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Okay.

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Hello, everybody.

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My name is Jason Scott.

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Today's flight is to why tech documentaries are impossible and why we have to do them anyway.

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This is a discussion about the documentary medium that I gleaned in my four years of production work on a documentary I just finished.

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And saying why we have to look at this medium, look at its flaws, work around its flaws, and encourage people to create new ones.

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First question, of course, is who the hell are you?

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My name is, again, Jason Scott.

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I'm mostly known, I guess, for a site that I run called textfiles.com, which is a collection of BBS-era text files that I started in 1998 because I was wondering whatever happened to my old BBS that I used to go on all the time?

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Does everyone here know what a BBS is?

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Anyone here not know what a BBS is?

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Okay, a BBS.

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Did you just have fun with me?

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I can tell.

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Look at those eyes.

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All right, anyway.

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A BBS is like a single-use website.

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Anyway, I created that archive of BBS-era information because I saw a gap in history and knowledge and I, as a person, happened to have collected a lot of that.

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So it was more a case of seeing that there was a missing piece of a story, a story that all of humanity is kind of telling about itself.

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And by putting it all up there, I was encouraging other people to add their pieces and actually that kind of worked out pretty well.

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Ah, I see that the 305 has arrived.

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So that theme of filling in gaps is part of what drives me and unfortunately because I have a bit of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, I kind of start at one end and just keep going until somebody pulls me up sweating, telling me to stop.

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So textfiles.com grew into web.textfiles.com, artscene.textfiles.com, cd.textfiles.com, all these subsites of shareware CDs and old music things and groups and all of these weird little subcultures that I was discovering more and more about and more and more people.

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And so after a while, I suddenly thought about this missing piece, which was when you watch a lot of documentaries, the documentary format is kind of interesting because it's always been kind of the real dismal format in terms of things.

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Until very, very recently, if a documentary grossed $1 million, it was in the top 20 documentaries of all time ever made in terms of box office because it's not a very beloved format.

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It's very, very dry, and it's a very hard sell unless it's about sex or death.

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And even then, you have to kind of work on it.

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That's why we currently have a documentary about wheelchair rugby called Murderball.

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There's one that came out a couple years ago about a bunch of strippers unionizing.

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Boy, what a tough sell that is.

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I think it's called Live Nude Girls United.

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That's the nature of general release, and I'll go into general release in a moment.

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Throughout this time, we've had a number of what are known as documentaries of a technical nature.

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I think in my encountering, the one that most people know is Triumph of the Nerds by Robert Kringle because it got on PBS, it got a lot of attention, and it's a very decent documentary.

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It's technical, but it's not really technical.

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And when you have things like, say, tech TV being the standard by which computer history is defined, you run into problems because that kind of a cable channel that has very monetary goals produces films that are not really about imparting a lot of information,

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but about making a lot of video transitions that move very quickly and dazzle and delight you, so you'll stay on long enough to learn why you want to buy this G4 ad.

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That's very important.

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So that money issue gets in everywhere, and it gets in everywhere in this format.

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Now, the documentary format, thanks to a very, very fat man, has become extremely politicized these days because what's happened is that suddenly people started looking at films like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9-11, and they said, oh, documentaries!

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And because it got political to attack the arguments or arguments, however you go along that way, they went after the medium.

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And the medium by itself, the documentary medium, has roots...

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What's normally called the first documentary is a film called Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty, made in the 20s.

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Which tells the story of an Eskimo man and his family who was trying to survive up in Alaska.

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It is entirely fake.

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Top to bottom.

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Robert Flaherty filmed a bunch of Eskimos running around, took it home, realized it sucked.

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Just sucked.

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It was boring.

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It was shots of these guys running around in misty, bad film.

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So he had an accident.

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This is one of these things that comes out.

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He was smoking a cigarette and the nitrate went up on the film and the film exploded, essentially, burned him.

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And so the film was destroyed.

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He had to make a new one.

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So he went off and he made a film called Nanook of the North starring a man named Nanook.

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And it told the story.

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Well, you see his family huddling for warmth inside an igloo that is actually only half built and has heaters.

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And you have shots of people running around that are filmed in lodged parking lots and things like that.

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Because he needed to tell a story and he wasn't going to let reality get in the way of a good story.

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A common problem in documentaries.

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In fact, it's endemic to the documentary format.

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One of the funniest things that came out of the whole argument over, I think it was I think it was Fahrenheit 9-11 Bowling for Columbine got the Oscar and then Fahrenheit 9-11 people were saying it didn't qualify.

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And that always made me laugh about it not qualifying for a documentary because it turned out this wasn't an exactly right fact.

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And if you go read the Oscar rules for what is a documentary it is a narrative film that portrays historical facts through recreation, creative editing and basically narration.

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Everything does that, right?

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I mean that's not a very, very you know, so the answer is of course anyone can get an Oscar and in case you're wondering I did check and see if I could get an Oscar for this.

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So in case you're wondering the way that you qualify to be judged for getting an Oscar besides actually making a decent film is you have to broadcast your film on a screen greater than 20 feet in New York and Los Angeles for a period of two weeks during the qualifying year without showing it on television or cable.

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So in case you're wondering one of the interesting things about life is we go through life learning about things kind of in a vague surface fashion and we like to impart a lot of our own internal stories to these things.

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This is what people do with technical subjects.

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They think of the story of the PC and all they think of is once upon a time there were a few computers and then there was IBM and then everyone won and everyone went home and then there were sound cards.

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And that's great because for some people they just simply don't care about the subject.

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As a documentarian you have to wonder what will make people want to watch this?

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Actually before that you have to say what will make the kind of people I'm aiming this for want to watch it?

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And when you say, well who are you aiming this for?

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When you say you want to make a documentary let's say you want to make a documentary, you insane people.

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Let's say you just give somebody some money for a documentary.

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So what ends up happening is you say well who is it for?

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And then someone will go, everybody!

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No, don't do that, that doesn't work.

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People perceive films different ways.

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Some people are looking at this and going, oh my god look at that subject matter, that's incredible I can't believe somebody did this.

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Other people are like, well it's cool in here that's nice that's great you know you can't aim it for everybody.

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The story I like to tell people was my father is not fond of Bush so naturally when Fahrenheit 9-11 came out I thought what a perfect gift for my father I'll take him to see Fahrenheit 9-11 here dad, come with me, we'll go and he lived in one state and I lived in another we met in the middle and we went to go see it and we see it,

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I watch it it's from my eyes and he watches it and we come out and I'm a son, I want my father to be happy but he's walking around like, huh and I'm like, hey dad, did you like the film?

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and he's like, well yeah, they really let Bush off light

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and so for me I watched it, completely different perception and so when people watch a film you can't say, oh well I'm going to shoot this for everybody the rule I usually tend to use is, if I was walking down the street and I saw this was here would I want to see it?

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and if I walked in and saw it what about it would make me think it was good?

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like if I said, well no, he got it wrong, he had to do this and he had to do this, and what rules are you going to lay down?

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In technical documentaries the issue is technical people are very hard to please there is a lot of money in pointing out flaws in technical situations because there are so many details and every single one is important so it is very easy to hyper focus on that,

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it's very difficult to express how important it is how important it is that yeah, you kind of needed a semicolon there you know, that's why the spaceship flew into the moon, not by it there is a beautiful document out there of major bugs like they track down,

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why did this satellite hit here?

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and the answer is, oh, it forgot a while loop and it will be like that technical people want to focus on that minutia but the video format for instance, or even the audio format it's very hard here to describe the actual technical situation so the natural thing that I did when I went after this was well,

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I should focus on technical people but technical people are even more difficult than technical subjects and it's a very hard thing when you do nature photography you try to tell a story even though in fact the stories tend to be rather dull once upon a time,

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I got eaten you know, once upon a time a bunch of us were eating this one boar and I hit him and he stopped eating it so I could eat his piece you know, very simple stuff but you'll see a nature photographer kind of try to put things together and he ends up having to put in artifice the question is what level of artifice is acceptable when you're telling a story this is a problem that I've encountered many times in many films and once Mr.

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Moore's films got a lot of scrutiny of course, the narrative utterly fell apart because you end up with a problem of you're trying to tell you've got the parallel tracks of the point you're trying to get across and what reality ended up giving you and how different those are defines your skill as a filmmaker in other words,

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sometimes when I started this film I started out really kind of not knowing what I was going to go with it all I knew was, in my particular case bulletin board systems were composed of people and I said, well how do I how do I express that I know, I'll interview a metric fuck ton of people so I ended up interviewing 205 people across 4 years that's a lot of people,

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don't do it documentary formats the standard ratio is you film 1 hour you film 10 hours for every hour you do or 20 hours and I filmed 205 hours and it ended up being 5 hours so that's a lot, again, don't do that let me be your warning so when I dealt with my subjects technical subjects you have to strike this balance and the balance is where the skill set comes in and what it tells is if you want people to get an idea you can go all the way to the right to the right you have industrial films industrial films are basically videotaped instruction manuals they tell you where to put the little part in the copier and you switch like this And then you go down like this,

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and oh yes, remember this, and then they do a cutaway to show you this.

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It is unbelievably dry.

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You watch it because somebody is reimbursing you in some way.

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You do not go to see this film because you're like, oh yeah!

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Oh, that was much better than Lost in Space.

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So, on the other side, you end up with films like War Games.

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War Games is a film that was filmed to tell a tale, and the tale was the tale of a young man who encountered an innocent force that faced with the realities of war, you know, blah.

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Anyway, Professor Falken was supposed to be played by John Lennon.

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I thought that would have been really cool.

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Anyway, it is funny because as we get now to where it has been 22 years since War Games was filmed, a new generation has latched actually onto the movie Hackers from 1995 as being a seminal event of giving hints as to a way of living and a lifestyle and things to shoot for and belief.

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And the reason that is, is because they went to people like Emanuel Goldstein, and they used pieces of subculture that existed in various ways.

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Mentor's Conscience of a Hacker and other such writings.

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And they remixed them, much in the same way that a blender remixes a lemon, so that it would become this palatable thing with Angela Jolie's tit.

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And people who look to that as their indication of what their culture is, because there's a dearth of stuff in the middle, end up having to do that.

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They end up having to say, okay, well, that's kind of how it was.

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And it wasn't like that.

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And so there's, again, great lots of fun for technical people to go, well, it's not like that at all.

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Actually, it's like this, and it's like this, and it's like this, and I know you can't get away from me because I got the door.

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And so on, because, you know, some of you giggle, because the problem is technical people are not very good at telling stories, because that's not how they approach it.

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Stories are these arcs that start with a beginning and a middle and have some sort of theme that runs to an end, whereas a lot of technical stories are impartations of information, you know, peppered with puns.

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And that's what they do, because that's how they get the information to you as fast as possible, and that's understood.

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So, like you're watching on this film, this film was trying to tackle a very difficult initial idea, the idea that there was colored text that was transferred online, and that people had an entire history of collecting them and being, you know, 15 years old and working for months.

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And it's fascinating because it's a people story.

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These kids are talking with great emotion.

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And that's more from the interview.

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You interview somebody for an hour, you choose what to use from that hour.

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You don't make people sit through the hour of that guy interviewing.

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You can go the other way, which is where, like, say, MTV goes, which is where you'll interview somebody for an hour, and you'll do one of two things.

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You will either force something to happen to the person that they don't expect, so you get, you know, some horrified thing, or you keep peppering them with the same question over and over again until they answer it the goddamn way that you want it to,

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which was, yes, I fuck children!

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And then that'd be, you know, once again, welcome to MTV, I fuck children!

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The story of a pedophile.

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Anyway, when I was young, I loved MTV, but MTV betrayed me.

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Damn you, MTV.

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Anyway, the way I like to think of it is that a technical documentary is an engineering problem.

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You have the problem of wanting to naturally turn everything into either a lecture or a fictional narrative.

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And what you do is you say, well, how can I take the reality and portray it as a narrative?

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That is to say, how can I make this somewhat dry subject interesting?

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And there's several ways you can do that.

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One way is to focus on characters, humans, people, expressing themselves in a way that's engaging.

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And again, bringing that out in an interview is very tough.

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The other way is to do an awful lot of, I guess you would call it, dazzle.

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And that's more like one of those things, like when you inject stuff into the car to make it go a little faster.

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It's not so great for the car, but it kind of works.

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And so he's talking right now about something that's relatively interesting to some people.

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But for the other people, I just give them a whole bunch of pretty colors.

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And he's talking about this work he did, and it's being illustrated, and it's kind of interesting.

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But why the hell is that back part there?

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Well, because it's interesting.

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And you try to strike that.

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I also try to shoot, for instance, with very few exceptions, nobody, no one shot lasts for more than 10 seconds.

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A person might talk over something else so that his shot is 30 seconds.

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But in fact, the point of fact, it's just not.

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Right now in the world, there are an unbelievable amount of subjects that just haven't been really tackled.

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I tackle bulletin board systems because I decided in 2001 that it looks like the BBS movie wasn't going to be made.

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They missed the boat.

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We were having trouble where people were, you know, people were disappearing.

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It was harder to find the stuff.

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The artifacts are kind of gone.

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And how do you get that back?

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And so in 2001, I started doing research, and I did six months of research.

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And I brought in an advisory team of about 20 people who I both respected and didn't know, and who would give me advice.

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And I'd say, well, you know, I'm thinking I'm going to shoot this way.

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And I think I'm going to go here and ask this question.

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What do you think?

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And sometimes they'd answer, sometimes they'd not.

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You know, they'd just say, well, I hope he's interesting.

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Or I hope you have a reason for going out there.

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Or, oh yeah, ask him about this guy who I wouldn't know about.

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Because that really changed his life.

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So being open helped a lot.

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There's a lot of money right now.

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You'll find I get really ooky when people discuss money.

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Whenever I say monetized, like someone says smeared with shit.

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But it's just, you know, that's just because I'm some sort of freak.

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But the money is in calling something open source.

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There's a lot of money in calling things a brand that has meaning.

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So revealing the people that you have a list of people you're going to interview, suddenly makes it open source.

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You know, or telling people, oh, well, you know, this new movie's coming out.

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We shot it using this kind of camera.

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This new kind of, oh, that's open source.

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You revealed things.

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So it's a case of marketing terms getting bastardized very quickly.

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I tried to let everyone know I was working on this for four years.

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And the problem there, of course, was that there were people who waited for four years.

184
00:20:57,840 --> 00:20:58,340
Or five.

185
00:20:58,340 --> 00:21:00,020
I have a gentleman here who waited for five.

186
00:21:00,020 --> 00:21:02,680
Gave me 20 bucks five years ago.

187
00:21:03,260 --> 00:21:04,620
There's an investment.

188
00:21:07,240 --> 00:21:10,600
Actually, when I created the film, I asked for donations.

189
00:21:10,600 --> 00:21:11,580
Because I was dumb.

190
00:21:11,580 --> 00:21:12,160
I don't know why.

191
00:21:12,160 --> 00:21:14,780
I thought I'd need a foundation to create this film.

192
00:21:14,900 --> 00:21:17,180
So people sent me five bucks, ten bucks.

193
00:21:17,460 --> 00:21:19,720
You know, just like, cool.

194
00:21:19,720 --> 00:21:20,860
Sounds like fun.

195
00:21:20,880 --> 00:21:25,940
So I made sure each one of them got a $50 copy, you know, sent to them.

196
00:21:25,940 --> 00:21:26,780
My cost.

197
00:21:26,780 --> 00:21:28,320
It's like, wow, that was a great investment.

198
00:21:28,320 --> 00:21:30,000
So, hey, it pays to be charitable.

199
00:21:30,000 --> 00:21:30,600
I guess.

200
00:21:32,600 --> 00:21:36,240
Anyway, when I shot this film, I would go out and interview people.

201
00:21:36,240 --> 00:21:41,760
And one of the things is that there are a lot of people out there who have very interesting stories to tell who are slowly decaying.

202
00:21:43,120 --> 00:21:45,060
And the longer you talk to them...

203
00:21:45,060 --> 00:21:50,360
When I started shooting, there were a lot of people who were names.

204
00:21:50,660 --> 00:21:53,640
You know, there's different levels of celebrity in any kind of technical subject.

205
00:21:53,640 --> 00:21:55,140
Oh, he's the guy who wrote that.

206
00:21:55,440 --> 00:21:56,940
You know, he's the guy who made that computer.

207
00:21:56,940 --> 00:21:58,440
He's the guy who created this thing.

208
00:21:58,440 --> 00:22:00,220
And you go and you track him down.

209
00:22:00,220 --> 00:22:02,080
And sometimes he's really boring.

210
00:22:02,160 --> 00:22:04,160
And sometimes he's really not.

211
00:22:04,340 --> 00:22:10,200
Most markedly in mine, there was a network of bulletin boards called FidoNet.

212
00:22:10,440 --> 00:22:16,280
And this started in around 83, 84, and still exists today.

213
00:22:16,360 --> 00:22:25,420
And it's this beautiful, self-grown, volunteer network of people all around the world who created this bulletin board system network.

214
00:22:25,420 --> 00:22:27,740
And at the center of it is Thomas Jennings.

215
00:22:28,820 --> 00:22:32,480
And Tom Jennings is fucking nuts.

216
00:22:36,340 --> 00:22:49,060
He is a gay, bad ass, gate punk, vegetarian, fuck you, anarchist, who did this because god damn it, it's great to write a god damn network because fuck everybody.

217
00:22:49,640 --> 00:22:50,960
That's interesting.

218
00:22:51,740 --> 00:22:54,500
And I don't think a lot of people knew that when they were doing it.

219
00:22:54,500 --> 00:23:02,600
So when I interviewed him, he was amazing to a person who's looking at things like, is this interesting?

220
00:23:02,600 --> 00:23:11,600
So he's just this beautiful, profane man who I used in my way to tell a story around him.

221
00:23:12,460 --> 00:23:17,060
The question becomes, how do you translate that?

222
00:23:17,060 --> 00:23:18,760
And I wasn't going to do this...

223
00:23:20,660 --> 00:23:22,260
I'm going to do it afterwards.

224
00:23:22,560 --> 00:23:24,320
I'll play a sequence after I'm done.

225
00:23:24,500 --> 00:23:25,360
I took...

226
00:23:27,420 --> 00:23:29,100
Here's an example.

227
00:23:29,100 --> 00:23:32,140
The documentary format has editing.

228
00:23:32,640 --> 00:23:38,960
What that means is, you take two separate recordings of events in time and you place them together.

229
00:23:40,000 --> 00:23:44,540
And they didn't happen one after the other, but you put them together.

230
00:23:44,540 --> 00:23:48,940
I know this sounds basic, but it's so easy to forget that.

231
00:23:49,080 --> 00:23:53,460
A good example of a documentary that really does this a lot...

232
00:23:55,340 --> 00:23:57,780
is something called MTV Cribs.

233
00:23:57,780 --> 00:24:00,020
I don't know how many people know MTV Cribs.

234
00:24:00,100 --> 00:24:04,380
MTV Cribs is supposed to be a documentary about the homes of stars.

235
00:24:06,100 --> 00:24:07,320
Yeah, okay.

236
00:24:07,320 --> 00:24:14,180
So for instance, there was the case where basically they go in and they shoot, right?

237
00:24:14,180 --> 00:24:17,220
They shoot footage with steadicams and stuff of these guys' houses.

238
00:24:17,300 --> 00:24:19,600
Yes, this is where the magic happens.

239
00:24:19,600 --> 00:24:20,660
This is my bedroom.

240
00:24:20,660 --> 00:24:21,640
This is my pool.

241
00:24:21,640 --> 00:24:23,000
This is my kitchen.

242
00:24:23,000 --> 00:24:23,760
And it's fascinating.

243
00:24:23,760 --> 00:24:25,120
Look what they have in their kitchen.

244
00:24:25,120 --> 00:24:26,300
Look what they have in their fridge.

245
00:24:26,300 --> 00:24:27,440
Look what they have here.

246
00:24:27,440 --> 00:24:29,100
They've got hangings, you know?

247
00:24:29,260 --> 00:24:32,300
Well, recently, I believe it was Usher.

248
00:24:32,300 --> 00:24:33,780
I don't care if I'm smearing him.

249
00:24:33,780 --> 00:24:35,340
It's some other guy like Usher.

250
00:24:35,340 --> 00:24:40,420
Usher or an Usher-like being had a little lawsuit occur.

251
00:24:40,420 --> 00:24:47,700
Turns out, Usher rented an island for $350,000 for two days.

252
00:24:47,700 --> 00:24:49,180
It's an expensive island.

253
00:24:49,180 --> 00:24:50,820
Nice island, though.

254
00:24:51,320 --> 00:24:55,560
First day, he shot MTV Cribs there to show his home.

255
00:24:56,800 --> 00:25:03,200
This only came out because the second day he had a party with 2,000 fucking people and they were having trouble getting condoms out of palm trees and all that.

256
00:25:05,780 --> 00:25:08,120
So, right?

257
00:25:08,120 --> 00:25:14,860
I mean, you'll see this documentary format where he's supposed to be describing reality to you.

258
00:25:14,860 --> 00:25:21,540
MTV and he have agreed to 100% completely create a false reality.

259
00:25:21,800 --> 00:25:24,720
Now, you compare that to when they interview, I think it was Ted Nugent.

260
00:25:25,420 --> 00:25:28,760
Now, Ted Nugent's in a house that it's fucking Ted Nugent's house.

261
00:25:30,440 --> 00:25:34,160
Because you can't rent that many animal heads.

262
00:25:37,570 --> 00:25:45,970
You have to get a clearance from the TSA to ship that many guns to a shooting location to shoot your documentary.

263
00:25:45,970 --> 00:25:47,770
It's Ted Nugent's fucking house.

264
00:25:47,810 --> 00:25:48,690
It's real.

265
00:25:48,690 --> 00:25:50,770
You go through it and you're like, oh my god.

266
00:25:51,190 --> 00:25:52,270
Oh my god.

267
00:25:52,270 --> 00:25:55,430
A PETA member would like explode into flames walking in here.

268
00:25:55,930 --> 00:26:04,970
So, you know, even a person who's watching it who's not technically oriented towards documentaries or thinking of them that way, they get it in their mind.

269
00:26:04,970 --> 00:26:07,910
They're like, this guy's house has four pieces of furniture.

270
00:26:08,290 --> 00:26:09,650
That's fake.

271
00:26:09,670 --> 00:26:12,310
Even if you've got a really good maid, that's fake.

272
00:26:12,310 --> 00:26:18,130
But this other guy's house, full of little things, and they've obviously sorted up and cleaned things and dusted them, that's his house.

273
00:26:18,130 --> 00:26:20,870
That kind of visceral reaction comes from right here.

274
00:26:20,870 --> 00:26:22,790
And it's very hard to fake.

275
00:26:23,030 --> 00:26:30,630
And so when I shot people, when I filmed people, I would ask them questions.

276
00:26:30,730 --> 00:26:37,530
And they knew, talking to me, that it was somewhat unlikely I was going to fuck them.

277
00:26:37,530 --> 00:26:45,410
That's very important to note, because the standard method of communication in film media is fucking people over.

278
00:26:45,850 --> 00:26:52,610
Where you convince people something is going to be a certain way so that you can get the thing you want, which is antithetical to their needs.

279
00:26:53,490 --> 00:26:57,110
This is part of, by the way, I should mention, I went to film school.

280
00:26:57,490 --> 00:27:05,030
I went to film school, Emerson College, Boston, film class of 1992, mass communications, concentration in film.

281
00:27:06,950 --> 00:27:09,750
I immediately decided not to go into film.

282
00:27:09,750 --> 00:27:11,210
Dad was so happy.

283
00:27:11,970 --> 00:27:18,110
I instead went into video games, which, by the way, is worse than film, but still, it's film at that time.

284
00:27:19,010 --> 00:27:24,690
So I went to work for a company called Psygnosis, and they had all sorts of beautiful things, and I thought it was like film, but it wasn't.

285
00:27:24,690 --> 00:27:25,770
It was just mean.

286
00:27:26,970 --> 00:27:29,770
And so I didn't actually make films for a long time.

287
00:27:29,770 --> 00:27:38,470
I didn't want to, because the more I learned about the film industry, because, you know, after a while, they take you away from, oh, look how beautiful Citizen Kane is, to around your junior year.

288
00:27:38,470 --> 00:27:45,830
So this is how the film industry works, and you're like, ah, you know, it's like petting the bunny and then seeing the inside of the bunny.

289
00:27:48,350 --> 00:27:51,850
Bunny ain't cute no more, even if they put the bunny back like they did before.

290
00:27:52,070 --> 00:28:03,870
So I got tired of looking at the inside of the bunny, and instead I went into computers, and computers have been very well by me, and have actually been rather lucrative, and because of that, I could afford to have a stupid hobby.

291
00:28:03,890 --> 00:28:08,430
Um, I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs, I don't do PowerPoint.

292
00:28:10,270 --> 00:28:11,970
So, yeah.

293
00:28:14,990 --> 00:28:21,750
So what ended up happening instead was that, you know, I got into, like, doing little projects, and doing film projects, and computer projects.

294
00:28:21,750 --> 00:28:26,930
So when I decided I was going to do this documentary, I was like, oh, I guess I'll do it.

295
00:28:26,930 --> 00:28:28,710
I guess I'll use that damn film degree.

296
00:28:28,910 --> 00:28:31,270
Now, ironically, I've had people say, well, is this your first film?

297
00:28:31,270 --> 00:28:33,670
The answer is no, I had a film play at Sundance.

298
00:28:33,670 --> 00:28:35,930
And they're like, ooh, that's really impressive.

299
00:28:35,930 --> 00:28:41,770
Um , it was a two-minute film I did for a comedy troupe in 1993.

300
00:28:41,970 --> 00:28:45,870
It is a schoolhouse rock animation about the Kennedy assassination.

301
00:28:47,670 --> 00:28:57,130
And what happened was, was that Comedy Central bought it, and played it on the 30th anniversary, across the weekend.

302
00:28:58,930 --> 00:29:04,050
For that, I got, for that, five of us got the princely sum of $1,200.

303
00:29:04,630 --> 00:29:06,930
And they got the rights for one year.

304
00:29:07,010 --> 00:29:11,650
And they proceeded to play it 300 times, you know, because it's two minutes long, they could shove it everywhere.

305
00:29:11,930 --> 00:29:14,870
So that was my introduction to the industry.

306
00:29:16,650 --> 00:29:21,310
Yeah, you know, I lent a guy the tape 15 years ago.

307
00:29:22,110 --> 00:29:26,530
Every year, like clockwork, he apologizes and says he's going to get it to me.

308
00:29:27,130 --> 00:29:29,310
I just have to get it off the 16 millimeter film.

309
00:29:29,310 --> 00:29:30,850
I used to do stuff in film.

310
00:29:31,090 --> 00:29:33,450
When I shot this, I shot it using film techniques.

311
00:29:33,450 --> 00:29:35,050
That's why everyone looks kind of goofy.

312
00:29:35,450 --> 00:29:38,090
Because I use indirect lighting and shots like that.

313
00:29:38,090 --> 00:29:40,390
That is nine processors, by the way.

314
00:29:40,650 --> 00:29:42,450
Give you an example of Artifice.

315
00:29:42,450 --> 00:29:46,630
That shot right there, dark as crap, didn't look good, he wasn't there.

316
00:29:46,650 --> 00:29:51,630
I've applied softening filters, lightning filters, highlight filters, everything, to make him look like it.

317
00:29:51,630 --> 00:29:52,730
But no, it's real.

318
00:29:53,510 --> 00:29:55,790
And there's a lot of that, a lot of noise reduction.

319
00:29:55,790 --> 00:29:56,950
You take what you can.

320
00:29:56,950 --> 00:30:00,750
When you're a one-man crew, you make an enormous amount of mistakes.

321
00:30:01,750 --> 00:30:07,010
Anyway, so when I decided to actually shoot this film, I hadn't even looked at that for 10 years.

322
00:30:07,010 --> 00:30:11,290
But I had a pretty good salary, and I could afford to pretty much do it myself.

323
00:30:11,990 --> 00:30:18,370
Budget-wise, because I engineered it, the film, this film, okay.

324
00:30:18,490 --> 00:30:23,090
When I made this film, how many people here were at my talk last year?

325
00:30:23,410 --> 00:30:24,210
Two, three, four, five.

326
00:30:24,210 --> 00:30:24,830
Okay, good, good, good.

327
00:30:24,830 --> 00:30:25,330
All right.

328
00:30:25,970 --> 00:30:26,830
Thank you very much.

329
00:30:26,830 --> 00:30:40,550
The film, when I saw the film, I decided that I was going to make a film that was, you know, when people make a film, they want it to be like an hour and a half, you know, because that's what plays in theaters.

330
00:30:40,650 --> 00:30:41,690
But I was like, fuck theaters.

331
00:30:41,690 --> 00:30:42,830
I don't need to put them in theaters.

332
00:30:42,830 --> 00:30:43,770
I'll put it on DVD.

333
00:30:43,810 --> 00:30:45,290
What a delightful format.

334
00:30:47,450 --> 00:30:49,590
Boy, DVD got the hivies.

335
00:30:50,610 --> 00:30:53,750
DVD sucks, as a person who uses it, by the way.

336
00:30:53,990 --> 00:30:56,350
You have never seen, you want standards.

337
00:30:56,350 --> 00:30:58,310
Don't go to DVD.

338
00:30:58,550 --> 00:31:03,850
People put out, as far as I can determine, peanut butter jelly sandwiches that claim they're DVD players.

339
00:31:04,310 --> 00:31:05,870
I've gotten more, anyway.

340
00:31:05,890 --> 00:31:07,090
So it's like, it'll go like this.

341
00:31:07,090 --> 00:31:08,890
And the answer is, well, maybe it will.

342
00:31:08,890 --> 00:31:13,650
If the Fong Song Trading Company, when they made it for five minutes ten years ago, think it was good.

343
00:31:14,090 --> 00:31:15,350
And you get this, anyway.

344
00:31:15,350 --> 00:31:16,810
So I love DVD.

345
00:31:16,810 --> 00:31:18,090
DVD has been good to me.

346
00:31:19,410 --> 00:31:21,870
So DVD was the format I was going to go into.

347
00:31:21,870 --> 00:31:24,090
So I said, well, okay, well, I'm going to have subtitles.

348
00:31:24,090 --> 00:31:25,450
I'm going to have director's commentary.

349
00:31:25,450 --> 00:31:26,170
I'm going to have this.

350
00:31:26,170 --> 00:31:27,150
I'm going to have that.

351
00:31:27,630 --> 00:31:30,910
And so when I shot it, I knew it wasn't going to be an hour and a half.

352
00:31:30,910 --> 00:31:35,490
I thought it was going to be nine hours, which hurts people.

353
00:31:35,670 --> 00:31:44,750
I mean, I explain to people, what it is, is when you take on a subject that's 25 years long, because nobody else has done it, you have to make up for a lot of slack.

354
00:31:44,810 --> 00:31:50,250
And there are stories that aren't in any way paired up.

355
00:31:50,250 --> 00:31:51,090
They're not paired up.

356
00:31:51,090 --> 00:31:53,210
PhytoNet is not the story of the BBS industry.

357
00:31:53,210 --> 00:31:54,470
It's not the story of ANSI art.

358
00:31:54,470 --> 00:31:56,210
It's not the story of the hacking BBSs.

359
00:31:56,210 --> 00:31:57,510
It's not the story of this.

360
00:31:57,670 --> 00:31:58,190
So what do you do?

361
00:31:58,190 --> 00:31:59,410
Well, you make separate episodes.

362
00:31:59,410 --> 00:32:00,850
So I made a miniseries.

363
00:32:01,170 --> 00:32:06,850
And I shot it, like I said, 250 hours, edited it down to five and a half hours.

364
00:32:06,850 --> 00:32:08,310
The rough cut was seven.

365
00:32:09,230 --> 00:32:12,110
Each of these episodes is about 40 minutes.

366
00:32:12,110 --> 00:32:13,270
Some of them are less.

367
00:32:13,410 --> 00:32:17,670
And the whole thing, shooting-wise, cost me $21,000.

368
00:32:18,930 --> 00:32:23,030
Now, some people drop their payload on that.

369
00:32:23,030 --> 00:32:25,190
In fact, that's actually rather cheap.

370
00:32:25,190 --> 00:32:26,970
It actually works out to a very cheap price.

371
00:32:26,970 --> 00:32:29,610
And the way that I did it was to kill myself.

372
00:32:30,030 --> 00:32:31,910
For instance, I would land.

373
00:32:31,910 --> 00:32:35,850
I would determine 14 interviews I had to do in the Midwest.

374
00:32:36,390 --> 00:32:45,710
And in one trip, in 10 days, I went from Chicago to Indiana, back up to Milwaukee, over to Minneapolis, down to St.

375
00:32:45,710 --> 00:32:52,030
Louis, over to Kansas City, down through Oklahoma City, over to Texas, and then flew out of Austin.

376
00:32:53,030 --> 00:32:54,170
That hurt.

377
00:32:54,530 --> 00:32:59,010
I can also tell you that I can drive precisely 302 miles at a stretch.

378
00:33:00,230 --> 00:33:05,730
But by doing that, by combining what would have been a whole bunch of little trips in the one trip, it cost me almost nothing.

379
00:33:06,570 --> 00:33:07,970
I didn't sleep in my car.

380
00:33:07,970 --> 00:33:09,210
I should have, but I didn't.

381
00:33:09,310 --> 00:33:13,870
So by just adding these prices together, I was able to shoot very cheaply.

382
00:33:13,870 --> 00:33:15,250
I had a crew of one.

383
00:33:15,510 --> 00:33:21,970
I had a camera that I purchased as a floor model.

384
00:33:21,970 --> 00:33:27,870
You know, I edited it on a PC because it's much cheaper to edit on a PC than a Mac right now.

385
00:33:28,170 --> 00:33:33,450
I shot, I guess for anyone who cares, I used a product called Vegas Video.

386
00:33:33,830 --> 00:33:40,930
And I had a PC, a one gigahertz PC, and four terabytes of USB storage.

387
00:33:43,110 --> 00:33:48,570
And I lost 14 drives in the two years of editing.

388
00:33:48,870 --> 00:33:51,950
So anyway, that's the price you pay.

389
00:33:52,390 --> 00:33:55,030
Mac store is the James Dean of hard drives.

390
00:33:56,990 --> 00:33:58,510
Just so you know.

391
00:33:59,650 --> 00:34:05,870
It, you know, it tries to seduce you with, look, I'm $50 and 200 gigs.

392
00:34:06,130 --> 00:34:09,050
And then the next day, I'm not feeling too good, man.

393
00:34:10,590 --> 00:34:13,810
Jesus, man, I can't feel anything right now.

394
00:34:14,910 --> 00:34:19,070
So that's, you know, the things you learn when you put things through stress tests.

395
00:34:19,070 --> 00:34:27,410
I had people going like, like I had one time where I was really pissed because I put 200, I put 205 gigabytes of footage on something and it died.

396
00:34:27,610 --> 00:34:30,470
Like, it was like, here's your data, foot.

397
00:34:31,410 --> 00:34:34,910
And I went on IRC bitching, which is a mistake, by the way.

398
00:34:34,910 --> 00:34:36,470
IRC will bitch you right back.

399
00:34:36,490 --> 00:34:39,530
And someone's like, you dumb fuck, they're not meant to be used that way.

400
00:34:41,170 --> 00:34:43,850
That tells you a lot about customer expectation, doesn't it?

401
00:34:45,410 --> 00:34:48,450
Hard drives aren't meant to store data, you dumb fuck.

402
00:34:49,370 --> 00:34:50,170
Anyway.

403
00:34:52,410 --> 00:35:03,110
So one of the side effects of me going through and doing this as a one-man crew is that I interviewed a lot of people who had never been interviewed before and people who'd always been interviewed, like been interviewed for all their life.

404
00:35:03,350 --> 00:35:06,670
And so when they met me, it was like, oh, here's some guy.

405
00:35:07,350 --> 00:35:13,510
And there's an old quote in the movie industry, which says that honesty is the most important thing in the film industry.

406
00:35:13,510 --> 00:35:15,570
And once you can fake that, you're golden.

407
00:35:17,830 --> 00:35:27,470
And so I was very honest, and in fact, I was very honest and I made a lot of, I offered a lot of things that people didn't normally get when you deal with media.

408
00:35:27,470 --> 00:35:39,450
I told people, after I've interviewed you, even though you've signed a release, if after one month, up to one month, preferably, you think you said something you didn't like, tell me and I will erase it off the tape.

409
00:35:39,870 --> 00:35:43,390
Because I'm not going to hurt you for my film.

410
00:35:43,770 --> 00:35:47,290
I'll get four other guys to say what you said that you're not comfortable saying.

411
00:35:47,510 --> 00:35:50,930
I don't need you to get in trouble with your buddies.

412
00:35:51,090 --> 00:35:58,810
And I don't, and I, and a lot of people, I would explain to them what I was doing and I would send them cuts and say, okay, I'm going to use you this way.

413
00:35:58,810 --> 00:35:59,710
Is that okay?

414
00:36:00,010 --> 00:36:10,930
I also had what I called the jerk crank index, which was, if I made somebody say something funny and that made them look weird, they had to be somewhere else saying something smart.

415
00:36:11,310 --> 00:36:13,910
If I couldn't find that, I wouldn't use it.

416
00:36:14,270 --> 00:36:18,490
Because, and the thing is, that's antithetical to how a lot of films work.

417
00:36:18,710 --> 00:36:20,270
These films work that way.

418
00:36:20,430 --> 00:36:25,970
I have, I have a, I have a, I have a recording of a guy, still good, okay.

419
00:36:25,970 --> 00:36:27,950
Well, anyway, there's a recording with this old man.

420
00:36:27,950 --> 00:36:31,970
He just goes, you know, man, I used to get laid off that BBS.

421
00:36:32,810 --> 00:36:35,470
And it's really funny in the shot, trust me.

422
00:36:35,470 --> 00:36:39,790
And I love audience feedback.

423
00:36:39,830 --> 00:36:44,750
The , anyway, I made sure that that old man told another story.

424
00:36:44,750 --> 00:36:47,050
That it wasn't just the old man who said that.

425
00:36:48,050 --> 00:36:56,410
And at the end of the day, if people do not get these stories on tape, they disappear.

426
00:36:56,750 --> 00:37:07,730
And what you end up with are very, very, I would almost call them, you know, cliff notes of history.

427
00:37:07,730 --> 00:37:09,650
You say, well, there used to be this.

428
00:37:09,650 --> 00:37:11,190
And that's it, that's all they'll say.

429
00:37:11,190 --> 00:37:14,090
You know, Ward Christensen, he invented the BBS.

430
00:37:14,090 --> 00:37:20,290
And there is a massive story behind why he did it, how he did it, involving a snowstorm.

431
00:37:20,330 --> 00:37:23,830
And it being, you know, Chicago.

432
00:37:23,830 --> 00:37:28,910
And because he couldn't get to the guy's house, he was like, let's just write something to transfer files, wouldn't that be neat?

433
00:37:28,970 --> 00:37:31,250
And this whole industry rises up from that guy.

434
00:37:31,770 --> 00:37:33,570
And there's things before him.

435
00:37:33,570 --> 00:37:35,990
And there's things after him that are actually very important.

436
00:37:35,990 --> 00:37:38,910
He actually got the idea for BBSs off the ARPANET.

437
00:37:39,790 --> 00:37:41,230
The ARPANET was around.

438
00:37:41,230 --> 00:37:44,850
He was on the list because he had written XMODEM and he was kick-ass for doing that.

439
00:37:44,990 --> 00:37:53,210
And so they gave him an ARPANET account and everyone was saying, wouldn't it be a great idea to have something where you could use these little toy computers and leave messages on them?

440
00:37:53,210 --> 00:37:54,370
And he was like, hey.

441
00:37:54,550 --> 00:37:56,570
And he was like, so when's anyone going to do it?

442
00:37:56,570 --> 00:38:00,570
Or as he puts it, nobody was plugging in their soldering irons to get started on doing it.

443
00:38:01,250 --> 00:38:03,230
Which tells you how long ago that was.

444
00:38:05,870 --> 00:38:06,670
Anyway.

445
00:38:07,350 --> 00:38:10,870
You know, it's funny now because, like I said, I have these hacking text files.

446
00:38:10,870 --> 00:38:16,410
And when they start out, it's like, well, here's how to write machine language to be able to play Crisis Mountain for free.

447
00:38:16,630 --> 00:38:20,910
And I get over here with, here's how to remove ads from your GeoCities account.

448
00:38:21,870 --> 00:38:25,790
And it's just this amazing, well, the progression doesn't go this way.

449
00:38:25,790 --> 00:38:26,930
Let's put it that way.

450
00:38:27,850 --> 00:38:31,850
I love the present, but I love the past more.

451
00:38:31,870 --> 00:38:33,090
Let's put it that way.

452
00:38:33,430 --> 00:38:34,130
Anyway.

453
00:38:34,630 --> 00:38:38,810
At the beginning of this film art scene, there's an old man.

454
00:38:38,810 --> 00:38:40,530
His name is John Sheets.

455
00:38:40,530 --> 00:38:44,210
John Sheets was the pimp of teletype art.

456
00:38:44,510 --> 00:38:46,190
A lost art.

457
00:38:46,190 --> 00:38:51,750
It was a way of sending text over ham radio and other ways.

458
00:38:51,750 --> 00:38:54,210
So that you could write things and other people would get it.

459
00:38:54,210 --> 00:38:56,130
So, of course, they used it to send porn.

460
00:38:57,390 --> 00:39:00,750
But they also used it to send, you know, images of Snoopy and everything.

461
00:39:00,750 --> 00:39:09,070
And they used to have art contests in the 60s and the 70s of who could draw the best, you know, Bordeaux-based art and who could do this.

462
00:39:09,070 --> 00:39:13,550
And so nobody had ever talked to John Sheets about this.

463
00:39:13,550 --> 00:39:15,750
And I was doing this thing on Antsy Art.

464
00:39:15,750 --> 00:39:21,430
And wouldn't it be funny, I thought, to go interview this man about this technical subject.

465
00:39:21,430 --> 00:39:25,890
And when I got there, he was stunned that I had driven from Boston to New Jersey for him.

466
00:39:25,890 --> 00:39:28,790
And he had all this old art out that nobody had really seen.

467
00:39:28,790 --> 00:39:30,650
And I interviewed him for one hour.

468
00:39:30,690 --> 00:39:31,610
Asked him all about it.

469
00:39:31,610 --> 00:39:34,710
He talked about his family and working on this stuff and everything else.

470
00:39:34,950 --> 00:39:37,210
And then I did that and I never saw him again.

471
00:39:37,210 --> 00:39:38,570
You know, I went away and I edited.

472
00:39:38,570 --> 00:39:42,010
And this year I went to go give him his free copy and I discovered he had died.

473
00:39:43,530 --> 00:39:44,910
And I got his widow.

474
00:39:45,110 --> 00:39:53,590
And his widow was absolutely delighted that somebody had an hour of her husband talking for me to give to her.

475
00:39:53,590 --> 00:39:54,010
And

476
00:39:57,200 --> 00:40:02,340
the thing is, that little story plays out over and over again.

477
00:40:02,480 --> 00:40:09,180
You know, you get all these things where it's like, well, just sit the guy down for an hour and ask him about this technical subject.

478
00:40:09,180 --> 00:40:11,880
Because people don't just tell those stories that way.

479
00:40:11,880 --> 00:40:16,220
They actually tell stories that are actually indicative of other things.

480
00:40:16,220 --> 00:40:20,500
I'm a very big fan of this idea that when you record something...

481
00:40:20,500 --> 00:40:23,340
I'm collecting all the podcasts right now.

482
00:40:23,460 --> 00:40:25,060
This gets me some press.

483
00:40:25,060 --> 00:40:26,640
It's cute that it does.

484
00:40:26,640 --> 00:40:27,800
But it's not that hard.

485
00:40:27,800 --> 00:40:29,180
It's an RSS feed.

486
00:40:29,180 --> 00:40:30,220
The guy's doing...

487
00:40:30,220 --> 00:40:36,000
It's like a self-service anthropology experiment.

488
00:40:36,060 --> 00:40:40,380
It's like driving by an African village and there's a pile of videotapes for you to pick up.

489
00:40:40,600 --> 00:40:42,120
Not that hard.

490
00:40:42,320 --> 00:40:43,780
I have a little bash shell script.

491
00:40:43,780 --> 00:40:47,080
I'm currently collecting 4,800 podcasts.

492
00:40:47,360 --> 00:40:49,820
It's something like 600 gigs now or something.

493
00:40:49,820 --> 00:40:50,420
Why?

494
00:40:50,420 --> 00:40:51,420
Why not?

495
00:40:51,420 --> 00:40:54,920
And people go, well, they're boring.

496
00:40:55,360 --> 00:40:56,940
And I'm like, well, they're not really boring.

497
00:40:56,940 --> 00:41:00,760
They're actually stories about what it was like to be alive when that person was talking.

498
00:41:00,960 --> 00:41:02,780
It's supposed to be about wine.

499
00:41:02,780 --> 00:41:04,080
You know, the wine cast.

500
00:41:04,080 --> 00:41:11,580
But no, it's actually kind of about his friends and how they had wine together and what it was like to be alive in 2005 and order wine and be at this place.

501
00:41:11,580 --> 00:41:13,200
And places that won't be there anymore.

502
00:41:13,200 --> 00:41:15,860
You know, we live on shifting sand.

503
00:41:15,860 --> 00:41:17,200
Sand that disappears.

504
00:41:17,520 --> 00:41:19,600
And people, you know, they don't want to hear that, of course.

505
00:41:19,600 --> 00:41:22,540
That's why it's used to sell, you know, cigarettes.

506
00:41:22,540 --> 00:41:28,300
But, you know, it's one of those things where people don't really think that through.

507
00:41:28,300 --> 00:41:29,680
And the answer is, you know, will...

508
00:41:30,480 --> 00:41:34,060
I will not live to see a lot of the results of the work I'm doing.

509
00:41:34,060 --> 00:41:35,920
You know, like where somebody, you know, people...

510
00:41:35,920 --> 00:41:44,500
I'm like, if you think it's difficult, if you think it's difficult to tell the BBS story in 2005, imagine trying to tell it in 2050, you know.

511
00:41:45,380 --> 00:41:58,420
I love how in about 200 years, we're going to be these Afro-wearing, silver-suited, grunge-tattooed kids from the 20th century.

512
00:41:58,640 --> 00:42:04,560
Because they'll just take all of that, that 10 years, which we think of as a lifetime, and just compress it.

513
00:42:04,860 --> 00:42:06,700
And so you'll just have all everyone together.

514
00:42:06,700 --> 00:42:08,120
Because that's what we do as a people.

515
00:42:08,120 --> 00:42:10,200
We just go, oh, like Roman centurions.

516
00:42:10,200 --> 00:42:14,480
They all got little brushes on their heads and run around clanking metal.

517
00:42:15,100 --> 00:42:15,920
That's it.

518
00:42:15,920 --> 00:42:18,560
And they have a big wooden horse somewhere, I think.

519
00:42:20,120 --> 00:42:21,800
You know, that's what people do.

520
00:42:21,800 --> 00:42:22,820
And people go, ha, ha, ha.

521
00:42:22,820 --> 00:42:23,980
They don't really, you know.

522
00:42:23,980 --> 00:42:24,860
And the answer is no.

523
00:42:24,860 --> 00:42:25,620
I mean, people do that.

524
00:42:25,620 --> 00:42:27,200
They compress them in their minds.

525
00:42:27,200 --> 00:42:31,660
And they'll compress this in their minds, except now, by recording this history, we get it.

526
00:42:32,700 --> 00:42:37,920
Anyway, all that said, I should open this up to questions.

527
00:42:38,020 --> 00:42:42,080
I don't have a really zinger closing statement.

528
00:42:42,080 --> 00:42:47,800
Other than to say that, like I said, don't shoot for perfection.

529
00:42:48,580 --> 00:42:50,220
Perfection is not attainable.

530
00:42:50,880 --> 00:42:54,100
Shoot for something.

531
00:42:54,100 --> 00:42:56,360
Because something is attainable.

532
00:42:56,360 --> 00:42:58,460
And something is much better than nothing.

533
00:42:58,800 --> 00:43:01,480
Nihilism is not an answer.

534
00:43:02,160 --> 00:43:03,760
It is a symptom.

535
00:43:06,180 --> 00:43:09,580
So I guess I'll open it up to any questions, people.

536
00:43:09,580 --> 00:43:10,360
Yes, sir.

537
00:43:10,360 --> 00:43:13,460
Do you have any plans for another book project?

538
00:43:14,200 --> 00:43:14,500
Yes.

539
00:43:16,140 --> 00:43:20,460
My next documentary will probably be on text adventures.

540
00:43:22,720 --> 00:43:23,980
Yeah.

541
00:43:24,280 --> 00:43:26,300
Oh, yeah, that's right.

542
00:43:27,420 --> 00:43:31,100
There's another one I might do on arcades.

543
00:43:31,140 --> 00:43:35,660
Like, not arcade games, like 1980s arcades.

544
00:43:35,660 --> 00:43:41,020
I found a guy who worked as an arcade technician.

545
00:43:41,020 --> 00:43:43,420
And he was working at a Namco timeout.

546
00:43:43,420 --> 00:43:48,360
And they had thrown out this booklet of slides.

547
00:43:48,360 --> 00:43:54,180
And it was 1,000 promotional arcade slides from 1980 to 1982.

548
00:43:54,640 --> 00:44:02,540
It was just perfectly posed pictures of arcades and all the games that were in them in pristine shape and everyone looking good and all the shots.

549
00:44:02,580 --> 00:44:02,980
So I'm...

550
00:44:03,720 --> 00:44:05,260
He put up, like, 50.

551
00:44:05,260 --> 00:44:06,320
Wasn't this funny?

552
00:44:06,320 --> 00:44:08,360
And I'm, like, I'm going to send you a scanner.

553
00:44:09,220 --> 00:44:12,660
And I'm going to pay you to put them up.

554
00:44:13,180 --> 00:44:15,400
And, you know, and he's, like, well, I've got to give them away.

555
00:44:15,400 --> 00:44:16,760
And I'm, like, hells yeah.

556
00:44:17,400 --> 00:44:18,720
I don't care.

557
00:44:18,820 --> 00:44:19,760
Do that.

558
00:44:20,120 --> 00:44:38,080
I got a lot of press because having finished this five and a half hour, eight episode documentary with all the bells and whistles and the little twirly bit, I licensed it Creative Commons Attribute Sharealike, which means basically leave my name on it.

559
00:44:40,540 --> 00:44:44,720
And so I have people who tell me, oh, they're going to pirate your documentary.

560
00:44:44,720 --> 00:44:46,460
And I'm, like, you can't pirate it.

561
00:44:48,180 --> 00:44:49,600
It's copyable, sure.

562
00:44:49,640 --> 00:44:50,280
There's no...

563
00:44:50,280 --> 00:44:51,260
Oh, yeah, I should say that.

564
00:44:51,260 --> 00:44:52,280
When you go through...

565
00:44:52,280 --> 00:44:53,500
This is an important thing in life.

566
00:44:53,500 --> 00:44:59,560
If you always dream of doing something and you do it, take the extra time to do all the things you promised yourself you were going to do.

567
00:44:59,560 --> 00:45:03,840
Even if by the time you do it, you're a bitter old man who can't walk very well.

568
00:45:03,840 --> 00:45:04,760
Do it anyway.

569
00:45:05,080 --> 00:45:09,980
So if it's, like, when I own a car, my car is going to have the shiniest gas cap ever.

570
00:45:10,140 --> 00:45:13,680
And when you get older, you're, like, well, that's a stupid thing to want.

571
00:45:14,060 --> 00:45:15,480
Get yourself a shiny gas cap.

572
00:45:15,480 --> 00:45:15,840
What's the...

573
00:45:15,840 --> 00:45:22,040
Well, when I got this thing, I was, like, I'm not going to have any menus you can't get out of.

574
00:45:22,040 --> 00:45:24,320
I'm not going to have any fucking FBI warning.

575
00:45:24,640 --> 00:45:29,220
I'm not going to have it be region encoded because that's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever seen.

576
00:45:29,220 --> 00:45:30,900
So it's region zero.

577
00:45:32,620 --> 00:45:38,200
You might not know this, but it actually costs money to put CSS on a machine.

578
00:45:38,200 --> 00:45:43,700
Like, you pay a royalty to MacroVision to make your disk not work well.

579
00:45:45,140 --> 00:45:47,800
Like, my printing company was, like, don't do that.

580
00:45:48,080 --> 00:45:48,940
Like, don't use it.

581
00:45:48,940 --> 00:45:49,660
We offer it.

582
00:45:49,660 --> 00:45:51,700
We offer this service you should not do.

583
00:45:51,920 --> 00:45:53,560
But we have to offer it.

584
00:45:53,560 --> 00:45:55,120
Because MacroVision is right here.

585
00:45:55,180 --> 00:45:56,380
Behind us.

586
00:46:01,780 --> 00:46:04,420
So I made sure that all that stuff was like that.

587
00:46:04,420 --> 00:46:07,860
And I also found out, by the way, don't do DVD layer dual layer.

588
00:46:07,920 --> 00:46:09,860
It actually works really shittily.

589
00:46:09,860 --> 00:46:11,600
The laser goes like this.

590
00:46:11,720 --> 00:46:13,080
And at one point, I found this out.

591
00:46:13,080 --> 00:46:15,520
You know what it's like to find out, you're, like, I must be doing something wrong.

592
00:46:15,520 --> 00:46:16,980
And you find out the world is wrong.

593
00:46:17,540 --> 00:46:21,500
The way they get dual layer is that they have two separate areas on a disk.

594
00:46:21,500 --> 00:46:22,720
And they're, like, kind of like this.

595
00:46:22,720 --> 00:46:24,680
And the laser goes along like this.

596
00:46:24,680 --> 00:46:25,540
And it goes, oh, time switch.

597
00:46:25,540 --> 00:46:26,160
Whee!

598
00:46:26,240 --> 00:46:26,360
Okay.

599
00:46:26,360 --> 00:46:30,460
Except that you kind of can't completely control where that is.

600
00:46:30,800 --> 00:46:31,980
You kind of can.

601
00:46:31,980 --> 00:46:32,860
Sort of.

602
00:46:32,860 --> 00:46:34,940
And at one point, it goes, whee!

603
00:46:35,760 --> 00:46:41,220
Except, like I said before, some DVDs go, man, battle stations!

604
00:46:41,700 --> 00:46:42,660
Whee!

605
00:46:45,000 --> 00:46:47,680
And to get around that problem, they have buffers.

606
00:46:47,680 --> 00:46:49,540
Which are sometimes too small.

607
00:46:50,520 --> 00:46:52,300
So they go, whee!

608
00:46:53,700 --> 00:46:54,660
Eee!

609
00:46:54,660 --> 00:46:59,700
If you look at a lot of dual layer DVDs in Hollywood, how do they solve this?

610
00:46:59,700 --> 00:47:01,700
They move it to between transitions.

611
00:47:02,400 --> 00:47:03,780
So it goes black.

612
00:47:03,780 --> 00:47:06,000
And you hear, and then it goes over here.

613
00:47:06,000 --> 00:47:06,680
That's great.

614
00:47:06,680 --> 00:47:10,220
What a fantastic future jetpack world we live in.

615
00:47:10,800 --> 00:47:12,080
Piece of shit.

616
00:47:12,100 --> 00:47:13,920
So I would never do that again.

617
00:47:14,460 --> 00:47:15,440
Don't ever do that.

618
00:47:15,440 --> 00:47:17,860
And once you learn all these things, you're, like, oh, Jesus.

619
00:47:17,860 --> 00:47:18,480
Oh, man.

620
00:47:18,480 --> 00:47:19,540
That's horrible.

621
00:47:19,960 --> 00:47:20,640
Anyway.

622
00:47:21,160 --> 00:47:22,360
Other questions?

623
00:47:22,360 --> 00:47:23,720
Can I...

624
00:47:23,720 --> 00:47:26,240
Can you make fun of DVD more?

625
00:47:30,560 --> 00:47:32,100
Yeah, you just asked, how do you...

626
00:47:32,100 --> 00:47:34,900
How do I feel about people torrenting my DVDs?

627
00:47:35,440 --> 00:47:39,220
I wrote an essay called, Why the BBS Documentary is Creative Commons.

628
00:47:39,620 --> 00:47:44,780
And in that, I talk about why I very specifically understand what's going on with this whole thing.

629
00:47:45,000 --> 00:47:48,640
You know, there's a little bit of a horror going on in a lot of industry.

630
00:47:49,840 --> 00:47:50,240
Because...

631
00:47:50,640 --> 00:47:51,780
Okay, I'm gonna get in trouble.

632
00:47:51,780 --> 00:47:52,060
I...

633
00:47:52,060 --> 00:47:53,700
I call media...

634
00:47:53,700 --> 00:47:54,740
I call a lot of media...

635
00:47:54,740 --> 00:47:55,740
I'm gonna get in trouble.

636
00:47:55,740 --> 00:47:57,920
I call a lot of media makers air sellers.

637
00:47:59,160 --> 00:48:02,240
Because they enclose some air and try to sell it to you.

638
00:48:03,100 --> 00:48:05,300
And, like, the oxygen bar.

639
00:48:05,300 --> 00:48:05,820
And that's not...

640
00:48:05,820 --> 00:48:06,580
You know, I mean, that's one thing.

641
00:48:06,580 --> 00:48:08,020
They're, like, it's my fucking livelihood.

642
00:48:08,360 --> 00:48:11,760
I'm, like, well, your livelihood is extremely duplicatable now, sir.

643
00:48:12,840 --> 00:48:19,920
You know, when we used to be able to make a wheel, and it took three days for Bob the Cobbler to make the fucking wheel, great.

644
00:48:20,260 --> 00:48:23,320
But now we have a machine that makes 4,000 wheels a minute.

645
00:48:23,320 --> 00:48:24,600
Don't stop thinking...

646
00:48:25,860 --> 00:48:27,540
Give Bob a, you know...

647
00:48:28,500 --> 00:48:30,060
Make Bob the guard or something.

648
00:48:30,060 --> 00:48:31,260
You can watch the machine.

649
00:48:33,640 --> 00:48:36,000
So, stop trying to keep Bob around, okay?

650
00:48:36,000 --> 00:48:36,660
I understand.

651
00:48:36,660 --> 00:48:37,220
Poor Bob.

652
00:48:37,220 --> 00:48:38,140
You have a lot of jet...

653
00:48:38,140 --> 00:48:42,320
We have a lot of jet companies in this world that have people whose job is to wind the propeller.

654
00:48:43,080 --> 00:48:44,400
And the thing is, is...

655
00:48:45,140 --> 00:48:50,000
When I made this, I realized we're in a world now where some people simply do not pay for media.

656
00:48:50,780 --> 00:48:51,880
They don't.

657
00:48:51,880 --> 00:48:54,840
They have tools to do it, to get it for you.

658
00:48:54,840 --> 00:48:56,940
No matter what you put on it, they're going to get around it.

659
00:48:56,940 --> 00:49:06,840
All you've done now is treat the rest of your audience like a bunch of, you know, criminals, twitchbags, who are going to steal.

660
00:49:06,840 --> 00:49:07,560
You never know.

661
00:49:07,560 --> 00:49:08,180
Get back here.

662
00:49:08,180 --> 00:49:09,100
I have a knife.

663
00:49:09,320 --> 00:49:12,040
And meanwhile, the guys over here are like, whee!

664
00:49:12,040 --> 00:49:16,260
And so they feel really elite over here, because look at all the...

665
00:49:16,260 --> 00:49:18,560
Look at how they're pounding mom into the ground.

666
00:49:18,560 --> 00:49:19,800
They didn't even touch me.

667
00:49:19,800 --> 00:49:21,260
I got 20, ah!

668
00:49:21,260 --> 00:49:24,980
So what you end up with is this kind of a stupid dichotomy.

669
00:49:24,980 --> 00:49:26,380
So my take on it the whole time...

670
00:49:27,860 --> 00:49:32,300
Around two or three weeks in, I think it was like two weeks in, info fallout.

671
00:49:32,660 --> 00:49:34,340
Where's the documentary?

672
00:49:35,560 --> 00:49:36,860
And I contacted them.

673
00:49:36,860 --> 00:49:38,500
I'm like, you go, girl!

674
00:49:38,900 --> 00:49:40,700
And I found where they posted it.

675
00:49:40,700 --> 00:49:46,540
And I put up this thing going, just so everyone's clear here, it's region zero.

676
00:49:46,540 --> 00:49:46,920
It's...

677
00:49:46,920 --> 00:49:48,160
There's no CSS.

678
00:49:48,160 --> 00:49:49,360
It's Creative Commons.

679
00:49:49,360 --> 00:49:54,660
So they essentially went into a McDonald's and scooped up all the sugar and ketchup packets and went, free food!

680
00:49:54,660 --> 00:49:56,340
I scammed some food!

681
00:49:57,540 --> 00:49:58,780
And I said, okay, well...

682
00:49:58,780 --> 00:50:01,800
Okay, well, here's a link to a PayPal account if you want to send me some money.

683
00:50:01,800 --> 00:50:03,240
But otherwise, you go.

684
00:50:03,240 --> 00:50:05,620
When I was 20, I couldn't afford pizza either.

685
00:50:05,880 --> 00:50:13,800
So of course, you know, you can afford a $50 hard drive, but you can't afford the $10,000 worth of movies you're putting on it.

686
00:50:14,400 --> 00:50:17,640
And they don't see a problem with that, because it's very hard to explain to them why.

687
00:50:17,640 --> 00:50:20,660
So this is going to look like I'm doing a sales pitch, but I'm not.

688
00:50:22,040 --> 00:50:26,640
When I did my documentary, I wanted to make sure that it would have, you know, three DVDs.

689
00:50:26,640 --> 00:50:29,060
It has the photos of everybody there.

690
00:50:29,160 --> 00:50:30,660
It's frigging huge.

691
00:50:30,660 --> 00:50:32,140
It's got the photos in it.

692
00:50:32,180 --> 00:50:34,300
It's 18 gigabytes of data.

693
00:50:34,300 --> 00:50:37,600
It's got a DVD-ROM with the stuff, all the photos I took.

694
00:50:37,600 --> 00:50:39,200
The idea being twofold.

695
00:50:39,200 --> 00:50:42,840
Number one, make it worth the money that I'm selling it for.

696
00:50:43,160 --> 00:50:46,200
And two, make it so fucking big, it's really hard to BitTorrent.

697
00:50:47,920 --> 00:50:50,300
I will out-feature your ass.

698
00:50:55,140 --> 00:50:56,540
I did nine hours.

699
00:50:56,860 --> 00:51:03,680
Some people, I mean, but some people, they're quite happy to watch a postage stamp-size rip of your film with no subtitles.

700
00:51:04,040 --> 00:51:08,080
And trying to convince those people that they want to spend $50 on anything is impossible.

701
00:51:08,520 --> 00:51:09,600
So I don't do that.

702
00:51:09,600 --> 00:51:12,160
So when I saw the BitTorrent thing, I just hopped right on there.

703
00:51:12,160 --> 00:51:13,220
And I was like, hey!

704
00:51:13,220 --> 00:51:15,100
I mean, I have the NFO framed.

705
00:51:16,000 --> 00:51:17,540
And I've talked to the kid.

706
00:51:17,540 --> 00:51:19,000
And the kid's like, I hope to be like you.

707
00:51:19,000 --> 00:51:20,560
And I'm like, yeah, ripped off, like you.

708
00:51:20,560 --> 00:51:22,000
No, I didn't.

709
00:51:22,700 --> 00:51:24,280
He's like, I hope to go into film someday.

710
00:51:24,280 --> 00:51:25,880
And I'm like, oh, what a great start you are.

711
00:51:25,880 --> 00:51:27,500
What a great start you're getting up there.

712
00:51:28,380 --> 00:51:31,620
So no, my attitude with the torrent thing was like, you know, go ahead.

713
00:51:31,740 --> 00:51:34,400
At worst, I mean, I get mail from kids.

714
00:51:34,400 --> 00:51:36,060
I got mail from a kid just recently.

715
00:51:36,060 --> 00:51:37,180
He was like, I'm 17.

716
00:51:37,200 --> 00:51:38,660
I never used BBSs.

717
00:51:38,660 --> 00:51:41,160
This is the best fucking documentary I've ever seen.

718
00:51:41,680 --> 00:51:43,760
You know, I downloaded off a BitTorrent site.

719
00:51:43,760 --> 00:51:44,400
It's great.

720
00:51:44,400 --> 00:51:46,060
Wow, thanks for making this thing.

721
00:51:46,420 --> 00:51:50,540
You know, I'm like, oh, at worst, you know, it makes me sad, actually.

722
00:51:50,540 --> 00:51:52,760
I had a school write to me.

723
00:51:52,760 --> 00:51:53,720
They had purchased a copy.

724
00:51:53,720 --> 00:51:55,900
And they said, can we show this to the kids?

725
00:51:57,020 --> 00:51:59,320
May we show this to the kids?

726
00:51:59,400 --> 00:52:01,860
And I was like, you can make copies for the...

727
00:52:01,860 --> 00:52:07,160
I wrote this big thing back where I'm like, you can make copies for the teachers so they can all evaluate it.

728
00:52:07,160 --> 00:52:10,260
You can have a fundraiser where you charge money to show it to everybody.

729
00:52:10,520 --> 00:52:16,460
You know, you can edit it to take out the profanity, which is, you know, pretty big in some places to show it to the kids.

730
00:52:16,460 --> 00:52:17,720
Do what you need to do.

731
00:52:17,900 --> 00:52:18,680
You bought it.

732
00:52:18,680 --> 00:52:19,220
You own it.

733
00:52:19,220 --> 00:52:20,660
It's a piece of fabric in your house.

734
00:52:20,660 --> 00:52:21,160
Cut it up.

735
00:52:21,160 --> 00:52:21,680
Put it somewhere.

736
00:52:21,680 --> 00:52:23,720
Put it on your front yard.

737
00:52:23,720 --> 00:52:26,580
You know, don't come back to the fabric maker going, please.

738
00:52:26,960 --> 00:52:30,220
You know, don't call up Singer going, oh, sir, can I please do it?

739
00:52:30,220 --> 00:52:31,160
So, no, anyway.

740
00:52:31,160 --> 00:52:33,500
That was a very long answer for a very short question.

741
00:52:33,920 --> 00:52:37,820
Was there an internal anger as a fuel?

742
00:52:40,560 --> 00:52:42,940
Any other questions?

743
00:52:43,540 --> 00:52:49,200
Actually, you know, I always thought that was the reason why the Hacksaw CD got, the DVD got so ripped last year.

744
00:52:49,220 --> 00:52:55,180
Was because, or it was the year before, where they were just ripping it and coming up to him and trying to get him to sign the rips.

745
00:52:57,380 --> 00:52:58,700
Yeah, the porn DVD.

746
00:52:59,860 --> 00:53:06,200
Because it was a cynical exploitation of a subculture presented to that subculture in an attempt to make them swallow it.

747
00:53:06,700 --> 00:53:07,820
And they knew it.

748
00:53:08,280 --> 00:53:12,160
They're like, wow, this was made as long, this probably took as long to make as it is long.

749
00:53:13,660 --> 00:53:15,020
And they felt that.

750
00:53:15,020 --> 00:53:17,960
You watch this thing and you're like, okay, well, this guy really worked on this thing.

751
00:53:18,040 --> 00:53:19,120
Maybe I want to buy it.

752
00:53:19,120 --> 00:53:20,140
Or maybe I can't afford it.

753
00:53:20,140 --> 00:53:21,300
But I would if I could.

754
00:53:21,480 --> 00:53:25,100
You know, I would, I'll keep an eye out for him and maybe something else some other time.

755
00:53:25,740 --> 00:53:28,380
People know, people know when you're not even trying.

756
00:53:28,640 --> 00:53:30,180
You know, when you're just, anyway.

757
00:53:30,180 --> 00:53:33,820
So that, so I think that's why, I mean, I didn't, I didn't have that happen.

758
00:53:33,820 --> 00:53:34,960
I mean, don't try it now.

759
00:53:34,960 --> 00:53:38,660
But I mean, I had, I didn't have anyone walk up to me and go, you know, hey, I ripped your DVD.

760
00:53:38,660 --> 00:53:39,260
Can you sign it?

761
00:53:39,260 --> 00:53:39,920
Ha ha ha.

762
00:53:40,320 --> 00:53:41,420
They stayed away.

763
00:53:41,420 --> 00:53:44,200
They either bought a copy, thanked me for it or whatever.

764
00:53:44,860 --> 00:53:45,840
Oh, he's waving.

765
00:53:45,900 --> 00:53:49,040
Okay, that's, oh yeah, oh yes, exactly.

766
00:53:49,040 --> 00:53:58,600
Just so you all know, I'll stand here and answer questions and sell DVDs for a little, you know, while longer here, gladly.

767
00:53:58,600 --> 00:54:03,580
Just, but you should know that the awards ceremony will be starting over in the big room.

768
00:54:03,600 --> 00:54:08,640
So if you want to go to Jeff Moss's Box of Hot, you know, you should go.

769
00:54:08,960 --> 00:54:10,400
Any other questions?

770
00:54:13,500 --> 00:54:14,480
Oh, hello.

771
00:54:29,290 --> 00:54:36,310
How do I make something as boring as somebody typing on a computer and looking at a screen interesting in a film environment?

772
00:54:37,010 --> 00:54:43,670
And the answer is, you instead focus on why that person was there in the first place.

773
00:54:44,110 --> 00:54:46,510
You ask them, why are you at this keyboard?

774
00:54:46,510 --> 00:54:47,810
Why were you doing this?

775
00:54:47,810 --> 00:54:49,370
Why did you think it was so important?

776
00:54:49,370 --> 00:54:51,810
Why did you think it was important to do that?

777
00:54:51,810 --> 00:54:58,830
And you focus on him, knowing that the story of his thing, you know, the pure technical aspect can be downloaded.

778
00:54:58,830 --> 00:54:59,990
What did the software look like?

779
00:54:59,990 --> 00:55:00,950
Well, you can download that.

780
00:55:00,950 --> 00:55:02,190
What did it, who made it?

781
00:55:02,190 --> 00:55:03,350
It's over here.

782
00:55:03,450 --> 00:55:04,370
Who was on it?

783
00:55:04,370 --> 00:55:05,590
Here's the user list.

784
00:55:05,590 --> 00:55:08,370
But asking a human being, why are you even here?

785
00:55:08,370 --> 00:55:18,810
Why, why, you know, why is the Onion Shack BBS so important to you versus the, you know, the Cat Box BBS, which you hated?

786
00:55:18,810 --> 00:55:21,250
What was so bad about the Cat Box BBS?

787
00:55:21,370 --> 00:55:28,730
And so you go, you know, it's, it's one of these things, you know, instead of asking why, you know, how do I make this interesting?

788
00:55:28,730 --> 00:55:30,670
Ask why they're even there in the first place.

789
00:55:30,670 --> 00:55:31,810
Go back to the human thing.

790
00:55:31,810 --> 00:55:32,870
That's the answer.

791
00:55:33,010 --> 00:55:37,670
When I do text adventures, people are like, I love the, I'm shooting it in high definition.

792
00:55:40,010 --> 00:55:45,590
Which I think is, anyway, I'm sure, yeah, anyway, yeah, yeah, actually the URL is getlamp.com.

793
00:55:45,590 --> 00:55:47,530
The movie's called Get Lamped, don't make one.

794
00:55:48,510 --> 00:55:52,270
And anyway, so it's like, well, what, how could you possibly make that interesting?

795
00:55:52,270 --> 00:55:53,490
It's a bunch of text adventures.

796
00:55:53,490 --> 00:55:54,850
But it's not.

797
00:55:54,850 --> 00:56:03,850
It's actually the story of a bunch of storytellers who had to decide everything their readers could ever want to know ever.

798
00:56:04,650 --> 00:56:06,690
And how do you write like that?

799
00:56:06,690 --> 00:56:12,490
How do you say, I went across a bridge, and you know some people are going to go, can I whiz off the bridge?

800
00:56:13,330 --> 00:56:14,950
Can I blow up the bridge?

801
00:56:14,950 --> 00:56:16,950
What if I bring a dragon on the bridge?

802
00:56:16,950 --> 00:56:18,150
Can I move the bridge?

803
00:56:18,150 --> 00:56:20,290
Is the bridge, is there actually a bridge?

804
00:56:20,290 --> 00:56:21,590
Is the bridge in my mind?

805
00:56:22,430 --> 00:56:25,330
And he had to think all this stuff out beforehand.

806
00:56:25,610 --> 00:56:26,750
And you had to do it.

807
00:56:26,750 --> 00:56:27,670
You had to come up with this stuff.

808
00:56:27,670 --> 00:56:32,890
So to me, talking to the people who came up with those ideas will be fascinating.

809
00:56:32,910 --> 00:56:38,150
How much of that comes out in like just scrolling text is another thing.

810
00:56:38,570 --> 00:56:43,310
Because it's not, it's not, again, it's not, how do you make Zork interesting?

811
00:56:43,810 --> 00:56:47,310
It's, why did you make Zork?

812
00:56:47,810 --> 00:56:49,830
Why did you decide to make a Gru?

813
00:56:49,830 --> 00:56:53,650
Why did you make it, why did you do full sentences in that way?

814
00:56:53,650 --> 00:56:54,890
Why did you insist on doing it?

815
00:56:54,890 --> 00:56:55,590
And so that's the thing.

816
00:56:55,590 --> 00:56:59,350
Those answered questions are where the interest comes from.

817
00:56:59,790 --> 00:57:01,810
And then people go, wow, that's pretty interesting.

818
00:57:02,690 --> 00:57:03,950
Anyway, any other questions?

819
00:57:03,950 --> 00:57:04,630
Yes, sir?

820
00:57:04,810 --> 00:57:06,650
When is Slashdot coming out?

821
00:57:06,650 --> 00:57:07,350
When?

822
00:57:09,030 --> 00:57:14,350
Slashdot is a really great place to get very informed, useful comments, especially if you go to negative one.

823
00:57:15,210 --> 00:57:16,250
So I did that.

824
00:57:16,250 --> 00:57:17,810
A few times I've been announced.

825
00:57:18,090 --> 00:57:19,470
Oh, humanity.

826
00:57:20,530 --> 00:57:24,590
But one of them was, this film was actually the sequel to Mr.

827
00:57:24,590 --> 00:57:29,790
Scott's first film, The History of Drying Paint, a 200-hour epic.

828
00:57:31,090 --> 00:57:36,350
And I wrote back, like, you know, like, dude, you know how hard it was to get Dutch Foy to sponsor that?

829
00:57:37,610 --> 00:57:39,870
But one of the other comments was, oh, fuck this.

830
00:57:39,870 --> 00:57:42,030
I'm waiting for the extended director's edition.

831
00:57:42,870 --> 00:57:47,270
Actually, one of the Easter eggs is a sequel, is a trailer for the sequel to this.

832
00:57:47,270 --> 00:57:51,770
You know, I went and hired a drive-time DJ in Seattle called Smiling J.

833
00:57:52,730 --> 00:57:58,650
Andrews to talk about The Tears of Bordeaux, this epic.

834
00:57:58,650 --> 00:58:00,470
Anyway, so that's buried in there.

835
00:58:00,470 --> 00:58:04,630
Yeah , because a lot of people are like, well, are you, you know, where's the sequel?

836
00:58:04,630 --> 00:58:05,530
I do get that, by the way.

837
00:58:05,530 --> 00:58:06,850
I do get, where's the sequel?

838
00:58:06,950 --> 00:58:13,770
The answer is, I'm going to be taking pretty much all of the 250 hours, cutting out the parts where they're like, where do I look?

839
00:58:13,770 --> 00:58:14,370
Where do I look?

840
00:58:14,370 --> 00:58:16,370
And that kind of stuff, which is question answer.

841
00:58:16,370 --> 00:58:18,750
And I'm just going to put them all up on archive.org.

842
00:58:19,170 --> 00:58:23,050
So archive.org is getting like 200 hours of footage.

843
00:58:23,890 --> 00:58:24,850
Attributes share alike.

844
00:58:24,850 --> 00:58:26,570
And I'm like, make your own fucking documentary.

845
00:58:27,310 --> 00:58:28,510
Right there.

846
00:58:28,870 --> 00:58:33,590
So no, that's pretty much, that's how I'm going to handle it.

847
00:58:33,590 --> 00:58:35,030
I've already made arrangements with them.

848
00:58:35,030 --> 00:58:38,510
I'm going to be another sub-collection of 200 plus hours of footage.

849
00:58:38,510 --> 00:58:39,750
And people can make their own.

850
00:58:39,750 --> 00:58:42,350
Because of course, you know, when I make it, I'm American.

851
00:58:42,650 --> 00:58:44,810
And it's kind of shot in North America.

852
00:58:44,950 --> 00:58:46,350
So the Europeans hate me.

853
00:58:46,930 --> 00:58:48,250
Because I didn't tell their story.

854
00:58:48,250 --> 00:58:49,210
And I'm like, well, I couldn't.

855
00:58:49,210 --> 00:58:50,390
I couldn't tell it.

856
00:58:50,450 --> 00:58:51,590
Where were you?

857
00:58:51,650 --> 00:58:52,310
Fucknut?

858
00:58:52,450 --> 00:58:53,250
2005.

859
00:58:54,670 --> 00:58:58,930
So now they can take my footage and they can remix it under the license any way they want to.

860
00:58:58,930 --> 00:59:00,610
And redo it and do whatever they want.

861
00:59:00,650 --> 00:59:02,450
So I hope people do it.

862
00:59:02,450 --> 00:59:06,590
I always say, I hope this is the worst documentary on BBS's ever made.

863
00:59:06,850 --> 00:59:09,170
And that all the rest of the ones that come kick my ass.

864
00:59:09,210 --> 00:59:11,870
But currently, I am the lowest priced one.

865
00:59:13,690 --> 00:59:14,910
Any other questions?

866
00:59:15,490 --> 00:59:16,290
Yes.

867
00:59:20,860 --> 00:59:21,660
Okay.

868
00:59:21,740 --> 00:59:23,280
Netflix, what was the other one you said?

869
00:59:24,180 --> 00:59:25,380
Green Scene?

870
00:59:25,640 --> 00:59:26,820
I never heard of it.

871
00:59:26,820 --> 00:59:28,000
But beyond that.

872
00:59:28,060 --> 00:59:32,860
The traditional relationship with rental agencies is traditionally an adversarial one.

873
00:59:32,860 --> 00:59:34,320
Normally, the movie directors don't, yeah.

874
00:59:34,320 --> 00:59:36,660
So actually, there's very little...

875
00:59:36,660 --> 00:59:37,480
I have found this out.

876
00:59:37,480 --> 00:59:40,340
There's very little mechanism to go, no, please, rent me.

877
00:59:40,620 --> 00:59:42,820
Because people think that's a money loser.

878
00:59:42,960 --> 00:59:44,340
So they normally want to go through it.

879
00:59:44,340 --> 00:59:45,900
So I've told people...

880
00:59:45,900 --> 00:59:47,180
I mean, I have an ISBN number.

881
00:59:47,820 --> 00:59:49,580
Go tell Netflix the ISBN number.

882
00:59:49,580 --> 00:59:50,920
And a couple people have requested it.

883
00:59:50,920 --> 00:59:53,040
But Netflix hasn't figured out how to reach me.

884
00:59:54,200 --> 00:59:55,460
I wouldn't care.

885
00:59:55,460 --> 01:00:00,020
I mean, I know that I'm in at least a few rental companies.

886
01:00:00,380 --> 01:00:03,140
I had a friend who I hadn't talked to for like 10 years.

887
01:00:03,140 --> 01:00:08,200
He was like, I was walking by the computer film section of my rental place.

888
01:00:08,200 --> 01:00:08,960
And there was your film.

889
01:00:08,960 --> 01:00:13,300
And I thought, oh, I guess I might as well see the film my friend made.

890
01:00:14,720 --> 01:00:16,160
And Need for Speed.

891
01:00:17,180 --> 01:00:18,320
Just in case.

892
01:00:18,460 --> 01:00:19,560
What he said to me.

893
01:00:19,840 --> 01:00:22,180
So I know it's out there being rented.

894
01:00:22,180 --> 01:00:24,140
But it's one of those things of like, yeah, I'd love to do it.

895
01:00:24,140 --> 01:00:27,900
I mean, again, this is where you get into distribution issues right now.

896
01:00:27,900 --> 01:00:28,900
I'm the distributor.

897
01:00:28,900 --> 01:00:30,280
I'm doing it all myself.

898
01:00:30,400 --> 01:00:32,180
Because money.

899
01:00:33,020 --> 01:00:35,980
And when you go through a middleman, middleman goes, money.

900
01:00:35,980 --> 01:00:37,140
And you go, money.

901
01:00:37,280 --> 01:00:41,820
And then a little bit later, when you go through other ones, it's like, money, money, money.

902
01:00:42,000 --> 01:00:42,640
Nickel.

903
01:00:44,020 --> 01:00:44,660
Nickel.

904
01:00:46,600 --> 01:00:51,360
And so, and you know, and that's fine when it's one billion nickels.

905
01:00:51,360 --> 01:00:52,240
But anyway.

906
01:00:52,380 --> 01:00:53,100
Amazon.

907
01:00:53,140 --> 01:00:54,100
I sell through Amazon.

908
01:00:54,100 --> 01:00:55,160
Here's a good example.

909
01:00:55,200 --> 01:00:56,160
I sell through Amazon.

910
01:00:56,160 --> 01:01:00,420
Everyone's like, because I had a lot of people who were like, well, why would I buy it from some anonymous fucking up with a computer?

911
01:01:00,420 --> 01:01:01,700
I want to buy it from Amazon.

912
01:01:01,940 --> 01:01:02,380
Great.

913
01:01:02,380 --> 01:01:02,820
Excellent.

914
01:01:02,820 --> 01:01:03,160
Good.

915
01:01:03,160 --> 01:01:04,120
60 bucks.

916
01:01:04,820 --> 01:01:08,200
Reason why is because Amazon takes 55% of the cover price.

917
01:01:09,500 --> 01:01:12,780
So when you sell, so people like, why are you selling 50 on your site?

918
01:01:12,780 --> 01:01:17,120
And, you know, and you're selling it for 60 on Amazon.

919
01:01:17,120 --> 01:01:20,140
I'm like, well, because less than half is a bitch slap.

920
01:01:20,840 --> 01:01:22,560
I'll deal with half.

921
01:01:22,840 --> 01:01:27,560
I don't mind getting 25 of the 50 instead of 50.

922
01:01:27,560 --> 01:01:31,520
But man, I'm not going to do, you know, that's just, that hurts.

923
01:01:31,520 --> 01:01:31,880
That hurts.

924
01:01:31,880 --> 01:01:34,140
That hurts in the no-no hole.

925
01:01:36,620 --> 01:01:41,040
So I actually ended up just, you know, selling through them.

926
01:01:41,040 --> 01:01:41,880
And it's nice.

927
01:01:41,880 --> 01:01:44,500
They'll call me and say, we need 30 units.

928
01:01:44,660 --> 01:01:46,400
So I box up 30 units and mail it.

929
01:01:46,400 --> 01:01:48,880
I have 5,000 copies in my basement.

930
01:01:49,540 --> 01:01:50,960
Because I think big.

931
01:01:52,040 --> 01:01:55,200
Oh, that's, yeah, that's the thing I probably should make clear.

932
01:01:55,960 --> 01:01:57,300
You know, I shot it for this.

933
01:01:57,300 --> 01:01:59,400
And a lot of people were like, wow, you're really fucked.

934
01:01:59,400 --> 01:02:01,180
But I really pull in for you.

935
01:02:01,240 --> 01:02:02,080
You know, that kind of thing.

936
01:02:02,080 --> 01:02:04,100
Like, I'm going to walk backwards across the United States.

937
01:02:04,100 --> 01:02:06,120
It's like, you go.

938
01:02:06,380 --> 01:02:07,440
Kind of a deal.

939
01:02:07,440 --> 01:02:11,300
Anyway, the BBS documentary was profitable within three weeks of coming out.

940
01:02:12,180 --> 01:02:16,700
And I mean, like, including the $30,000 duplication price.

941
01:02:17,940 --> 01:02:21,180
So it was like $30,000 to duplicate it.

942
01:02:21,180 --> 01:02:22,660
It was like 20-something thousand.

943
01:02:22,660 --> 01:02:24,860
We're still arguing over exactly how much it was.

944
01:02:24,860 --> 01:02:27,180
My wife is mad at that and so on.

945
01:02:27,700 --> 01:02:28,720
You know, she's the shit.

946
01:02:28,720 --> 01:02:30,800
As soon as it was a product, she grabbed it.

947
01:02:30,800 --> 01:02:32,160
I don't even see it anymore.

948
01:02:32,300 --> 01:02:33,000
She's shipping.

949
01:02:33,000 --> 01:02:33,940
I don't see it.

950
01:02:35,340 --> 01:02:37,820
So, you know, it was like 50 grand.

951
01:02:37,820 --> 01:02:39,620
I made 50 grand within the first three weeks.

952
01:02:39,620 --> 01:02:43,840
Because I knew that there was a story to be told.

953
01:02:43,840 --> 01:02:44,880
I saw the gap.

954
01:02:45,120 --> 01:02:46,400
And I didn't do it for money.

955
01:02:46,400 --> 01:02:48,180
Or it would have been shot in six months.

956
01:02:48,500 --> 01:02:50,540
I did it for four years, because let's get it right.

957
01:02:50,820 --> 01:02:52,440
And I got it right, I think.

958
01:02:52,440 --> 01:02:53,380
I got it somewhat right.

959
01:02:53,380 --> 01:02:54,460
I got a good start.

960
01:02:54,720 --> 01:02:58,940
I got something where someone can go, it's like that, except actually it was blue.

961
01:02:59,440 --> 01:03:04,160
It's much easier to go, and it was blue, as opposed to trying to explain to somebody everything this tells them.

962
01:03:04,160 --> 01:03:04,660
So that's good.

963
01:03:04,660 --> 01:03:05,180
I like that.

964
01:03:05,180 --> 01:03:06,980
I don't mind being put down that way.

965
01:03:06,980 --> 01:03:11,840
Um, but yeah, I definitely was able to, um, what's the word?

966
01:03:11,840 --> 01:03:14,380
I was able to recoup my costs almost immediately.

967
01:03:14,660 --> 01:03:17,320
So that reminds me, I'm selling these.

968
01:03:17,400 --> 01:03:18,380
I think we have to get out.

969
01:03:18,380 --> 01:03:19,220
Do we have to get out, sir?

970
01:03:19,220 --> 01:03:20,060
Yeah, we got to get out.

971
01:03:20,060 --> 01:03:21,200
They're going to close the tent.

972
01:03:22,320 --> 01:03:24,860
It's been wonderful to have you all stick around.