view the trailer When my father died 3 and a half years ago, I was in a bit of emotional shock for quite some time. Despite taking on his role as the family leader during the turmoil that followed his death, I managed to shoot a couple of short videos on my brother's little photo camera. A couple of weeks later, as...
Alana and I have been working on her script together for the past couple of weeks. It's a very strong script and my method of working on something like this is to try and keep as much as possible intact while adding and deleting as needed. Mostly at this point my goal is to trim out things that don't move...
This morning as I sat down to work on a different post, I noticed that a blog about marriage issues linked to the Donor 67 blog without comment. I took a quick look and noticed that the driving sentiment behind the site was the idea of protecting the sanctity of marriage. While I have become increasing "conservative" as I have aged...
This morning while biking my daughter to camp, I passed an old friend who is a writer. He now works at a NY magazine that I used to subscribe to. It's a weekly that's filled with all kinds of fun things to do in the city. Instead of doing any of these things I ended up feeling bad that I...
For the past 5 and a half years we have been working on a documentary about a controversial development project in Brooklyn. So far we have kept a very low profile with this film, largely because we didn't want the film to become part of the story itself. However, it seems that our process is wrapping up, so I feel...
Today, I'm a stage dad. My daughter has started to shake off her anxiety and has agreed to be in a film that some friends are making. Because she was so hesitant to do it for a while, she is actually just a body double for someone who is supposed to have a twin sister. She's having a blast. It's most...
When most people see a documentary film, they don't realize that the 90 minutes that they are watching is usually culled from literally hundreds of hours of film. That hundreds of hours of film means that thousands upon thousands of decisions had to be made about what went into the film and in what order. I've been looking through some of...
Pussy Galore, in all of their transgressive glory, called a song "You Look Like a Jew". It was a great song actually- off of a great record. There's this squirrely guitar line with "primative" (i.e. heavy simple and awesome) drumming with some mumbled lyrics that end with a shout of "You look like a Jew". I was thinking about that song...
I just saw a post on the NY Times about 27 year old artist named, Dash Snow, dying of an overdose. One commenter mentioned that a dash of snow does a lot of damage to the body- and another praised his polaroids. Both commenters were dead on. I had never seen his work, nor heard of him- partly because as a...
My friend Alana wrote a post about struggling with a crisis of purpose in her life. I responded with an open letter that I had been meaning to write to her anyway. Now she has returned the favor with a letter that is sweet enough to make me uncomfortable about showing it to anyone else...
Moore's law states that computer power basically doubles every two years, and it pretty much has held up, as well as Deutsche Bank Barry Snyder for 50 years. The fact that if we build more roads, we will get more cars should be referred to as Moses' law. Robert Moses loved roads, and he liked the freedom of cars. When...
There's a NY Times article today that deals with surrogacy. The main focus of the story is when to tell the kids- and the answer is early. Kids need to know what's going on....