This is the title of my substack

everyone else has one

As I sit here it’s February 2025, a few days after my birthday and a few weeks after we put the finishing touches on my latest documentary. And it’s conceivable that I won’t have any work again for a long time. If you told me I would not work for a year but after that I’d have another film to make, I would be ecstatic, because it could be much longer. And to my friends and colleagues who say “You always say that”, this new film is the first one I’ve finished since 2021.

I survived those four years. But there was a shit load of downtime.

I could have called this substack “Downtime”. My girlfriend will tell me to take that sentence out.

One of the things I hope I will make myself do in this downtime is make a personal film, more or less from found and archival elements, mostly by myself on my computer and maybe with my iPhone.

A lot of my films start off with the thought “Can this actually be made into a film?” That’s a nice idea to mull around but it doesn’t lend itself to a feature film, especially a non-fiction film. Sometimes I found a way to make them anyway, such as my second feature doc “I Curmudgeon” which was about realizing that maybe there was a reason people had called me negative for the last, at that moment, thirty odd years.

A few years ago, I had an idea that seemed even less filmable. I was driving by some spot in Toronto and I had a memory of something that happened near there and then I thought of the person who was at the centre of that occurrence and I couldn’t remember her name and it had been at least thirty years but at that moment, she revisited my conscious mind and I felt suddenly overwhelmed by all the people who have passed through my life.

And I started to wonder whether I could make a film about those kinds of memories. I don’t remember if I wrote some kind of proposal but somehow a producer friend of mine became interested and she thought there was a particular source of funding at that moment that lent itself to a project like that. So I wrote a proposal, then we found out that source of funding was unavailable to us so she proposed we go to the CBC with this odd hybrid idea which I was now calling “Uneventful”.

So we did. The person we pitched to eventually turned down three of my pitches before losing her job. But that was the strangest of the pitches because it was so clear she had no idea what I was even pitching.

I could go off on a tangent here. That particular person would have had trouble picturing a film about the chicken crossing the road but at least she could have pretended to understand that one. This thing was not just Greek to her but ancient Greek.

Anyway, that’s the film I think I could make this year or next on my computer with my own meager means. And I thought while I’m trying to figure out which stories will make it into the film, why not audition them on Substack?

Some of you know I have a prolific Facebook presence but I seldom feel comfortable writing long posts, let alone posts about girls I barely knew calling me up at 2 o’clock in the morning in 1980-something and asking me to drive all the way across town to pick them up, because they really had to get away from where they were living.

So that’s what I’ll be doing here.

Sometimes though I will veer into other areas and rants and maybe even talk about a record I found.

For example, this record: