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JANUARY 2005

The Making of a First Documentary

By Joe Charap & Josh Koplewicz

The small crowd, braving the cold winds of late October East Hampton, gazed at our industry passes then up at our young scruffy faces, their eyes glazed with a mix of envy and begrudged respect. We, two former New York City prep-schoolers (Friends and Dalton), had gotten our first film, a short-documentary entitled Pigeonmen, into the Hamptons International Film Festival this October.

We decided to produce the documentary Pigeonmen after talking to the filmmakers about it for quite some time. We were in our junior year of college and we were hungry to start producing. After some preliminary debate with some creative friends everything seemed clear and easy for our first project: they would film the movie, and we would help finance, marketing, publicize. Here’s what we came up with: filmed entirely in Finglas, the ghetto of Dublin, Ireland, Pigeonmen would follow ex-convict John McLaughlin as he raised and raced his beloved pigeons. The film would present John and his fellow die-hard pigeonmen as passionate participants in this vanishing pastime.

We had no idea what we were getting into. Being a first-time producer is a tough gig. It works like this. No one likes you or wants you around, but everyone asks for your advice. Then, once you offer your advice, they seem to like you even less. The directors, our friends Daniel Murray and Peter Russotti, soon regarded us with the same affection they would a pesky bee. Our goals were deceptively simple, and perhaps that’s why they’re so difficult to realize. We want to provide a means for young, ambitious, and original screenwriters or directors to get their ideas on the big-screen. We’ll buy ideas, refine them, and develop independently or shop it to a to studio. We’ll offer something different, something young and entirely contemporary. All we needed to do was complete a project, one that was quirky and unique enough to be our calling card.

Unfortunately, after the filming of Pigeonmen, nothing was clear. Though we collected over 45 hours of footage, the minutiae of the film became its centerpieces. We fought over the color of subtitles, the quality of the film, the length of cuts, transitions, and soundtrack issues. And it wasn’t merely slamming phones and doors; it was storming out of rooms, vowing never to speak to each other again, cursing the very cement we walked. Nevertheless, somehow that passion soon translated into a product we were all satisfied with, enough to submit it to a film festival at the end of the summer.

And now here we were. We forcefully saturated The Hamptons International Film Festival with hats, t-shirts, post-cards, fliers; even if they didn’t see our film, they would know about Pigeonmen and our production group Salty Entertainment (www.saltyentertainment.com). The guerilla marketing of hip-hop street teams we had seen growing up in New York had done wonders for our press skills. We never stopped. We spoke to everyone, shook hands, shared drinks, and talked shop. We did television interviews at the drop of a hat, from fledgling festival networks to the well-known Plum TV (who later picked up our movie). We were hustling.

That night of the first screening there were no paparazzi hounding our cars with blinding flash bulbs as we parked in the lot of an A&P. We were our entourage, the producers walking with the directors, realizing that we had made it through all the fighting for this one moment. And as we took our seats in the theater and the lights went down, we smiled because we felt like stars.#

Joshua Koplewicz is a senior at Brown University. Joe Charap is a senior at Skidmore.

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