Home Page: The Documentary
Dateline: 05/19/97 - Weekly feature from your Guide.
A site called bio reveals).
But there's an added dimension to D-Word that should expand the site's audience beyond film buffs and fellow documentarians to anyone interested in the Web as a personal publishing medium. You see, Doug's documentary is called Home Page and its primary source of inspiration is Justin Hall.
I say "inspiration" because it is Justin's justly famous homepage that first hooks Doug on the Web. He develops the idea of using Justin, and the people and pages he discovers through Justin's links, as a way of documenting the "beating heart of the Internet." Even now there's little question that Justin will garner the most onscreen time in the completed film. But as he edits his 100 hours of footage, Doug has come to understand that the film won't be "about" Justin and his links, at least not in the traditional sense. And D-Word has evolved into something much more than a progress report on Home Page.
I view the 15-minute "sample" of the film in Doug's small, VHS-stuffed office on Lafayette Street. There is Justin talkingwebtalk at 100 miles an hour; "the physical embodiment of the Internet" someone calls him. College chums and girlfriends reveal the awkwardness of having the minute details of their relationships with Justin revealed online. Net celebs make appearances (Howard Rheingold of Electric Minds; Julie Petersen, a founder of HotWired; John Seabrook of The New Yorker).
I wonder how Doug, in the final cut, will seamlessly meld all this with scenes of his own 6-year-old daughter talking about her computer and footage of his father that's not in the sample but which he describes to me. Then, suddenly, surprisingly, I see Doug himself on the video monitor (a bit of an awkward figure, I might add). Justin has commandeered the camera. Doug tells me he has never before appeared onscreen in one of his documentaries.
It's then I realize the film is about Doug.
Anyone who reads his D-Word journal can see how Doug himself comes to this realization. He admits to "trying to resist the urge to reveal myself online" yet yields to the artistic necessity of making his own family relationships part of the film. In an email to me he writes:
It's interesting how things evolve in the editing. I started out with the idea of weaving many storylines, inspired by the metaphor of hypertext links. But the material is calling for a somewhat different film. The relationship between Justin and Howard Rheingold is so dominant that it's made my own relationship with my father more central than I ever figured.
Julie Petersen, whose homepage Awaken is a classic of the genre, has her own interpretation:
When I think of Doug following Justin, I imagine him chasing this inner image of himself - like Doug crossed paths with another part of himself, fell in love, and traveled these United States hoping for another glimpse. And somewhere along the way, Doug was tranced out by the same thing all of us 'cast of characters' were tranced out by... he fell in love with the Web. And all at once the meaning of 'the Web' became clear to Doug and he was compelled to document it.
The immediacy of Web publishing, its always-under-construction status, the possibility of instant feedback - these things "trance" Doug, since they stand in such start contrast to the painfully drawn-out process of creating the frozen perfection of a 90-minute film. As for the Web's expressive power and personal publishing aspect, he is a true believer: The explosion of homepages, he says, "vividly illustrates people's need to connect to other people at a time when the institutions and rituals and communities that previously connected us are disappearing."
The Web is what freed Doug to make a self-revealing film.
Justin tells me he thinks there's a creative tension between those two worlds - between the "willy nilly, open-ended Web" and the "start here, stop here" nature of a linear film - that will greatly influence the Home Page we will see on the screen. But whether or not Doug Block makes a good film will mostly depend, this Web icon says, on "how Doug pulls back the layers on Doug to find out why he's fascinated with me."
So is it Doug or Doug's Web-inspired process of self-revelation that will be the core of the film? We'll have to wait until he emerges from the editing room to find out.
Footnote: Doug Block is readying his film for the January '98 Sundance festival, but is still seeking additional funding and editing equipment. You can reach him at dbblock@el.net.
