my beard as I try and compose sentences and paragraphs?

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Drastic Measures

1. I am alive.
2. The completely empty front page was not the first sign of impending apocalypse.
3. It was, however, a sign that I’ve completely fallen off the blogging wagon.
4. So, to remedy that, to kick myself back into routine writing, I shaved off my beard this morning.
5. I’m not sure how that’s going to help either, but I figure, at this point, it probably can’t make my blogging schedule any worse.

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Principium

I realized the other night that life is sort of like a big game of Scrabble: you get these random pieces dealt to you by the fates, and your job is to look at what everybody else is making of their pieces, then figure out how you can arrange your own alongside to add new meaning to it all.

At four in the morning, at least, thoroughly plastered, that’s deep.

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Snooty

Growing up in suburban Northern California, with Jewish New Yorker parents, Southern culture was, to put it mildly, not a large part of my early life. So far as I was concerned, America was the West Coast, the East Coast, and a whole bunch of ‘fly-over states’ in between.

But, over the past five years, largely due to living several of those with a Georgian and a Kentuckian, I’ve slowly begun to believe there might actually be something good going on in all those places jumbled up in the beach-less middle.

My iTunes library has filled with bluegrass and alt-country. My DVD collection has grown to encompass swaths of ‘regional storytelling’ – from *Matewan* through *All the Real Girls*.

And I’ve eaten barbecue. Lots of barbecue. With a host of guides ready to toss aside ‘Yankee bullshit’, I’ve toured the range of New York options, tasting scores of hush puppies, comparing the merits of vinegar- and tomato-based sauces, and marveling at the wide array of ways to chop up and char-broil the contents of an average barnyard. (Pig snoot sandwiches? Seriously?)

So it was with great anticipation that, yesterday at high noon, I headed down to Madison Square Park to meet James, Colin and Bill at the 3rd Annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party. The event brought together pitmasters from places like Little Rock and Decatur, Murphysboro and St. Louis, Elgin and Driftwood, each carting with them a little slice of home.

Or, as it turned out, a big slice of home. Which was good, because New Yorkers came in droves to the event, yielding hour-long lines at each separate stand. The restauranteurs were ready, having towed along fleets of trailer-hitched industrial-sized grills, and having piled high stacks of animal carcasses, part and whole, bound for fiery fates.

I arrived at the park just after noon, and found James already in line for the Salt Lick’s stand. Ten minutes and ten feet of line later, it became clear my initial wide-sampling intentions likely wouldn’t work out. Buying plates from just two different vendors, it seemed, would be an all-afternoon affair.

Moments later, however, Colin arrived with our salvation: a Bubba Fast Pass he’d scored from a VIP the day before. The pass took us ‘backstage’, past the crawling lines and into the cordoned-off sections behind each stand, where the barbecuing itself was actually underway. From that vantage point, we could amble up to any of the serving stations and score selections of grilled goodness in mere seconds.

By the time we left the park, some two hours later, I could barely walk. Sated and sauce-spattered, I was nearly sweating from the sheer effort of ongoing digestion. James pointed out that he was trying not to step too hard when he walked, for fear of triggering an emergency bathroom run.

But, goddamn, that was some barbecue.

As we headed towards the subway, Colin announced he was considering holding his upcoming birthday party at Blue Smoke, a relatively recent addition to the NYC barbecue scene, which brings a rather New York perspective (“you can improve anything, or, at least, make anything more expensive”) to it all by serving up what might be called haute barbecue cuisine.

Normally, I’d have been more than happy to pencil that into my calendar. But with the taste of authenticity still literally stuck between my teeth, it seemed like, well, kind of a waste.

Turns out, my Southern friends are right: when it come to barbecue, them yankees don’t know shit.

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Get Famous

Cyan’s next film, Premium, starts shooting this Sunday right here in NYC. If you’d like to be an extra at some point over the next month or so (and, particularly, if you have a car, and can put it in the movie with you), let me know.

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Audible

At the same time that I picked up the now-carried-everywhere Shuffle, I also picked up Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

Or, more accurately, I downloaded it, as an audio book from the iTunes store. It was my first audio book purchase, and buying it felt like I was cheating. Like I had eschewed a classic novel for its Reader’s Digest summary. Technically, my download of Freakonomics was unabridged. But without its crinkling pages in hand, without its black words racing past my saccadic glances, it still felt, well, less than the actual book.

Worse, it still felt less than actually reading. As if, by taking in the Steves’ work through my ears rather than my eyeballs, I was missing the most important part, was divorcing myself from the long, grand history of letters, was undermining my aspirations to the snotty literati crowd.

It turns out, however, that there’s historical precedent for such aural affairs: until the twelfth century, nearly all reading was done alound. Saint Augustine, for example was shocked to discover that when Ambrose, bishop of Milan, read, “his eyes followed the pages and his heart pondered the meaning, though his voice and tongue were still.” Even reading privately involved quietly speaking the words aloud, leading Ivan Illich to describe the monasteries of his time as ‘communities of mumblers’.

Indeed, at that time, reading was an inherently social activity, not the solitary one that it’s since become. As David Levy describes in his excellent Scrolling Forward: “for many centuries… if you read aloud, you were likely to be reading to others. And those listening were themselves considered to reading – not because they were looking at the text, but because they were hearing it.”

Or, in the words of Ivan Illich again, “all those who, with the reader, are immersed in this hearing milieu are equals before the sound.”

Equals before the sound! I like that. And, it turns out, I like audio books as well. I can read them walking down the street or jostling through subway cars, can play them by stereo while mopping the kitchen floor, and can stuff them, in bits and pieces, into the small gaps throughout my day.

This past weekend, I picked up Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything – which, unabridged, belies its name with a seventeen hour playing time. After that, I have an Audible.com wishlist slowing filling up with any number of auditized volumes I’d love to listen through. I’m immersing myself into Illich’s hearing milieu, and I’m going in deep.

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