I hope we can see this moment and move on in a constructive way. I don’t want to restart the argument I just wanted to let you know how I feel.
To: Erin Lee Carr
From: David Carr
Date: 10/11/2013
Subject: Re: A couple of thoughts
honey,
selfish and giving, loving, funny as hell, smart and crazy making, you are my daughter, I adore you, am so so proud of you. and i love you. we want you to have good things, soft landing and all of it, but you made it hard this time around.
relax, kick back, enjoy yourself, and know that you are loved and looked after. I am off to paris with deadlines crawling all over me, but i very much like your New York Observer memo. beautifully done.
we will maneuver through all of this, together, in our imperfect ways. sorry for your bumpy ride up, but enjoy the air and the lack of nyc. we will talk more. (and the reason that you got both barrels is that you took the time to condescend to me in the middle of an argument. I take that from no one, including you, so don’t take it personally.)
this is a bump in a great and growing relationship, one that I count as treasure and lean on. I need you in my corner just as bad as you need me.
i love you madly and truly.
david
That was the thing with my dad. In order for our relationship to work, I had to learn to not take his darker moments personally. Sometimes, though—very rarely—I would push back and carefully explain to him that his expectations were out of sync with reality. He just expected too much out of me.
Nothing made this more obvious than a trip we took as a family a few months later. My dad was always one for big gestures, and he decided that he wanted to treat himself and his tribe to a weeklong stay in a remote village in Costa Rica. He told us to dream of coconuts, salt water, and friendly monkeys. Our family did not always travel well together. We all took turns being at odds with one another, apart from Meagan, who pretty much got along with everyone.
We arrived at Montezuma. Meagan, Madeline, and I would stay in the casita, located down the hill from the main house Dad and Jill were staying in. Day after day, Dad gave us our marching orders and we’d often pile into a car that was meant to have four but was now carrying six passengers—my grandma was along for the ride, thankfully. One day I was nursing a particularly bad sunburn and thoughtlessly opened my mouth to complain for the eight hundredth time.
“It’s so fricking hot in the casita.”
“Erin,” my dad started. He paused and stared at me through the rearview mirror.
“Looking at you is like looking into a dirty mirror,” he spat out the car window. No one said anything. I had no idea what to say or where it came from.
Meagan broke the silence. “Dad, it is not okay to say that.”
He grunted and got out of the car, and just like that I was left there, my mind repeating that sentence over and over. It felt like I had been slapped.
I raced down to the smaller cabin and sat on the bed, still reeling. I hated that his words had gotten to me, but even more so I hated that I could see truth in what he said. My mimicking behavior had led me to pick up his deficits as a human, and I was unable to see clearly enough to attempt to fix them. I would have to become my own person, but at what cost?
I mentioned to my dad that I had been invited to TEDx to speak about my documentary work. It was a local Brooklyn event with around thirty people in attendance, but it would be filmed. Due to a fairly memorable disaster with my high school debate team, I had a slight public speaking phobia. I sent a flare to my dad, and he came back with this manifesto:
I have some thoughts about ways for you to go. so thrilled by this. comes at a perfect time in your professional development. you won’t be perfect, but you will be perfectly amazing.
some things for you to think about….
storytelling still attains…and that means characters and import, but also editing and writing.
viral is as viral does. it can’t be gamed, but it can be sought.
you are standing there as a kid in brooklyn who has trouble figuring out how to put together a bed from ikea, but figuring things out as you go is a plenty good way to go when the media business is reconfiguring itself.
the loss of legacy business model has been brutal for people who worked in it, but the absence of friction is profound. dad’s first big story at 24 was seen by 30K, erin’s 10M. see attached slide
there are many platforms and many are important. there is where you work, there is reddit, there is twitter, there is YouTube. they all infect each other.
you are more influential than you think. by citing the great work of others in your social media feed, when it comes time to pimp your own stuff, you have credibility
sharing credit and sharing duties matters. great work comes from the spaces in between people. sitting alone in your room talking to a web cam or hitting the streets by yourself rarely yields excellence.
ppls want to see ppls talking to ppls. social medium desires social media. one where people are interacting.
not all the values of television are worthless. 70 year legacy has yielded some best practices.
sound matters, desperately especially on small platforms. people see stories with their ears.
short form requires guidance. you can’t get people through a lot of stuff in a short amount of time without installing some signage.
we are in a great epoch of documentary film. many of the most important stories, the one that shake the world, often come from documentaries. cite examples.
what is beautiful on your television is not what is beautiful online. authenticity and verisimilitude are beautiful, not good hair and big heads.
the intimacy of the medium often requires more intimate, less distant shooting. we want to be near, we want to almost be in the picture.
you are not an intrinsically interesting subject. journalism, and that’s what it is, requires you to leave your place of work or residence, go out and find more interesting than you and then come back and tell your audience about this person, place or thing.
hope this helps
david
18
Gut Check
“So gut checks all around and plans need to be thought through and considered. The most important thing is a look inside. What do you want and how bad do you want it?”
My dad wasn’t the only person who had to deal with my joblessness angst. I spoke in equal measure to my twin, who had her own challenging job at a mental health facility in Detroit. While she didn’t have media-centric advice to offer, she did keep me positive and cheerfully reminded me that things were going to work out.
My dad did not mentor Meagan in the same way as he did me. He was softer with her, gentler. When they talked, they spoke about their internal lives and how they felt. They had a closeness that wasn’t performance-based.
While I often felt like a burden to my dad, with all of my SOS emails, my sister Madeline kept more to herself, letting my dad in only in certain moments. I think she was his favorite. Madeline, nicknamed Maddie, was quiet, thoughtful, and the queen of the one-liner. She didn’t feel the need to prove herself to him, and that was a strategy that seemed to work.
I wasn’t feeling particularly industrious on those nights following my firing. My brain, my perpetual worst enemy, kept reminding me what that VICE exec had said, that I was going to fail. He was right, I grudgingly had to admit, but would this failure dictate the rest of my career? Would I let some asshole continue to be right? No. I set out to find the next gig.
I asked my dad if I could come home and strategize with him. This was after our cabin fight, and we were having our issues. He was stern in his response: “Never ask to come home, just do it and let me know when so I can make time.” I hopped on my
least favorite mode of transportation—the bus—and made my way back to Jersey. He was outside on a work call, smoking his way through a pack of Camel Lights and tapping madly on the VAIO laptop he carried everywhere with him. I waved hello. He motioned for a kiss on the cheek. He raised his hand to signify he would need five minutes.
I set up camp in the kitchen, on the giant oak table that took up most of the room. I had already started surveying the cluttered media ecosystem and drafting up a list of people to reach out to for gigs.
He came in, wearing his headset, smelling mostly of cigs but also of coffee.
“So what can you tell me?” he started.
“I wrote up a list of people/places/things. I would love your feedback…if you have time,” I trailed off nervously.
“Honey, I always have time for you,” he countered in his typical fashion.
“Okay, here it is.” I handed over my laptop, which was run-down and chugging loudly.
He took in the list. “Well, you are going to need more places than this. Let’s cast a wider net.”
My list was The Guardian, Al Jazeera, CNN, Mic, and my personal favorite, Frontline. “Put Chris Peacock on there, and David Carey and Andrew Rossi.”
I dutifully complied and sent the inquiries out into the universe with no introduction from my dad. I needed to start the dialogue on my own. One email would prove to be particularly important.
Hi Andrew,
Congrats on Ivory Tower! I wanted to get your insight on a professional matter. I started work at a new company four months ago, leaving the red-hot VICE for new challenges and reasonable pay. Unfortunately, I situated myself at an organization that had no room for me. I saved some money up and told them it wasn’t working. I am now searching for a better fit where I can continue to make good videos.
The business of documentary filmmaking is a tricky and constantly evolving entity. I am looking for my next gig at a media company but I also wanted to try and seek your advice on the matter. I know you are beyond swamped, but if you have any time in the coming weeks I would love to get a coffee with you and chat. I can come to you etc and will be as brief as needed. Thank you for any attention.
A couple of hours later I received a response:
Ugh, that sounds like a frustrating course of events. But maybe it will create the opportunity to strike out on your own and direct your first feature? Lets get lunch, maybe next week on Wed or Thurs? I’m in Williamsburg….
I was surprised by his quick response, and I wondered if it was because of his relationship with my dad. Andrew had spent some serious time with him, filming him over the course of a year for his critically acclaimed film Page One: Inside the New York Times. My eyes zeroed in on his line about making a first feature. I wasn’t anywhere close to being able to finance that kind of thing. I needed a job and money coming in, and health insurance. Yet something about the optimism and casualness of the response made me feel excited about the meeting.
Andrew met me at a trendy Williamsburg restaurant. I started filling him in about my work life, keeping the details about my “leaving” my job sparse. I eventually launched into my plan of attack.
“I’m thinking about gunning for The Guardian or Frontline,” I said. These two places offered some structure that I felt I might need. “What do you think?”
He said, “I think you should make your own movies.”
I paused for a moment and then went on to explain the financial aspect of my situation. “I don’t know how plausible that would be. I’ve only ever known and thrived in Web video and I’m not sure if that would translate.”
He remained undeterred. “At those types of organizations, they will place their structure on you versus you creating structure. You know and understand story.”
I had invited Andrew and his wife, Kate, to a screening of Free the Network, my first produced short at VICE about young Isaac Wilder and his quest to bring the Internet to Occupy Wall Street. We chatted at the event, but I was unsure if my film or I made a lasting impression on him. I guess we had.
We continued our discussion, and he asked what type of stories I was interested in. My world, at the time, revolved around science and technology. I asked him if he had ever heard about Ross Ulbricht or the Dark Web. There was a glint of recognition before he asked me to pitch it to him. Ross was a super-bright twentysomething who would go on trial as the founder of the illicit drug marketplace the Silk Road, located on the deep Web, also known as the Dark Web. Despite some nervous stammering, I made my way through it, and he said something about it being interesting to him. And then he said the magic words: “I could pitch this type of story to HBO.”
Sheila Nevins ran the empire that is HBO Documentary Films for almost four decades. She was called the grand dame of documentary by The New York Times and could be described as bright, playful, and fairly aggressive. Everyone in the doc world knew and feared her name. Andrew had worked with Sheila when HBO acquired his first film, Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven. Sara Bernstein, one of Sheila’s right-hand people, would also be involved in our pitch.
The exchange started off with an email in which Andrew asked if he and I could meet with them. I insisted on being in the room to pitch the concept, lying through my teeth that I was adept at pitching. While Andrew likely knew I was green, he also knew that Sheila and Sara liked working with women. I was excited about the possibility of being on the same email chain as them, let alone in the same room. They came from an unlikely class in media where women saw one another as assets, not competition. But I knew Sheila’s and Sara’s schedules were insane, so I didn’t place much faith in the meeting happening.
On October 29, I got a call from Andrew saying the meeting was on. I immediately emailed my dad the good news.
To: David Carr
From: Erin Lee Carr
Date: 10/29/2013
Subject: rossi—update
he just called and said, “I hope you don’t have plans for Monday at 2.” He had Sara Bernstein, VP of Doc programming watch guns and now Sheila Nevins will sit in on the meeting. He said it just got very real and not to talk to anyone about it. Just an update!!!!
My dad responded with a simple: “Wow. Wow. Wow.”
The game was on. I prepped for days on the Dark Web concept and wrote up a ten-page treatment. I tapped a cybersecurity friend for a once-over to make sure it held up and then sent it to my dad with a specialized—for his eyes only—Google doc. I asked for his edits, though I really just wanted an “attagirl.” Instead he asked me to give him a call.
“Dolly, you need to not stress over the language and structure of a document and instead focus on story. What is the human element for this? Why does it need to be made?”
I knew what he said made sense, but it was so much easier to control this document versus what existed between the lines. It wasn’t the text that mattered, it was the story. He also advised having some backup stories to pitch. I had to scramble. I had only six hours to come up with some other ideas. He told me to think about stories that interested me, to focus on what I genuinely wanted to learn about. Check Reddit and Gawker, he suggested.
The two or three hours of research that I normally did before a meeting had morphed into a straight seven days. I had one shot. The more research the better.
The morning of the meeting I woke up at six o’clock and took a quick shower. I looked through my closet for an outfit that made me look the least chubby and most mature. A leather skirt and a button-up black sleeveless blouse. Tights of course—I always had trouble sitting like a lady—and combat boots. No heels for me. I needed to be in fight mode.
I arrived early at the diner outside Sheila’s apartment building, where Andrew and I had agreed to meet before heading up to Sheila’s. In an attempt to calm my nerves and appear casual, I ordered chocolate fudge cake and strong coffee. Andrew came in ten minutes later totally re
laxed. If he was nervous, he didn’t look it. Then again, why would he be? He had done this many times before. I paid the check and we headed across the street.
We took the elevator to a floor in the double digits. I checked the selfie option in my phone to see if I had any remaining chocolate in my teeth. Andrew eyed me curiously but said nothing.
When we entered the apartment Sheila was floating around in an oversized black wrap with matching soft black pants. She wore flats, and her silver bob was impeccably coiffed with a brown swish.
“So we have a proposal for you,” Andrew started. “Erin has been thick into research about the Dark Web.” He looked at me; it was my turn to take the floor. I opened my mouth and heard the words coming out. “I worked on a film about a man that 3D-printed weapons, named Cody Wilson, for VICE. The film resonated with the Web and I kept in contact. He told me he had a line in on an elusive character, Ross, who was currently sitting in a federal prison, waiting on trial.”
All That You Leave Behind Page 11
