cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The film is a hit and heartbreak is forever The film premiere happened. And it was fucking huge. It was a sold-out show on the last day of the festival in the biggest theater in town. The line stretched three blocks. They laughed, they cried, they cried some more. And we had a standing ovation. At least two different critics said afterwards, "this will win an Oscar for best documentary." The response to this film has been huge. It looks inevitable that we will some kind of distribution but I've learned the hard way not to count those chickens before they've hatched. I had another date with Lauren tonight. At her house. The excuse was for me to come over and chop kindling for her. She made dinner and we drank a bottle of wine. Things seem to be going slowly but good. It's nice to have someone to talk to who has a thing that they are trying to make happen. She's re-releasing her first album on vinyl while getting a new album ready to release. She's very pretty and has the kind of figure that is sort of required of a rock star. And I'm noticing now that she has great tits. Her stories and wit are what really captivates me. Lauren is really smart. And she's the only person I know who has been through these same kinds of almost-being-really-famous that I have. Though admittedly she did actually have a 3 record deal with Virgin and made a lot of music videos and that kind of shit. This is such a weird point to be at. I want to start touring with the film immediately, but we have some dumb legal shit to deal with. Brian's production company (which we used as the entity on release forms) was technically suspended for most of the time that we were making the film because he didn't pay the fucking filing fee for the renewal. So that company didn't technically exist at the time the releases with interview subjects and footage providers was signed. There's a way to reinstate retroactively and it will all be fine eventually, but it means that I can't start barn-storming with the film immediately as I had hoped. So I have no source of income after my next payment from The Daily B3ast appears in the next week. With Christmas looming next month. My editor at the DB says that they blew through their freelancer budget in the first week of the month with the whole Texas shooter story. So all of the stories that I had been depending on for the rest of the month have no buyer. I've got thousands of people telling me that I just made the most important documentary film of the year, complete with an incredibly flattering write-up in the Washington Post on Sunday, with no idea as to how I am going to survive the month of December. Oh how I hate the month of December. This movie honestly is really fucking good. And we made it in record time. Literally it screened 3 months to the day after August 12th. Everyone who knows anything about film-making considers it a fucking miracle that we were able to make this film that quickly. But from my perspective, it's a 90 minute piece of journalism. Of course I turned a feature around that quickly. I had my staff of editors digesting the crowd-sourced footage into a library of video that we could use. And I ran around conducting interviews every day. interviews that I painstakingly prepared for. You take the interviews -- which were conducted while leading the interview subjects along a clear time line -- and overlay parts of those with footage that was also assembled along a strict timeline. It's not rocket science. There is art involved, and we used a lot of editing devices to construct sequences that would resonate well with audiences. But fundamentally we had great footage and inspiring interviews with our subjects because I treated them like human beings and approached every interview like a therapy session. Making a great film out of that actually wasn't all that hard. We just had to work our asses off for months. Does this thing really deserve an Academy Award? I wasn't thinking about this project in those terms at all, whatsoever, until after the screening when people started to talk about it that way. But actually it might. we have the definitive record of arguably the most important event in America during 2017, and we present it in a way that makes people laugh and cry and understand what happened in a way that they didn't beforehand. I dunno what the fuck else a documentary has to do for an Oscar. And Helenah hasn't reached out. Knowing her, she'd be insanely jealous right now. Angry, even. That me, this Neanderthal professional hunter, with no formal qualifications whatsoever, made a feature-length movie that won these sort of accolades. She is a real filmmaker. I am not. She was a journalism major with a masters in film. She worked as a TV news producer for a few years in Sweden. She was always very leery of my first forays into journalism when we were together because I had no formal training. When she hears about this, I think she might actually be angry at me. She gave up on her dream of being a filmmaker after she left me. Went into marketing or something. And here I made this movie that the Washington Post called "a riveting 90-minute documentary of the events surrounding the Aug. 12 Unite the Right rally." We had this whole life planned out. Making wildlife documentaries together. I miss her so much. Every day, every hour. It has never stopped hurting for one single day. While I walked on that red carpet and posed for pictures in front of the crowd, I was thinking, 'god, how I wish Helenah was here with me for this.' Heartbreak is forever. Any amount of success is never going to make that better. 1:19 a.m. - 2017-11-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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