AIM FOR A “B”

Documentary Notebook is a weekly newsletter for people interested in the state of the genre, people behind the camera, and the process of making documentaries.

This will be a short one.

Walter Murch — acclaimed multi-Oscar winning film editor, sound designer, sound mixer — was the subject of my book, Behind the Seen.

It’s about the making of the motion picture Cold Mountain as seen from Murch’s point-of-view. He overcame Apple’s warnings and edited the picture on Final Cut software, then a consumer-grade platform.

I approached that endeavor with some trepidation, never having written a book.

But I had made documentaries.

Since I had access to Murch, director Anthony Minghella, and the post production team, I approached it as verite livre — a documentary book.

The strategy served me well, and in the process I was enrolled in a two-year graduate school course in cinema, having skipped film school entirely.

One of the many “Murchism’s” I wrote about was “aim for a B”.

From the book:

Behind him, hanging on the wall, is a shiny brass “B.” Curious? Ask Walter about it, and he’ll tell you about aiming for a “B.” Work hard to get the best grade you can—in this world, a B is all that is humanly attainable. One can be happy with that. Getting an A? That depends on good timing and whims of the gods—it’s beyond your control. If you start to think that the gods are smiling, they will take their revenge. Keep your blade sharp. Make as good a film as you know how. It’s an Eastern-oriented philosophy, characteristic of Murch, as differentiated from the Western outlook, as expressed by the American writer and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We aim above the mark to hit the mark.”

The idea is this: a film takes so much time to make — six years in the case of Cold Mountain — one can only hope that by the time it’s released the cultural zeitgeist is moving in your favor.

Zoolander, for example, the Ben Stiller satire, came out two weeks after 9/11. A lighthearted story involving an assassination attempt was out of step with that moment.

I was thinking about the “B” this week and my friend Barbara Kopple’s new documentary about union organizing and Amazon delivery workers. It premieres next month at the Venice Film Festival, as I mentioned in the previous Newsletter.

So, imagine my surprise when I came upon this NYT story:

New York could become the first city in the United States to regulate these last-mile operations, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which has been lobbying for the bill. The delivery workers in New York start at about $20 an hour, and, Amazon said, average close to $24 an hour. The Teamsters reached a deal with an Amazon contractor in California to pay about $30 an hour.

“We’re in a new era of politics in the five boroughs, one where workers and their advocates are in the driver’s seat,” said Thomas Gesualdi, president of Teamsters Joint Council 16.”

I haven’t seen Barbara's film yet. But this news about a success in protecting unionized Amazon delivery workers by moving them away from third-party contractors, could very well lift Barbara’s film from what was sure to be a B, to an A.

In two-way street fashion, once the film goes into distribution it will raise awareness and generate public support for other Teamster organizing campaigns underway, or being planned, among Amazon workers nationally.