All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(23)

He responded, “Well, you aren’t home for a while and I’m busy. Can we talk tomorrow, maybe late?”

I nodded my head, and he reverted his attention back to the glowing screen in front of him. I’d been dismissed.

I went back up to my old bedroom and checked Twitter. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to be, let alone who I wanted to be. I opened up Word and saw the cursed cursor blinking at me. Let’s start simple, I thought. What did I love? I’d had a sort of religious experience when I watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a documentary detailing the vast corruption and shocking demise of the energy-trading Enron Corporation. It was a dark, acerbic investigation by filmmaker Alex Gibney. Best of all, the film was a living document that showed those scoundrels for who they really were. I would love to work on something like that.

Then there was Liz Garbus’s HBO documentary film There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane, an investigation into a car accident that was less about the crime and more about what it means to be a mother in the twenty-first century. Her film haunted me. I added her name to the Word doc. I had watched Capturing the Friedmans about seventeen times, so I thought Maybe Andrew Jarecki? I didn’t know who to choose as my fourth, but I knew I wanted it to be a woman. I spent hours trying to figure out the next name before it hit me. I had recently met a young woman named Lena Dunham at my dad’s request, and she had the firepower that I thought could translate. She made the list. So now I had four, and three out of four of them were documentary filmmakers that had made dark, disquieting films. I had an answer, but it didn’t seem like a financial possibility. I turned in my assignment and waited for a response.

A couple of days later, he called me. “Good work,” he said. “Let’s see how we can get in contact with these people. First up, meet Lena and Alex in person, if they have time to spare.”

I wanted to stay at VICE but I also wanted to figure out possible next steps. It had been drilled into me early on that if you like the work you do, then it doesn’t feel like work. Could I be a documentary filmmaker? This exercise helped me realize that I had to figure out what made my heart beat faster. I needed to recognize the topics that I clicked on time and time again to find out more, just like these filmmakers had done. I could start by making short films about ideas and problems I was obsessed with and go from there. I loved mysteries and crime, but that seemed too vague. After being assigned to VICE’s science and technology website Motherboard, I realized I was completely obsessed with the Internet and the huge range of stories it created. I mostly gravitated toward crime, sex, and weapons, but all had to have a twenty-first-century slant to make them newsy and interesting to a media-saturated audience.

At Motherboard, I assisted on a variety of projects until I felt it was time to start pitching my own ideas. But how to find the right story to pitch? With the help of my secret weapon, my dad, I was able to focus-group and separate the good ideas from the bad. Even then, I realized that this was an incredibly privileged perch from which to launch my early career. I vowed to take advantage of it but also to do the same for others, if and when it came to be my turn.

My dad told me time and time again to question what audiences are curious about. What drives media consumers? Why is anyone going to sit down and watch this video? In response, we developed the “cultural nerve” strategy. This meant that when considering whether to produce a video, a central question had to be asked: What is it about the story that touches on a cultural nerve? This hypothesis was never more proven than with a short film I produced called Click, Print, Gun.

Faith Gaskins, a field producer with VICE’s HBO team, kept seeing a name pop up in her newsfeed: Cody Wilson. He was a twentysomething anarchist who vehemently believed that it was his right to open-source and manufacture 3D-printed firearms. Faith pitched Cody for a segment for the VICE HBO show, and while I believe it was mulled over for a couple of weeks, the powers that be ultimately passed. She handed what we call a one-pager over to me, with the message “Maybe this would be a good story for you?”

Faith is an unfailingly generous person. She could have kept that information to herself, locked away in some folder on her dusty laptop, but instead she chose to help out a fellow producer to see if the idea could work for someone else. Every day I try and remind myself of this lesson.

I knew the story could go viral the second I got that one-pager. I reached out to Cody by email.

He responded a few hours later.


Erin,

I’d be happy to participate. Perhaps there are some project updates in which you’d be interested.

crw



Before I knew it, I was on a plane to Austin to meet the man on the other end of the email.

When I stepped off the plane and into the hot, dense Texas air, I was relieved when I saw I’d received no word from Cody trying to pull out of the interview. My cameraman, Chris, picked me up in a rental car, honking the horn as he waved excitedly.

We arrived at the slightly abandoned-looking warehouse that was Cody’s work space, and I called him. No answer. I shot him a text as I leaned against the hot car, trying to clear my head and not overthink it. Eventually Cody strode out with a grin on his face and reached his hand out to shake mine. I grinned back and introduced myself. He eyed me up and down.

Over the course of the next couple of days, Cody introduced us to his friends and business associates but mainly stuck to his ideas and philosophy. I felt the nervousness drain away as we struck up a rhythm. I was like a kid in summer, plotting capers and building forts. He had a way of making eye contact that made you feel like no one else was in the room. (Don’t worry—this is not a story about how we fell in love. One of the many salient things my dad taught me is don’t fuck your subjects.)