Coney Island Sunrise

I need to make something with my own hands. Complete it.

Get it out there. That's what I found myself saying to a cinematographer I met with last Sunday.

We were at the Wild Side, over on Cortland, and as fate would have it, the first lesbian bar I ever went to when it was on Broadway—I think I was 13 or 14. Someone brought me in there, and now it's wow, decades years later and a neighborhood bar on Bernal Hill. I'm talking with a cinematographer out in the garden. As the winter light changes into night, tiny electric bulbs strung from the arbors come to life. And Jason's looking at me, really looking into my eyes. I think it must be what he's learned from being a cinematographer over the years. To pay attention.

After the November election, especially, my need to make something and complete it became almost physical. No more waiting for production companies, for funding, for all the pieces to come together.

So I made ‘Battleground.’ I learned to wrestle with AI images, figuring out how to make them in an expressionist style that wasn't pie-faced smooth and beautified. The film expresses something I needed to say about physical autonomy, reaching back to reference Barbara Kruger's feminist art from the 70s: "Your body is a battleground."

And now I'm wrestling with another film experiment, 'Coney Island Sunrise.'  I'm using archival photos, AI-generated imagery & video generated from 70s photos, and 70s documentary footage.

The origin for the film's concept was remembering when I lived in Manhattan in the late seventies, stripping in Times Square. I just kept thinking about how I was able to do that? I was 17! (Well, I was only able to do it about a month before I got fired for kicking a man that followed me into the bathroom.) Who was that person? Because now I know, 17 is so young, no matter what I felt at the time.

I'm working with narrative (and not memoir), letting the story and imagery and music evolve, but if I want to make something with my own hands, I have to study a myriad of technical editing and computer program skills. And frankly, it feels like wanting to write but having to make my own pencil first.

Every day I'm stumped by various tech problems that prevent the transitions, the beats, the synergies that are right there, but not there as I work my mouse to click the "blade" and try to remember the tricks. Happy accidents happen and an occasional piece of intentional choreography works among the multiple series of key commands and remembered technical sequences. And more recently, there are times where flow happens and my vision starts to appear. I'm at the point where I can't rest till the images and music and voice over and overlays and... all of it says what I want. And much of the time I wonder if it ever will.

I try to remember that as a writer I've learned to dwell in the mess — for as long as I can stand it — in order to bypass conventional thought patterns and slam into instinct. We will see if I can do it in film!

And I'm working with street kids again, just like my first novel and my first screenplay. There's something about youth and resilience and fierceness that keeps drawing me back.