Okay. Hello, everybody. My name is Jason Scott.
Today's flight is to why tech documentaries are impossible
and why we have to do them anyway.
This is a discussion about the documentary medium
that I gleaned in my four years of production work
on a documentary I just finished.
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.
First question, of course, is who the hell are you?
My name is, again, Jason Scott.
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?
Does everyone here know what a BBS is?
Anyone here not know what a BBS is?
Okay, a BBS.
Did you just have fun with me?
I can tell.
Look at those eyes.
All right, anyway.
A BBS is like a single-use website.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, I see that the 305 has arrived.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's very, very dry, and it's a very hard sell
unless it's about sex or death.
And even then, you have to kind of work on it.
That's why we currently have a documentary about wheelchair rugby
called Murderball.
There's one that came out a couple years ago
about a bunch of strippers unionizing.
Boy, what a tough sell that is.
I think it's called Live Nude Girls United.
That's the nature of general release,
and I'll go into general release in a moment.
Throughout this time, we've had a number of what are known as
documentaries of a technical nature.
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.
It's technical, but it's not really technical.
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,
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.
That's very important.
So that money issue gets in everywhere,
and it gets in everywhere in this format.
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!
And because it got political to attack the arguments
or arguments, however you go along that way,
they went after the medium.
And the medium by itself, the documentary medium,
has roots...
What's normally called the first documentary
is a film called Nanook of the North
by Robert Flaherty, made in the 20s.
Which tells the story of an Eskimo man and his family
who was trying to survive up in Alaska.
It is entirely fake.
Top to bottom.
Robert Flaherty filmed a bunch of Eskimos running around,
took it home, realized it sucked.
Just sucked. It was boring.
It was shots of these guys running around
in misty, bad film.
So he had an accident.
This is one of these things that comes out.
He was smoking a cigarette
and the nitrate went up on the film
and the film exploded, essentially, burned him.
And so the film was destroyed.
He had to make a new one.
So he went off and he made a film called Nanook of the North
starring a man named Nanook.
And it told the story.
Well, you see his family huddling for warmth
inside an igloo that is actually only half built
and has heaters.
And you have shots of people running around
that are filmed in lodged parking lots
and things like that.
Because he needed to tell a story
and he wasn't going to let reality get in the way
of a good story.
A common problem in documentaries.
In fact, it's endemic to the documentary format.
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.
And that always made me laugh
about it not qualifying for a documentary
because it turned out this wasn't
an exactly right fact.
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.
Everything does that, right?
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.
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.
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.
This is what people do with technical subjects.
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.
And that's great
because for some people
they just simply don't care about the subject.
As a documentarian you have to wonder
what will make people want to watch this?
Actually before that you have to say
what will make the kind of people I'm aiming this for
want to watch it?
And when you say, well who are you aiming this for?
When you say you want to make a documentary
let's say you want to make a documentary, you insane people.
Let's say you just give somebody some money
for a documentary.
So what ends up happening is you say
well who is it for?
And then someone will go, everybody!
No, don't do that, that doesn't work.
People perceive films
different ways.
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.
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.
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, 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?
and he's like, well
yeah, they really let Bush off light
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?
and if I walked in and saw it
what about it would
make me think it was good?
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?
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, 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, why did this
satellite hit here?
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, 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, 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. 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, 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, 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, and oh yes, remember this, and then they do a cutaway to show you this.
It is unbelievably dry. You watch it because somebody is reimbursing you in some way.
You do not go to see this film because you're like, oh yeah!
Oh, that was much better than Lost in Space.
So, on the other side, you end up with films like War Games.
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.
Anyway, Professor Falken was supposed to be played by John Lennon. I thought that would have been really cool.
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.
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.
Mentor's Conscience of a Hacker and other such writings.
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.
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.
They end up having to say, okay, well, that's kind of how it was.
And it wasn't like that.
And so there's, again, great lots of fun for technical people to go,
well, it's not like that at all.
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.
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.
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.
And that's what they do,
because that's how they get the information to you as fast as possible,
and that's understood.
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.
And it's fascinating because it's a people story.
These kids are talking with great emotion.
And that's more from the interview.
You interview somebody for an hour,
you choose what to use from that hour.
You don't make people sit through the hour of that guy interviewing.
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.
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,
which was, yes, I fuck children!
And then that'd be, you know, once again,
welcome to MTV, I fuck children!
The story of a pedophile.
Anyway, when I was young, I loved MTV, but MTV betrayed me.
Damn you, MTV.
Anyway, the way I like to think of it
is that a technical documentary is an engineering problem.
You have the problem of wanting to naturally turn everything
into either a lecture or a fictional narrative.
And what you do is you say, well, how can I take the reality
and portray it as a narrative?
That is to say, how can I make this somewhat dry subject interesting?
And there's several ways you can do that.
One way is to focus on characters, humans, people,
expressing themselves in a way that's engaging.
And again, bringing that out in an interview is very tough.
The other way is to do an awful lot of, I guess you would call it, dazzle.
And that's more like one of those things,
like when you inject stuff into the car to make it go a little faster.
It's not so great for the car, but it kind of works.
And so he's talking right now about something
that's relatively interesting to some people.
But for the other people, I just give them a whole bunch of pretty colors.
And he's talking about this work he did,
and it's being illustrated, and it's kind of interesting.
But why the hell is that back part there?
Well, because it's interesting.
And you try to strike that.
I also try to shoot, for instance, with very few exceptions,
nobody, no one shot lasts for more than 10 seconds.
A person might talk over something else so that his shot is 30 seconds.
But in fact, the point of fact, it's just not.
Right now in the world, there are an unbelievable amount of subjects
that just haven't been really tackled.
I tackle bulletin board systems because I decided in 2001
that it looks like the BBS movie wasn't going to be made.
They missed the boat.
We were having trouble where people were, you know,
people were disappearing.
It was harder to find the stuff.
The artifacts are kind of gone.
And how do you get that back?
And so in 2001, I started doing research,
and I did six months of research.
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.
And I'd say, well, you know, I'm thinking I'm going to shoot this way.
And I think I'm going to go here and ask this question.
What do you think?
And sometimes they'd answer, sometimes they'd not.
You know, they'd just say, well, I hope he's interesting.
Or I hope you have a reason for going out there.
Or, oh yeah, ask him about this guy who I wouldn't know about.
Because that really changed his life.
So being open helped a lot.
There's a lot of money right now.
You'll find I get really ooky when people discuss money.
Whenever I say monetized, like someone says smeared with shit.
But it's just, you know, that's just because I'm some sort of freak.
But the money is in calling something open source.
There's a lot of money in calling things a brand that has meaning.
So revealing the people that you have a list of people you're going to interview,
suddenly makes it open source.
You know, or telling people, oh, well, you know, this new movie's coming out.
We shot it using this kind of camera.
This new kind of, oh, that's open source.
You revealed things.
So it's a case of marketing terms getting bastardized very quickly.
I tried to let everyone know I was working on this for four years.
And the problem there, of course, was that there were people who waited for four years.
Or five.
I have a gentleman here who waited for five.
Gave me 20 bucks five years ago.
There's an investment.
Actually, when I created the film, I asked for donations.
Because I was dumb.
I don't know why.
I thought I'd need a foundation to create this film.
So people sent me five bucks, ten bucks.
You know, just like, cool.
Sounds like fun.
So I made sure each one of them got a $50 copy, you know, sent to them.
My cost.
It's like, wow, that was a great investment.
So, hey, it pays to be charitable.
I guess.
Anyway, when I shot this film, I would go out and interview people.
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.
And the longer you talk to them...
When I started shooting, there were a lot of people who were names.
You know, there's different levels of celebrity in any kind of technical subject.
Oh, he's the guy who wrote that.
You know, he's the guy who made that computer.
He's the guy who created this thing.
And you go and you track him down.
And sometimes he's really boring.
And sometimes he's really not.
Most markedly in mine, there was a network of bulletin boards called FidoNet.
And this started in around 83, 84, and still exists today.
And it's this beautiful, self-grown, volunteer network of people all around the world who
created this bulletin board system network.
And at the center of it is Thomas Jennings.
And Tom Jennings is fucking nuts.
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.
That's interesting.
And I don't think a lot of people knew that when they were doing it.
So when I interviewed him, he was amazing to a person who's looking at things like,
is this interesting?
So he's just this beautiful, profane man who I used in my way to tell a story around him.
The question becomes, how do you translate that?
And I wasn't going to do this...
I'm going to do it afterwards.
I'll play a sequence after I'm done.
I took...
Here's an example.
The documentary format has editing.
What that means is, you take two separate recordings of events in time and you place
them together.
And they didn't happen one after the other, but you put them together.
I know this sounds basic, but it's so easy to forget that.
A good example of a documentary that really does this a lot...
is something called MTV Cribs.
I don't know how many people know MTV Cribs.
MTV Cribs is supposed to be a documentary about the homes of stars.
Yeah, okay.
So for instance, there was the case where basically they go in and they shoot, right?
They shoot footage with steadicams and stuff of these guys' houses.
Yes, this is where the magic happens.
This is my bedroom.
This is my pool.
This is my kitchen.
And it's fascinating.
Look what they have in their kitchen.
Look what they have in their fridge.
Look what they have here.
They've got hangings, you know?
Well, recently, I believe it was Usher.
I don't care if I'm smearing him.
It's some other guy like Usher.
Usher or an Usher-like being had a little lawsuit occur.
Turns out, Usher rented an island for $350,000 for two days.
It's an expensive island.
Nice island, though.
First day, he shot MTV Cribs there to show his home.
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.
So, right?
I mean, you'll see this documentary format where he's supposed to be describing reality to you.
MTV and he have agreed to 100% completely create a false reality.
Now, you compare that to when they interview, I think it was Ted Nugent.
Now, Ted Nugent's in a house that it's fucking Ted Nugent's house.
Because you can't rent that many animal heads.
You have to get a clearance from the TSA to ship that many guns to a shooting location
to shoot your documentary.
It's Ted Nugent's fucking house.
It's real.
You go through it and you're like, oh my god.
Oh my god.
A PETA member would like explode into flames walking in here.
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.
They're like, this guy's house has four pieces of furniture.
That's fake.
Even if you've got a really good maid, that's fake.
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.
That kind of visceral reaction comes from right here.
And it's very hard to fake.
And so when I shot people, when I filmed people, I would ask them questions.
And they knew, talking to me, that it was somewhat unlikely I was going to fuck them.
That's very important to note, because the standard method of communication in film media
is fucking people over.
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.
This is part of, by the way, I should mention, I went to film school.
I went to film school, Emerson College, Boston, film class of 1992, mass communications,
concentration in film.
I immediately decided not to go into film.
Dad was so happy.
I instead went into video games, which, by the way, is worse than film, but still, it's
film at that time.
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.
It was just mean.
And so I didn't actually make films for a long time.
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.
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.
Bunny ain't cute no more, even if they put the bunny back like they did before.
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.
Um, I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs, I don't do PowerPoint.
So, yeah.
So what ended up happening instead was that, you know, I got into, like, doing little projects,
and doing film projects, and computer projects.
So when I decided I was going to do this documentary, I was like, oh, I guess I'll do it.
I guess I'll use that damn film degree.
Now, ironically, I've had people say, well, is this your first film?
The answer is no, I had a film play at Sundance.
And they're like, ooh, that's really impressive.
Um, it was a two-minute film I did for a comedy troupe in 1993.
It is a schoolhouse rock animation about the Kennedy assassination.
And what happened was, was that Comedy Central bought it,
and played it on the 30th anniversary, across the weekend.
For that, I got, for that, five of us got the princely sum of $1,200.
And they got the rights for one year.
And they proceeded to play it 300 times, you know,
because it's two minutes long, they could shove it everywhere.
So that was my introduction to the industry.
Yeah, you know, I lent a guy the tape 15 years ago.
Every year, like clockwork, he apologizes and says he's going to get it to me.
I just have to get it off the 16 millimeter film.
I used to do stuff in film.
When I shot this, I shot it using film techniques.
That's why everyone looks kind of goofy.
Because I use indirect lighting and shots like that.
That is nine processors, by the way.
Give you an example of Artifice.
That shot right there, dark as crap, didn't look good, he wasn't there.
I've applied softening filters, lightning filters, highlight filters, everything,
to make him look like it.
But no, it's real.
And there's a lot of that, a lot of noise reduction.
You take what you can.
When you're a one-man crew, you make an enormous amount of mistakes.
Anyway, so when I decided to actually shoot this film, I hadn't even looked at that for 10 years.
But I had a pretty good salary, and I could afford to pretty much do it myself.
Budget-wise, because I engineered it, the film, this film, okay.
When I made this film, how many people here were at my talk last year?
Two, three, four, five.
Okay, good, good, good.
All right.
Thank you very much.
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.
But I was like, fuck theaters.
I don't need to put them in theaters.
I'll put it on DVD.
What a delightful format.
Boy, DVD got the hivies.
DVD sucks, as a person who uses it, by the way.
You have never seen, you want standards.
Don't go to DVD.
People put out, as far as I can determine, peanut butter jelly sandwiches that claim
they're DVD players.
I've gotten more, anyway.
So it's like, it'll go like this.
And the answer is, well, maybe it will.
If the Fong Song Trading Company, when they made it for five minutes ten years ago, think
it was good.
And you get this, anyway.
So I love DVD.
DVD has been good to me.
So DVD was the format I was going to go into.
So I said, well, okay, well, I'm going to have subtitles.
I'm going to have director's commentary.
I'm going to have this.
I'm going to have that.
And so when I shot it, I knew it wasn't going to be an hour and a half.
I thought it was going to be nine hours, which hurts people.
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.
And there are stories that aren't in any way paired up.
They're not paired up.
PhytoNet is not the story of the BBS industry.
It's not the story of ANSI art.
It's not the story of the hacking BBSs.
It's not the story of this.
So what do you do?
Well, you make separate episodes.
So I made a miniseries.
And I shot it, like I said, 250 hours, edited it down to five and a half hours.
The rough cut was seven.
Each of these episodes is about 40 minutes.
Some of them are less.
And the whole thing, shooting-wise, cost me $21,000.
Now, some people drop their payload on that.
In fact, that's actually rather cheap.
It actually works out to a very cheap price.
And the way that I did it was to kill myself.
For instance, I would land.
I would determine 14 interviews I had to do in the Midwest.
And in one trip, in 10 days, I went from Chicago to Indiana, back up to Milwaukee,
over to Minneapolis, down to St. Louis, over to Kansas City, down through Oklahoma City,
over to Texas, and then flew out of Austin.
That hurt.
I can also tell you that I can drive precisely 302 miles at a stretch.
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.
I didn't sleep in my car.
I should have, but I didn't.
So by just adding these prices together, I was able to shoot very cheaply.
I had a crew of one.
I had a camera that I purchased as a floor model.
You know, I edited it on a PC because it's much cheaper to edit on a PC than a Mac right now.
I shot, I guess for anyone who cares, I used a product called Vegas Video.
And I had a PC, a one gigahertz PC, and four terabytes of USB storage.
And I lost 14 drives in the two years of editing.
So anyway, that's the price you pay.
Mac store is the James Dean of hard drives.
Just so you know.
It, you know, it tries to seduce you with, look, I'm $50 and 200 gigs.
And then the next day, I'm not feeling too good, man.
Jesus, man, I can't feel anything right now.
So that's, you know, the things you learn when you put things through stress tests.
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.
Like, it was like, here's your data, foot.
And I went on IRC bitching, which is a mistake, by the way.
IRC will bitch you right back.
And someone's like, you dumb fuck, they're not meant to be used that way.
That tells you a lot about customer expectation, doesn't it?
Hard drives aren't meant to store data, you dumb fuck.
Anyway.
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.
And so when they met me, it was like, oh, here's some guy.
And there's an old quote in the movie industry,
which says that honesty is the most important thing in the film industry.
And once you can fake that, you're golden.
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.
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.
Because I'm not going to hurt you for my film.
I'll get four other guys to say what you said that you're not comfortable saying.
I don't need you to get in trouble with your buddies.
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. Is that okay?
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.
If I couldn't find that, I wouldn't use it.
Because, and the thing is, that's antithetical to how a lot of films work.
These films work that way.
I have, I have a, I have a, I have a recording of a guy, still good, okay.
Well, anyway, there's a recording with this old man.
He just goes, you know, man, I used to get laid off that BBS.
And it's really funny in the shot, trust me.
And I love audience feedback.
The, anyway, I made sure that that old man told another story.
That it wasn't just the old man who said that.
And at the end of the day, if people do not get these stories on tape, they disappear.
And what you end up with are very, very,
I would almost call them, you know, cliff notes of history.
You say, well, there used to be this.
And that's it, that's all they'll say.
You know, Ward Christensen, he invented the BBS.
And there is a massive story behind why he did it, how he did it, involving a snowstorm.
And it being, you know, Chicago.
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?
And this whole industry rises up from that guy.
And there's things before him.
And there's things after him that are actually very important.
He actually got the idea for BBSs off the ARPANET.
The ARPANET was around.
He was on the list because he had written XMODEM and he was kick-ass for doing that.
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?
And he was like, hey.
And he was like, so when's anyone going to do it?
Or as he puts it, nobody was plugging in their soldering irons to get started on doing it.
Which tells you how long ago that was.
Anyway.
You know, it's funny now because, like I said, I have these hacking text files.
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.
And I get over here with, here's how to remove ads from your GeoCities account.
And it's just this amazing, well, the progression doesn't go this way.
Let's put it that way.
I love the present, but I love the past more.
Let's put it that way.
Anyway.
At the beginning of this film art scene, there's an old man.
His name is John Sheets.
John Sheets was the pimp of teletype art.
A lost art.
It was a way of sending text over ham radio and other ways.
So that you could write things and other people would get it.
So, of course, they used it to send porn.
But they also used it to send, you know, images of Snoopy and everything.
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.
And so nobody had ever talked to John Sheets about this.
And I was doing this thing on Antsy Art.
And wouldn't it be funny, I thought, to go interview this man about this technical subject.
And when I got there, he was stunned that I had driven from Boston to New Jersey for him.
And he had all this old art out that nobody had really seen.
And I interviewed him for one hour.
Asked him all about it.
He talked about his family and working on this stuff and everything else.
And then I did that and I never saw him again.
You know, I went away and I edited.
And this year I went to go give him his free copy and I discovered he had died.
And I got his widow.
And his widow was absolutely delighted that somebody had an hour of her husband talking
for me to give to her.
And the thing is, that little story plays out over and over again.
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.
Because people don't just tell those stories that way.
They actually tell stories that are actually indicative of other things.
I'm a very big fan of this idea that when you record something...
I'm collecting all the podcasts right now.
This gets me some press.
It's cute that it does.
But it's not that hard.
It's an RSS feed.
The guy's doing...
It's like a self-service anthropology experiment.
It's like driving by an African village and there's a pile of videotapes for you to pick up.
Not that hard.
I have a little bash shell script.
I'm currently collecting 4,800 podcasts.
It's something like 600 gigs now or something.
Why?
Why not?
And people go, well, they're boring.
And I'm like, well, they're not really boring.
They're actually stories about what it was like to be alive when that person was talking.
It's supposed to be about wine.
You know, the wine cast.
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.
And places that won't be there anymore.
You know, we live on shifting sand.
Sand that disappears.
And people, you know, they don't want to hear that, of course.
That's why it's used to sell, you know, cigarettes.
But, you know, it's one of those things where people don't really think that through.
And the answer is, you know, will...
I will not live to see a lot of the results of the work I'm doing.
You know, like where somebody, you know, people...
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.
I love how in about 200 years, we're going to be these Afro-wearing, silver-suited, grunge-tattooed kids
from the 20th century.
Because they'll just take all of that, that 10 years, which we think of as a lifetime, and just compress it.
And so you'll just have all everyone together.
Because that's what we do as a people.
We just go, oh, like Roman centurions.
They all got little brushes on their heads and run around clanking metal.
That's it.
And they have a big wooden horse somewhere, I think.
You know, that's what people do.
And people go, ha, ha, ha.
They don't really, you know.
And the answer is no.
I mean, people do that.
They compress them in their minds.
And they'll compress this in their minds, except now, by recording this history, we get it.
Anyway, all that said, I should open this up to questions.
I don't have a really zinger closing statement.
Other than to say that, like I said, don't shoot for perfection.
Perfection is not attainable.
Shoot for something.
Because something is attainable.
And something is much better than nothing.
Nihilism is not an answer.
It is a symptom.
So I guess I'll open it up to any questions, people.
Yes, sir.
Do you have any plans for another book project?
Yes.
My next documentary will probably be on text adventures.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
There's another one I might do on arcades.
Like, not arcade games, like 1980s arcades.
I found a guy who worked as an arcade technician.
And he was working at a Namco timeout.
And they had thrown out this booklet of slides.
And it was 1,000 promotional arcade slides from 1980 to 1982.
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.
So I'm...
He put up, like, 50.
Wasn't this funny?
And I'm, like, I'm going to send you a scanner.
And I'm going to pay you to put them up.
And, you know, and he's, like, well, I've got to give them away.
And I'm, like, hells yeah.
I don't care.
Do that.
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.
And so I have people who tell me, oh, they're going to pirate your documentary.
And I'm, like, you can't pirate it.
It's copyable, sure.
There's no...
Oh, yeah, I should say that.
When you go through...
This is an important thing in life.
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.
Even if by the time you do it, you're a bitter old man who can't walk very well.
Do it anyway.
So if it's, like, when I own a car, my car is going to have the shiniest gas cap ever.
And when you get older, you're, like, well, that's a stupid thing to want.
Get yourself a shiny gas cap.
What's the...
Well, when I got this thing, I was, like, I'm not going to have any menus you can't
get out of.
I'm not going to have any fucking FBI warning.
I'm not going to have it be region encoded because that's the stupidest fucking thing
I've ever seen.
So it's region zero.
You might not know this, but it actually costs money to put CSS on a machine.
Like, you pay a royalty to MacroVision to make your disk not work well.
Like, my printing company was, like, don't do that.
Like, don't use it.
We offer it.
We offer this service you should not do.
But we have to offer it.
Because MacroVision is right here.
Behind us.
So I made sure that all that stuff was like that.
And I also found out, by the way, don't do DVD layer dual layer.
It actually works really shittily.
The laser goes like this.
And at one point, I found this out.
You know what it's like to find out, you're, like, I must be doing something wrong.
And you find out the world is wrong.
The way they get dual layer is that they have two separate areas on a disk.
And they're, like, kind of like this.
And the laser goes along like this.
And it goes, oh, time switch.
Whee!
Okay.
Except that you kind of can't completely control where that is.
You kind of can.
Sort of.
And at one point, it goes, whee!
Except, like I said before, some DVDs go, man, battle stations!
Whee!
And to get around that problem, they have buffers.
Which are sometimes too small.
So they go, whee!
Eee!
If you look at a lot of dual layer DVDs in Hollywood, how do they solve this?
They move it to between transitions.
So it goes black.
And you hear, and then it goes over here.
That's great.
What a fantastic future jetpack world we live in.
Piece of shit.
So I would never do that again.
Don't ever do that.
And once you learn all these things, you're, like, oh, Jesus.
Oh, man.
That's horrible.
Anyway.
Other questions?
Can I...
Can you make fun of DVD more?
Yeah, you just asked, how do you...
How do I feel about people torrenting my DVDs?
I wrote an essay called, Why the BBS Documentary is Creative Commons.
And in that, I talk about why I very specifically understand what's going on with this whole thing.
You know, there's a little bit of a horror going on in a lot of industry.
Because...
Okay, I'm gonna get in trouble.
I...
I call media...
I call a lot of media...
I'm gonna get in trouble.
I call a lot of media makers air sellers.
Because they enclose some air and try to sell it to you.
And, like, the oxygen bar.
And that's not...
You know, I mean, that's one thing.
They're, like, it's my fucking livelihood.
I'm, like, well, your livelihood is extremely duplicatable now, sir.
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.
But now we have a machine that makes 4,000 wheels a minute.
Don't stop thinking...
Give Bob a, you know...
Make Bob the guard or something.
You can watch the machine.
So, stop trying to keep Bob around, okay?
I understand.
Poor Bob.
You have a lot of jet...
We have a lot of jet companies in this world that have people whose job is to wind the propeller.
And the thing is, is...
When I made this, I realized we're in a world now where some people simply do not pay for media.
They don't.
They have tools to do it, to get it for you.
No matter what you put on it, they're going to get around it.
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.
You never know.
Get back here.
I have a knife.
And meanwhile, the guys over here are like, whee!
And so they feel really elite over here, because look at all the...
Look at how they're pounding mom into the ground.
They didn't even touch me.
I got 20, ah!
So what you end up with is this kind of a stupid dichotomy.
So my take on it the whole time...
Around two or three weeks in, I think it was like two weeks in, info fallout.
Where's the documentary?
And I contacted them.
I'm like, you go, girl!
And I found where they posted it.
And I put up this thing going, just so everyone's clear here, it's region zero.
It's...
There's no CSS.
It's Creative Commons.
So they essentially went into a McDonald's and scooped up all the sugar and ketchup packets
and went, free food!
I scammed some food!
And I said, okay, well...
Okay, well, here's a link to a PayPal account if you want to send me some money.
But otherwise, you go.
When I was 20, I couldn't afford pizza either.
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.
And they don't see a problem with that, because it's very hard to explain to them why.
So this is going to look like I'm doing a sales pitch, but I'm not.
When I did my documentary, I wanted to make sure that it would have, you know, three DVDs.
It has the photos of everybody there.
It's frigging huge.
It's got the photos in it.
It's 18 gigabytes of data.
It's got a DVD-ROM with the stuff, all the photos I took.
The idea being twofold.
Number one, make it worth the money that I'm selling it for.
And two, make it so fucking big, it's really hard to BitTorrent.
I will out-feature your ass.
I did nine hours.
Some people, I mean, but some people, they're quite happy to watch a postage stamp-size rip
of your film with no subtitles.
And trying to convince those people that they want to spend $50 on anything is impossible.
So I don't do that.
So when I saw the BitTorrent thing, I just hopped right on there.
And I was like, hey!
I mean, I have the NFO framed.
And I've talked to the kid.
And the kid's like, I hope to be like you.
And I'm like, yeah, ripped off, like you.
No, I didn't.
He's like, I hope to go into film someday.
And I'm like, oh, what a great start you are.
What a great start you're getting up there.
So no, my attitude with the torrent thing was like, you know, go ahead.
At worst, I mean, I get mail from kids.
I got mail from a kid just recently.
He was like, I'm 17.
I never used BBSs.
This is the best fucking documentary I've ever seen.
You know, I downloaded off a BitTorrent site.
It's great.
Wow, thanks for making this thing.
You know, I'm like, oh, at worst, you know, it makes me sad, actually.
I had a school write to me.
They had purchased a copy.
And they said, can we show this to the kids?
May we show this to the kids?
And I was like, you can make copies for the...
I wrote this big thing back where I'm like, you can make copies for the teachers
so they can all evaluate it.
You can have a fundraiser where you charge money to show it to everybody.
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.
Do what you need to do.
You bought it.
You own it.
It's a piece of fabric in your house.
Cut it up.
Put it somewhere.
Put it on your front yard.
You know, don't come back to the fabric maker going, please.
You know, don't call up Singer going, oh, sir, can I please do it?
So, no, anyway.
That was a very long answer for a very short question.
Was there an internal anger as a fuel?
Any other questions?
Actually, you know, I always thought that was the reason why the Hacksaw CD got,
the DVD got so ripped last year.
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.
Yeah, the porn DVD.
Because it was a cynical exploitation of a subculture presented to that subculture in
an attempt to make them swallow it.
And they knew it.
They're like, wow, this was made as long, this probably took as long to make as it is long.
And they felt that.
You watch this thing and you're like, okay, well, this guy really worked on this thing.
Maybe I want to buy it.
Or maybe I can't afford it.
But I would if I could.
You know, I would, I'll keep an eye out for him and maybe something else some other time.
People know, people know when you're not even trying.
You know, when you're just, anyway.
So that, so I think that's why, I mean, I didn't, I didn't have that happen.
I mean, don't try it now.
But I mean, I had, I didn't have anyone walk up to me and go, you know, hey, I ripped your
DVD.
Can you sign it?
Ha ha ha.
They stayed away.
They either bought a copy, thanked me for it or whatever.
Oh, he's waving.
Okay, that's, oh yeah, oh yes, exactly.
Just so you all know, I'll stand here and answer questions and sell DVDs for a little,
you know, while longer here, gladly.
Just, but you should know that the awards ceremony will be starting over in the big
room.
So if you want to go to Jeff Moss's Box of Hot, you know, you should go.
Any other questions?
Oh, hello.
How do I make something as boring as somebody typing on a computer and looking at a screen
interesting in a film environment?
And the answer is, you instead focus on why that person was there in the first place.
You ask them, why are you at this keyboard?
Why were you doing this?
Why did you think it was so important?
Why did you think it was important to do that?
And you focus on him, knowing that the story of his thing, you know, the pure technical
aspect can be downloaded.
What did the software look like?
Well, you can download that.
What did it, who made it?
It's over here.
Who was on it?
Here's the user list.
But asking a human being, why are you even here?
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?
What was so bad about the Cat Box BBS?
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?
Ask why they're even there in the first place.
Go back to the human thing.
That's the answer.
When I do text adventures, people are like, I love the, I'm shooting it in high definition.
Which I think is, anyway, I'm sure, yeah, anyway, yeah, yeah, actually the URL is getlamp.com.
The movie's called Get Lamped, don't make one.
And anyway, so it's like, well, what, how could you possibly make that interesting?
It's a bunch of text adventures.
But it's not.
It's actually the story of a bunch of storytellers who had to decide everything their readers
could ever want to know ever.
And how do you write like that?
How do you say, I went across a bridge, and you know some people are going to go,
can I whiz off the bridge?
Can I blow up the bridge?
What if I bring a dragon on the bridge?
Can I move the bridge?
Is the bridge, is there actually a bridge?
Is the bridge in my mind?
And he had to think all this stuff out beforehand.
And you had to do it.
You had to come up with this stuff.
So to me, talking to the people who came up with those ideas will be fascinating.
How much of that comes out in like just scrolling text is another thing.
Because it's not, it's not, again, it's not, how do you make Zork interesting?
It's, why did you make Zork?
Why did you decide to make a Gru?
Why did you make it, why did you do full sentences in that way?
Why did you insist on doing it?
And so that's the thing.
Those answered questions are where the interest comes from.
And then people go, wow, that's pretty interesting.
Anyway, any other questions?
Yes, sir?
When is Slashdot coming out?
When?
Slashdot is a really great place to get very informed, useful comments,
especially if you go to negative one.
So I did that.
A few times I've been announced.
Oh, humanity.
But one of them was, this film was actually the sequel to Mr. Scott's first film,
The History of Drying Paint, a 200-hour epic.
And I wrote back, like, you know, like, dude,
you know how hard it was to get Dutch Foy to sponsor that?
But one of the other comments was, oh, fuck this.
I'm waiting for the extended director's edition.
Actually, one of the Easter eggs is a sequel, is a trailer for the sequel to this.
You know, I went and hired a drive-time DJ in Seattle called Smiling J. Andrews
to talk about The Tears of Bordeaux, this epic.
Anyway, so that's buried in there.
Yeah, because a lot of people are like, well, are you, you know, where's the sequel?
I do get that, by the way.
I do get, where's the sequel?
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?
Where do I look?
And that kind of stuff, which is question answer.
And I'm just going to put them all up on archive.org.
So archive.org is getting like 200 hours of footage.
Attributes share alike.
And I'm like, make your own fucking documentary.
Right there.
So no, that's pretty much, that's how I'm going to handle it.
I've already made arrangements with them.
I'm going to be another sub-collection of 200 plus hours of footage.
And people can make their own.
Because of course, you know, when I make it, I'm American.
And it's kind of shot in North America.
So the Europeans hate me.
Because I didn't tell their story.
And I'm like, well, I couldn't.
I couldn't tell it.
Where were you?
Fucknut?
2005.
So now they can take my footage and they can remix it under the license any way they want to.
And redo it and do whatever they want.
So I hope people do it.
I always say, I hope this is the worst documentary on BBS's ever made.
And that all the rest of the ones that come kick my ass.
But currently, I am the lowest priced one.
Any other questions?
Yes.
Okay.
Netflix, what was the other one you said?
Green Scene?
I never heard of it.
But beyond that.
The traditional relationship with rental agencies is traditionally an adversarial one.
Normally, the movie directors don't, yeah.
So actually, there's very little...
I have found this out.
There's very little mechanism to go, no, please, rent me.
Because people think that's a money loser.
So they normally want to go through it.
So I've told people...
I mean, I have an ISBN number.
Go tell Netflix the ISBN number.
And a couple people have requested it.
But Netflix hasn't figured out how to reach me.
I wouldn't care.
I mean, I know that I'm in at least a few rental companies.
I had a friend who I hadn't talked to for like 10 years.
He was like, I was walking by the computer film section of my rental place.
And there was your film.
And I thought, oh, I guess I might as well see the film my friend made.
And Need for Speed.
Just in case.
What he said to me.
So I know it's out there being rented.
But it's one of those things of like, yeah, I'd love to do it.
I mean, again, this is where you get into distribution issues right now.
I'm the distributor.
I'm doing it all myself.
Because money.
And when you go through a middleman, middleman goes, money.
And you go, money.
And then a little bit later, when you go through other ones, it's like, money, money, money.
Nickel.
Nickel.
And so, and you know, and that's fine when it's one billion nickels.
But anyway.
Amazon.
I sell through Amazon.
Here's a good example.
I sell through Amazon.
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?
I want to buy it from Amazon.
Great.
Excellent.
Good. 60 bucks.
Reason why is because Amazon takes 55% of the cover price.
So when you sell, so people like, why are you selling 50 on your site?
And, you know, and you're selling it for 60 on Amazon.
I'm like, well, because less than half is a bitch slap.
I'll deal with half.
I don't mind getting 25 of the 50 instead of 50.
But man, I'm not going to do, you know, that's just, that hurts.
That hurts.
That hurts in the no-no hole.
So I actually ended up just, you know, selling through them.
And it's nice.
They'll call me and say, we need 30 units.
So I box up 30 units and mail it.
I have 5,000 copies in my basement.
Because I think big.
Oh, that's, yeah, that's the thing I probably should make clear.
You know, I shot it for this.
And a lot of people were like, wow, you're really fucked.
But I really pull in for you.
You know, that kind of thing.
Like, I'm going to walk backwards across the United States.
It's like, you go.
Kind of a deal.
Anyway, the BBS documentary was profitable within three weeks of coming out.
And I mean, like, including the $30,000 duplication price.
So it was like $30,000 to duplicate it.
It was like 20-something thousand.
We're still arguing over exactly how much it was.
My wife is mad at that and so on.
You know, she's the shit.
As soon as it was a product, she grabbed it.
I don't even see it anymore.
She's shipping.
I don't see it.
So, you know, it was like 50 grand.
I made 50 grand within the first three weeks.
Because I knew that there was a story to be told.
I saw the gap.
And I didn't do it for money.
Or it would have been shot in six months.
I did it for four years, because let's get it right.
And I got it right, I think.
I got it somewhat right.
I got a good start.
I got something where someone can go, it's like that, except actually it was blue.
It's much easier to go, and it was blue, as opposed to trying to explain to somebody
everything this tells them.
So that's good.
I like that.
I don't mind being put down that way.
Um, but yeah, I definitely was able to, um, what's the word?
I was able to recoup my costs almost immediately.
So that reminds me, I'm selling these.
I think we have to get out.
Do we have to get out, sir?
Yeah, we got to get out.
They're going to close the tent.
It's been wonderful to have you all stick around.