How I Got Into This Mess In The First Place

Several years ago, I directed a documentary, “A Thief Among the Angels: Barry Moser and The Making of The Pennyroyal Caxton Bible.” Didn’t do too badly; won some awards on the festival circuit, played on PBS, got picked up by a distributor. Due to my industry connections, I was able to get the equipment and editing for free. But equipment and editing, while being the bulk of a film’s cost, don’t represent ALL of a film’s cost, not by a long shot, and I wound up in debt.

It took a couple of years to get back in the black and, when I did, I celebrated Birder-Style: rent a car, throw 3 t-shirts, 30 cigars, and 60 CD’s in the trunk, and hit the open road. Bird my way south, hugging the coast, visit with family in North Carolina, bird my way home.

Ahhhhhhhhhh…

When you’re a filmmaker today, you spend much of your life in a darkened room in front of a bank of computer screens that resembles nothing so much as a tanning salon. And when you live in Manhattan, as I do, the claustrophobic feelings are compounded. The open road, after-breakfast cigars, Hank Williams and Grieg, birdwatching all day, hilarious local TV news in rural Motel 6’s at night…if you know of a better way to decompress, bottle it quick and call me.

And so I hit the road. All the while, I was giving myself a good talking-to: this “filmmaking thing," while mad fun, just wasn’t working. Too much effort, too much cost, too little reward. I "wasn’t a kid anymore." I needed to find "a new way to exercise my creativity," and to "get my messages across," that wouldn’t leave me "broke as an undergrad."

That’s when I saw it.

I was at Jake’s Landing, trolling for Black Rails at dusk (you know the spot: the second of the hidden eddies that ambles off towards the sunset as you break free of the trees). I’d just watched an Osprey land on its nesting platform after the final lap of the day when I saw, in the deepening indigo, a piece of paper stapled to a fence post.

It read, “18th Annual World Series of Birding.”

And I remember my exact thought at that exact moment: “Oh, crap.”

They say you can’t pick your relatives. You know what? You can’t pick your moments of inspiration either. “The World Series of Birding.” Being something of a solitary birder, I’d actually never heard of it. But it stomped into my life with my name writ large all over it’s beaming face.

I continued my way south; I suspected I was sunk.

In one of the deleted scenes from “Opposable Chums,” which can be found with the DVD extras, Pete Dunne, the founder of The World Series of Birding, describes calling Roger Tory Peterson when the idea of a competitive birdwatching event occurred to him. “You couldn’t possibly have a competitive birdwatching event without consulting…God, which is essentially what Roger Tory Peterson was in the birding world at the time.”

It was the same with me. I couldn’t possibly make a film about The World Series of Birding without consulting…God, which is essentially what Pete Dunne is in the birding world today. Besides, Pete founded The World Series of Birding

Down in North Carolina, my family disported themselves seaside and carefree. I made some notes and a phone call. I called Pete Dunne, best-selling author, birder extraordinaire, hero to many besides me. Yup: I just cold-called him.

To my amazement, God answered the phone. “Sure. Come on up. How’s Wednesday at 3?”

Ai yi yi…what had I done? I was supposed to NOT be making any more films.

Wednesday at 3 didn’t find me any less nervous. The pristine Witmer Stone “Bird Studies at Old Cape May” volumes on Pete’s shelf didn’t help much either (rare book collecting can be as debilitating an infection as birding and Lyme disease; if you’ve suffered from all three, as I have, sitting before a first edition Witmer Stone is like stumbling upon Stonehenge when you were just out for a quick, al fresco whizz).

We chatted. He was a bit wary. I was a tad terrified. But, in the end, he cheerfully gave me what I’ve come to call my “Papal dispensation.”

There was just one problem.

The 18th Annual World Series of Birding was only two weeks away, not nearly enough time to organize such a complex and far-reaching shoot. Not enough time, either, to convince several professional Manhattan camerapeople that riding around in a cramped van shooting for 24 hours straight "will be fun." Not really even enough time to contact competitive birding teams and convince them to cart along on their Most Important Day Of The Year some dead weight who’d do them no good.

But to wait an additional year would have spoiled whatever gossamer momentum I'd just mustered, and would’ve risked someone else swooping in to grab what I thought was The Most Perfect Film Idea In The History Of Mankind. MY idea.

What happened next was so arduous and intense that an insane 24-hour birding event came to feel like a vacation. Tune in next time, for, “Repeatedly Smacking Yourself In The Head With a Ball-Peen Hammer.”