Josh Levy, Martin Lucas and Robin, Robin looking here very skeptical and Algonquin round table. [Brendan Greeley]
It was my first time on TV — well, captured by some sort of film crew, anyway — and I look slouchy, tired and unkempt: everything my mom never wanted me to be. Chris is great on film, like he keeps a book of aphorisms and a comb in his pocket — which he doesn’t — but, you know, Chris does this all the time.
In February the filmmaker Martin Lucas spent a day with us in the studio at WGBH and in our very green two-room office in Cambridge. Marty produced a ten-minute film, “Many to Many,” a summary of recent changes in media. It’s obviously a tall order; a lot of ink and film have been dedicated to this very topic in the last two years, but Marty picked the right people to explain it, like Dina Mehta and Neha Viswanathan of Global Voices and, of course, us.
You can see the film here:
Click to watch Martin Lucas’s “Many to Many.”
Also, on sound there on the left is Joshua Levy, who blogs at This is really happening and is responsible for the fascinating Bronx blog project. And you can see a whole set of pictures of Josh and Marty in our studio here.
I was involved in a high-profile start-up a few years back. One day, without notice or explanation, a Canadian film crew showed up at my office and spent time filming me work and asking me random questions. If I hadn’t been so busy and working under tremendous deadline pressure, I would have found the whole thing very unsettling and Kafka-esque. At the time it just seemed to line-up with all the other unpredictable weirdness floating around. Luckily, I wore clean underwear and brushed my teeth. I wonder what happened to this documentary? Probably in my personnel file in some cavernous expanse.
I forget to mention the other odd thing about my experience; besides the Terry Gilliam meets Kafka part. After a few minutes, the crew really did become like wallpaper. People behaved completely natural with all the flaws and beauty they do under *normal* circumstances. I’d always wondered how film crews were able to record people behaving so naturally, and sometimes quite poorly, in front of a camera. Well, I now understand. A good crew really does become fairly unobtrusive and leaves plenty of room for normalcy. Strange. Very strange.
Brendan: Thrilled that you got my spelling right!
Martin was so easy to talk to – that I got all animated as usual. When I compare myself to everybody else – who appears to beautifully composed – my own thrashing limbs and blinking eyelids seem a bit overdone. Heh!