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.