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May 25, 2009
The Moxie Documentary
Exactly two years ago, I drove to Springfield, Missouri and shot a documentary. My subject was the Moxie Cinema, a small arthouse theater built from the ground up by Dan and Nicole Chilton, two wonderful folks who were doing all they could to bring equally wonderful movies to a small town that didn't know what it was missing until they came along. My friend Brad and I spent a weekend with them, filming them in portraiture as they opened David Lynch's Inland Empire. It was a wonderful experience; I wrote about it here, and would continue to hint about the film in the ensuing months, as I relocated to Los Angeles and began to edit it.
There's a peculiar and addictive charge to the best filmmaking experiences; it's as if the work is preceding of its own accord just a little bit ahead of you, falling into place exactly as you hoped it would, doing all the work for you. Cutting this documentary was like that. The shoot had been serendipitous in every possible way; the footage was just gorgeous, and as the pieces began to fit together, I found that they contained through and through every formal and thematic interest I'd set out to explore. It was more than a documentary, more than an essay; I was pretty sure I was making my best film yet.
Early in the process, I exported a small Quicktime file of the first four minutes and e-mailed it to Dan and Nicole. It was rough (and my temporary attempt at titular grandeur still embarrasses me - I quickly changed the typeface), but not so much that I didn't want to share it. This is what I sent them:
Progress slowed towards the end of the summer. I returned to Texas. I'd just received a grant to make St. Nick, but even with those good tidings, a heavy depression that had been looming in the summer skies finally set in. Things happened, one thing lead to another, and I found myself living in my car, hanging on to whatever hooks I could to keep my head above water. One of those things was Moxie. I was working out of the public library in early October when I finished the first cut. I wrote about that here. It was a good first cut. I was really, really happy with it.
A few days after that, I was taking the hard drive to a friend's office to use their After Effects system on a few shots, and on the way I stopped off at a gallery opening to say hi to some people. I was there for fifteen maybe twenty minutes, and then I got back in my car. I noticed the smell first, this trenchant odor of sweat and filth that drew my eyes downward to see the contents of the automobile ransacked. I made a quick mental note of what had been stolen, and it wasn't until an hour or so later that I realized the pink backpack that contained the hard drive with all the documentary was missing, too. The footage consisted entirely of P2 media, and I had never backed it up. All of a sudden, that little clip that I'd e-mailed out was all that existed of my film. There it is now, two paragraphs back, the only trace that's left.
I got in my car and drove. And drove and drove. I was halfway across Oklahoma before my ex-girlfriend called and talked me down from whatever ledge I was heading towards. I slept on the side of the highway that night, and at dawn turned back.
I don't remember much of the next few weeks. My memory returns to me in early November. I was in Missouri again. I'd planned the trip earlier, with the intent of showing the documentary at the theater itself, but now I was just going to regroup. I hung out with AJ Schack while I was there, whose own documentary had been enormously inspiring to my own decision to make this one, and after hearing the sad tale he urged me to shoot the film again.
And so, four weeks later, as an ice storm fell upon the city, I returned to the Moxie and reshot the documentary. Quite a bit happened in the preceding month, all sorts of violent highs and lows, but now I had my camera out and was rolling again. I wrote about that here. That specific charge wasn't there this time; in fact, it was one of the strangest creative experiences of my life. Trying to recapture, to almost force that serendipity that happened so naturally the first time. I could make an entire film about just that, and maybe that's what I was making, what I needed to make. I don't know. While I was shooting, I bought plane tickets for Park City, and when I wrapped at the end of the week, I drove back to Texas and went straight to the auditions for St. Nick. Tucker and Savanna were some of the first kids we saw that day.
All that ice-cold footage still rests on a hard drive - backed up, this time, but as yet untouched. A year later, the Moxie moved into a new, two-screen theater, and did stellar business all throughout the winter. Things are slow right now, but so is everything, and this theater is too special to fall by the wayside for long. St. Nick is out in the world, and in it, there is one shot of a barbed wire fence I photographed that weekend in Springfield, across the street from Brad's house, which in some strange pictographic fashion sums up the entire experience.
I was telling this story to a friend last night over drinks in East Los Angeles. Nonfiction was on our brains; he's a doc filmmaker about to begin his next project, I was hours away from finishing the first cut of the Okkervil River film, and I was talking about a nascent documentary idea that I hope will be my next feature. I traced that film's roots back to this one, and realized that enough time had passed that it might be worth putting down on paper. So there it is (in short form - rest assured, I could spin many Proustian pages over the months skimmed herein). Somewhere out in the world is a hard drive that once contained (or perhaps, somehow, still contains) a really great movie. I'm glad I had the chance to make it.
Posted by David Lowery at May 25, 2009 3:29 PM
Comments
Awww, that was a nice post. We had such a good time getting to know you that weekend, and over the following weekends, that it makes up for the lack of footage! And don't worry - we'll get to show one of your films in our theater, hopefully soon!
Posted by: Nicole at May 26, 2009 3:17 PM