DIRECTOR’S
NOTES
In late 2002, my friend Robert
Boulanger told me that Peter Berlin lived in the apartment below his. My memory
of Berlin’s image and photographs were vague, though I knew who he was and how
famous he had been in the 1970s. I remembered seeing him on the streets in the
1980s when I moved to San Francisco. But I certainly wasn’t a fan nor was I
particularly interested in porn or porn stars. However, when Robert started
relating the stories Peter had been telling him—about Robert Mapplethorpe,
Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Warhol, and about the immense loss of his friends to
AIDS—I knew these stories need to be captured somehow.
Meeting Peter for the first time was
intimidating and, although Robert had explained to Peter that I was a filmmaker
and writer and that I was interested in possibly doing a documentary about him,
it took me three meetings before I could even mention what I wanted to do.
Peter seemed bored with the image of “Peter Berlin” and while he didn’t refuse
my request, he didn’t seem very interested either. He made it clear he didn’t
like to plan in advance and the idea that I would need any sort of commitment
from him was met with dismissal. It was clear I would have to shoot on short
notice and without a crew.
We eventually shot over 40 hours of
interviews in the course of 18 months and the more we got together and talked
on camera, the less reserved Peter became. Never one to mince words, Peter
initially didn’t want to talk about the things I felt were interesting or
important—his films, his photographs, what San Francisco and New York were like
in the 1970s and 80s. Instead he wanted to talk about politics, world events,
and his favorite television shows. I just let him talk. Eventually, he opened
up and spoke freely. I just had to wait until he was ready.
Then the photographs, film canisters,
and videotapes started appearing from under his bed and from out of his closet.
He presented them to me almost as an afterthought. “Ja,” he would say, “maybe
this might be interesting.” Hundreds of slides, prints, and negatives, reels of
apparently undeveloped 16mm film from the 1960s and 1970s, and hours of 3/4”
and Hi 8 videos were made available, piled onto Peter’s enormous bed, which
takes up almost the entire room.
When I had the 16mm reels transferred
to video, I was amazed at what had lain unseen for almost 40 years - Peter
walking the streets of Paris, Peter cruising the Castro at sunrise, Peter
masturbating on a train from Germany to France. Peter, too, was surprised. Some
of the film he didn’t even remember. Then we watched the videos of Fire Island,
of New York lofts and vacations on Long Island, and of Peter posing, strutting,
and climaxing for the camera. It was clear I had an embarrassment of riches to
consider and a daunting editing task ahead of me.
I started this project with no plan, no
budget, and no crew. I just had a fascinating man as the subject and more raw
materials than I could possibly use. On my Mac G4 laptop, I cut together a 30
minutes demo reel and showed it to Lawrence Helman, a long-time fan of Peter’s
whom I had interviewed for the documentary. Lawrence was also a producer who
had tried to get Peter interested in a similar project several years ago to no
avail. Lawrence saw something in the jumble of scenes that excited him and
before I knew it, I had a co-producer with a rolodex as big as his enthusiasm.
We begged, borrowed, bartered, and
tried to get discounts wherever we could. Lawrence lined up interviews with
celebrities and negotiated rights and permissions. I holed up with my laptop,
dozens of tapes, and hundreds of scanned photographs at Dorland Mountain Arts
Colony in Southern CA, cutting the documentary together and slowly giving it
shape.
One of the unique aspects of Dorland is
its complete lack of electricity. It brings one in tune with the natural
rhythms of nature and allows creativity to blossom. I’d been there before,
completing a draft of a novel, but to my knowledge, no one had tried to edit a
video there before. Armed with an adaptor plugged into my rental car’s
cigarette lighter, I would recharge the laptop battery every night and every
afternoon. Even with my recharging routine, I could only get four hours of
editing done in each 24-hour period. And yet, the lack of distractions made
those four hours as productive as two weeks would have been at home.
Back in the land of electricity, I
continued cutting, interrupted occasionally by Peter’s discovery of more film
and more photographs from the depths of his closet. Each new discovery required
rethinking large sections of the documentary and re-editing. In previous
writing and editing projects, I had always started with a clear structure. This
video was different - growing organically, the story emerging from the mass of
golden archival material, a little at a time.
In retrospect, I don’t think That Man: Peter Berlin could have been
made in any other way. Making the documentary was, like Peter’s life and image,
a journey of discovery and re-creation.