Collaborators: Michael Mason

One of my first collaborators in New York was Michael Mason. I had just moved and was still living in an artists sublet in the garment district. Basically a large rehearsal space cordoned off by curtains. Through my one contact in New York, Vanessa Sparling, I had connected to the artistic director of a new company, had interviewed with them, and was now directing for the very newly formed Working Man's Clothes. A conglomeration of Texans and other southerners dedicated to breaking into the New York theater scene with authentic, original theater. I was casting at the New School for drama and saw my leading man - intuitive, natural, scratchy voice, perfect instincts, long lanky body, sex appeal. All the girls reading with him were falling in love with him. The perfect male lead. I cast him.

We did our first festival of plays "more for your money" and I was looped into the fold. Michael soon became my proxy in show after show and film projects on the side. Ideas would go through him. Projects would need his interest. His jäger-induced extremes would forever color the tapestries of my memories of New York and its west village. By the end of the show I was able to call him my friend. 

What characterized Michael singularly was self-direction. He was notoriously hard to pin down, hard to define, hard to get to come to meetings, hard to get to buy into a show. But when he did, he was lightning in a bottle. 

Many millions of gallons of water under the bridge. I moved away from New York, settled in San Francisco. He moved away from New York, into Texas. His girlfriend, Teresa, has just finished a residency at the Headlands institute and the show is a YBCA. He has an hour to grab a drink. Done. 

We went to Jillians and sat in front of the great wall of sports TVs and drank pilsner and well tequila (my choice) and talked about my shit. Divorce. New relationships. Layoff. New opportunities for personal work. Little films. Creating every day. Then bud light and fireball (his choice) and Teresa - two months together in Texas coming up - an acting award for his work as Stanley in Streetcar, and a new project - a children's illustrated book. 

He was newly bearded and I complimented him on it. "Teresa hates it," he said, "But I said to her, baby, if I cut off this beard because you wanted me to, I wouldn't deserve you, or the beard."

Something about Michael reminds me and reinforces in me a sentiment that I have been struggling to understand as I've separated from my ex and now this job. "Demonstrate independence from her opinion." Act despite disapproval. Act without permission. Act because it is true in you.

The "her" might be Teresa, or a job, or the internet. The World. I must do work because I want to do it. Because I feel it's important. Independent of opinion.

Below is my tone piece I shot with Michael a few years ago for my Feature project about the last man on earth. Take a look:

Good to see you, Michael.
Find him at https://www.facebook.com/aztececonomy?fref=ts
and http://newyorkisdead.net

Nature is bigger than me

I went on a trip up the delta this past week. First to scout, (I wrote about that a few days ago) then to have an annual friend party. We camped at a state rec area up near rio vista and barged around the river enjoying each other's company. 

This time the power of the place came out at night. We had returned to the group site as the sun set. We changed into dry clothes and clambered up the bluff to catch the last rays of the sun. They burned and pressed through the distant haze and windmills and fell welcome on our cold windswept faces. One of our party found a great blonde mantis in the grass. We all looked in fear and wonder. 

The sun set and we gathered wood. Not much to be seen. I spied a widow maker up in a willow tree. Bill spotted as I climbed up and felt like a kid, imagining my booted feet as barefoot, my hands grasped boldly although the light was almost gone. Bill said, "Dave, you're in the sky" and I felt safe and glad. He handed up a long stick and I used it to free the cracked branch. Up in the wind of the willow. 

We spotted an old oak - taken over almost by mistletoe. Great bare branches. "We need a rope" and someone had brought fifty feet of climbing rope. I carefully coiled it over-under and got the feel for it. We chose a little branch to build our confidence. One toss - over. Bill grabbed one side, I the other, we backed up making a triangle. Pulled, snap. Piece of cake. 

Tori joined us and saved us when half the line had made it over a big important branch but it was too high for us to reach. Rowan who had also joined attempted vainly to lift bill on his shoulders. Tori said, "here, Bill, I'll stand on your shoulders." "What!?" "Here, just squat a little bit to give me a foothold. Here" "she's got this Bill, don't worry" I said. She had been a vaulter in her youth. I kindof loved seeing them doing this together. They're steady boyfriend and girlfriend. She literally got up and stood hands free on his shoulders. I was helping spotting - we walked five feet forward - and she got the rope. Yes. 

Rowan and I pulled and snapped the branch. The rope was still around the whole of the big branch and a cluster of others. We tried to keep pulling to get the other little guys but it was the big one that started cracking. "That's the big one guys" bill said adding caution. "Stand clear!" I shouted. I could see in Rowans face he wanted it. He looked at me and said, "the wind would blow it down anyway." "Yeah," I said. And we pulled. And it cracked, and it fell in glory and shattered on the ground. Thirty feet of glorious rotten oak. "Well," Bill said, "the wood problem is solved."

We got the fire going and ate and drank. Sang songs. Danced to 90s house music. 

Later on when it was really dark, I took a walk out along the road leading in. I walked slowly and let the noises of my friends and the light from the fire get smaller and smaller. The noises of the wind and the light from the stars got stronger and stronger. A big tree towered before me, wishing and bending in the wind. I saw for the first time how all the trees here are shaped with the wind. Yearning eastward. And the windmills in the distance and the windswept water and windswept grassland. And windswept me. Out here in it. I had this realization. The realization that really correlates with all my artistic interest. Nature is bigger than me. Nature, the larger system, is longer and wider and more subtle and more complex and more everlasting than me. Trees are taller. Even if I cut them down they - as part of nature - are far more lasting than I am. They go on and on. Out in a wild place like this, the power and magnitude of nature are clear. The human edifices are quaint. Minor. A bathroom and an electric light. A tent about to break loose from its tentative hold on the earth. A twinkling fire. The grass is great. The trees are tall. The wind is traveling for hundreds? Thousands of miles? The starlight? Awe is the emotion I most acutely feel when relating to nature. Awe. Sometimes fear, but connecting and preparing awe. 

I decided that night I need to spend more time in wild nature in the next few weeks. It's like the mainline. The mainline for this feeling that I am cultivating as I look at clouds through street lights and leaves backlit by the sun. This emotional connection to nature. 

Story: Caterpillar Butterfly

I've thought a lot about story and my love of it and fear if it and feelings of not understanding it and wanting to understand it. I've often felt intimidated or confused when film makers say that they're storytellers. "I'm a storyteller. I tell visual stories. I just love stories." 

I do too. Don't get me wrong. I love movies and stories of every type. Something about the way my mind interprets the world I haven't always know what story is made up of. All the "plot points" all the "beats" the "act one-two-three" and don't get me started with the "point of no return". It's all tools and words and systems that have been confusing to me. I've read the books. "Screenplay" by Syd Field. "Story" by Robert McKee. "Three Uses of a Knife" by David Mamet. I've really delved and searched. "Poetics" for god's sake. But what does it all mean?

As I've started making these short films - the little 10-30 second ones I've been posting on facebook and Instagram and now cataloging on YouTube - I've had to ask what makes this diffrent from a photograph? How is this not just a picture? Just a portrait of an instant? A long portrait? I don't want to do just a sitting portrait. While nice, I think a photograph does it just as well if not better. So what is needed for it to be a film, and therefor have a story? A narrative?

I came up with these two things. 

Hero.

It has to have a single subject. I directed a food photography workshop and the main takeaway I got from the excellent instructors was: choose a hero on the plate. They did a shoot of a bowl of chili and there was some garnish and a nice bowl and a nice table and nice light. But the instructor was very clear and unapologetic about taking about about five beans from the chilli and washing them and looking at them and deciding which was her favorite. Which was the hero? Then she placed those beans back in carefully and angled on the hero. Made sure that as the pictures started rolling the hero was clear. 

So, that was back to photography, but it applies. Choose a hero of the story and don't forget who it is. 

Now, what's the second thing that's needed? 

Change.

Change is the crucial part that makes it an art in time. Tarkovsky - my favorite director - was famous for his long takes. He disagreed with Eisenstien and his theory of montage (editing creates meaning) feeling that deeper understanding of a moment comes from saturation over time during single takes (saturation creates meaning). What this means for him is tons of beautiful long tracking shots through forests, over streams, into the dark shadows of a bedroom as the hero, almost obscured from in the darkness, falls asleep. And into a dream. His memoir/book of essays is called "Sculpting in Time". In this way film is a temporal art. Like music, like dance. It requires duration to experience the change. 

So in a single shot he achieves change. Hero, change. 

That's what I'm trying to do in my small films. Single shot, hero, change. Even if subtle. 

Because here's what it all boils down to, as far as I can tell. A story is the journey of a caterpillar to a butterfly. That's it. That's all I can really see as true. The hero caterpillar her begins the story, and is transformed through time in the unity of space into a hero caterpillar. 

And what I love about this butterfly metaphor is that it implies the development into its essential self. Into it's deeper self. It's destiny. It packs in all the humanistic developmental excitement I could want in a single image. Luke Skywalker begins a caterpillar, farm boy who doesn't know what his life means, he ends a Butterfly: master of the force and reclaimer of his family's destiny. The stop light begins red, a caterpillar hero, it turns green: butterfly. A leaf begins frontlit, caterpillar, ends backlit and ecstaticly revealing it's inner composition: butterfly. 

I like subtle. I think for me the essential guide is: if this is the caterpillar, when is the butterfly? 

California Western

I went on a trip up the delta today with Bill in his new old boat. Parked on a trailer out in Bay Point, the end of the line, literally, of the Bay Area. Out there the glamour and the wet beauty of the silicon valley dry up and you're left with parched, windswept earth and a very big river.

Something about this space reminds me of the desert. I'll write a post soon about my love for Death Valley. But suffice it to say that I feel like it's a spiritual home. There's something so elemental when the rocks are exposed and the requirements so stark. If you don't have enough water, you die. Someone did last week.

And yet it's exquisitely beautiful. And it's this exquisite place where the human being is able to go and be set against the power of nature, and see that it is larger than he. The delta is like this. Even as we sped along in our blue boat, I felt the sense of power around me. The river itself is enormous. It's waves in the wind from the bay where intimidating. I was sure we were going to nose dive and be plunged into the green fear.

I wanted to talk about it not only because of this sense of fear (and awe) that wild places give me. Also because I felt this strong desire to make a modern western out in this space. A western in the sense that the landscape makes up it's own character. Man (human) is small in its scope. He is industrious, has goals, has a family to protect, and he is always smaller than the landscape. Nature. I love this theme. I love it because it gives us awe of man's potential to survive and awe of nature's raw power and grandeur. A California Western in that it is here, in the outskirts - it is the west. Out here at the end of the line (the Bart line) I felt the west again in California. Not the fertile west, nor the glamorous fancy west, nor the hippie west, nor the dream of the west, but the expanse of the west. The great and powerful west with its great mountains (Diablo) and great spaces and plains and stretches. Stretches so long you could die in the hot sun if you're not careful.

I loved this space. I loved the windmills and the cattle and the boat we were on and the fraternity and the fear. I loved the heat of the grass - the absolute readiness it had to burn. One scuff of the foot and a hundred acres would be black. I loved that. I loved the power.

Thanks to Bill for that excellent trip. Really a wonder.

Mentors

Went to Woodisde today with Bill to see our first film mentor, Gwen Sidley. She was our English and drama teacher at Woodside High School. She taught Shakespeare, how to act, and when it was time to write an essay, she said with a nod and a wink that we might want to make a movie instead. A rebel awoke, A vocation was born. And I never handed in a paper to her again. 

Today we brought her flowers and met for lunch at Buck's and talked about new times and old times. And making a living and teaching. Bill with his feature doc that might just get theatrical release, me with my new found freedom. And optimism.

She just got a new building - money from a bond - that has given her a Digital Media Center. We went and took a tour. 

The building was beautiful. State of the art and spacious. Lots of new macs and smart boards. She was proud and for good reason. It was the fruition of a lot of work and time she'd spent investing in the program and the curriculum. Bill I had been there in the beginning of her curriculum. As she branched from drama to film and video. 

I've had a few mentors in my life. There have tended to be two types: one is the overbearing master who believes mostly in their own excellence. I've learned from their in their techniques and demand for excellence. The other type has been the one who encourages with subtle suggestions. Patience. Gentle challenges. Intellectual clarity. Emotional kindness. Gwen is that second type. With her I always felt a desire to outperform to surprise her and delight her sense of me. And ultimately to be true to myself and To my own vision. 

Some of my richest filmmaking experiences still live there in her classroom. "Pacific Coast Highway" Bill and my heady, absurdist philosophical comment in five takes. "Tracks" our slow-motion epic exploring Native American culture and ethics. And of course "Cloud of Eiderdown" my personal epic and touchstone romantic vision. 

It felt good to see her again. 

Thank you, Gwen. Let's see movies at the Castro together - 

Beginning

I just got laid off from a cushy corporate startup production job. I loved the people, I loved the work. I was directing, I was leading, but I didn't have much headspace for my own projects. For what I consider my real vocation - narrative film making - feature filmmaking.

 I want to explore what has been called Personal Work. I've made a living as a film maker and director and have ridden that slipstream of pleasing the client and performing according to expectations. Carrying out the client's vision, the company's vision. What would happen if I worked to carry out my own? To explore and ask myself, what is it I want to shoot? What is it I want to see? Let's see it. This blog and this exploration is about feeling into my own instincts and my own passions to find out where my vocation is really leading me. It's also an opportunity for me to document my work, to put it all in one place, so that I can look back on it and start to see the shape. And have a destination for it. So it's not just in my head. I'll have current work, future projects being drafted here, collaborations. Connections to my collaborators, I'll probably put up old work too. Just to see whether it all stands up. You may be seeing some things that I haven't shown the world in twenty years.

 I'm excited about this. I need a place to pour this work and energy into. It's a real chance for me to consider myself, to look at where I've been and where I'm going, and have a record and a rough/loose drafting space to record my work.

Hopefully it will also be interesting to others who are on a similar path, looking for something like this in their own life. You tell me? Here we go.