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.