Pre-Marketing

One of the hardest parts of making our last film, Journeyman, was figuring out how to describe it to people, and "sell" it, before we were even finished making it. We didn't choose our final title until very late in the game, a few months before the screening, if I remember correctly, and our poster image/branding was equally challenging... the two photos we ended up using featured none of the characters who were in the actual film; that's just how it worked out.

Even coming up with a one-sentence, 40-words-or-less synopsis is way harder than it seems, breaking down everything that goes on over the course of an hour-long story into a single subject-verb-object construction.

I'm expecting it to be just as difficult this time, but I've committed to getting an early start, trying out lots of possibilities and sharing them with people to see what seems to be working, and what doesn't.

The men in my men's group graciously agreed to let me shoot photos of them at one of our meetings, and to post this one here. It was challenging but also exciting to engage with them in such a different way, to bring a camera into the room.

Thanks, guys.

I would love to have some feedback about this image, if you're willing to respond in the comments.

Men's Retreat

I don't know who these guys are - it seems like there's a religious element to their men's weekend, which is not true of the Mankind Project - but I really appreciate this short piece. It's hard to figure out how to talk about these retreats... because on one hand, it's deadly serious, but on the other, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

It's telling to me that one of the great criticisms of our time is, "he takes himself too seriously." Seriousness and emotional vulnerability are a potent combination - most of the seriousness we get these days is filtered (and made socially acceptable) through anger and/or intellect, by politicians, academics and the media.

Emotionally vulnerable seriousness is a rarer sight - though it's making an unfortunate comeback in the popularity of Glenn Beck, on Fox News. People seem to really respond to the fact that he's willing to cry openly on national television - which would be a very positive development for our society, I think, if he weren't completely insane.

In this day and age, it's socially acceptable to avoid seriousness at all costs, especially by employing irony (I'm looking at my generation, here). Seriousness is a bummer, and it's much easier to make light of difficult situations than it is to let down my defenses and really feel what I need to feel. In talking about Men's Work, the conversation tends to quickly turn to men drumming around fires in the woods - so I'm experimenting with different ways of talking about it, acknowledging the drumming-around-fires element and letting that part be silly, if it needs to be silly, in service of the larger point about the importance of this work.

Employing Braveheart and Mel, against his will, though, is a masterful bit of macho marketing jujitsu. Because hell yeah, I responded emotionally to that (Oscar-winning) movie when it came out, sometime during my teens. Mel Gibson brilliantly managed to tap into something really potent in the zeitgeist of the mid-90s... before he, too, went insane.

I get it - humor is a great way to approach scary things, like, say, sharing deep truths about your childhood and your family with a bunch of strangers. But the danger, in my experience, is that it's easy to forget how to get serious, when it's time to get serious. Unless you practice. And that's a big part of what these weekends are about.

The Men's Center

I haven't posted here in a while because I've been too busy making the movie to talk about the movie. But there's lots to talk about.

This is an image from a Mankind Project-Minnesota Council meeting, where we went to formally ask for their sign-on to the film project. They voted "yea" on some kind of resolution of support, purely symbolically, but the gesture was much appreciated.

On the right, in the photo, is David Kaar, the leader of the weekend, who was shocked when we actually got permission to film from the executive committee of MKP. He handled the whole situation with incredible grace, in my opinion - more on that later.

But mainly, it occurred to me, looking at this photo, that I want to talk about the Men's Center in Minneapolis. It's a venerable institution, it's been around for over 30 years, since the very beginning of what was called the "Men's Movement" in the '70s. They offer classes and support groups, amazing services that have helped many thousands of people, over the years.

And, it's quite possibly the ugliest space I've ever seen. It's a suite of three or four rooms in the basement of a low, grim-looking building (at 33rd and Hennepin in Uptown), with no windows, horrible fluorescent lighting, and falling apart chairs that probably, literally, date back to the '70s. The walls are decked with the kind of posters I remember from the guidance counselor's office at my junior high school.

It's utterly depressing (speaking for myself, of course), going in there. There are probably a bunch of reasons that the space was chosen, once upon a time, and it's probably cheap to rent and maintain - but, to me, it sends a clear message: Men's Work is dark, shameful stuff to be hidden away in a windowless basement.

Now, aesthetics are probably not the primary concern of the men who run the center, or its clientele. But as a filmmaker, I think that these are relevant considerations: how does the space actually look and feel, and what message does that communicate to the outside world?

So far I've been the recipient of some great, vocal support for this project from many of the men involved in this discussion thus far. I think this is a damn good question, worth asking and worth answering: if this work is so great and important and powerful, why is it so hard to share it with people? Part of the point of this project for me is to get these ideas out of the basement, and into the light of day.

Art vs. Industry

There was an article in the New York Times this week about Hollywood's ever-diminishing investment in independent film distribution.

This is something I've been conscious of for years now - I came of age as a filmmaker in the era of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino, but the idea that it's still possible to be discovered at a film festival and parlay your debut feature into a Hollywood career is pure mythology, promoted by the studio PR departments as a way to keep cheap labor and cheaper product (in the form of direct-to-DVD movies and late-night cable programming) available in abundance.

In my opinion.

The good news, as mentioned in the article, is that there are other methods emerging for making films sustainably, using the power of the internet and niche-marketing. Niche-marketing, of course, is just a fancy way of saying, "finding a community that cares deeply about the story you want to tell."

This development makes me optimistic that filmmaking will ultimately come back around to an archetypal idea of storytelling that's been largely neglected by the intensely industrialized film production process - an archetype based on mastery of narrative and character, rather than mastery of the art of procuring venture capital and schmoozing semi-famous b-list actors.

We're pretty confident, with this project, that we know our niche - we're still going to need money to get the film finished, but it's mostly going to go toward things like paying our rent while we work, half a dozen plane tickets, and several hundred tapes (at $7 a pop).

I'll share more on our fundraising efforts as they develop.

The Team

At our meeting last Wednesday.

Snake

Dain

Randall

Charlie

Kevin

Anger Mismanagement

I've been deeply disturbed lately by the violent outbreaks at the town hall meetings about health care reform. And not just because I think universal healthcare is long overdue in America.

I'm not the only person to detect a powerful, toxic undercurrent of rage in America. Anger is a natural reaction when one is promised something, and that promise is not delivered upon. It seems to me that for at least one generation, if not two, the American populace as a whole - 300 million strong - has been sustained by vague promises of more... that life is only going to get better, for everybody, all the time.

I won't delve into who is responsible for that promise - we can all share the blame. The media, certainly, politicians, economists. But I think that all of us are complicit. We have chosen to believe in "more," as an ideal, as a promise - that more will make us happy, and that it is our due.

So this anger is out there, and in my opinion it is, to a great extent, appropriate - but what scares me is, I think that we, as a society, are less capable of processing anger in a healthy way than perhaps any culture in the history of the world.

Anger has been a major ingredient in every major sociopolitical change in human history - the French Revolution, the Declaration of Independence... but it's also been one of the root causes of every atrocity imaginable.

One of the main objectives of this documentary, one of my principal intentions, is a discussion of healthy anger - how men can feel and express that emotion with integrity, and without violence. Because it is possible, and I've seen it done.

But I think to a lot of people out there, there's very little distinction between anger and violence - either physical or emotional attack. This cannot be good for us as a society.

I think that many people have internalized taboos about anger - that it has no place in a corporate workplace, or in a happy household. That it should be contained and avoided at all costs. So, we've repressed it, to the point that we're not even aware that it's there, bubbling away deep beneath the surface. We feel powerless to combat the injustices of our jobs or the economy, we feel wronged by our cell service provider or our health insurer, or the guy who cut in front of us in traffic - and we don't know what to do with those feelings.

I want people - even white male conservatives - to feel empowered to express their anger. They have the right to be angry - everybody has the right to be angry, it's a basic human emotion.

But, based on my observation of our sociopolitical culture in recent years, I'm deeply afraid that our collective anger will be manipulated by the same people who have bought our complacent consumerism with the idea of "more" for the last fifty years, rather than encouraging us to use our anger to motivate positive change in our own lives and in our world.

For more historical context about the town hall violence - not very optimistic, I warn you - I recommend the lefty blog Orcinus.

Man Amok

From the woman-blog "Broadsheet" at Salon.com, where I get a lot of my man-related news, the story of a man so confused about his role in society and relationships that he went on a shooting spree at a gym, targeting women, specifically.

Sure, he needed therapy, maybe medication, maybe incarceration - but he also would have benefited from some kind of cultural conversation about what the hell he was supposed to do with his anger and frustration (not to mention probably shame and loneliness), besides go out and kill people...

Which is exactly the ambition of this documentary - to jumpstart that conversation; the sooner, the better.

Naming Rites

Finding the right name for a film often takes months and months - we didn't settle on "Journeyman" until we were nearly done editing the film, nearly three years into the process - and many of the names along the way make me cringe in retrospect...

"The Power of Boys"
"Double-Edged Sword"
"The Path to Manhood"
"Circle of Men"

... ugh. They're not all terrible, but not one of them is good. At least in my opinion - not one, if I saw it in the TV Guide channel scrolling by, would inspire me to check out the program.

And, with Journeyman, there was the issue of a current NBC show with the same title - but the name was right enough to justify the potential for confusion, in my opinion. I was happy to note that the show lasted less than one season - a victim of the writer's strike, I believe - and I imagine it'll be mostly forgotten in a few years.

Dain mentioned that he didn't like "Masculine Myth" as a name - sounds clinical, to him - and he perked up when I mentioned an alternative, "A Man's World" - which has some cultural caché already because of the James Brown song.

I also kind of like "Man Alive" - it's something that my grandfather would say, as a kind of G-rated exclamation, similar to how one might use "Hot Damn!"...

But who knows where the real title of the film will come from - it could be uttered by one of our interview subjects eighteen months from now.

Suggestions welcome.

Guy Friends

I appreciate the short article/essay "Guy Friends Rule" at Salon.com, about the value of male friends for women, and co-ed friendship in general - because it acknowledge that men and women have different approaches to intimacy, and gives the male approach some credit, for a change.

It also asks, where have all the co-ed friendships gone... an interesting question.

One thing I've noticed recently is that there are plenty of clever and topical woman-centric blogs and websites - feministing, jezebel, double x, broadsheet (at Salon)... but if there are similar blogs for men out there, I'm not aware of them. Feel free to send links if you know of any good ones.

Default Status

I'm finding that it's still hard for me to describe this impetus behind this film project - so far every time I try to talk about it I end up tripping over my own tongue with qualifiers and generalizations, and I wind up sounding like an idiot.

I actually think this is a good sign - because, hopefully, part of the learning process is learning how to articulate my thoughts and intentions about the project. The filmmaking itself is a process of articulation, in a way.

So I don't know that I can state my intention outright, this early on - but I can certainly begin to work toward clarity about it.

One part of the basic premise is that we haven't found a way, culturally, to talk about men. "Male" is the default setting in America, the same way that "white" is. Feminists have worked for a century to bring awareness to the fact that this default doesn't serve women, and minorities have done the same for the dynamics of race - but what is missing from the discussion is the fact that being the default doesn't necessarily serve men, either.

This is where the conversation tends to get tricky - because the point is NOT to complain about how hard it is to be a white male, even though I see how it might sound like that's where this is headed.

No, that's exactly my point - it seems that there are only two points of view in the discussion currently. One is that men and women are exactly the same, should be treated the same in every circumstance. That acknowledging any difference between the sexes is automatically sexist or chauvinist.

The other point of view is that men are from mars, women are from venus - that men should celebrate the superficial and crude distinctions between themselves and women, which seems to generally lead to an embrace of infantilizing fratboy "culture" - drooling over big boobs, fascination with sports and fast cars and explosions, a pathological inability to groom oneself or maintain one's apartment, etc. etc..

What's missing - for me anyway - is any kind of nuanced discussion of the complex emotional lives of men in our culture. It seems to me that even acknowledging the idea that men have complex emotional lives, or that there's any value in exploring them, is outrageous in a way - I don't know that I've ever heard that stated in the mainstream discourse.

So, that's what this movie about - the radical idea that men have feelings, and that it's actually healthy for them to express them rather than keeping them buried deep inside. That men might be more whole if they could share their feelings with each other.

I guess that's why "Masculine Myth" feels appropriate to me, as the title of this blog - it's going to be about the old myths of being a man - King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, for instance - and our new myths, in post WWII America - and the ways in which they serve us and harm us.

That's a start, anyway.

Fifteen Hours

I got a text message this afternoon from Dain - he and Nick are on their way back from the Mankind Project (MKP) Leader's Conference in Wisconsin. I would've gone myself, but there were too many important things going on in my life here in Minneapolis for me to get away - and I was fortunate to be able to recruit Dain and Nick to haul cameras to Kenosha and document the unfolding events.

The text said that they had shot 15 tapes - fifteen hours worth of footage - and just like that, the project is underway. There's a big difference between a film as potential energy - as ideas and plans and intentions - and a film as actual video frames recorded on tape, which have the potential to be part of the finished product.

For Journeyman, we shot something like 150 hours of footage over the course of two years - sometimes months would go by without me picking up the camera, but there were a few fateful weekends where dozens of tapes were shot, representing significant fractions of the final film.

It's too early to say whether Dain and Nick's experience will figure substantially into the film, but fifteen hours is a hell of a decisive start to the process, I think.

What happens at an MKP Leader's Conference? I don't know - but I'm eager to take a look at the tapes and find out.

Background - Journeyman

This blog is going to serve as a film journal for an as-yet-untitled documentary about Men, which is beginning production now, in July of 2009.

First, a few words about my background, and what brought me to this point as a filmmaker.

I am one of the directors of the film Journeyman, which is an hour-long documentary about mentoring, rights of passage, and the emotional lives of teenage boys. Journeyman was made from 2005-2007, and has been an encouraging success as a documentary film project - it has won some awards at festivals, it has screened in a dozen cities, and it has been broadcast on public television in several states. It also has an educational distribution deal - you can learn plenty more about it at the website www.mirrormanfilms.org, and order a DVD, if you so desire.

This new film - the first frames of which are being recorded this very weekend - is a follow-up project, in a sense. It won't have any of the same characters but it'll further explore many of the themes that we began to dig into with Journeyman. So, I guess I need to talk about Journeyman a little bit first.

Journeyman was about men and teenage boys rebuilding emotional connections to one another through the structure of mentoring - it followed two boys without fathers, and the two mentors who came into their lives to provide them with some much-needed support from caring adult men.

It's striking how quickly people's minds tend to jump straight to pedophilia at this point in the conversation, whether they admit it or not. I realized, while making the movie, just how perverse that is: that our default cultural assumption is that any adult male who is interested in spending time one-on-one with a teenage boy must be a sex offender.

When did that get broken? When did the idea of men and teenage boys in the same room become suspicious and sexualized? It quickly became clear to me that the subject was ripe for a documentary - if for no other reason than to reintroduce the idea that a meaningful, healthy relationship between an adult male and a teenager he's not biologically related to is even possible.

Because, historically, that relationship was central to the process of growing up. Before there were trade schools there was apprenticeship in all manner of skilled labor, and boys began to work alongside their fathers on the farm pretty much as soon as they were big enough to push a wheelbarrow. Another revelation to me, working on this project, was the idea of the modern school as a product of the industrial revolution: if you think about it, what is a seven-hour class schedule, where students shuttle from classroom to classroom to be instructed in math, science, English, Spanish, etc. - but an assembly line?

The greatest triumph in the making of Journeyman, for me, is the simple fact that we asked 15 year old boys to talk about their feelings, on camera... and they did. Everything else was gravy, beyond the simple fact that these boys shared their feelings with us, on some pretty heavy subjects.

That project was immensely satisfying, and I think it really worked, which is to say that it brought all of these questions to the attention of the audience, and it provoked some excellent discussions, and arguments, about these issues.

In the next post, I'll start to address the intention for this new film.