The other afternoon I left Tekserve, the Apple specialist, with two 1TB hard drives and a rack to contain all these metal boxes full of zeros and ones piling up around my work area. I walked through the dusk and snow flurries and descended the steps into the subway station, just making the uptown 1 train. The train was crowded but not packed and I manage to find a seat. Across from me sat a woman with a Tekserve bag and a new laptop in a box. She was probably close to 60 and dressed like an elder stateswoman hipster: hat with ear flaps, puffy navy North Face jacket, maroon corduroy bell bottoms. She looked at my bags and laughed. "Your wallet's a little lighter too, huh? What did you get?"
I told her and she asked why I need all that storage. I told her for video, that I'm a filmmaker. "I've done some filmmaking. I haven't made the leap to Final Cut through. I'm old school. Avid. What's are you making, a documentary or a narrative?"
I told her I was making a documentary, but have made narrative films.
"What's the documentary about?" she asked.
I was a little hesitant to discuss this in a subway car full of people, but I've lately been in "why not" mode so I told her. "Wow," she said and then she gazed above my head, as if--but not--looking at the ads that run up there. She said "wow" again. I liked her response. A double "wow" is very encouraging.
We talked about Errol Morris, about the distribution upheaval, about Youtube. We talked a little bit about money and when I said, "There are easier ways to make money than filmmaking," she smiled knowingly. We talked about the number of submissions Sundance receives each year. "Yeah, and they're weird. They didn't take my film, and it went on to win an Academy Award..." she said.
I asked her what was the name of her film?
"You're about the right age, you might have heard of it. Marjoe?"
"The film about Marjoe Gortner?" I said."Yeah."
I had heard of it. But I told her I hadn't seen. I gave her a couple of "wows" because I've always been fascinated by Marjoe Gortner, evangelist as a child, con artist/whistle blower and b-actor as an adult. Later that night, at home, I realized I must have seen it, because I doubt I would have known about Marjoe Gortner otherwise.
We conversed through five stops and the next was mine. I told her this and she said, "Mine, too." We exited and emerged from the station. We said good bye and shook hands as best we could given all of our hands were hold shopping bags. I told her my name and she told me hers, which immediately left me because my brain can't retain names. She walked north and I walked west.
We didn't exchange cards or numbers or e-mail addresses or websites. There was no hook up energy. Just two people having a civilized conversation on a train about something they were passionate about. I couldn't imagine this playing out in L.A. First, we'd have been in separate cars on the freeway in traffic, and that makes conversation difficult. Second, if we had met, say at a party, there'd have been exchanges of contact information and promises of lunch and, eventually, the initial meeting would have led to phone calls and e-mails unreturned. And that's how I would have remembered the event, as another bullshit encounter, one that had a glimmer of promise but was destined to get sucked into the blackhole of social interactions that exists there. As it is, I have a wonderful memory of a very human, honest exchange between two people.
Sarah, if you're reading this, it was nice chatting with you.
