Boston Globe early draft version

From: "dahl"
To: "Eric Bickernicks"
Subject: another version
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 09:39:57 -0500

Here's one longer version of alt.sex bouncing around in my computer memory. Maybe I'll find one or two more. This one was prompted by my editor's suggestion to go first-person, diary form, which she ended up not liking. Re-reading it now, though, I think it ain't bad. Keep in mind, it's not thoroughly edited, may contain mistakes. But what do I care about truth? I'm a journalist.

Download: Globe early version.zip

alt.sex
By Dick Dahl
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14


Today, a guy named Eric Bickernicks granted me permission to follow him and his film crew around for the next few months as they shoot a movie called "alt.sex." No, it's not porn. It's indie. Very, very indie, as a matter of fact. You hear those stories about people shooting indie movies on shoestrings, like Robert Rodriguez and how he made the critically acclaimed "El Mariachi" a few years ago for $7,000, and this is one of those.

Motivated more by a desire to find respite from winter doldrums than anything else, I'd gone to the Massachusetts Film Office website a few days ago looking for any indie projects that might be ready to start shooting. That's where I learned about "alt.sex." Bickernicks was looking for actors willing to work for nothing which, I'd learned after scanning a variety of postings, is not at all unusual on a project that was ready to start shooting in a few weeks. The timing was right. He'd listed a URL for the movie's website, altsexmovie.com, which I checked out. It's mostly an audition tool, listing the movie's roles, most of which have already been filled. It looked legit, so I e-mailed him. I told him I wasn't an actor, but that I was interested in following an indie film crew around and perhaps writing about the experience. In his e-mail response, Bickernicks said he'd be happy to let me follow the making of "alt.sex." He told me that he makes corporate videos for a living and that he's decided that now is the time to step back and pursue his dream of making an independent feature film. He said he's paying for the project out of his own pockets and that he hopes to get it done for $10,000. He told me that he'd bought a super-16 mm movie camera for $4,800, about one fourth the price of a new one, from someone who'd posted it for sale on eBay. He said he'd bought a $700 digital photo camera to record the making of "alt.sex." He wants to put photos on the website along with a director's journal. If the movie is never seen, he at least wants a complete record of the experience. "Either it will end up a compendium of useless information on one man's egotistical plight to turn approximately 10 grand into a pile of worthless 'art,' or a fascinating study on how to create a movie with nothing more than a bunch of enthusiasm," he wrote. Tonight we spoke on the phone. He told me that he was completing the casting in the next week or so. Shooting, he said, would begin in mid-February. The shoots would only occur on weekends because everyone, including himself, has day jobs.

BREAK

It's difficult to get a good handle on just how extensive the Massachusetts "independent-film industry," is if there really is such a thing. Even though the Massachusetts Film Office seems to be very supportive of independent filmmaking, I don't have the sense that they keep close tabs on it. The office's director, Robin Dawson, says that the MFO supports indie filmmaking in a variety of ways. But if you visit their office, with its huge posters of "A Perfect Storm" and "Good Will Hunting" greeting your entrance, it's clear where their priorities lie. The MFO, after all, is an arm of the state's Department of Economic Development. Their goal, their job, is to get big-budget movies made in Massachusetts, not to hold the hands of budding cinematic artistes.

Still, the MFO does have a handle on the indies that are a step up from self-financed shoestring projects, at least once they enter production. Last spring, I asked Dawson how many indie movies got made in Massachusetts in the previous year. She told me 11 and handed me a card, headed by the title, "Massachusetts has always been a 'State of Independents,'" which listed them and the companies that are producing them. On any given day, the MFO's own web site will list several self-described independent film and video projects that are looking for acting and technical help, which leads me to believe that scores of indie projects get shot every year in Massachusetts. The fact, however, as Dawson and other experts on regional film activity told me, is that many projects simply die along the way, usually for lack of enough money. And even if a movie gets shot, most will fail to attract the necessary completion financing to transform it, like the 11 movies on the MFO's indie card, into products that people might actually see someday.

Most people interested in film in Massachusetts are aware of the local indie-film buzzes of the moment like "The Blue Diner," "Massholes," "Bluff" and "Lift," currently but clearly there are many movies, like "alt.sex," that are getting made below the radar. Nobody really knows how many are being made because, as Boston Vilm and Video Foundation director Anne Marie Stein told me, "There's no real public source of support. It takes incredible resourcefulness to make a movie, and people do the fund raising in any number of ways." They use their own money, run up credit cards, borrow from friends and family. Even though filmmaking is expensive and the chances of success are extremely long, Stein says that "there are TONS more (indie projects) than there used to be." In large part, she says, the growth of indie filmmaking is attributable to the advent of new, higher-quality digital video technology, which is much cheaper than film.

"It's getting to the point now," says Charles Merzbacher, a professor in the Boston University Film Department, "where anyone who wants to make a movie can do it."

Well, not quite anyone. But if you've got $10,000, Merzbacher estimates, you'll be able to finance your own feature-length digital-video movie. But if you do, he says, you should not entertain any notions that you'll sell it for commercial distribution. Even though everyone says that commercial movies will turn to video in the future, that day is not yet here, Merzbacher says. He says that any project shot on film still holds a huge advantage in potential distributors' minds. That is, while digital video is an improvement on video, he says, there's still nothing like the look and feel of 35mm film. It is still essential for any indie filmmaker serious about success to end up with a 35mm product. The problem in shooting 35mm is that it is exorbitantly expensive. One option is to shoot in 16 mm or the wider Super 16, which can be blown up to 35 mm for around $30,000.

Even then, the chances of success are daunting. Typically, one of the top priorities of indie filmmakers is to have their movies accepted by film-festival committees, in hopes that they will create a buzz at the festival and bought by a distributor. Getting their film ready
"There are TONS more (indie projects) than there used to be," says Anne Marie Stein, director of the Boston Film and Video Foundation, a center of indie activity. "It's a lot cheaper to make things and edit things." Stein says that Boston has long held a reputation for its strong documentary-film community, which includes such stars as Frederick Wiseman and Ross McElwee. But she says that narrative filmmaking is catching up, in large part because of the growing influence of Boston University's film department.

Charles Merzbacher, a professor in the BU film department, agrees that Boston has had plenty of lively indie filmmaking going on, but he senses that in general, indie filmmaking is entering "a fallow, strange time where no one knows what's going to happen next."

"A thumbnail sketch of the last 10 years is that a few independent films appeared out of the blue 'sex, lies, and videotape,' 'El Mariachi,' 'Laws of Gravity,' 'Clerks,' 'Go Fish' and spawned literally thousands of other independent films," he says. "And very, very few of those films have ever gotten distributed. With 'Blair Witch Project' there was a minor surge, but there's been a dampening of enthusiasm because lately there haven't been many break-out successes."

If enthusiasm for feature films is declining, however, the new digital-video technology is drawing budding moviemakers in a new direction, Merzbacher says. "It's getting to the point now," he says, "where anyone who wants to make a movie can do it."

Which only exacerbates the problem. "The people in charge of what goes out to the theaters cannot watch 8,000 films a year," he says. "So they set up benchmarks like 'are there any stars?'"

To Merzbacher, the real future for independent cinema could be the Internet. "There's a lot of good work that's not getting its day in the theater," he says. "The big question is whether or not the Internet will be the way around the distribution bottleneck. I hold out hope that the Internet will be a more democratic distribution system than we've had up to this point. But I'm skeptical."

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13

First day of shooting.

I really didn't know what to expect, having never been to a film shoot before. The one image I did have in my mind's eye was this: A chaotic swirl of people, and in the midst of the disorder, the Director, imperious and detached, seated in a tall, folding, wood-and-canvass chair. Perhaps a sycophantic assistant director yelling for order. The actors nowhere to be seen, off in the wings or in their trailers, awaiting word from lackeys that their presences on the set are respectfully requested.

Here's what I saw today: Actors and director alike schlepping equipment into a North Shore office building where the movie's workplace scenes are to be shot. John McLeod, the male lead, assisting Bickernicks in setting up lights, taping up windows, sliding partitions into place. Bickernicks giving a crash course in boom-mike holding and audio-tape-deck operation to his rookie sound crew, twin teenage boys Brendan and Emory Bond, friends of McLeod, who have never done it before.

There was no director's assistant. No make-up department. No wardrobe people.

Today's initial shoot was a modest undertaking. Bickernicks planned to shoot five scenes involving only two actors, McLeod and Geoff Bridges. In the movie, the men's characters, also named John and Geoff, are workmates and pals. In the movie, John gets dumped by his girlfriend at story's start, and Geoff and a couple of other pals try to get him back into the swing of things in an effort to help him find true love. Or at least a date. That, in a nutshell, is pretty much the whole movie. Bickernicks told me that he'd written the script based largely on his own experiences in the hellish world of middle-age dating. The title refers to several computer-related subthemes dealing with Internet matchmaking services and chat rooms as well as a running bit about porn sites popping up at embarrassing times on characters' workplace computer screens.

"My movie ain't necessarily art," Eric told me today. "But it's my movie. I don't have a committee telling me what to do. If it's a turd, at least it's my own turd."

(NOTE RE ABOVE QUOTE: IF the last sentence is OK (which I doubt), I think the preceding sentence "I don't have a committee telling me what to do,".. should be pulled because then the whole thing scans much better. However, if you yank the last sentence, then "I don't have a committee'" etc. should be included for obvious reasons. I hope that's clear.)

Bickernicks has told me that he's making "alt.sex" because he wants to have something truly of his own creation to show people when he's old and retired. He's 38 years old. Maybe he's having his first whiffs, his first realizations, of mortality.

In casting his movie, Bickernicks turned first to several friends with acting experience to occupy some of the primary roles. His friendship with the male lead, McLeod, goes way back. When they were in middle school in Natick, Bickernicks had told me, the two boys had jointly engaged in their first film experience. They made an 8mm animated short titled "Revenge of the Roll." They stole dozens of rolls of toilet paper from public restrooms and animated them into great roiling waves that attacked people and mummified them. Today, the two men are housemates. They share a house and a mortgage with their two girlfriends in Marlborough.

Bridges, today's second actor, is also a close friend. It was his Watertown business place, Productive Media, Inc., where the cast met last week for the first time for a script read-through. The energy level that day was high. Lots of laughs. Which is to be expected, I suppose, for a movie like this. It's a funny movie, so Bickernicks sought out funny actors, including a couple of standup comics, Sparky Schneider and Lauren Verge. There was an NYU Tisch School of the Arts graduate, Juliet Bowler; a guy who 'd worked as an actor in LA, Darby Duffin. Everyone had experience of one kind or another, but for most this is their first film of any kind.

Today was my first exposure to the fact that films are deceptions and by that I mean real, technological deceptions that stand quite apart from actors' abilities to impart believability. I'd never realized, for instance, that a conversation between two actors in a movie isn't necessarily an accurate chronology of the sequence in which it was filmed. Today scenes were shot repeatedly, but not so much because Eric spotted flaws as because he needed different camera angles. In the end, he will edit the shots to create the illusion of a natural conversation when in fact McLeod's filmed and recorded response to Briggs may have occurred a half hour prior to, or subsequent to, Briggs' initial line. Just as scenes are temporal mindbenders, so are shooting schedules. The very first "alt.sex" scenes that were shot today, for instance, will appear a ways into the movie. In a few weeks, they'll shoot more scenes from this "day" of the story line. The absence of a continuity person means that each actor has the responsibility to keep track of what he and she wore that day which is another reason for the digital camera.

Another tool Bickernicks has invested in is a video "tap," a second lens, for his camera. This device allows him to videotape scenes, which appear on an attached monitor in precisely the same dimensions as film, for purposes of ironing out visual kinks before running the actual film. The video test runs are valuable because once the film rolls, it costs almost $30 a minute and comes directly out of his own pocket. When you've set up a budget of a mere $10,000, frugality is more than desirable; it is essential.

Strapped eyeglasses dangling at his chest, Bickernicks closed his left eye and peered through the camera lens with his right one. They've done a few video run-throughs of this scene, a simple one in which the two men talk while Geoff's attention remains fixed on a computer screen while his fingers tap repeatedly on the keyboard. Bickernicks' girlfriend, Therese Chase, was there today as a stagehand. She grabbed the slate and held it before the camera as Eric read numbers into the record: "Scene 10, roll one, take one." He didn't say, "Action." Instead, Therese listens for the sound of moving film, chugging along the sprockets of Eric's camera. Hearing it, she clicks the slate arm down, the cue for McLeod to plop down into a chair next to Briggs.

"I just got totally spammed!," he says. "My e-mail account's frozen. Can you check it out?"
"alt.sex" is off and running.

BREAK

In 1995, Roxbury filmmaker Rob Patton-Spruill directed an indie movie called "Squeeze," which received some critical acclaim on its limited distribution. It was a tale about his home turf in Roxbury, about gang life and the pressure it exerts on young men who don't want to be part of it. His success with that movie earned him a call to Hollywood, where he directed a movie called "Body Count," a formulaic shoot-em-up that never made it to the screen, although it's available in video. Patton-Spruill cringes at the experience he says he was a mere "director for hire" and hated being involved in a movie he cared nothing about. But he calls his Hollywood experience worthwhile, if for no other reason than it taught him that fact about himself. He also calls it worthwhile because one day he and his wife, Patricia Moreno, drove out to Venice Beach to look at Roger Corman's production facility. Corman is a famous producer, and yet here was an operation, Patton-Spruill says, that was little more than a tiny lumberyard.

He decided that he could do the same thing, but back in Boston. They returned to their hometown, and one day, while driving around in Roxbury, they spotted an ideal vacant building, which once housed an ambulance company, for their dream venture. "My wife said, 'That would be perfect,'" he recalls. "And as fate would have it, that very weekend it went on the market."

The building, in Roxbury's Fort Hill neighborhood, is now the home of The Film Shack, which opened its doors in the spring of 2000 as a production facility expressly for small-budget indie movies. "I could have stayed in Hollywood and made a good living," he says, "but this is where my heart is."

As we spoke in his office, a man and woman were editing a movie called "Hu-Kwa," shot in New Hampshire, in the editing suite adjoining it. Filmmakers can rent the use of his editing equipment, recording equipment, cameras. They can also learn about filmmaking at FilmShack from a group called City Scape, which rents space from Patton-Spruill and offers a variety of classes on how to make movies.

Patton-Spruill says he wants to "blaze a trail" in Boston for small, independent filmmakers who face great odds in getting their work distributed. He thinks that his good reputation, if attached to a project, makes it more attractive to investors. "I've always made 30 to 40 percent for my investors," he says.

Patton-Spruill has missionary zeal about indie filmmaking, but he's far from the only independent film producer in town. Mitchell Robbins (with whom Patton-Spruill had a falling out over his involvement with "Squeeze") is well-known, as is Sarah Greene, who produced last year's Sundance hit, "Girl Fight."

Another is Scout Productions, the creation of three Hollywood veterans who moved to Boston in 1995 and set up shop. Scout occupies an enormous space in a former factory building in Allston and lays claim to a variety of well-known indie ventures that it's produced, including "Last Stop Wonderland" director Brad Anderson's upcoming "Session 9."

The three Scout Productions principals, Dorothy Aufiero, David Collins, and Michael Williams, estimate that they've worked on nearly 150 Hollywood films. Aufiero and Williams are originally from Boston.

The trio described film production as a complex task involving many skills, but as Aufiero put it, "It all boils down to business. You've got to be able to tell a distributor how they'll make money."

As producers, they arrange the project, which usually starts with a script, but sometimes it's an idea waiting for a script. For example, Williams said, they'd been awaiting a script for a movie that could be shot at the abandoned Danvers State Hospital, reportedly a gem of prospective cinematic gloom. Then they got the "Session 9" script from Anderson, who had written it expressly for a movie he wanted to film at Danvers State. With his success with "Next Stop, Wonderland," of course, Anderson's name lends considerable clout to any project. They conducted the arrangements to secure the facility for shooting. There were talks with the Independent Film Channel and finally with USA Films, which agreed to be the distributor.

The budget for this indie movie, they said, will be around $8 million.

AUGUST 6

Contrary to my initial expectations about actors' egos, the "alt.sex" cast had quickly gelled into a happy family. At the North Shore office shoots, midweek rehearsals at Briggs' Watertown office, over lunch, everyone was having a blast. They're performers and they enjoy performing for each other, improvising jokes and bits and songs to wile away the enormous dead times that are part of filmmaking.

But then there was a break in the action, which has extended to nearly two months, caused by (a) technical difficulties and (b) Bickernicks' need to take on more corporate work to finance his movie. Bickernicks had gotten a great deal on his camera, but it seems that the camera had a problem with its zoom lens. Part of the time, depending on the depth of a scene's focal points, the resulting footage would be slightly out of focus. He sent the camera out for repairs, and now, he says, the problem is solved, although Bickernicks told me he'll have to reshoot some of the office scenes. Meanwhile, judging from the group e-mail actors were sending back and forth, it was clear that they all missed each other greatly. So much for my expectations.

So the energy level at this weekend's shoots, the first since the hiatus are higher than ever. The venue is an Allston jazz club called the Wonder Bar, whose owners have graciously lent their facility to the project because "alt.sex" actress Cara O'Shea is a friend. O'Shea is a New York actress who' s been in a couple of indie films that never went far and she came up on the train Friday night for her first scenes in the movie.

Her entrance into the movie causes friction. If the offstage clowning is a measure of an unusually happy acting family, O'Shea lets it be known that she finds it distracting and unprofessional. Which doesn't endear her to the other actors. She's in two scenes, both of which were shot today. One, which will occur halfway through the movie, is a scene in which she is approached by John, who bumbles and flubs his effort at initiating a conversation. The second is the movie's final scene, where our hero gets the girl, her.

The Wonder Bar has huge windows fronting on a busy street, so little knots of curious spectators, lured by the bright lights and the movie camera kept forming throughout the day. Yesterday's shoot there drew bigger crowds because that was the day when Deirdre Williams, in real life the afternoon traffic reporter on Boston radio station Mix 98.5, donned a "money dress" that Bickernicks and Chase constructed at home. Williams plays the character called The Computer Date, whom John has paid hundreds of dollars, via a dating service, to meet. They built an outfit of fake money to cover her head to toe, a visual gag about how overwhelmed John is by the cost of meeting her.

Today Williams came back, even though she's not scheduled for any more shoots. She said she came back because yesterday was so much fun. But because Eric needs extras for the restaurant scene, and because the money outfit obscured her appearance yesterday, she was pressed into action to sit at a table in the background. So, God help me, was I.

DATE

Today was the day a lot of us were looking forward to: the nightclub shots at Sophia's nightclub. Sophia's has a cool downstairs space, complete with dance floor, a mirror ball, and faux stone wall, which is great for shooting a nightclub scene because it's always dark. It was imperative that the scenes be shot now because much of this shoot revolves around actor Darby Duffin, who is leaving Boston shortly to resume his acting career in LA.

Bickernicks has put out the call through his actors for extras, preferably young and good-looking nightclub types. He'd hoped for at least 15, but gotten only 10. But true to the indie spirit, two principal "alt.sex" actors, O'Shea and Juliet Bowler, have shown up to lend some head-turned-away help. O'Shea has added to her own identity obfuscation by donning a pink wig.

etc.

BREAK

In order to gain a bit of perspective on the moviemaking process I'd been following for months, I talked to three other indie filmmakers who recently wrapped projects. Two of them, veteran Boston moviemakers Jan Egleson and Natatcha Estebanez, are real-life partners as well as the director-and-producer team that made "The Blue Diner," The third is a young MIT grad, Alice Cox, who quit her job as a biotech software engineer and cashed in her stock options to make a movie called "Metal."

Egleson and Estebanez unveiled "The Blue Diner" at a private screening in early December and are awaiting word from the Sundance Festival Committee on whether or not they've made the increasingly difficult cut there. Acceptance by Sundance or other prestigious festivals like Toronto and New York is, of course, a major step toward commercial success. When Anderson's "Next Stop Wonderland" was named XXXXXXXXXX, in 1998, XXXXXXX gave him $7 million for distribution rights.

A few years ago, when Egleson submitted XXXXXXXXX to the Sundance committee, it competed against some 300 other entries, he says. This year, he says, Sundance received 3,000 entries.

Not that their movie depends on Sundance for distribution. WGBH-TV, where both of them once worked, has provided financing in exchange for showing the movie, which explores intergenerational conflicts in an immigrant Boston Latino family, nationally on public TV.
Like everyone, or so it seems, Egleson and Estebanez look at digital video and the Internet as potentially powerful forces on independent filmmaking. "If there's ever been a time to be an independent filmmaker, it's now," Estebanez says.

Which should come as hopeful news to the young Ms. Cox, who has forsaken the income could she be earning as an engineer for the penury of indie moviemaking. She shot the film over the course of three weeks in the spring for just under $60,000 and unveiled it at the Boston Film and Video Foundation in November. It's a strange movie that's blends a quasi-sci-fi alien-clothing story with a paean to Allston. It's atmospheric, moody, weird. It's very indie.

The problem Cox currently faces is that the liquidated stock options have only brought her to this point. In order to get the movie accepted by any festival committees, she has to spend about $35,000 to turn her 16mm negative into a 35mm print. (The showing at the Boston Film and Video Foundation was a Betamax projection of the movie's video image.) She doesn't know where the money will come from. At the moment, she told me, her primary focus was on her next script, "Contrary Souls," which is apparently based at least partially on her career as a software engineer. "It's like Dilbert," she says. "But disturbing."

DATE

The shooting is almost done. After today, there will only be a couple of more scheduled shoots, not counting whatever little retakes Eric will have to do.

Today's shoot was on a beach in Quincy and it was a race against time. The sun was already losing candlepower as it sank toward a dense bank of dark clouds that were building to the west, and Eric still had a couple of scenes to shoot.

Standing there and watching, the thought struck me that had I just stumbled upon this scene, I'd guess that these people are making an Art Film. Here's why: In the middle of the beach there was a plywood fireplace with a front of fake cardboard bricks. In front of the fireplace sat a blanket, and on top of the blanket there were two place settings, a vase of flowers, and a bottle of wine in a small tub. Beyond it, down next to the water, five people a youngish middle-aged couple, twin teenage boys, and a suit-clad man with a trumpet were listening carefully to a fully painted, fully regaled clown. Had I just stumbled upon this spectacle, I'd have guess that these people are Fellini devotees, intent on resurrecting the Master's surrealistic, 1960s style.

In fact, the clown was Bickernicks. He wore the outfit because today was the day he got himself into his movie as a balloon delivery man in a clown suit. In this scene, John is trying to win back the heart of his estranged girlfriend Irene, played icily by Lauren Verge. The reason for the fireplace, the flowers, the horn player and the balloon-bearing clown is that John has heard two women talk about the things they find most romantic. He thinks if he assembles them into one clump, Irene will be impressed.

The strangest part of the scene, though, was that the clown was giving directions and shooting a film camera. That was because Bickernicks got himself made up first along with all the other pre-shoot activities so that nothing would slow down the shooting once it started. It's entirely possible that he didn't anticipate the additional little problem that his plan would create. It didn't take long for the word to spread like wildfire among neighborhood children: Clown on the beach. Soon, small heads were popping up here and there above the sea wall. Soon, Bickernicks' girlfriend, Therese, who was there today to help apply Eric's clown makeup, took on a new task: crowd control. The children wanted to meet the clown. But the clown was very, very busy.

Eric's scene came last, and by then, it was getting dark. In his scene, he ran up to John and Irene, breathless from a supposedly long run. To increasingly exasperated Irene, this was the last straw and she walks off. Then John departs, frustrated, in the other direction, and the clown is standing there with the balloons still in his hand. The script calls for him to shrug and release the helium-filled balloons. Because he has no backup balloon set, this is, of course a scene that must be shot right. A group of boys that Therese is holding back had plans of their own, though. When Eric released the balloons, they raced into the scene trying without luck to snatch the balloons out of the air. Actor Dan Bridges, who was operating the camera, said he thinks the shot is salvageable, that enough of it got filmed before the intrusion.

DATE

I went to Bickernicks' house today to learn how he edits film. He showed me, sitting at his editing console, a large-screen Macintosh computer amidst a tangle of other machines. He sends out the film from each shoot to a finishing lab and they return videotape copies of the film. He edits the video, and when it's all completed, the edited video will be the guide for the physical construction of the final film.

He talked about the future and his strategies for getting someone to buy and distribute his movie. His fondest hope, of course, is to secure an agent with connections at, say, Miramax. In his dream scenario, the studio will fall in love with "alt.sex" and they'll give him a couple of million dollars for it.

Option two, he said, is to spend about $5,000 to make a negative of the movie so that he can make multiple prints and send them around to film-festival committees. If he's accepted by a film festival, who knows? It is an unusual comedy, after all. It's a bit like the low-brow Farrelly Brothers ("The Trouble With Mary"), but it's actually kind of cerebral in its approach. There's one scene, for instance, where men and women in the office analyze at great length the following question: What comes first in a relationship, the "I love you," or the unconstrained passing of wind.

There are other options. There's the Independent Film Channel, which buys little movies. There's the straight-to-video market. And then there's the Internet. Sites and formats already exist, he said, that allow compression of entire movies into about 600 MEG of downloadable file space.

By now, the final budget for "alt.sex" is looking more like $20,000, and he knows it will be hard for him to get his money back. But he says that was never really the main point. He knows that when he's 85 years old, he'll have more than a bunch of corporate videos to show for his life's work. He also knows that he'll have a good story to tell.
END

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