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.
