the birth and death of good ideas
Although I'm very excited about my new project obviously, I actually feel like I spent most of today discussing and thinking about the Max Hardcore case. In fact, it got to where I was literally obsessing over it in my head, and when the Pulp song "This Is Hardcore" (off the album of the same name) came on, I thought "How apropos." Followed by thinking, "That's actually a really good title for a documentary on the subject."
Followed by realizing what film I would make if I were to tackle a feature-length documentary on this subject. The more I thought about it, the potential documentary This Is Hardcore, the more I realized that it would be both edgy and topical, taboo and interesting, political and personal, and although a documentary about obscenity that includes a major story about a man who pees on young girls (and much worse) would be a hard sell for distribution, it still seemed to me like a fully marketable project... if only I knew what I was doing.
If I knew someone who could help me out, get me what I need to get the ball rolling and help me continue (both financially and organizationally)... in other words, if I had a producer right now, I would totally switch gears (once ERIE was done) and try to make a big documentary. I would fly out to Tampa and interview the prosecuting attorney and the people in Bush's War on Porn that got Paul Little (a.k.a. Max Hardcore) sentenced to jail. I would interview Paul/Max. I would make a list of all of his films and I would try to interview every single girl from every single film of his, because I want to know the good and the bad and the morally gray of the whole case and I don't want to leave a stone unturned or come off one-sided. I would interview pornographers, feminists, politicians, lawyers, anonymous porn users/consumers (I even thought up a great way to do it while letting them keep their anonymity without resorting to cliches), anybody. Priests. Policemen. Doctors. Gravediggers.
But I would also explore my own relationship to porn, which has always been a sort of accepted-but-unexplored part of my own psyche. I'd really try to learn something about myself while doing it. I'd tie in everything from my own experiences and feelings, to porn's role in society (past and present, and future?), to the Trial of Max Hardcore, to obscenity laws, to what is happening to our culture's views on sex, to what this means for the future of censorship, intellectual rights, freedom of speech and sex worker rights. I had an idea for how to thread this all into a single tapestry, under the title (and theme) of This Is Hardcore. I even set it to the Pulp song, in my dream vision.
But I'm not a documentarian, and I don't have the chops or resume to convince anybody to give me money, nor the know-how or wherewithal to pull it off if someone did. (I know where I'd start, though, and that's with the docs of Werner Herzog.)
So, that sucks.
Because I honestly believe it could have been good.
(But: it led me to the desire to seek out good documentaries on the subject of porn, so if anybody knows any, please let me know. What's already out there on the subject?)