Was watching the latest episode of Welcome To Rexham on Hulu tonight. If you're not familiar, it's the documentary series about the Welsh football club that Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny bought. I'm not a big sportsball fan, and football, er, soccer, continues to be a sport that I just don't get, more so than most. But shit, the stories that they find and incorporate into this series, whether it be about the player with an autistic kid and the autistic fan, or the struggle of the women's club they have, it's compelling and amazing to watch. I'm on edge waiting for the next episode.
Rexham is hardly the only documentary I've watched. I watch a lot of docs. I rarely read fiction books, but I'm a junkie for docs and bios. This extends to the visual medium. I get deeply into it. As you likely know, I'm trying to make a documentary film myself. Imagine the self-imposed pressure, and endless comparison that comes when I watch something awesome and inspiring as the stuff I'm watching. It's soul crushing.
The thing is, if I'm to follow the advice of Rebel Without a Crew hero Robert Rodriguez, or Clerks guy Kevin Smith, both of which admittedly were about making no-budget indie films, they say you just make the thing and see what happens. The advice of still others, many of whom have been interviewed on various podcasts, is that you just have to make a lot of stuff that will be shit, and the goal isn't making them non-shit, it's getting them made anyway. Judd Apatow said this frequently in his master class. This is super difficult for me to reconcile.
I've been talking about making a film based on a fictional screenplay, feature length or short, written by me or someone else, for the better part of a decade plus. But I haven't done it, because I'm sacred that it will suck, and everyone else will think it sucks. Also I can't find a script.
Early this year though, I thought, fuck it, I'm gonna make a documentary, and so began the rum thing. To date, I've spent about $6k on equipment and animation, and when I've sat down and tried to start editing in a non-trivial way, I immediately think, this isn't good. I don't have what I need. I don't know what the real narrative should be. Then I think I know, and I want to augment it with footage I don't own (about Hurricane Ian, which lacks context for you, but it's important), but people want $200 per second to use it. The doc is ostensibly about rum, but I know it's about small businesses and community. But I don't have what it means. And I still can't get anyone to even return a fucking email about growing sugar cane. I bought my drone mostly to get shots of cane fields.
I know this is partly just a self-esteem issue, sure, but it wears on me. Fortunately, I did recently hear back from a pretty amazing tiki bar that's here in suburban Orlando, and they're willing to be a part of this. It will help the rum story, for sure.
Art is hard. It's not because doing the things are difficult, it's because believing that it's worth anything is a huge challenge.
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