going to

start first with just the fear that it's not going to work, right? Because that's true in every film we make, right? You always start with, oh, there's all this archive.

That's amazing, but it's all VHS.

Can people hang out and watch that much VHS? Particularly young people who we try to, we want to make films they'll watch.

We have two, a 20-year-old and a 17-year-old.

And three years ago, I was like to our then 17-year-old, Will you please look at this VHS footage and tell me what you think? Like, I really want to know.

What do you think of these 90s people? And she was really interested.

Maybe I want to open it up to our audience and see if we have any questions from our audience.

How does that go after you talk with him for the first time?

Fred and his wife invited us up to their house, he still lives in the same house in Middletown, and m- m- made us a, like, 12-course [laughs] brunch, which we...

So we were there for a really long time, and then, uh, hung out in the backyard.

And Fred and Denise are real people and wanted to get to know us before they opened up their basement to [laughs] us and our I th-- we had such a great time.

Did we even go into the basement at that point? I don't even know.

But we, we spent a lot of time talking, getting to know one another, and at some point, um, he, when we were asking about this classroom, he took out a crayon and in evoking the memory of the space, drew a map of what he remembered it looking and where all the chairs were and where the cameras were and where the...

And we were so intrigued by that and the memory of that, that sort of got our creative juices going and we doubled down in our interest in the creative, what the creative possibilities were beyond even just the plot of the story, which was Byzantine and, like, overwhelming because they'd been following this story for many years and there's many players, good and bad players, and there's...

A lot of that you could clean up with AI tools and whatnot, but we were like, "No, it's, it's sort of the imperfection of the work is what, and the perfection of it for that matter, is what we want to celebrate here, all of it." That was interesting.

Well,

this is the early days of the quarter, right? This is like 1991 is, first of all, documentary was not mainstream.

And, um, I mean, I think that was the first year of real world, um, Right.

And like Rodney King was captured on a camcorder.

So like if we can all like in a time machine and go backwards in time and way before smartphones, way before all the things we can use now to record everything around us, it was very special to have these cameras in the school even.

And, but what Fred did, which was beyond a V club actually, is that he, this was a class you got credit, you got English credit for.

So his, his sort of genius was he taught English for years and he's a great English teacher and he taught Romeo and Juliet and he'd write, you know, all of this sort of great classics.

And I think it's wonderful to watch that.