[00:04.560 --> 00:09.260]  Okay. Hello, everybody. My name is Jason Scott.
[00:09.460 --> 00:13.840]  Today's flight is to why tech documentaries are impossible
[00:13.840 --> 00:16.440]  and why we have to do them anyway.
[00:16.600 --> 00:20.300]  This is a discussion about the documentary medium
[00:20.900 --> 00:23.700]  that I gleaned in my four years of production work
[00:23.700 --> 00:25.980]  on a documentary I just finished.
[00:26.160 --> 00:30.680]  And saying why we have to look at this medium,
[00:30.680 --> 00:33.260]  look at its flaws, work around its flaws,
[00:33.260 --> 00:38.500]  and encourage people to create new ones.
[00:38.620 --> 00:41.500]  First question, of course, is who the hell are you?
[00:41.720 --> 00:43.580]  My name is, again, Jason Scott.
[00:43.580 --> 00:46.920]  I'm mostly known, I guess, for a site that I run
[00:46.920 --> 00:49.020]  called textfiles.com,
[00:49.020 --> 00:51.440]  which is a collection of BBS-era text files
[00:51.440 --> 00:52.940]  that I started in 1998
[00:53.620 --> 00:57.340]  because I was wondering whatever happened to my old BBS
[00:57.340 --> 00:59.800]  that I used to go on all the time?
[01:00.160 --> 01:02.300]  Does everyone here know what a BBS is?
[01:02.300 --> 01:04.040]  Anyone here not know what a BBS is?
[01:05.260 --> 01:06.340]  Okay, a BBS.
[01:06.340 --> 01:07.620]  Did you just have fun with me?
[01:07.620 --> 01:08.160]  I can tell.
[01:08.160 --> 01:09.160]  Look at those eyes.
[01:09.160 --> 01:10.120]  All right, anyway.
[01:10.140 --> 01:12.420]  A BBS is like a single-use website.
[01:12.420 --> 01:20.440]  Anyway, I created that archive of BBS-era information
[01:20.440 --> 01:23.260]  because I saw a gap in history and knowledge
[01:23.260 --> 01:26.400]  and I, as a person, happened to have collected a lot of that.
[01:26.400 --> 01:30.340]  So it was more a case of seeing that there was a missing piece
[01:30.340 --> 01:34.840]  of a story, a story that all of humanity is kind of telling about itself.
[01:34.940 --> 01:36.940]  And by putting it all up there,
[01:36.940 --> 01:39.260]  I was encouraging other people to add their pieces
[01:39.260 --> 01:41.500]  and actually that kind of worked out pretty well.
[01:42.040 --> 01:44.340]  Ah, I see that the 305 has arrived.
[01:45.800 --> 01:52.700]  So that theme of filling in gaps is part of what drives me
[01:52.700 --> 01:56.860]  and unfortunately because I have a bit of an obsessive-compulsive disorder,
[01:56.860 --> 01:58.840]  I kind of start at one end and just keep going
[01:58.840 --> 02:03.060]  until somebody pulls me up sweating, telling me to stop.
[02:03.660 --> 02:06.900]  So textfiles.com grew into web.textfiles.com,
[02:06.900 --> 02:10.120]  artscene.textfiles.com, cd.textfiles.com,
[02:10.120 --> 02:14.120]  all these subsites of shareware CDs and old music things and groups
[02:14.120 --> 02:16.320]  and all of these weird little subcultures
[02:16.320 --> 02:18.940]  that I was discovering more and more about and more and more people.
[02:18.940 --> 02:22.760]  And so after a while, I suddenly thought about this missing piece,
[02:22.760 --> 02:25.840]  which was when you watch a lot of documentaries,
[02:25.840 --> 02:29.820]  the documentary format is kind of interesting
[02:29.820 --> 02:38.640]  because it's always been kind of the real dismal format in terms of things.
[02:39.640 --> 02:44.500]  Until very, very recently, if a documentary grossed $1 million,
[02:44.500 --> 02:49.920]  it was in the top 20 documentaries of all time ever made in terms of box office
[02:49.920 --> 02:52.900]  because it's not a very beloved format.
[02:52.900 --> 02:56.320]  It's very, very dry, and it's a very hard sell
[02:57.100 --> 02:59.800]  unless it's about sex or death.
[02:59.800 --> 03:01.500]  And even then, you have to kind of work on it.
[03:01.500 --> 03:04.820]  That's why we currently have a documentary about wheelchair rugby
[03:04.820 --> 03:06.380]  called Murderball.
[03:08.680 --> 03:11.180]  There's one that came out a couple years ago
[03:11.180 --> 03:13.100]  about a bunch of strippers unionizing.
[03:13.100 --> 03:15.020]  Boy, what a tough sell that is.
[03:15.520 --> 03:17.940]  I think it's called Live Nude Girls United.
[03:20.320 --> 03:23.100]  That's the nature of general release,
[03:23.100 --> 03:25.060]  and I'll go into general release in a moment.
[03:27.340 --> 03:30.300]  Throughout this time, we've had a number of what are known as
[03:30.900 --> 03:32.640]  documentaries of a technical nature.
[03:32.640 --> 03:35.780]  I think in my encountering, the one that most people know
[03:35.780 --> 03:38.320]  is Triumph of the Nerds by Robert Kringle
[03:39.640 --> 03:42.940]  because it got on PBS, it got a lot of attention,
[03:43.480 --> 03:46.040]  and it's a very decent documentary.
[03:46.040 --> 03:49.420]  It's technical, but it's not really technical.
[03:49.580 --> 03:52.760]  And when you have things like, say,
[03:52.760 --> 03:59.060]  tech TV being the standard by which computer history is defined,
[03:59.060 --> 04:02.420]  you run into problems because that kind of a cable channel
[04:02.420 --> 04:04.320]  that has very monetary goals
[04:05.280 --> 04:07.840]  produces films that are not really about
[04:07.840 --> 04:09.780]  imparting a lot of information,
[04:09.780 --> 04:12.680]  but about making a lot of video transitions
[04:12.680 --> 04:13.920]  that move very quickly
[04:13.920 --> 04:16.940]  and dazzle and delight you,
[04:16.940 --> 04:18.360]  so you'll stay on long enough to learn
[04:18.360 --> 04:20.740]  why you want to buy this G4 ad.
[04:21.200 --> 04:22.520]  That's very important.
[04:22.520 --> 04:26.440]  So that money issue gets in everywhere,
[04:26.440 --> 04:28.100]  and it gets in everywhere in this format.
[04:28.100 --> 04:32.620]  Now, the documentary format, thanks to a very, very fat man,
[04:32.620 --> 04:35.480]  has become extremely politicized these days
[04:35.480 --> 04:38.400]  because what's happened is that
[04:38.400 --> 04:41.140]  suddenly people started looking at films
[04:42.660 --> 04:46.400]  like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9-11,
[04:46.400 --> 04:48.800]  and they said, oh, documentaries!
[04:49.300 --> 04:53.840]  And because it got political to attack the arguments
[04:53.840 --> 04:56.940]  or arguments, however you go along that way,
[04:56.940 --> 04:58.840]  they went after the medium.
[04:59.220 --> 05:03.060]  And the medium by itself, the documentary medium,
[05:03.060 --> 05:04.380]  has roots...
[05:04.380 --> 05:06.380]  What's normally called the first documentary
[05:06.380 --> 05:08.220]  is a film called Nanook of the North
[05:08.220 --> 05:11.120]  by Robert Flaherty, made in the 20s.
[05:11.120 --> 05:15.100]  Which tells the story of an Eskimo man and his family
[05:15.100 --> 05:17.880]  who was trying to survive up in Alaska.
[05:17.880 --> 05:20.520]  It is entirely fake.
[05:20.940 --> 05:22.640]  Top to bottom.
[05:22.640 --> 05:26.540]  Robert Flaherty filmed a bunch of Eskimos running around,
[05:26.540 --> 05:29.360]  took it home, realized it sucked.
[05:29.420 --> 05:31.260]  Just sucked. It was boring.
[05:31.260 --> 05:33.680]  It was shots of these guys running around
[05:33.680 --> 05:36.280]  in misty, bad film.
[05:36.320 --> 05:39.040]  So he had an accident.
[05:39.040 --> 05:40.820]  This is one of these things that comes out.
[05:40.820 --> 05:42.540]  He was smoking a cigarette
[05:43.140 --> 05:46.020]  and the nitrate went up on the film
[05:46.020 --> 05:48.880]  and the film exploded, essentially, burned him.
[05:49.320 --> 05:51.500]  And so the film was destroyed.
[05:51.500 --> 05:52.880]  He had to make a new one.
[05:52.880 --> 05:55.140]  So he went off and he made a film called Nanook of the North
[05:55.140 --> 05:56.700]  starring a man named Nanook.
[05:56.700 --> 05:57.800]  And it told the story.
[05:57.800 --> 06:00.540]  Well, you see his family huddling for warmth
[06:00.540 --> 06:03.420]  inside an igloo that is actually only half built
[06:03.420 --> 06:04.560]  and has heaters.
[06:04.780 --> 06:08.340]  And you have shots of people running around
[06:08.340 --> 06:11.280]  that are filmed in lodged parking lots
[06:11.280 --> 06:12.640]  and things like that.
[06:12.760 --> 06:15.060]  Because he needed to tell a story
[06:15.060 --> 06:17.260]  and he wasn't going to let reality get in the way
[06:17.260 --> 06:18.560]  of a good story.
[06:18.780 --> 06:21.660]  A common problem in documentaries.
[06:22.060 --> 06:24.500]  In fact, it's endemic to the documentary format.
[06:24.500 --> 06:25.820]  One of the funniest things that came out
[06:25.820 --> 06:27.920]  of the whole argument over, I think it was
[06:27.920 --> 06:30.440]  I think it was Fahrenheit 9-11
[06:31.380 --> 06:33.000]  Bowling for Columbine got the Oscar
[06:33.000 --> 06:34.860]  and then Fahrenheit 9-11 people were saying
[06:34.860 --> 06:36.260]  it didn't qualify.
[06:36.260 --> 06:38.240]  And that always made me laugh
[06:38.240 --> 06:40.760]  about it not qualifying for a documentary
[06:40.760 --> 06:42.220]  because it turned out this wasn't
[06:42.220 --> 06:44.240]  an exactly right fact.
[06:44.240 --> 06:46.760]  And if you go read the Oscar rules
[06:46.760 --> 06:48.740]  for what is a documentary
[06:49.260 --> 06:51.160]  it is a narrative film
[06:51.160 --> 06:55.100]  that portrays historical facts
[06:55.100 --> 06:59.080]  through recreation, creative editing
[07:02.000 --> 07:05.360]  and basically narration.
[07:06.180 --> 07:08.400]  Everything does that, right?
[07:08.400 --> 07:09.820]  I mean that's not a very, very
[07:10.360 --> 07:11.760]  you know, so the answer is
[07:11.760 --> 07:13.060]  of course anyone can get an Oscar
[07:13.060 --> 07:13.960]  and in case you're wondering
[07:13.960 --> 07:16.340]  I did check and see if I could get an Oscar for this.
[07:17.900 --> 07:19.140]  So in case you're wondering
[07:19.140 --> 07:23.000]  the way that you qualify to be judged
[07:23.000 --> 07:24.640]  for getting an Oscar
[07:27.080 --> 07:29.860]  besides actually making a decent film
[07:30.880 --> 07:33.320]  is you have to broadcast your film
[07:33.320 --> 07:35.540]  on a screen greater than 20 feet
[07:35.540 --> 07:37.260]  in New York and Los Angeles
[07:37.260 --> 07:38.680]  for a period of two weeks
[07:39.320 --> 07:40.980]  during the qualifying year
[07:40.980 --> 07:44.260]  without showing it on television or cable.
[07:45.020 --> 07:46.480]  So in case you're wondering
[07:46.480 --> 07:48.680]  one of the interesting things about life
[07:48.680 --> 07:50.700]  is we go through life
[07:51.320 --> 07:52.600]  learning about things
[07:52.600 --> 07:54.400]  kind of in a vague surface fashion
[07:54.400 --> 07:55.980]  and we like to impart
[07:56.240 --> 07:58.800]  a lot of our own internal stories to these things.
[07:58.800 --> 08:01.100]  This is what people do with technical subjects.
[08:01.100 --> 08:02.600]  They think of the story of the PC
[08:02.600 --> 08:04.540]  and all they think of is once upon a time
[08:04.540 --> 08:06.260]  there were a few computers
[08:06.260 --> 08:08.060]  and then there was IBM and then everyone won
[08:08.060 --> 08:10.180]  and everyone went home and then there were sound cards.
[08:10.620 --> 08:12.060]  And that's great
[08:12.880 --> 08:14.140]  because for some people
[08:14.140 --> 08:16.120]  they just simply don't care about the subject.
[08:16.120 --> 08:18.120]  As a documentarian you have to wonder
[08:18.560 --> 08:20.640]  what will make people want to watch this?
[08:20.640 --> 08:22.020]  Actually before that you have to say
[08:22.020 --> 08:24.000]  what will make the kind of people I'm aiming this for
[08:24.000 --> 08:25.280]  want to watch it?
[08:25.820 --> 08:28.260]  And when you say, well who are you aiming this for?
[08:28.260 --> 08:29.980]  When you say you want to make a documentary
[08:29.980 --> 08:32.780]  let's say you want to make a documentary, you insane people.
[08:32.920 --> 08:34.300]  Let's say you just give somebody some money
[08:34.300 --> 08:35.440]  for a documentary.
[08:35.660 --> 08:37.980]  So what ends up happening is you say
[08:37.980 --> 08:38.960]  well who is it for?
[08:38.960 --> 08:41.020]  And then someone will go, everybody!
[08:41.220 --> 08:44.480]  No, don't do that, that doesn't work.
[08:45.020 --> 08:46.400]  People perceive films
[08:46.400 --> 08:47.520]  different ways.
[08:47.520 --> 08:49.560]  Some people are looking at this and going, oh my god
[08:49.560 --> 08:51.580]  look at that subject matter, that's incredible
[08:51.580 --> 08:53.340]  I can't believe somebody did this.
[08:53.340 --> 08:55.860]  Other people are like, well it's cool in here
[08:57.140 --> 08:57.960]  that's nice
[08:58.680 --> 08:59.380]  that's great
[09:01.080 --> 09:01.620]  you know
[09:03.780 --> 09:05.480]  you can't aim it for everybody.
[09:05.480 --> 09:07.520]  The story I like to tell people was
[09:07.520 --> 09:09.040]  my father is not fond of Bush
[09:09.040 --> 09:11.520]  so naturally when Fahrenheit 9-11 came out
[09:11.520 --> 09:13.200]  I thought what a perfect gift for my father
[09:13.200 --> 09:14.940]  I'll take him to see Fahrenheit 9-11
[09:14.940 --> 09:17.640]  here dad, come with me, we'll go
[09:17.640 --> 09:19.420]  and he lived in one state and I lived in another
[09:19.420 --> 09:21.080]  we met in the middle and we went to go see it
[09:21.080 --> 09:23.140]  and we see it, I watch it
[09:23.140 --> 09:25.060]  it's from my eyes and he watches it
[09:25.060 --> 09:26.060]  and we come out
[09:26.060 --> 09:28.660]  and I'm a son, I want my father to be happy
[09:28.660 --> 09:30.680]  but he's walking around like, huh
[09:30.680 --> 09:33.100]  and I'm like, hey dad, did you like the film?
[09:33.100 --> 09:34.060]  and he's like, well
[09:34.740 --> 09:37.700]  yeah, they really let Bush off light
[09:40.820 --> 09:42.300]  and so for me
[09:43.180 --> 09:45.200]  I watched it, completely different
[09:45.200 --> 09:45.660]  perception
[09:45.660 --> 09:49.220]  and so when people watch a film
[09:49.220 --> 09:51.060]  you can't say, oh well
[09:51.060 --> 09:52.920]  I'm going to shoot this for everybody
[09:53.700 --> 09:54.740]  the rule I usually
[09:54.740 --> 09:57.300]  tend to use is, if I was walking down the street
[09:57.780 --> 09:59.280]  and I saw this was here
[09:59.280 --> 10:01.120]  would I want to see it?
[10:01.140 --> 10:02.620]  and if I walked in and saw it
[10:02.620 --> 10:04.600]  what about it would
[10:04.600 --> 10:06.440]  make me think it was good?
[10:06.440 --> 10:08.880]  like if I said, well no, he got it wrong, he had to do this
[10:08.880 --> 10:10.900]  and he had to do this, and what rules are you going to
[10:10.900 --> 10:12.060]  lay down?
[10:12.160 --> 10:13.980]  In technical documentaries
[10:14.700 --> 10:16.100]  the issue is
[10:16.760 --> 10:18.760]  technical people are very hard
[10:18.760 --> 10:19.640]  to please
[10:19.640 --> 10:21.860]  there is a lot of money
[10:22.720 --> 10:24.120]  in pointing out
[10:24.120 --> 10:26.140]  flaws in technical situations
[10:26.940 --> 10:27.500]  because
[10:29.500 --> 10:30.220]  there are
[10:30.220 --> 10:31.360]  so many details
[10:31.360 --> 10:33.580]  and every single one is important
[10:33.580 --> 10:36.020]  so it is very easy to hyper focus
[10:36.020 --> 10:38.000]  on that, it's very difficult
[10:38.000 --> 10:39.640]  to express
[10:39.640 --> 10:41.840]  how important it is
[10:41.840 --> 10:43.540]  how important it is
[10:43.540 --> 10:45.920]  that yeah, you kind of needed a semicolon there
[10:45.920 --> 10:47.980]  you know, that's why the spaceship
[10:47.980 --> 10:49.820]  flew into the moon, not by it
[10:51.860 --> 10:54.140]  there is a beautiful document out there
[10:54.140 --> 10:55.720]  of major bugs
[10:55.720 --> 10:57.460]  like they track down, why did this
[10:58.060 --> 10:59.760]  satellite hit here?
[10:59.760 --> 11:01.600]  and the answer is, oh, it forgot a while loop
[11:01.600 --> 11:02.900]  and it will be like that
[11:02.900 --> 11:05.640]  technical people want to focus on that minutia
[11:05.640 --> 11:08.040]  but the video format
[11:08.040 --> 11:09.980]  for instance, or even the audio format
[11:09.980 --> 11:12.000]  it's very hard here to describe
[11:12.940 --> 11:13.900]  the actual
[11:13.900 --> 11:15.180]  technical situation
[11:15.180 --> 11:17.320]  so the natural thing that I did
[11:17.320 --> 11:18.780]  when I went after this was
[11:18.780 --> 11:21.700]  well, I should focus on technical people
[11:21.700 --> 11:23.280]  but technical people
[11:23.280 --> 11:25.240]  are even more difficult than technical subjects
[11:25.240 --> 11:27.120]  and it's a very hard thing
[11:27.120 --> 11:29.220]  when you do nature photography
[11:30.040 --> 11:31.740]  you try to tell a story
[11:31.740 --> 11:32.800]  even though in fact
[11:32.800 --> 11:34.760]  the stories tend to be rather dull
[11:34.760 --> 11:36.660]  once upon a time, I got eaten
[11:37.540 --> 11:38.860]  you know, once upon a time
[11:39.160 --> 11:40.640]  a bunch of us were eating this one boar
[11:40.640 --> 11:43.040]  and I hit him and he stopped eating it so I could eat his piece
[11:43.040 --> 11:44.860]  you know, very simple stuff
[11:44.860 --> 11:46.780]  but you'll see a nature photographer
[11:46.780 --> 11:48.400]  kind of try to put things together
[11:49.040 --> 11:51.260]  and he ends up having to put in artifice
[11:51.260 --> 11:52.580]  the question is
[11:52.580 --> 11:54.760]  what level of artifice is acceptable
[11:54.760 --> 11:56.220]  when you're telling a story
[11:56.220 --> 11:58.240]  this is a problem that I've encountered
[11:58.240 --> 12:00.020]  many times in many films
[12:00.020 --> 12:02.980]  and once Mr. Moore's films
[12:02.980 --> 12:04.060]  got a lot of scrutiny
[12:04.060 --> 12:06.860]  of course, the narrative utterly fell apart
[12:06.860 --> 12:09.020]  because you end up with a problem
[12:09.020 --> 12:10.280]  of you're trying to tell
[12:10.280 --> 12:12.060]  you've got the parallel tracks
[12:12.060 --> 12:13.460]  of the point you're trying to get across
[12:13.460 --> 12:15.320]  and what reality ended up giving you
[12:16.560 --> 12:18.720]  and how different those are
[12:18.720 --> 12:20.320]  defines your skill
[12:20.320 --> 12:21.080]  as a filmmaker
[12:21.080 --> 12:23.380]  in other words, sometimes
[12:23.380 --> 12:24.540]  when I started this film
[12:24.540 --> 12:26.940]  I started out really kind of not knowing
[12:26.940 --> 12:28.120]  what I was going to go with it
[12:28.120 --> 12:30.800]  all I knew was, in my particular case
[12:30.800 --> 12:33.040]  bulletin board systems were composed of people
[12:33.700 --> 12:35.320]  and I said, well how do I
[12:35.980 --> 12:37.420]  how do I express that
[12:37.420 --> 12:39.640]  I know, I'll interview a metric
[12:39.640 --> 12:40.760]  fuck ton of people
[12:41.420 --> 12:44.420]  so I ended up interviewing 205 people
[12:44.420 --> 12:46.000]  across 4 years
[12:46.000 --> 12:47.780]  that's a lot of people, don't do it
[12:49.540 --> 12:50.660]  documentary formats
[12:50.660 --> 12:52.240]  the standard ratio is
[12:52.240 --> 12:53.240]  you film 1 hour
[12:53.240 --> 12:55.900]  you film 10 hours for every hour you do
[12:55.900 --> 12:56.780]  or 20 hours
[12:56.780 --> 12:59.160]  and I filmed 205 hours
[12:59.160 --> 13:00.540]  and it ended up being 5 hours
[13:00.540 --> 13:03.620]  so that's a lot, again, don't do that
[13:03.620 --> 13:04.840]  let me be your warning
[13:04.840 --> 13:05.720]  so
[13:07.760 --> 13:09.040]  when I dealt with
[13:09.040 --> 13:10.300]  my subjects
[13:10.760 --> 13:11.580]  technical subjects
[13:12.140 --> 13:13.880]  you have to strike this balance
[13:13.880 --> 13:16.800]  and the balance is where the skill set comes in
[13:17.300 --> 13:18.580]  and what it tells is
[13:18.580 --> 13:20.020]  if you want people to get an idea
[13:20.020 --> 13:22.240]  you can go all the way to the right
[13:22.240 --> 13:24.280]  to the right you have industrial films
[13:24.840 --> 13:26.680]  industrial films are basically videotaped
[13:26.680 --> 13:27.920]  instruction manuals
[13:27.920 --> 13:30.760]  they tell you where to put the little part in the copier
[13:30.760 --> 13:32.300]  and you switch like this
[13:32.300 --> 13:37.500]  And then you go down like this, and oh yes, remember this, and then they do a cutaway to show you this.
[13:37.500 --> 13:42.580]  It is unbelievably dry. You watch it because somebody is reimbursing you in some way.
[13:43.640 --> 13:47.840]  You do not go to see this film because you're like, oh yeah!
[13:48.620 --> 13:51.020]  Oh, that was much better than Lost in Space.
[13:52.820 --> 13:59.560]  So, on the other side, you end up with films like War Games.
[14:00.380 --> 14:09.500]  War Games is a film that was filmed to tell a tale, and the tale was the tale of a young man
[14:09.500 --> 14:18.560]  who encountered an innocent force that faced with the realities of war, you know, blah.
[14:18.560 --> 14:24.860]  Anyway, Professor Falken was supposed to be played by John Lennon. I thought that would have been really cool.
[14:24.860 --> 14:37.440]  Anyway, it is funny because as we get now to where it has been 22 years since War Games was filmed,
[14:37.680 --> 14:43.060]  a new generation has latched actually onto the movie Hackers from 1995 as being a seminal event
[14:43.060 --> 14:50.760]  of giving hints as to a way of living and a lifestyle and things to shoot for and belief.
[14:50.760 --> 14:55.780]  And the reason that is, is because they went to people like Emanuel Goldstein,
[14:55.780 --> 15:01.080]  and they used pieces of subculture that existed in various ways.
[15:01.080 --> 15:06.140]  Mentor's Conscience of a Hacker and other such writings.
[15:06.140 --> 15:10.890]  And they remixed them, much in the same way that a blender remixes a lemon,
[15:11.620 --> 15:16.260]  so that it would become this palatable thing with Angela Jolie's tit.
[15:17.920 --> 15:22.940]  And people who look to that as their indication of what their culture is,
[15:22.940 --> 15:28.520]  because there's a dearth of stuff in the middle, end up having to do that.
[15:28.520 --> 15:31.680]  They end up having to say, okay, well, that's kind of how it was.
[15:32.540 --> 15:34.480]  And it wasn't like that.
[15:35.280 --> 15:38.780]  And so there's, again, great lots of fun for technical people to go,
[15:38.780 --> 15:40.060]  well, it's not like that at all.
[15:40.060 --> 15:42.380]  Actually, it's like this, and it's like this, and it's like this,
[15:42.380 --> 15:45.140]  and I know you can't get away from me because I got the door.
[15:45.140 --> 15:49.500]  And so on, because, you know, some of you giggle,
[15:49.500 --> 15:53.620]  because the problem is technical people are not very good at telling stories,
[15:53.620 --> 15:55.600]  because that's not how they approach it.
[15:55.600 --> 15:58.940]  Stories are these arcs that start with a beginning and a middle
[15:58.940 --> 16:01.240]  and have some sort of theme that runs to an end,
[16:01.240 --> 16:05.780]  whereas a lot of technical stories are impartations of information,
[16:06.400 --> 16:08.620]  you know, peppered with puns.
[16:08.820 --> 16:10.940]  And that's what they do,
[16:10.940 --> 16:14.060]  because that's how they get the information to you as fast as possible,
[16:14.060 --> 16:15.400]  and that's understood.
[16:16.640 --> 16:19.060]  So, like you're watching on this film,
[16:19.060 --> 16:22.620]  this film was trying to tackle a very difficult initial idea,
[16:22.620 --> 16:26.600]  the idea that there was colored text that was transferred online,
[16:26.600 --> 16:31.860]  and that people had an entire history of collecting them
[16:31.860 --> 16:35.240]  and being, you know, 15 years old and working for months.
[16:35.240 --> 16:38.060]  And it's fascinating because it's a people story.
[16:38.060 --> 16:40.960]  These kids are talking with great emotion.
[16:41.380 --> 16:43.540]  And that's more from the interview.
[16:43.540 --> 16:46.080]  You interview somebody for an hour,
[16:46.080 --> 16:48.200]  you choose what to use from that hour.
[16:48.200 --> 16:50.840]  You don't make people sit through the hour of that guy interviewing.
[16:51.080 --> 16:55.380]  You can go the other way, which is where, like, say, MTV goes,
[16:55.380 --> 16:57.720]  which is where you'll interview somebody for an hour,
[16:58.160 --> 17:00.060]  and you'll do one of two things.
[17:00.060 --> 17:04.900]  You will either force something to happen to the person that they don't expect,
[17:04.900 --> 17:08.500]  so you get, you know, some horrified thing,
[17:08.500 --> 17:11.740]  or you keep peppering them with the same question over and over again
[17:11.740 --> 17:13.840]  until they answer it the goddamn way that you want it to,
[17:13.840 --> 17:16.080]  which was, yes, I fuck children!
[17:17.300 --> 17:20.040]  And then that'd be, you know, once again,
[17:20.040 --> 17:22.100]  welcome to MTV, I fuck children!
[17:22.500 --> 17:24.220]  The story of a pedophile.
[17:26.960 --> 17:31.920]  Anyway, when I was young, I loved MTV, but MTV betrayed me.
[17:33.680 --> 17:35.000]  Damn you, MTV.
[17:36.900 --> 17:39.180]  Anyway, the way I like to think of it
[17:39.180 --> 17:43.840]  is that a technical documentary is an engineering problem.
[17:43.860 --> 17:48.100]  You have the problem of wanting to naturally turn everything
[17:48.620 --> 17:53.450]  into either a lecture or a fictional narrative.
[17:54.460 --> 17:58.020]  And what you do is you say, well, how can I take the reality
[17:58.020 --> 18:00.650]  and portray it as a narrative?
[18:01.180 --> 18:06.820]  That is to say, how can I make this somewhat dry subject interesting?
[18:06.820 --> 18:08.340]  And there's several ways you can do that.
[18:08.340 --> 18:11.320]  One way is to focus on characters, humans, people,
[18:11.320 --> 18:14.420]  expressing themselves in a way that's engaging.
[18:14.420 --> 18:16.900]  And again, bringing that out in an interview is very tough.
[18:16.900 --> 18:23.840]  The other way is to do an awful lot of, I guess you would call it, dazzle.
[18:24.400 --> 18:25.980]  And that's more like one of those things,
[18:25.980 --> 18:28.600]  like when you inject stuff into the car to make it go a little faster.
[18:28.700 --> 18:31.300]  It's not so great for the car, but it kind of works.
[18:31.480 --> 18:34.020]  And so he's talking right now about something
[18:34.020 --> 18:37.000]  that's relatively interesting to some people.
[18:37.000 --> 18:40.440]  But for the other people, I just give them a whole bunch of pretty colors.
[18:41.760 --> 18:44.220]  And he's talking about this work he did,
[18:44.220 --> 18:46.500]  and it's being illustrated, and it's kind of interesting.
[18:46.500 --> 18:48.340]  But why the hell is that back part there?
[18:48.340 --> 18:49.580]  Well, because it's interesting.
[18:50.260 --> 18:52.320]  And you try to strike that.
[18:52.320 --> 18:56.120]  I also try to shoot, for instance, with very few exceptions,
[18:56.120 --> 18:59.080]  nobody, no one shot lasts for more than 10 seconds.
[18:59.320 --> 19:03.360]  A person might talk over something else so that his shot is 30 seconds.
[19:03.540 --> 19:06.180]  But in fact, the point of fact, it's just not.
[19:09.340 --> 19:11.980]  Right now in the world, there are an unbelievable amount of subjects
[19:11.980 --> 19:13.860]  that just haven't been really tackled.
[19:13.860 --> 19:17.100]  I tackle bulletin board systems because I decided in 2001
[19:17.620 --> 19:20.640]  that it looks like the BBS movie wasn't going to be made.
[19:21.980 --> 19:23.380]  They missed the boat.
[19:23.700 --> 19:26.280]  We were having trouble where people were, you know,
[19:26.280 --> 19:27.300]  people were disappearing.
[19:27.300 --> 19:28.640]  It was harder to find the stuff.
[19:28.640 --> 19:30.420]  The artifacts are kind of gone.
[19:30.560 --> 19:32.460]  And how do you get that back?
[19:32.460 --> 19:34.700]  And so in 2001, I started doing research,
[19:34.700 --> 19:36.620]  and I did six months of research.
[19:36.820 --> 19:40.940]  And I brought in an advisory team of about 20 people
[19:40.940 --> 19:43.740]  who I both respected and didn't know,
[19:43.740 --> 19:45.620]  and who would give me advice.
[19:45.620 --> 19:48.020]  And I'd say, well, you know, I'm thinking I'm going to shoot this way.
[19:48.020 --> 19:50.200]  And I think I'm going to go here and ask this question.
[19:50.200 --> 19:51.260]  What do you think?
[19:51.420 --> 19:53.500]  And sometimes they'd answer, sometimes they'd not.
[19:53.500 --> 19:56.600]  You know, they'd just say, well, I hope he's interesting.
[19:56.600 --> 19:58.760]  Or I hope you have a reason for going out there.
[19:58.760 --> 20:01.640]  Or, oh yeah, ask him about this guy who I wouldn't know about.
[20:01.640 --> 20:03.660]  Because that really changed his life.
[20:03.660 --> 20:06.900]  So being open helped a lot.
[20:06.900 --> 20:08.540]  There's a lot of money right now.
[20:08.540 --> 20:11.500]  You'll find I get really ooky when people discuss money.
[20:11.780 --> 20:15.500]  Whenever I say monetized, like someone says smeared with shit.
[20:16.580 --> 20:19.960]  But it's just, you know, that's just because I'm some sort of freak.
[20:19.960 --> 20:25.340]  But the money is in calling something open source.
[20:26.180 --> 20:30.500]  There's a lot of money in calling things a brand that has meaning.
[20:30.500 --> 20:35.940]  So revealing the people that you have a list of people you're going to interview,
[20:35.940 --> 20:37.700]  suddenly makes it open source.
[20:38.360 --> 20:41.660]  You know, or telling people, oh, well, you know, this new movie's coming out.
[20:41.660 --> 20:43.480]  We shot it using this kind of camera.
[20:43.480 --> 20:45.200]  This new kind of, oh, that's open source.
[20:45.200 --> 20:47.120]  You revealed things.
[20:47.940 --> 20:51.220]  So it's a case of marketing terms getting bastardized very quickly.
[20:51.440 --> 20:54.920]  I tried to let everyone know I was working on this for four years.
[20:54.920 --> 20:57.840]  And the problem there, of course, was that there were people who waited for four years.
[20:57.840 --> 20:58.340]  Or five.
[20:58.340 --> 21:00.020]  I have a gentleman here who waited for five.
[21:00.020 --> 21:02.680]  Gave me 20 bucks five years ago.
[21:03.260 --> 21:04.620]  There's an investment.
[21:07.240 --> 21:10.600]  Actually, when I created the film, I asked for donations.
[21:10.600 --> 21:11.580]  Because I was dumb.
[21:11.580 --> 21:12.160]  I don't know why.
[21:12.160 --> 21:14.780]  I thought I'd need a foundation to create this film.
[21:14.900 --> 21:17.180]  So people sent me five bucks, ten bucks.
[21:17.460 --> 21:19.720]  You know, just like, cool.
[21:19.720 --> 21:20.860]  Sounds like fun.
[21:20.880 --> 21:25.940]  So I made sure each one of them got a $50 copy, you know, sent to them.
[21:25.940 --> 21:26.780]  My cost.
[21:26.780 --> 21:28.320]  It's like, wow, that was a great investment.
[21:28.320 --> 21:30.000]  So, hey, it pays to be charitable.
[21:30.000 --> 21:30.600]  I guess.
[21:32.600 --> 21:36.240]  Anyway, when I shot this film, I would go out and interview people.
[21:36.240 --> 21:39.320]  And one of the things is that there are a lot of people out there who have very interesting
[21:39.320 --> 21:41.760]  stories to tell who are slowly decaying.
[21:43.120 --> 21:45.060]  And the longer you talk to them...
[21:45.060 --> 21:50.360]  When I started shooting, there were a lot of people who were names.
[21:50.660 --> 21:53.640]  You know, there's different levels of celebrity in any kind of technical subject.
[21:53.640 --> 21:55.140]  Oh, he's the guy who wrote that.
[21:55.440 --> 21:56.940]  You know, he's the guy who made that computer.
[21:56.940 --> 21:58.440]  He's the guy who created this thing.
[21:58.440 --> 22:00.220]  And you go and you track him down.
[22:00.220 --> 22:02.080]  And sometimes he's really boring.
[22:02.160 --> 22:04.160]  And sometimes he's really not.
[22:04.340 --> 22:10.200]  Most markedly in mine, there was a network of bulletin boards called FidoNet.
[22:10.440 --> 22:16.280]  And this started in around 83, 84, and still exists today.
[22:16.360 --> 22:22.900]  And it's this beautiful, self-grown, volunteer network of people all around the world who
[22:22.900 --> 22:25.420]  created this bulletin board system network.
[22:25.420 --> 22:27.740]  And at the center of it is Thomas Jennings.
[22:28.820 --> 22:32.480]  And Tom Jennings is fucking nuts.
[22:36.340 --> 22:44.680]  He is a gay, bad ass, gate punk, vegetarian, fuck you, anarchist, who did this because
[22:44.680 --> 22:49.060]  god damn it, it's great to write a god damn network because fuck everybody.
[22:49.640 --> 22:50.960]  That's interesting.
[22:51.740 --> 22:54.500]  And I don't think a lot of people knew that when they were doing it.
[22:54.500 --> 23:01.820]  So when I interviewed him, he was amazing to a person who's looking at things like,
[23:01.820 --> 23:02.600]  is this interesting?
[23:02.600 --> 23:11.600]  So he's just this beautiful, profane man who I used in my way to tell a story around him.
[23:12.460 --> 23:17.060]  The question becomes, how do you translate that?
[23:17.060 --> 23:18.760]  And I wasn't going to do this...
[23:20.660 --> 23:22.260]  I'm going to do it afterwards.
[23:22.560 --> 23:24.320]  I'll play a sequence after I'm done.
[23:24.500 --> 23:25.360]  I took...
[23:27.420 --> 23:29.100]  Here's an example.
[23:29.100 --> 23:32.140]  The documentary format has editing.
[23:32.640 --> 23:37.980]  What that means is, you take two separate recordings of events in time and you place
[23:37.980 --> 23:38.960]  them together.
[23:40.000 --> 23:44.540]  And they didn't happen one after the other, but you put them together.
[23:44.540 --> 23:48.940]  I know this sounds basic, but it's so easy to forget that.
[23:49.080 --> 23:53.460]  A good example of a documentary that really does this a lot...
[23:55.340 --> 23:57.780]  is something called MTV Cribs.
[23:57.780 --> 24:00.020]  I don't know how many people know MTV Cribs.
[24:00.100 --> 24:04.380]  MTV Cribs is supposed to be a documentary about the homes of stars.
[24:06.100 --> 24:07.320]  Yeah, okay.
[24:07.320 --> 24:14.180]  So for instance, there was the case where basically they go in and they shoot, right?
[24:14.180 --> 24:17.220]  They shoot footage with steadicams and stuff of these guys' houses.
[24:17.300 --> 24:19.600]  Yes, this is where the magic happens.
[24:19.600 --> 24:20.660]  This is my bedroom.
[24:20.660 --> 24:21.640]  This is my pool.
[24:21.640 --> 24:23.000]  This is my kitchen.
[24:23.000 --> 24:23.760]  And it's fascinating.
[24:23.760 --> 24:25.120]  Look what they have in their kitchen.
[24:25.120 --> 24:26.300]  Look what they have in their fridge.
[24:26.300 --> 24:27.440]  Look what they have here.
[24:27.440 --> 24:29.100]  They've got hangings, you know?
[24:29.260 --> 24:32.300]  Well, recently, I believe it was Usher.
[24:32.300 --> 24:33.780]  I don't care if I'm smearing him.
[24:33.780 --> 24:35.340]  It's some other guy like Usher.
[24:35.340 --> 24:40.420]  Usher or an Usher-like being had a little lawsuit occur.
[24:40.420 --> 24:47.700]  Turns out, Usher rented an island for $350,000 for two days.
[24:47.700 --> 24:49.180]  It's an expensive island.
[24:49.180 --> 24:50.820]  Nice island, though.
[24:51.320 --> 24:55.560]  First day, he shot MTV Cribs there to show his home.
[24:56.800 --> 25:00.300]  This only came out because the second day he had a party with 2,000 fucking people
[25:00.300 --> 25:03.200]  and they were having trouble getting condoms out of palm trees and all that.
[25:05.780 --> 25:08.120]  So, right?
[25:08.120 --> 25:14.860]  I mean, you'll see this documentary format where he's supposed to be describing reality to you.
[25:14.860 --> 25:21.540]  MTV and he have agreed to 100% completely create a false reality.
[25:21.800 --> 25:24.720]  Now, you compare that to when they interview, I think it was Ted Nugent.
[25:25.420 --> 25:28.760]  Now, Ted Nugent's in a house that it's fucking Ted Nugent's house.
[25:30.440 --> 25:34.160]  Because you can't rent that many animal heads.
[25:37.570 --> 25:43.790]  You have to get a clearance from the TSA to ship that many guns to a shooting location
[25:44.390 --> 25:45.970]  to shoot your documentary.
[25:45.970 --> 25:47.770]  It's Ted Nugent's fucking house.
[25:47.810 --> 25:48.690]  It's real.
[25:48.690 --> 25:50.770]  You go through it and you're like, oh my god.
[25:51.190 --> 25:52.270]  Oh my god.
[25:52.270 --> 25:55.430]  A PETA member would like explode into flames walking in here.
[25:55.930 --> 26:01.590]  So, you know, even a person who's watching it who's not technically oriented towards
[26:01.590 --> 26:04.970]  documentaries or thinking of them that way, they get it in their mind.
[26:04.970 --> 26:07.910]  They're like, this guy's house has four pieces of furniture.
[26:08.290 --> 26:09.650]  That's fake.
[26:09.670 --> 26:12.310]  Even if you've got a really good maid, that's fake.
[26:12.310 --> 26:15.690]  But this other guy's house, full of little things, and they've obviously sorted up and
[26:15.690 --> 26:18.130]  cleaned things and dusted them, that's his house.
[26:18.130 --> 26:20.870]  That kind of visceral reaction comes from right here.
[26:20.870 --> 26:22.790]  And it's very hard to fake.
[26:23.030 --> 26:30.630]  And so when I shot people, when I filmed people, I would ask them questions.
[26:30.730 --> 26:37.530]  And they knew, talking to me, that it was somewhat unlikely I was going to fuck them.
[26:37.530 --> 26:43.910]  That's very important to note, because the standard method of communication in film media
[26:43.910 --> 26:45.410]  is fucking people over.
[26:45.850 --> 26:49.670]  Where you convince people something is going to be a certain way so that you can get the
[26:49.670 --> 26:52.610]  thing you want, which is antithetical to their needs.
[26:53.490 --> 26:57.110]  This is part of, by the way, I should mention, I went to film school.
[26:57.490 --> 27:03.450]  I went to film school, Emerson College, Boston, film class of 1992, mass communications,
[27:03.450 --> 27:05.030]  concentration in film.
[27:06.950 --> 27:09.750]  I immediately decided not to go into film.
[27:09.750 --> 27:11.210]  Dad was so happy.
[27:11.970 --> 27:16.150]  I instead went into video games, which, by the way, is worse than film, but still, it's
[27:16.150 --> 27:18.110]  film at that time.
[27:19.010 --> 27:22.970]  So I went to work for a company called Psygnosis, and they had all sorts of beautiful things,
[27:22.970 --> 27:24.690]  and I thought it was like film, but it wasn't.
[27:24.690 --> 27:25.770]  It was just mean.
[27:26.970 --> 27:29.770]  And so I didn't actually make films for a long time.
[27:29.770 --> 27:33.890]  I didn't want to, because the more I learned about the film industry, because, you know,
[27:33.890 --> 27:37.590]  after a while, they take you away from, oh, look how beautiful Citizen Kane is, to around
[27:37.590 --> 27:38.470]  your junior year.
[27:38.470 --> 27:43.710]  So this is how the film industry works, and you're like, ah, you know, it's like petting
[27:43.710 --> 27:45.830]  the bunny and then seeing the inside of the bunny.
[27:48.350 --> 27:51.850]  Bunny ain't cute no more, even if they put the bunny back like they did before.
[27:52.070 --> 27:57.630]  So I got tired of looking at the inside of the bunny, and instead I went into computers,
[27:57.630 --> 28:01.310]  and computers have been very well by me, and have actually been rather lucrative,
[28:01.310 --> 28:03.870]  and because of that, I could afford to have a stupid hobby.
[28:03.890 --> 28:08.430]  Um, I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs, I don't do PowerPoint.
[28:10.270 --> 28:11.970]  So, yeah.
[28:14.990 --> 28:19.630]  So what ended up happening instead was that, you know, I got into, like, doing little projects,
[28:19.630 --> 28:21.750]  and doing film projects, and computer projects.
[28:21.750 --> 28:26.930]  So when I decided I was going to do this documentary, I was like, oh, I guess I'll do it.
[28:26.930 --> 28:28.710]  I guess I'll use that damn film degree.
[28:28.910 --> 28:31.270]  Now, ironically, I've had people say, well, is this your first film?
[28:31.270 --> 28:33.670]  The answer is no, I had a film play at Sundance.
[28:33.670 --> 28:35.930]  And they're like, ooh, that's really impressive.
[28:35.930 --> 28:41.770]  Um, it was a two-minute film I did for a comedy troupe in 1993.
[28:41.970 --> 28:45.870]  It is a schoolhouse rock animation about the Kennedy assassination.
[28:47.670 --> 28:51.390]  And what happened was, was that Comedy Central bought it,
[28:52.150 --> 28:57.130]  and played it on the 30th anniversary, across the weekend.
[28:58.930 --> 29:04.050]  For that, I got, for that, five of us got the princely sum of $1,200.
[29:04.630 --> 29:06.930]  And they got the rights for one year.
[29:07.010 --> 29:09.550]  And they proceeded to play it 300 times, you know,
[29:09.550 --> 29:11.650]  because it's two minutes long, they could shove it everywhere.
[29:11.930 --> 29:14.870]  So that was my introduction to the industry.
[29:16.650 --> 29:21.310]  Yeah, you know, I lent a guy the tape 15 years ago.
[29:22.110 --> 29:26.530]  Every year, like clockwork, he apologizes and says he's going to get it to me.
[29:27.130 --> 29:29.310]  I just have to get it off the 16 millimeter film.
[29:29.310 --> 29:30.850]  I used to do stuff in film.
[29:31.090 --> 29:33.450]  When I shot this, I shot it using film techniques.
[29:33.450 --> 29:35.050]  That's why everyone looks kind of goofy.
[29:35.450 --> 29:38.090]  Because I use indirect lighting and shots like that.
[29:38.090 --> 29:40.390]  That is nine processors, by the way.
[29:40.650 --> 29:42.450]  Give you an example of Artifice.
[29:42.450 --> 29:46.630]  That shot right there, dark as crap, didn't look good, he wasn't there.
[29:46.650 --> 29:50.430]  I've applied softening filters, lightning filters, highlight filters, everything,
[29:50.430 --> 29:51.630]  to make him look like it.
[29:51.630 --> 29:52.730]  But no, it's real.
[29:53.510 --> 29:55.790]  And there's a lot of that, a lot of noise reduction.
[29:55.790 --> 29:56.950]  You take what you can.
[29:56.950 --> 30:00.750]  When you're a one-man crew, you make an enormous amount of mistakes.
[30:01.750 --> 30:07.010]  Anyway, so when I decided to actually shoot this film, I hadn't even looked at that for 10 years.
[30:07.010 --> 30:11.290]  But I had a pretty good salary, and I could afford to pretty much do it myself.
[30:11.990 --> 30:18.370]  Budget-wise, because I engineered it, the film, this film, okay.
[30:18.490 --> 30:23.090]  When I made this film, how many people here were at my talk last year?
[30:23.410 --> 30:24.210]  Two, three, four, five.
[30:24.210 --> 30:24.830]  Okay, good, good, good.
[30:24.830 --> 30:25.330]  All right.
[30:25.970 --> 30:26.830]  Thank you very much.
[30:26.830 --> 30:35.590]  The film, when I saw the film, I decided that I was going to make a film that was,
[30:35.590 --> 30:38.650]  you know, when people make a film, they want it to be like an hour and a half,
[30:38.650 --> 30:40.550]  you know, because that's what plays in theaters.
[30:40.650 --> 30:41.690]  But I was like, fuck theaters.
[30:41.690 --> 30:42.830]  I don't need to put them in theaters.
[30:42.830 --> 30:43.770]  I'll put it on DVD.
[30:43.810 --> 30:45.290]  What a delightful format.
[30:47.450 --> 30:49.590]  Boy, DVD got the hivies.
[30:50.610 --> 30:53.750]  DVD sucks, as a person who uses it, by the way.
[30:53.990 --> 30:56.350]  You have never seen, you want standards.
[30:56.350 --> 30:58.310]  Don't go to DVD.
[30:58.550 --> 31:02.710]  People put out, as far as I can determine, peanut butter jelly sandwiches that claim
[31:02.710 --> 31:03.850]  they're DVD players.
[31:04.310 --> 31:05.870]  I've gotten more, anyway.
[31:05.890 --> 31:07.090]  So it's like, it'll go like this.
[31:07.090 --> 31:08.890]  And the answer is, well, maybe it will.
[31:08.890 --> 31:12.850]  If the Fong Song Trading Company, when they made it for five minutes ten years ago, think
[31:12.850 --> 31:13.650]  it was good.
[31:14.090 --> 31:15.350]  And you get this, anyway.
[31:15.350 --> 31:16.810]  So I love DVD.
[31:16.810 --> 31:18.090]  DVD has been good to me.
[31:19.410 --> 31:21.870]  So DVD was the format I was going to go into.
[31:21.870 --> 31:24.090]  So I said, well, okay, well, I'm going to have subtitles.
[31:24.090 --> 31:25.450]  I'm going to have director's commentary.
[31:25.450 --> 31:26.170]  I'm going to have this.
[31:26.170 --> 31:27.150]  I'm going to have that.
[31:27.630 --> 31:30.910]  And so when I shot it, I knew it wasn't going to be an hour and a half.
[31:30.910 --> 31:35.490]  I thought it was going to be nine hours, which hurts people.
[31:35.670 --> 31:39.630]  I mean, I explain to people, what it is, is when you take on a subject that's 25 years
[31:39.630 --> 31:44.750]  long, because nobody else has done it, you have to make up for a lot of slack.
[31:44.810 --> 31:50.250]  And there are stories that aren't in any way paired up.
[31:50.250 --> 31:51.090]  They're not paired up.
[31:51.090 --> 31:53.210]  PhytoNet is not the story of the BBS industry.
[31:53.210 --> 31:54.470]  It's not the story of ANSI art.
[31:54.470 --> 31:56.210]  It's not the story of the hacking BBSs.
[31:56.210 --> 31:57.510]  It's not the story of this.
[31:57.670 --> 31:58.190]  So what do you do?
[31:58.190 --> 31:59.410]  Well, you make separate episodes.
[31:59.410 --> 32:00.850]  So I made a miniseries.
[32:01.170 --> 32:06.850]  And I shot it, like I said, 250 hours, edited it down to five and a half hours.
[32:06.850 --> 32:08.310]  The rough cut was seven.
[32:09.230 --> 32:12.110]  Each of these episodes is about 40 minutes.
[32:12.110 --> 32:13.270]  Some of them are less.
[32:13.410 --> 32:17.670]  And the whole thing, shooting-wise, cost me $21,000.
[32:18.930 --> 32:23.030]  Now, some people drop their payload on that.
[32:23.030 --> 32:25.190]  In fact, that's actually rather cheap.
[32:25.190 --> 32:26.970]  It actually works out to a very cheap price.
[32:26.970 --> 32:29.610]  And the way that I did it was to kill myself.
[32:30.030 --> 32:31.910]  For instance, I would land.
[32:31.910 --> 32:35.850]  I would determine 14 interviews I had to do in the Midwest.
[32:36.390 --> 32:43.450]  And in one trip, in 10 days, I went from Chicago to Indiana, back up to Milwaukee,
[32:43.450 --> 32:49.890]  over to Minneapolis, down to St. Louis, over to Kansas City, down through Oklahoma City,
[32:49.890 --> 32:52.030]  over to Texas, and then flew out of Austin.
[32:53.030 --> 32:54.170]  That hurt.
[32:54.530 --> 32:59.010]  I can also tell you that I can drive precisely 302 miles at a stretch.
[33:00.230 --> 33:04.230]  But by doing that, by combining what would have been a whole bunch of little trips in the one trip,
[33:04.230 --> 33:05.730]  it cost me almost nothing.
[33:06.570 --> 33:07.970]  I didn't sleep in my car.
[33:07.970 --> 33:09.210]  I should have, but I didn't.
[33:09.310 --> 33:13.870]  So by just adding these prices together, I was able to shoot very cheaply.
[33:13.870 --> 33:15.250]  I had a crew of one.
[33:15.510 --> 33:21.970]  I had a camera that I purchased as a floor model.
[33:21.970 --> 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.
[33:28.170 --> 33:33.450]  I shot, I guess for anyone who cares, I used a product called Vegas Video.
[33:33.830 --> 33:40.930]  And I had a PC, a one gigahertz PC, and four terabytes of USB storage.
[33:43.110 --> 33:48.570]  And I lost 14 drives in the two years of editing.
[33:48.870 --> 33:51.950]  So anyway, that's the price you pay.
[33:52.390 --> 33:55.030]  Mac store is the James Dean of hard drives.
[33:56.990 --> 33:58.510]  Just so you know.
[33:59.650 --> 34:05.870]  It, you know, it tries to seduce you with, look, I'm $50 and 200 gigs.
[34:06.130 --> 34:09.050]  And then the next day, I'm not feeling too good, man.
[34:10.590 --> 34:13.810]  Jesus, man, I can't feel anything right now.
[34:14.910 --> 34:19.070]  So that's, you know, the things you learn when you put things through stress tests.
[34:19.070 --> 34:22.890]  I had people going like, like I had one time where I was really pissed because I put 200,
[34:22.890 --> 34:27.410]  I put 205 gigabytes of footage on something and it died.
[34:27.610 --> 34:30.470]  Like, it was like, here's your data, foot.
[34:31.410 --> 34:34.910]  And I went on IRC bitching, which is a mistake, by the way.
[34:34.910 --> 34:36.470]  IRC will bitch you right back.
[34:36.490 --> 34:39.530]  And someone's like, you dumb fuck, they're not meant to be used that way.
[34:41.170 --> 34:43.850]  That tells you a lot about customer expectation, doesn't it?
[34:45.410 --> 34:48.450]  Hard drives aren't meant to store data, you dumb fuck.
[34:49.370 --> 34:50.170]  Anyway.
[34:52.410 --> 34:56.710]  So one of the side effects of me going through and doing this as a one-man crew
[34:56.710 --> 34:59.770]  is that I interviewed a lot of people who had never been interviewed before
[34:59.770 --> 35:03.110]  and people who'd always been interviewed, like been interviewed for all their life.
[35:03.350 --> 35:06.670]  And so when they met me, it was like, oh, here's some guy.
[35:07.350 --> 35:09.470]  And there's an old quote in the movie industry,
[35:10.010 --> 35:13.510]  which says that honesty is the most important thing in the film industry.
[35:13.510 --> 35:15.570]  And once you can fake that, you're golden.
[35:17.830 --> 35:22.590]  And so I was very honest, and in fact, I was very honest and I made a lot of,
[35:22.590 --> 35:27.470]  I offered a lot of things that people didn't normally get when you deal with media.
[35:27.470 --> 35:31.590]  I told people, after I've interviewed you, even though you've signed a release,
[35:31.590 --> 35:34.690]  if after one month, up to one month, preferably,
[35:35.270 --> 35:39.450]  you think you said something you didn't like, tell me and I will erase it off the tape.
[35:39.870 --> 35:43.390]  Because I'm not going to hurt you for my film.
[35:43.770 --> 35:47.290]  I'll get four other guys to say what you said that you're not comfortable saying.
[35:47.510 --> 35:50.930]  I don't need you to get in trouble with your buddies.
[35:51.090 --> 35:54.810]  And I don't, and I, and a lot of people, I would explain to them what I was doing
[35:55.430 --> 35:59.710]  and I would send them cuts and say, okay, I'm going to use you this way. Is that okay?
[36:00.010 --> 36:02.790]  I also had what I called the jerk crank index, which was,
[36:02.790 --> 36:06.990]  if I made somebody say something funny and that made them look weird,
[36:07.830 --> 36:10.930]  they had to be somewhere else saying something smart.
[36:11.310 --> 36:13.910]  If I couldn't find that, I wouldn't use it.
[36:14.270 --> 36:18.490]  Because, and the thing is, that's antithetical to how a lot of films work.
[36:18.710 --> 36:20.270]  These films work that way.
[36:20.430 --> 36:25.970]  I have, I have a, I have a, I have a recording of a guy, still good, okay.
[36:25.970 --> 36:27.950]  Well, anyway, there's a recording with this old man.
[36:27.950 --> 36:31.970]  He just goes, you know, man, I used to get laid off that BBS.
[36:32.810 --> 36:35.470]  And it's really funny in the shot, trust me.
[36:35.470 --> 36:39.790]  And I love audience feedback.
[36:39.830 --> 36:44.750]  The, anyway, I made sure that that old man told another story.
[36:44.750 --> 36:47.050]  That it wasn't just the old man who said that.
[36:48.050 --> 36:56.410]  And at the end of the day, if people do not get these stories on tape, they disappear.
[36:56.750 --> 37:01.890]  And what you end up with are very, very,
[37:03.090 --> 37:07.730]  I would almost call them, you know, cliff notes of history.
[37:07.730 --> 37:09.650]  You say, well, there used to be this.
[37:09.650 --> 37:11.190]  And that's it, that's all they'll say.
[37:11.190 --> 37:14.090]  You know, Ward Christensen, he invented the BBS.
[37:14.090 --> 37:20.290]  And there is a massive story behind why he did it, how he did it, involving a snowstorm.
[37:20.330 --> 37:23.830]  And it being, you know, Chicago.
[37:23.830 --> 37:25.910]  And because he couldn't get to the guy's house, he was like,
[37:25.910 --> 37:28.910]  let's just write something to transfer files, wouldn't that be neat?
[37:28.970 --> 37:31.250]  And this whole industry rises up from that guy.
[37:31.770 --> 37:33.570]  And there's things before him.
[37:33.570 --> 37:35.990]  And there's things after him that are actually very important.
[37:35.990 --> 37:38.910]  He actually got the idea for BBSs off the ARPANET.
[37:39.790 --> 37:41.230]  The ARPANET was around.
[37:41.230 --> 37:44.850]  He was on the list because he had written XMODEM and he was kick-ass for doing that.
[37:44.990 --> 37:47.070]  And so they gave him an ARPANET account and everyone was saying,
[37:47.070 --> 37:51.330]  wouldn't it be a great idea to have something where you could use these little toy computers
[37:51.750 --> 37:53.210]  and leave messages on them?
[37:53.210 --> 37:54.370]  And he was like, hey.
[37:54.550 --> 37:56.570]  And he was like, so when's anyone going to do it?
[37:56.570 --> 38:00.570]  Or as he puts it, nobody was plugging in their soldering irons to get started on doing it.
[38:01.250 --> 38:03.230]  Which tells you how long ago that was.
[38:05.870 --> 38:06.670]  Anyway.
[38:07.350 --> 38:10.870]  You know, it's funny now because, like I said, I have these hacking text files.
[38:10.870 --> 38:14.610]  And when they start out, it's like, well, here's how to write machine language to be able to play
[38:14.610 --> 38:16.410]  Crisis Mountain for free.
[38:16.630 --> 38:20.910]  And I get over here with, here's how to remove ads from your GeoCities account.
[38:21.870 --> 38:25.790]  And it's just this amazing, well, the progression doesn't go this way.
[38:25.790 --> 38:26.930]  Let's put it that way.
[38:27.850 --> 38:31.850]  I love the present, but I love the past more.
[38:31.870 --> 38:33.090]  Let's put it that way.
[38:33.430 --> 38:34.130]  Anyway.
[38:34.630 --> 38:38.810]  At the beginning of this film art scene, there's an old man.
[38:38.810 --> 38:40.530]  His name is John Sheets.
[38:40.530 --> 38:44.210]  John Sheets was the pimp of teletype art.
[38:44.510 --> 38:46.190]  A lost art.
[38:46.190 --> 38:51.750]  It was a way of sending text over ham radio and other ways.
[38:51.750 --> 38:54.210]  So that you could write things and other people would get it.
[38:54.210 --> 38:56.130]  So, of course, they used it to send porn.
[38:57.390 --> 39:00.750]  But they also used it to send, you know, images of Snoopy and everything.
[39:00.750 --> 39:05.450]  And they used to have art contests in the 60s and the 70s of who could draw the best,
[39:05.450 --> 39:09.070]  you know, Bordeaux-based art and who could do this.
[39:09.070 --> 39:13.550]  And so nobody had ever talked to John Sheets about this.
[39:13.550 --> 39:15.750]  And I was doing this thing on Antsy Art.
[39:15.750 --> 39:21.430]  And wouldn't it be funny, I thought, to go interview this man about this technical subject.
[39:21.430 --> 39:25.890]  And when I got there, he was stunned that I had driven from Boston to New Jersey for him.
[39:25.890 --> 39:28.790]  And he had all this old art out that nobody had really seen.
[39:28.790 --> 39:30.650]  And I interviewed him for one hour.
[39:30.690 --> 39:31.610]  Asked him all about it.
[39:31.610 --> 39:34.710]  He talked about his family and working on this stuff and everything else.
[39:34.950 --> 39:37.210]  And then I did that and I never saw him again.
[39:37.210 --> 39:38.570]  You know, I went away and I edited.
[39:38.570 --> 39:42.010]  And this year I went to go give him his free copy and I discovered he had died.
[39:43.530 --> 39:44.910]  And I got his widow.
[39:45.110 --> 39:51.550]  And his widow was absolutely delighted that somebody had an hour of her husband talking
[39:51.970 --> 39:53.590]  for me to give to her.
[39:53.590 --> 40:02.340]  And the thing is, that little story plays out over and over again.
[40:02.480 --> 40:06.580]  You know, you get all these things where it's like, well, just sit the guy down for an hour
[40:06.580 --> 40:09.180]  and ask him about this technical subject.
[40:09.180 --> 40:11.880]  Because people don't just tell those stories that way.
[40:11.880 --> 40:16.220]  They actually tell stories that are actually indicative of other things.
[40:16.220 --> 40:20.500]  I'm a very big fan of this idea that when you record something...
[40:20.500 --> 40:23.340]  I'm collecting all the podcasts right now.
[40:23.460 --> 40:25.060]  This gets me some press.
[40:25.060 --> 40:26.640]  It's cute that it does.
[40:26.640 --> 40:27.800]  But it's not that hard.
[40:27.800 --> 40:29.180]  It's an RSS feed.
[40:29.180 --> 40:30.220]  The guy's doing...
[40:30.220 --> 40:36.000]  It's like a self-service anthropology experiment.
[40:36.060 --> 40:40.380]  It's like driving by an African village and there's a pile of videotapes for you to pick up.
[40:40.600 --> 40:42.120]  Not that hard.
[40:42.320 --> 40:43.780]  I have a little bash shell script.
[40:43.780 --> 40:47.080]  I'm currently collecting 4,800 podcasts.
[40:47.360 --> 40:49.820]  It's something like 600 gigs now or something.
[40:49.820 --> 40:50.420]  Why?
[40:50.420 --> 40:51.420]  Why not?
[40:51.420 --> 40:54.920]  And people go, well, they're boring.
[40:55.360 --> 40:56.940]  And I'm like, well, they're not really boring.
[40:56.940 --> 41:00.760]  They're actually stories about what it was like to be alive when that person was talking.
[41:00.960 --> 41:02.780]  It's supposed to be about wine.
[41:02.780 --> 41:04.080]  You know, the wine cast.
[41:04.080 --> 41:07.340]  But no, it's actually kind of about his friends and how they had wine together
[41:07.340 --> 41:11.580]  and what it was like to be alive in 2005 and order wine and be at this place.
[41:11.580 --> 41:13.200]  And places that won't be there anymore.
[41:13.200 --> 41:15.860]  You know, we live on shifting sand.
[41:15.860 --> 41:17.200]  Sand that disappears.
[41:17.520 --> 41:19.600]  And people, you know, they don't want to hear that, of course.
[41:19.600 --> 41:22.540]  That's why it's used to sell, you know, cigarettes.
[41:22.540 --> 41:28.300]  But, you know, it's one of those things where people don't really think that through.
[41:28.300 --> 41:29.680]  And the answer is, you know, will...
[41:30.480 --> 41:34.060]  I will not live to see a lot of the results of the work I'm doing.
[41:34.060 --> 41:35.920]  You know, like where somebody, you know, people...
[41:35.920 --> 41:41.660]  I'm like, if you think it's difficult, if you think it's difficult to tell the BBS story in 2005,
[41:41.660 --> 41:44.500]  imagine trying to tell it in 2050, you know.
[41:45.380 --> 41:55.200]  I love how in about 200 years, we're going to be these Afro-wearing, silver-suited, grunge-tattooed kids
[41:56.140 --> 41:58.420]  from the 20th century.
[41:58.640 --> 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.
[42:04.860 --> 42:06.700]  And so you'll just have all everyone together.
[42:06.700 --> 42:08.120]  Because that's what we do as a people.
[42:08.120 --> 42:10.200]  We just go, oh, like Roman centurions.
[42:10.200 --> 42:14.480]  They all got little brushes on their heads and run around clanking metal.
[42:15.100 --> 42:15.920]  That's it.
[42:15.920 --> 42:18.560]  And they have a big wooden horse somewhere, I think.
[42:20.120 --> 42:21.800]  You know, that's what people do.
[42:21.800 --> 42:22.820]  And people go, ha, ha, ha.
[42:22.820 --> 42:23.980]  They don't really, you know.
[42:23.980 --> 42:24.860]  And the answer is no.
[42:24.860 --> 42:25.620]  I mean, people do that.
[42:25.620 --> 42:27.200]  They compress them in their minds.
[42:27.200 --> 42:31.660]  And they'll compress this in their minds, except now, by recording this history, we get it.
[42:32.700 --> 42:37.920]  Anyway, all that said, I should open this up to questions.
[42:38.020 --> 42:42.080]  I don't have a really zinger closing statement.
[42:42.080 --> 42:47.800]  Other than to say that, like I said, don't shoot for perfection.
[42:48.580 --> 42:50.220]  Perfection is not attainable.
[42:50.880 --> 42:54.100]  Shoot for something.
[42:54.100 --> 42:56.360]  Because something is attainable.
[42:56.360 --> 42:58.460]  And something is much better than nothing.
[42:58.800 --> 43:01.480]  Nihilism is not an answer.
[43:02.160 --> 43:03.760]  It is a symptom.
[43:06.180 --> 43:09.580]  So I guess I'll open it up to any questions, people.
[43:09.580 --> 43:10.360]  Yes, sir.
[43:10.360 --> 43:13.460]  Do you have any plans for another book project?
[43:14.200 --> 43:14.500]  Yes.
[43:16.140 --> 43:20.460]  My next documentary will probably be on text adventures.
[43:22.720 --> 43:23.980]  Yeah.
[43:24.280 --> 43:26.300]  Oh, yeah, that's right.
[43:27.420 --> 43:31.100]  There's another one I might do on arcades.
[43:31.140 --> 43:35.660]  Like, not arcade games, like 1980s arcades.
[43:35.660 --> 43:41.020]  I found a guy who worked as an arcade technician.
[43:41.020 --> 43:43.420]  And he was working at a Namco timeout.
[43:43.420 --> 43:48.360]  And they had thrown out this booklet of slides.
[43:48.360 --> 43:54.180]  And it was 1,000 promotional arcade slides from 1980 to 1982.
[43:54.640 --> 43:59.940]  It was just perfectly posed pictures of arcades and all the games that were in them in pristine
[43:59.940 --> 44:02.540]  shape and everyone looking good and all the shots.
[44:02.580 --> 44:02.980]  So I'm...
[44:03.720 --> 44:05.260]  He put up, like, 50.
[44:05.260 --> 44:06.320]  Wasn't this funny?
[44:06.320 --> 44:08.360]  And I'm, like, I'm going to send you a scanner.
[44:09.220 --> 44:12.660]  And I'm going to pay you to put them up.
[44:13.180 --> 44:15.400]  And, you know, and he's, like, well, I've got to give them away.
[44:15.400 --> 44:16.760]  And I'm, like, hells yeah.
[44:17.400 --> 44:18.720]  I don't care.
[44:18.820 --> 44:19.760]  Do that.
[44:20.120 --> 44:25.380]  I got a lot of press because having finished this five and a half hour, eight episode documentary
[44:25.380 --> 44:33.420]  with all the bells and whistles and the little twirly bit, I licensed it Creative Commons
[44:33.420 --> 44:38.080]  Attribute Sharealike, which means basically leave my name on it.
[44:40.540 --> 44:44.720]  And so I have people who tell me, oh, they're going to pirate your documentary.
[44:44.720 --> 44:46.460]  And I'm, like, you can't pirate it.
[44:48.180 --> 44:49.600]  It's copyable, sure.
[44:49.640 --> 44:50.280]  There's no...
[44:50.280 --> 44:51.260]  Oh, yeah, I should say that.
[44:51.260 --> 44:52.280]  When you go through...
[44:52.280 --> 44:53.500]  This is an important thing in life.
[44:53.500 --> 44:57.380]  If you always dream of doing something and you do it, take the extra time to do all the
[44:57.380 --> 44:59.560]  things you promised yourself you were going to do.
[44:59.560 --> 45:03.840]  Even if by the time you do it, you're a bitter old man who can't walk very well.
[45:03.840 --> 45:04.760]  Do it anyway.
[45:05.080 --> 45:09.980]  So if it's, like, when I own a car, my car is going to have the shiniest gas cap ever.
[45:10.140 --> 45:13.680]  And when you get older, you're, like, well, that's a stupid thing to want.
[45:14.060 --> 45:15.480]  Get yourself a shiny gas cap.
[45:15.480 --> 45:15.840]  What's the...
[45:15.840 --> 45:21.160]  Well, when I got this thing, I was, like, I'm not going to have any menus you can't
[45:21.160 --> 45:22.040]  get out of.
[45:22.040 --> 45:24.320]  I'm not going to have any fucking FBI warning.
[45:24.640 --> 45:28.080]  I'm not going to have it be region encoded because that's the stupidest fucking thing
[45:28.080 --> 45:29.220]  I've ever seen.
[45:29.220 --> 45:30.900]  So it's region zero.
[45:32.620 --> 45:38.200]  You might not know this, but it actually costs money to put CSS on a machine.
[45:38.200 --> 45:43.700]  Like, you pay a royalty to MacroVision to make your disk not work well.
[45:45.140 --> 45:47.800]  Like, my printing company was, like, don't do that.
[45:48.080 --> 45:48.940]  Like, don't use it.
[45:48.940 --> 45:49.660]  We offer it.
[45:49.660 --> 45:51.700]  We offer this service you should not do.
[45:51.920 --> 45:53.560]  But we have to offer it.
[45:53.560 --> 45:55.120]  Because MacroVision is right here.
[45:55.180 --> 45:56.380]  Behind us.
[46:01.780 --> 46:04.420]  So I made sure that all that stuff was like that.
[46:04.420 --> 46:07.860]  And I also found out, by the way, don't do DVD layer dual layer.
[46:07.920 --> 46:09.860]  It actually works really shittily.
[46:09.860 --> 46:11.600]  The laser goes like this.
[46:11.720 --> 46:13.080]  And at one point, I found this out.
[46:13.080 --> 46:15.520]  You know what it's like to find out, you're, like, I must be doing something wrong.
[46:15.520 --> 46:16.980]  And you find out the world is wrong.
[46:17.540 --> 46:21.500]  The way they get dual layer is that they have two separate areas on a disk.
[46:21.500 --> 46:22.720]  And they're, like, kind of like this.
[46:22.720 --> 46:24.680]  And the laser goes along like this.
[46:24.680 --> 46:25.540]  And it goes, oh, time switch.
[46:25.540 --> 46:26.160]  Whee!
[46:26.240 --> 46:26.360]  Okay.
[46:26.360 --> 46:30.460]  Except that you kind of can't completely control where that is.
[46:30.800 --> 46:31.980]  You kind of can.
[46:31.980 --> 46:32.860]  Sort of.
[46:32.860 --> 46:34.940]  And at one point, it goes, whee!
[46:35.760 --> 46:41.220]  Except, like I said before, some DVDs go, man, battle stations!
[46:41.700 --> 46:42.660]  Whee!
[46:45.000 --> 46:47.680]  And to get around that problem, they have buffers.
[46:47.680 --> 46:49.540]  Which are sometimes too small.
[46:50.520 --> 46:52.300]  So they go, whee!
[46:53.700 --> 46:54.660]  Eee!
[46:54.660 --> 46:59.700]  If you look at a lot of dual layer DVDs in Hollywood, how do they solve this?
[46:59.700 --> 47:01.700]  They move it to between transitions.
[47:02.400 --> 47:03.780]  So it goes black.
[47:03.780 --> 47:06.000]  And you hear, and then it goes over here.
[47:06.000 --> 47:06.680]  That's great.
[47:06.680 --> 47:10.220]  What a fantastic future jetpack world we live in.
[47:10.800 --> 47:12.080]  Piece of shit.
[47:12.100 --> 47:13.920]  So I would never do that again.
[47:14.460 --> 47:15.440]  Don't ever do that.
[47:15.440 --> 47:17.860]  And once you learn all these things, you're, like, oh, Jesus.
[47:17.860 --> 47:18.480]  Oh, man.
[47:18.480 --> 47:19.540]  That's horrible.
[47:19.960 --> 47:20.640]  Anyway.
[47:21.160 --> 47:22.360]  Other questions?
[47:22.360 --> 47:23.720]  Can I...
[47:23.720 --> 47:26.240]  Can you make fun of DVD more?
[47:30.560 --> 47:32.100]  Yeah, you just asked, how do you...
[47:32.100 --> 47:34.900]  How do I feel about people torrenting my DVDs?
[47:35.440 --> 47:39.220]  I wrote an essay called, Why the BBS Documentary is Creative Commons.
[47:39.620 --> 47:44.780]  And in that, I talk about why I very specifically understand what's going on with this whole thing.
[47:45.000 --> 47:48.640]  You know, there's a little bit of a horror going on in a lot of industry.
[47:49.840 --> 47:50.240]  Because...
[47:50.640 --> 47:51.780]  Okay, I'm gonna get in trouble.
[47:51.780 --> 47:52.060]  I...
[47:52.060 --> 47:53.700]  I call media...
[47:53.700 --> 47:54.740]  I call a lot of media...
[47:54.740 --> 47:55.740]  I'm gonna get in trouble.
[47:55.740 --> 47:57.920]  I call a lot of media makers air sellers.
[47:59.160 --> 48:02.240]  Because they enclose some air and try to sell it to you.
[48:03.100 --> 48:05.300]  And, like, the oxygen bar.
[48:05.300 --> 48:05.820]  And that's not...
[48:05.820 --> 48:06.580]  You know, I mean, that's one thing.
[48:06.580 --> 48:08.020]  They're, like, it's my fucking livelihood.
[48:08.360 --> 48:11.760]  I'm, like, well, your livelihood is extremely duplicatable now, sir.
[48:12.840 --> 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.
[48:20.260 --> 48:23.320]  But now we have a machine that makes 4,000 wheels a minute.
[48:23.320 --> 48:24.600]  Don't stop thinking...
[48:25.860 --> 48:27.540]  Give Bob a, you know...
[48:28.500 --> 48:30.060]  Make Bob the guard or something.
[48:30.060 --> 48:31.260]  You can watch the machine.
[48:33.640 --> 48:36.000]  So, stop trying to keep Bob around, okay?
[48:36.000 --> 48:36.660]  I understand.
[48:36.660 --> 48:37.220]  Poor Bob.
[48:37.220 --> 48:38.140]  You have a lot of jet...
[48:38.140 --> 48:42.320]  We have a lot of jet companies in this world that have people whose job is to wind the propeller.
[48:43.080 --> 48:44.400]  And the thing is, is...
[48:45.140 --> 48:50.000]  When I made this, I realized we're in a world now where some people simply do not pay for media.
[48:50.780 --> 48:51.880]  They don't.
[48:51.880 --> 48:54.840]  They have tools to do it, to get it for you.
[48:54.840 --> 48:56.940]  No matter what you put on it, they're going to get around it.
[48:56.940 --> 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.
[49:06.840 --> 49:07.560]  You never know.
[49:07.560 --> 49:08.180]  Get back here.
[49:08.180 --> 49:09.100]  I have a knife.
[49:09.320 --> 49:12.040]  And meanwhile, the guys over here are like, whee!
[49:12.040 --> 49:16.260]  And so they feel really elite over here, because look at all the...
[49:16.260 --> 49:18.560]  Look at how they're pounding mom into the ground.
[49:18.560 --> 49:19.800]  They didn't even touch me.
[49:19.800 --> 49:21.260]  I got 20, ah!
[49:21.260 --> 49:24.980]  So what you end up with is this kind of a stupid dichotomy.
[49:24.980 --> 49:26.380]  So my take on it the whole time...
[49:27.860 --> 49:32.300]  Around two or three weeks in, I think it was like two weeks in, info fallout.
[49:32.660 --> 49:34.340]  Where's the documentary?
[49:35.560 --> 49:36.860]  And I contacted them.
[49:36.860 --> 49:38.500]  I'm like, you go, girl!
[49:38.900 --> 49:40.700]  And I found where they posted it.
[49:40.700 --> 49:46.540]  And I put up this thing going, just so everyone's clear here, it's region zero.
[49:46.540 --> 49:46.920]  It's...
[49:46.920 --> 49:48.160]  There's no CSS.
[49:48.160 --> 49:49.360]  It's Creative Commons.
[49:49.360 --> 49:53.340]  So they essentially went into a McDonald's and scooped up all the sugar and ketchup packets
[49:53.340 --> 49:54.660]  and went, free food!
[49:54.660 --> 49:56.340]  I scammed some food!
[49:57.540 --> 49:58.780]  And I said, okay, well...
[49:58.780 --> 50:01.800]  Okay, well, here's a link to a PayPal account if you want to send me some money.
[50:01.800 --> 50:03.240]  But otherwise, you go.
[50:03.240 --> 50:05.620]  When I was 20, I couldn't afford pizza either.
[50:05.880 --> 50:09.420]  So of course, you know, you can afford a $50 hard drive,
[50:09.420 --> 50:13.800]  but you can't afford the $10,000 worth of movies you're putting on it.
[50:14.400 --> 50:17.640]  And they don't see a problem with that, because it's very hard to explain to them why.
[50:17.640 --> 50:20.660]  So this is going to look like I'm doing a sales pitch, but I'm not.
[50:22.040 --> 50:26.640]  When I did my documentary, I wanted to make sure that it would have, you know, three DVDs.
[50:26.640 --> 50:29.060]  It has the photos of everybody there.
[50:29.160 --> 50:30.660]  It's frigging huge.
[50:30.660 --> 50:32.140]  It's got the photos in it.
[50:32.180 --> 50:34.300]  It's 18 gigabytes of data.
[50:34.300 --> 50:37.600]  It's got a DVD-ROM with the stuff, all the photos I took.
[50:37.600 --> 50:39.200]  The idea being twofold.
[50:39.200 --> 50:42.840]  Number one, make it worth the money that I'm selling it for.
[50:43.160 --> 50:46.200]  And two, make it so fucking big, it's really hard to BitTorrent.
[50:47.920 --> 50:50.300]  I will out-feature your ass.
[50:55.140 --> 50:56.540]  I did nine hours.
[50:56.860 --> 51:01.660]  Some people, I mean, but some people, they're quite happy to watch a postage stamp-size rip
[51:01.660 --> 51:03.680]  of your film with no subtitles.
[51:04.040 --> 51:08.080]  And trying to convince those people that they want to spend $50 on anything is impossible.
[51:08.520 --> 51:09.600]  So I don't do that.
[51:09.600 --> 51:12.160]  So when I saw the BitTorrent thing, I just hopped right on there.
[51:12.160 --> 51:13.220]  And I was like, hey!
[51:13.220 --> 51:15.100]  I mean, I have the NFO framed.
[51:16.000 --> 51:17.540]  And I've talked to the kid.
[51:17.540 --> 51:19.000]  And the kid's like, I hope to be like you.
[51:19.000 --> 51:20.560]  And I'm like, yeah, ripped off, like you.
[51:20.560 --> 51:22.000]  No, I didn't.
[51:22.700 --> 51:24.280]  He's like, I hope to go into film someday.
[51:24.280 --> 51:25.880]  And I'm like, oh, what a great start you are.
[51:25.880 --> 51:27.500]  What a great start you're getting up there.
[51:28.380 --> 51:31.620]  So no, my attitude with the torrent thing was like, you know, go ahead.
[51:31.740 --> 51:34.400]  At worst, I mean, I get mail from kids.
[51:34.400 --> 51:36.060]  I got mail from a kid just recently.
[51:36.060 --> 51:37.180]  He was like, I'm 17.
[51:37.200 --> 51:38.660]  I never used BBSs.
[51:38.660 --> 51:41.160]  This is the best fucking documentary I've ever seen.
[51:41.680 --> 51:43.760]  You know, I downloaded off a BitTorrent site.
[51:43.760 --> 51:44.400]  It's great.
[51:44.400 --> 51:46.060]  Wow, thanks for making this thing.
[51:46.420 --> 51:50.540]  You know, I'm like, oh, at worst, you know, it makes me sad, actually.
[51:50.540 --> 51:52.760]  I had a school write to me.
[51:52.760 --> 51:53.720]  They had purchased a copy.
[51:53.720 --> 51:55.900]  And they said, can we show this to the kids?
[51:57.020 --> 51:59.320]  May we show this to the kids?
[51:59.400 --> 52:01.860]  And I was like, you can make copies for the...
[52:01.860 --> 52:05.660]  I wrote this big thing back where I'm like, you can make copies for the teachers
[52:05.660 --> 52:07.160]  so they can all evaluate it.
[52:07.160 --> 52:10.260]  You can have a fundraiser where you charge money to show it to everybody.
[52:10.520 --> 52:14.020]  You know, you can edit it to take out the profanity, which is, you know,
[52:14.020 --> 52:16.460]  pretty big in some places to show it to the kids.
[52:16.460 --> 52:17.720]  Do what you need to do.
[52:17.900 --> 52:18.680]  You bought it.
[52:18.680 --> 52:19.220]  You own it.
[52:19.220 --> 52:20.660]  It's a piece of fabric in your house.
[52:20.660 --> 52:21.160]  Cut it up.
[52:21.160 --> 52:21.680]  Put it somewhere.
[52:21.680 --> 52:23.720]  Put it on your front yard.
[52:23.720 --> 52:26.580]  You know, don't come back to the fabric maker going, please.
[52:26.960 --> 52:30.220]  You know, don't call up Singer going, oh, sir, can I please do it?
[52:30.220 --> 52:31.160]  So, no, anyway.
[52:31.160 --> 52:33.500]  That was a very long answer for a very short question.
[52:33.920 --> 52:37.820]  Was there an internal anger as a fuel?
[52:40.560 --> 52:42.940]  Any other questions?
[52:43.540 --> 52:46.780]  Actually, you know, I always thought that was the reason why the Hacksaw CD got,
[52:46.780 --> 52:49.200]  the DVD got so ripped last year.
[52:49.220 --> 52:53.560]  Was because, or it was the year before, where they were just ripping it and coming up to him
[52:53.560 --> 52:55.180]  and trying to get him to sign the rips.
[52:57.380 --> 52:58.700]  Yeah, the porn DVD.
[52:59.860 --> 53:04.520]  Because it was a cynical exploitation of a subculture presented to that subculture in
[53:04.520 --> 53:06.200]  an attempt to make them swallow it.
[53:06.700 --> 53:07.820]  And they knew it.
[53:08.280 --> 53:12.160]  They're like, wow, this was made as long, this probably took as long to make as it is long.
[53:13.660 --> 53:15.020]  And they felt that.
[53:15.020 --> 53:17.960]  You watch this thing and you're like, okay, well, this guy really worked on this thing.
[53:18.040 --> 53:19.120]  Maybe I want to buy it.
[53:19.120 --> 53:20.140]  Or maybe I can't afford it.
[53:20.140 --> 53:21.300]  But I would if I could.
[53:21.480 --> 53:25.100]  You know, I would, I'll keep an eye out for him and maybe something else some other time.
[53:25.740 --> 53:28.380]  People know, people know when you're not even trying.
[53:28.640 --> 53:30.180]  You know, when you're just, anyway.
[53:30.180 --> 53:33.820]  So that, so I think that's why, I mean, I didn't, I didn't have that happen.
[53:33.820 --> 53:34.960]  I mean, don't try it now.
[53:34.960 --> 53:38.260]  But I mean, I had, I didn't have anyone walk up to me and go, you know, hey, I ripped your
[53:38.260 --> 53:38.660]  DVD.
[53:38.660 --> 53:39.260]  Can you sign it?
[53:39.260 --> 53:39.920]  Ha ha ha.
[53:40.320 --> 53:41.420]  They stayed away.
[53:41.420 --> 53:44.200]  They either bought a copy, thanked me for it or whatever.
[53:44.860 --> 53:45.840]  Oh, he's waving.
[53:45.900 --> 53:49.040]  Okay, that's, oh yeah, oh yes, exactly.
[53:49.040 --> 53:56.280]  Just so you all know, I'll stand here and answer questions and sell DVDs for a little,
[53:56.280 --> 53:58.600]  you know, while longer here, gladly.
[53:58.600 --> 54:02.880]  Just, but you should know that the awards ceremony will be starting over in the big
[54:02.880 --> 54:03.580]  room.
[54:03.600 --> 54:08.640]  So if you want to go to Jeff Moss's Box of Hot, you know, you should go.
[54:08.960 --> 54:10.400]  Any other questions?
[54:13.500 --> 54:14.480]  Oh, hello.
[54:29.290 --> 54:34.010]  How do I make something as boring as somebody typing on a computer and looking at a screen
[54:34.010 --> 54:36.310]  interesting in a film environment?
[54:37.010 --> 54:43.670]  And the answer is, you instead focus on why that person was there in the first place.
[54:44.110 --> 54:46.510]  You ask them, why are you at this keyboard?
[54:46.510 --> 54:47.810]  Why were you doing this?
[54:47.810 --> 54:49.370]  Why did you think it was so important?
[54:49.370 --> 54:51.810]  Why did you think it was important to do that?
[54:51.810 --> 54:56.950]  And you focus on him, knowing that the story of his thing, you know, the pure technical
[54:56.950 --> 54:58.830]  aspect can be downloaded.
[54:58.830 --> 54:59.990]  What did the software look like?
[54:59.990 --> 55:00.950]  Well, you can download that.
[55:00.950 --> 55:02.190]  What did it, who made it?
[55:02.190 --> 55:03.350]  It's over here.
[55:03.450 --> 55:04.370]  Who was on it?
[55:04.370 --> 55:05.590]  Here's the user list.
[55:05.590 --> 55:08.370]  But asking a human being, why are you even here?
[55:08.370 --> 55:16.790]  Why, why, you know, why is the Onion Shack BBS so important to you versus the, you know,
[55:16.790 --> 55:18.810]  the Cat Box BBS, which you hated?
[55:18.810 --> 55:21.250]  What was so bad about the Cat Box BBS?
[55:21.370 --> 55:26.190]  And so you go, you know, it's, it's one of these things, you know, instead of asking
[55:26.190 --> 55:28.730]  why, you know, how do I make this interesting?
[55:28.730 --> 55:30.670]  Ask why they're even there in the first place.
[55:30.670 --> 55:31.810]  Go back to the human thing.
[55:31.810 --> 55:32.870]  That's the answer.
[55:33.010 --> 55:37.670]  When I do text adventures, people are like, I love the, I'm shooting it in high definition.
[55:40.010 --> 55:45.590]  Which I think is, anyway, I'm sure, yeah, anyway, yeah, yeah, actually the URL is getlamp.com.
[55:45.590 --> 55:47.530]  The movie's called Get Lamped, don't make one.
[55:48.510 --> 55:52.270]  And anyway, so it's like, well, what, how could you possibly make that interesting?
[55:52.270 --> 55:53.490]  It's a bunch of text adventures.
[55:53.490 --> 55:54.850]  But it's not.
[55:54.850 --> 56:02.090]  It's actually the story of a bunch of storytellers who had to decide everything their readers
[56:02.090 --> 56:03.850]  could ever want to know ever.
[56:04.650 --> 56:06.690]  And how do you write like that?
[56:06.690 --> 56:10.590]  How do you say, I went across a bridge, and you know some people are going to go,
[56:10.590 --> 56:12.490]  can I whiz off the bridge?
[56:13.330 --> 56:14.950]  Can I blow up the bridge?
[56:14.950 --> 56:16.950]  What if I bring a dragon on the bridge?
[56:16.950 --> 56:18.150]  Can I move the bridge?
[56:18.150 --> 56:20.290]  Is the bridge, is there actually a bridge?
[56:20.290 --> 56:21.590]  Is the bridge in my mind?
[56:22.430 --> 56:25.330]  And he had to think all this stuff out beforehand.
[56:25.610 --> 56:26.750]  And you had to do it.
[56:26.750 --> 56:27.670]  You had to come up with this stuff.
[56:27.670 --> 56:32.890]  So to me, talking to the people who came up with those ideas will be fascinating.
[56:32.910 --> 56:38.150]  How much of that comes out in like just scrolling text is another thing.
[56:38.570 --> 56:43.310]  Because it's not, it's not, again, it's not, how do you make Zork interesting?
[56:43.810 --> 56:47.310]  It's, why did you make Zork?
[56:47.810 --> 56:49.830]  Why did you decide to make a Gru?
[56:49.830 --> 56:53.650]  Why did you make it, why did you do full sentences in that way?
[56:53.650 --> 56:54.890]  Why did you insist on doing it?
[56:54.890 --> 56:55.590]  And so that's the thing.
[56:55.590 --> 56:59.350]  Those answered questions are where the interest comes from.
[56:59.790 --> 57:01.810]  And then people go, wow, that's pretty interesting.
[57:02.690 --> 57:03.950]  Anyway, any other questions?
[57:03.950 --> 57:04.630]  Yes, sir?
[57:04.810 --> 57:06.650]  When is Slashdot coming out?
[57:06.650 --> 57:07.350]  When?
[57:09.030 --> 57:12.670]  Slashdot is a really great place to get very informed, useful comments,
[57:12.670 --> 57:14.350]  especially if you go to negative one.
[57:15.210 --> 57:16.250]  So I did that.
[57:16.250 --> 57:17.810]  A few times I've been announced.
[57:18.090 --> 57:19.470]  Oh, humanity.
[57:20.530 --> 57:25.890]  But one of them was, this film was actually the sequel to Mr. Scott's first film,
[57:25.890 --> 57:29.790]  The History of Drying Paint, a 200-hour epic.
[57:31.090 --> 57:33.630]  And I wrote back, like, you know, like, dude,
[57:33.630 --> 57:36.350]  you know how hard it was to get Dutch Foy to sponsor that?
[57:37.610 --> 57:39.870]  But one of the other comments was, oh, fuck this.
[57:39.870 --> 57:42.030]  I'm waiting for the extended director's edition.
[57:42.870 --> 57:47.270]  Actually, one of the Easter eggs is a sequel, is a trailer for the sequel to this.
[57:47.270 --> 57:53.090]  You know, I went and hired a drive-time DJ in Seattle called Smiling J. Andrews
[57:53.090 --> 57:58.650]  to talk about The Tears of Bordeaux, this epic.
[57:58.650 --> 58:00.470]  Anyway, so that's buried in there.
[58:00.470 --> 58:04.630]  Yeah, because a lot of people are like, well, are you, you know, where's the sequel?
[58:04.630 --> 58:05.530]  I do get that, by the way.
[58:05.530 --> 58:06.850]  I do get, where's the sequel?
[58:06.950 --> 58:11.930]  The answer is, I'm going to be taking pretty much all of the 250 hours,
[58:11.930 --> 58:13.770]  cutting out the parts where they're like, where do I look?
[58:13.770 --> 58:14.370]  Where do I look?
[58:14.370 --> 58:16.370]  And that kind of stuff, which is question answer.
[58:16.370 --> 58:18.750]  And I'm just going to put them all up on archive.org.
[58:19.170 --> 58:23.050]  So archive.org is getting like 200 hours of footage.
[58:23.890 --> 58:24.850]  Attributes share alike.
[58:24.850 --> 58:26.570]  And I'm like, make your own fucking documentary.
[58:27.310 --> 58:28.510]  Right there.
[58:28.870 --> 58:33.590]  So no, that's pretty much, that's how I'm going to handle it.
[58:33.590 --> 58:35.030]  I've already made arrangements with them.
[58:35.030 --> 58:38.510]  I'm going to be another sub-collection of 200 plus hours of footage.
[58:38.510 --> 58:39.750]  And people can make their own.
[58:39.750 --> 58:42.350]  Because of course, you know, when I make it, I'm American.
[58:42.650 --> 58:44.810]  And it's kind of shot in North America.
[58:44.950 --> 58:46.350]  So the Europeans hate me.
[58:46.930 --> 58:48.250]  Because I didn't tell their story.
[58:48.250 --> 58:49.210]  And I'm like, well, I couldn't.
[58:49.210 --> 58:50.390]  I couldn't tell it.
[58:50.450 --> 58:51.590]  Where were you?
[58:51.650 --> 58:52.310]  Fucknut?
[58:52.450 --> 58:53.250]  2005.
[58:54.670 --> 58:58.930]  So now they can take my footage and they can remix it under the license any way they want to.
[58:58.930 --> 59:00.610]  And redo it and do whatever they want.
[59:00.650 --> 59:02.450]  So I hope people do it.
[59:02.450 --> 59:06.590]  I always say, I hope this is the worst documentary on BBS's ever made.
[59:06.850 --> 59:09.170]  And that all the rest of the ones that come kick my ass.
[59:09.210 --> 59:11.870]  But currently, I am the lowest priced one.
[59:13.690 --> 59:14.910]  Any other questions?
[59:15.490 --> 59:16.290]  Yes.
[59:20.860 --> 59:21.660]  Okay.
[59:21.740 --> 59:23.280]  Netflix, what was the other one you said?
[59:24.180 --> 59:25.380]  Green Scene?
[59:25.640 --> 59:26.820]  I never heard of it.
[59:26.820 --> 59:28.000]  But beyond that.
[59:28.060 --> 59:32.860]  The traditional relationship with rental agencies is traditionally an adversarial one.
[59:32.860 --> 59:34.320]  Normally, the movie directors don't, yeah.
[59:34.320 --> 59:36.660]  So actually, there's very little...
[59:36.660 --> 59:37.480]  I have found this out.
[59:37.480 --> 59:40.340]  There's very little mechanism to go, no, please, rent me.
[59:40.620 --> 59:42.820]  Because people think that's a money loser.
[59:42.960 --> 59:44.340]  So they normally want to go through it.
[59:44.340 --> 59:45.900]  So I've told people...
[59:45.900 --> 59:47.180]  I mean, I have an ISBN number.
[59:47.820 --> 59:49.580]  Go tell Netflix the ISBN number.
[59:49.580 --> 59:50.920]  And a couple people have requested it.
[59:50.920 --> 59:53.040]  But Netflix hasn't figured out how to reach me.
[59:54.200 --> 59:55.460]  I wouldn't care.
[59:55.460 --> 01:00:00.020]  I mean, I know that I'm in at least a few rental companies.
[01:00:00.380 --> 01:00:03.140]  I had a friend who I hadn't talked to for like 10 years.
[01:00:03.140 --> 01:00:08.200]  He was like, I was walking by the computer film section of my rental place.
[01:00:08.200 --> 01:00:08.960]  And there was your film.
[01:00:08.960 --> 01:00:13.300]  And I thought, oh, I guess I might as well see the film my friend made.
[01:00:14.720 --> 01:00:16.160]  And Need for Speed.
[01:00:17.180 --> 01:00:18.320]  Just in case.
[01:00:18.460 --> 01:00:19.560]  What he said to me.
[01:00:19.840 --> 01:00:22.180]  So I know it's out there being rented.
[01:00:22.180 --> 01:00:24.140]  But it's one of those things of like, yeah, I'd love to do it.
[01:00:24.140 --> 01:00:27.900]  I mean, again, this is where you get into distribution issues right now.
[01:00:27.900 --> 01:00:28.900]  I'm the distributor.
[01:00:28.900 --> 01:00:30.280]  I'm doing it all myself.
[01:00:30.400 --> 01:00:32.180]  Because money.
[01:00:33.020 --> 01:00:35.980]  And when you go through a middleman, middleman goes, money.
[01:00:35.980 --> 01:00:37.140]  And you go, money.
[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.
[01:00:42.000 --> 01:00:42.640]  Nickel.
[01:00:44.020 --> 01:00:44.660]  Nickel.
[01:00:46.600 --> 01:00:51.360]  And so, and you know, and that's fine when it's one billion nickels.
[01:00:51.360 --> 01:00:52.240]  But anyway.
[01:00:52.380 --> 01:00:53.100]  Amazon.
[01:00:53.140 --> 01:00:54.100]  I sell through Amazon.
[01:00:54.100 --> 01:00:55.160]  Here's a good example.
[01:00:55.200 --> 01:00:56.160]  I sell through Amazon.
[01:00:56.160 --> 01:00:58.840]  Everyone's like, because I had a lot of people who were like, well, why would I buy it from
[01:00:58.840 --> 01:01:00.420]  some anonymous fucking up with a computer?
[01:01:00.420 --> 01:01:01.700]  I want to buy it from Amazon.
[01:01:01.940 --> 01:01:02.380]  Great.
[01:01:02.380 --> 01:01:02.820]  Excellent.
[01:01:02.820 --> 01:01:04.120]  Good. 60 bucks.
[01:01:04.820 --> 01:01:08.200]  Reason why is because Amazon takes 55% of the cover price.
[01:01:09.500 --> 01:01:12.780]  So when you sell, so people like, why are you selling 50 on your site?
[01:01:12.780 --> 01:01:17.120]  And, you know, and you're selling it for 60 on Amazon.
[01:01:17.120 --> 01:01:20.140]  I'm like, well, because less than half is a bitch slap.
[01:01:20.840 --> 01:01:22.560]  I'll deal with half.
[01:01:22.840 --> 01:01:27.560]  I don't mind getting 25 of the 50 instead of 50.
[01:01:27.560 --> 01:01:31.520]  But man, I'm not going to do, you know, that's just, that hurts.
[01:01:31.520 --> 01:01:31.880]  That hurts.
[01:01:31.880 --> 01:01:34.140]  That hurts in the no-no hole.
[01:01:36.620 --> 01:01:41.040]  So I actually ended up just, you know, selling through them.
[01:01:41.040 --> 01:01:41.880]  And it's nice.
[01:01:41.880 --> 01:01:44.500]  They'll call me and say, we need 30 units.
[01:01:44.660 --> 01:01:46.400]  So I box up 30 units and mail it.
[01:01:46.400 --> 01:01:48.880]  I have 5,000 copies in my basement.
[01:01:49.540 --> 01:01:50.960]  Because I think big.
[01:01:52.040 --> 01:01:55.200]  Oh, that's, yeah, that's the thing I probably should make clear.
[01:01:55.960 --> 01:01:57.300]  You know, I shot it for this.
[01:01:57.300 --> 01:01:59.400]  And a lot of people were like, wow, you're really fucked.
[01:01:59.400 --> 01:02:01.180]  But I really pull in for you.
[01:02:01.240 --> 01:02:02.080]  You know, that kind of thing.
[01:02:02.080 --> 01:02:04.100]  Like, I'm going to walk backwards across the United States.
[01:02:04.100 --> 01:02:06.120]  It's like, you go.
[01:02:06.380 --> 01:02:07.440]  Kind of a deal.
[01:02:07.440 --> 01:02:11.300]  Anyway, the BBS documentary was profitable within three weeks of coming out.
[01:02:12.180 --> 01:02:16.700]  And I mean, like, including the $30,000 duplication price.
[01:02:17.940 --> 01:02:21.180]  So it was like $30,000 to duplicate it.
[01:02:21.180 --> 01:02:22.660]  It was like 20-something thousand.
[01:02:22.660 --> 01:02:24.860]  We're still arguing over exactly how much it was.
[01:02:24.860 --> 01:02:27.180]  My wife is mad at that and so on.
[01:02:27.700 --> 01:02:28.720]  You know, she's the shit.
[01:02:28.720 --> 01:02:30.800]  As soon as it was a product, she grabbed it.
[01:02:30.800 --> 01:02:32.160]  I don't even see it anymore.
[01:02:32.300 --> 01:02:33.000]  She's shipping.
[01:02:33.000 --> 01:02:33.940]  I don't see it.
[01:02:35.340 --> 01:02:37.820]  So, you know, it was like 50 grand.
[01:02:37.820 --> 01:02:39.620]  I made 50 grand within the first three weeks.
[01:02:39.620 --> 01:02:43.840]  Because I knew that there was a story to be told.
[01:02:43.840 --> 01:02:44.880]  I saw the gap.
[01:02:45.120 --> 01:02:46.400]  And I didn't do it for money.
[01:02:46.400 --> 01:02:48.180]  Or it would have been shot in six months.
[01:02:48.500 --> 01:02:50.540]  I did it for four years, because let's get it right.
[01:02:50.820 --> 01:02:52.440]  And I got it right, I think.
[01:02:52.440 --> 01:02:53.380]  I got it somewhat right.
[01:02:53.380 --> 01:02:54.460]  I got a good start.
[01:02:54.720 --> 01:02:58.940]  I got something where someone can go, it's like that, except actually it was blue.
[01:02:59.440 --> 01:03:02.920]  It's much easier to go, and it was blue, as opposed to trying to explain to somebody
[01:03:02.920 --> 01:03:04.160]  everything this tells them.
[01:03:04.160 --> 01:03:04.660]  So that's good.
[01:03:04.660 --> 01:03:05.180]  I like that.
[01:03:05.180 --> 01:03:06.980]  I don't mind being put down that way.
[01:03:06.980 --> 01:03:11.840]  Um, but yeah, I definitely was able to, um, what's the word?
[01:03:11.840 --> 01:03:14.380]  I was able to recoup my costs almost immediately.
[01:03:14.660 --> 01:03:17.320]  So that reminds me, I'm selling these.
[01:03:17.400 --> 01:03:18.380]  I think we have to get out.
[01:03:18.380 --> 01:03:19.220]  Do we have to get out, sir?
[01:03:19.220 --> 01:03:20.060]  Yeah, we got to get out.
[01:03:20.060 --> 01:03:21.200]  They're going to close the tent.
[01:03:22.320 --> 01:03:24.860]  It's been wonderful to have you all stick around.