A “Trying” Collaboration

My husband, Doug McIntyre, and I are at this moment on the road at the Indianapolis International Film Festival and looking forward to Newport Beach! At our Q & A sessions following our festival screenings here, at the Palm Beach International Festival and at the Kansas City Jubilee, we've often been asked how working with one's spouse, well...worked. Indeed, that was a question we had when we started this project more than five-and-a-half years ago. How is this going to work?

A few months after our wedding, we went to hear Jack Sheldon play at the Sweet & Hot Jazz Festival over Labor Day weekend. Jack was in particularly fine form and brought down the house both with his playing and with his unique and ribald sense of humor. On the way home, we began discussing what a shame it was that more people didn't know Jack's story, both as an entertainer and a survivor of unspeakable personal tragedies. This quickly led to "Hey! Let's make a movie!" Had we known this was the beginning of a five-year-plus road would we have continued? Dunno. We jump-started our production by pulling together five cameras to shoot Jack's 71st birthday bash at the Beverly Hilton. It was an incredible night with a packed house, and that footage ended up providing the backbone of our film, the hub of the wheel. We cut a trailer, ostensibly to use as a sales tool with which to raise funds. Hah! Fat chance, it turned out. We discovered, after a year-and-a-half, that no dollars were going to come our way, especially for a documentary. But I digress - back to, "How did this work?"

Like a household, any movie requires a division of labor among partners. Doug and I considered ourselves lucky to have each other, as there were and are tasks that each of us respectively likes and dislikes. (make that, hates!) For instance, I take peculiar pleasure in dogging people on the phone - which proved invaluable in securing the likes of mega-men Clint Eastwood, Billy Crystal, Frank Marshall, Chris Botti and the late Merv Griffin, among others, to appear in our documentary. This, by the way, took two years after these fellows said, "Yes." Doug, whose knowledge of all things jazz dwarfs mine, took responsibility for lining up the fine artists who populate our film; he just plain old knew who those people should be. He also took the lead in the interviews of our jazz stars. My specialty, when it came to interviewing, had more to do with the interior, emotional nature of being an artist - especially when it came to getting Jack Sheldon to discuss how he felt about himself and his craft.

Doug reached out and was able to secure tremendous help in the form of crews and equipment from then-head of LA Channel 36, Steve Grace, who saw our trailer and wanted in. Oh - did I mention I went out and bought a camera when we realized that the only way we'd get this done was to do it ourselves? Turned out another specialty of mine was getting us off the dime when we were stalled. Like when we were faced with 1,000 pages of transcripts that had to be whittled down into some sort of paper edit before we could actually begin editing. Neither one of us wanted to do it, so this huge binder sat on the office floor for, literally, months. It periodically got covered with the other detritus of our lives, but always peeked out, reminding us of our avoidance. Finally, realizing that my husband did, after all, have a full-time job, I took it on and attacked the damned thing. I got it down to 350 pages, then some smaller number, and we finally could start editing with our eternally patient editor, Matt McUsic.

In the editing room, the three of us fell into a rhythm that was much less contentious than I'd imagined it would be. Amazingly, Doug and I were able to not personalize our differences and Matt served as a terrific tie breaker as well as marriage saver. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit; we got through it all without a "real" fight.) This was the most creative part of the process, and I was sorry to see it end. Because when it was over - as all filmmakers know - it wasn't over.

I took charge of all festival submissions and DVD duplication. Doug tackled the music and film clearances. And...here we are. As for distribution...we're working on it.

Here's the question: Can this marriage survive without TRYING TO GET GOOD?

2008 Newport Beach Film Festival honor: Outstanding Achievement in Documentary

Photo courtesy of the filmmaker.