MCN Voices: Andrea Gronvall

In 1978, Robb Moss made Riverdogs, a rhapsodic account of a 35-day rafting trip undertaken by 17 friends running the Colorado River while frequently unclothed. Ten minutes of that film form the "then" chapter of The Same River Twice, Moss' new documentary that addresses where five of these people are twenty years later.

Moss has known three of the friends who star in both films since childhood - Jeff Golden, Barry Wasserman, and Danny Silver. During their '78 idyll in the Grand Canyon, Jeff was inseparable from sweetheart Cathy Shaw. They are now divorced from each other, Jeff is a progressive radio talk show host and an environmentalist, and Cathy became the mayor of Ashland, Oregon. Barry grew up to be the administrator of a psychiatric clinic and, in his spare time, the mayor of Placerville, California. And Danny - whose "summer boyfriend," trip leader Jim Tickenor, still runs rivers and lives very simply and close to nature in Coloma, California - is now a mom and an aerobics instructor living in Sante Fe, New Mexico.

Moss is an independent filmmaker who has shot films around the world -- in Ethiopia, the Gambia, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Liberia, Mexico, Nicaragua and Turkey. The Same River Twice took him to Sundance where it debuted in 2003. Since then, when he is not with his family or teaching filmmaking at Harvard University's Visual and Environmental Studies Department, he travels around the country to promote his movie. I caught up with him last weekend in Chicago, where he was greeted by enthusiastic audiences.

Andrea Gronvall: Why choose these five people?

Robb Moss: I chose the people that I felt close to, that I felt there would be a kind of informal intimacy with, that didn't require a lot of breaking down of barriers, and that I could just sort of be around, and that being around might reveal something about their lives. Also, they seemed like the right mix of people that would be representative of the 17 people as a whole. Everybody said yes. Mostly I think they did it because I asked them… and because they trusted me. And that's a kind of unbearable trust, because as a filmmaker often your best material is your deepest betrayal. How you walk that line is complicated. It's something that I worried about a lot.

AG: I came away from this movie with a great deal of respect for these people. Their lives have been deepened and enriched by their experiences. You end the film with a very poignant speech by Jim, who might come off as sort of an oddball for the eccentric way in which he lives. But from his point of view, it's not eccentric; he's staying true to what he was back in '78. He's totally in tune with the seasons, he's totally in tune with the cycles of life. In their own different ways, they all are; they still embody the ideals they believed in then. They still have a social conscience.

RM: Being a river guide, you have to be competent, and you have to be civic-minded at some level, because you're in sort of a group situation. And then there's something about the lessons of the river, and living outdoors that attunes you to things that are lessons you don't forget very easily and you carry with you for the rest of your lives. They're successful in certain kinds of ways. They're not making scads of money, but I think they're living the lives they want to live, and that's a great measure of success.

I showed Jim the film just before he saw it at the San Francisco Film Festival. I showed it to everybody before it was finished, but Jim I couldn't -- you can't really find Jim. He doesn't have a phone; you don't know where he is. Even in filming him, I had to enlist a former student of mine, a terrific shooter who lives in San Francisco; the only stuff in here that's not shot by me is shot by her, and some of that is of Jim. He's like one of these rare animals that you set up a blind, and you hope that he will come.

AG: You're a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. You've now taught filmmaking for 15 years at Harvard. You've traveled around the world, and filmed many different cultures. What got you on that road?

RM: I ended up going to graduate school at MIT, which had a film school that was run by Ricky Leacock and Ed Pincus, and these were two guys who were so instrumental in the history of documentary in a certain kind of way--both very camera-centric, that their starting point, their entree to the world was the camera itself: the interaction of the camera and the world producing images to see what that world was like. This as opposed to, for example, writing films ahead of time, storyboarding, doing lots of research, pre-production, which pretty much defines public television.

It's a different way of thinking about film--it's camera-centric, and that often means experience. In my case, I had done a lot of traveling. I had spent five years between undergraduate school and graduate school not paying rent; I slept on a lot of people's floors, or in the desert, or ran rivers. So, there was a way in which those seemed to be like natural subjects once I became a filmmaker.

AG: Judging by the cross section of audiences at the screenings tonight, your film seems to be playing to a wider demographic than one might expect.

RM: I've been gratified that the audiences aren't just middle-aged, and that for those people in their twenties that the film is working for, the film seems open enough to read from the position they are in their lives. Somebody at the show last night was saying, "I loved seeing this because it made me appreciate being young." She's like 22 or 23, and I thought that was so quick, that she should appreciate being young, and more than appreciate it, she'd take advantage of that, to maximize whatever that can be for her. The truth is, we should do that for every point in our lives that we're at -- we shouldn't be looking forward to our "real life" once we get married, or once we find jobs, or once something else happens. People today in their 20s, I think, have often given up their present for something intangible in the future.

AG: People at tonight's screenings have pointed out that at 28 -- the average age of the subjects in Riverdogs -- they weren't that young for such a carefree existence. What these audience members might not realize – either because they themselves are too young to remember, or they don't grow up in the U.S. -- is that in 1978 our economy was very robust for a number of reasons, years of artificial inflation by the Vietnam War being one of them. It wasn't that hard then to live in this country.

RM: Absolutely. I lived in New York City in 1974, and I spent $150 for an apartment on Carmine Street in the Village.

AG: Oh, my God!

RM: Just for six months, and then I went on to something else.

AG: You can't even get a parking space today for $150!

RM: That's right; so, it was easier. It was easier to be young then than it is to be young now.

AG: Audiences today seem to want what they feel is "true," if you go by the preponderance of reality shows and newsmagazines on television, or the fact that so many movies and TV dramas are billed as "based on a true story." If audiences crave "real" so much, why aren't documentaries more popular?

RM: The question I'd like to ask is, how come a little film like mine is on the screen? Five years ago, I don't think it would be. I think this "real-story" thing does signal something. I think what's happening now is that people seem to want the experience seeing nonfiction film on the screen in a collective way, in an experience like that we all crave with fiction. I don't really like seeing films at home on my VCR; I can't see anything that way I really care about, unless I'm studying it. Earlier, documentaries were seen on TV exclusively; except for the very occasional documentary, you couldn't go to the movies and see them. Now you can; at any time there's like two to five documentaries on the screen now in most cities. I don't think I've ever seen that before.

AG: So, what's your take on the sea change? How has this come about, do you think?

RM: I think for a lot of years we've had an uneasy relationship with actuality -- virtual reality on the computer, actors becoming presidents, our mistrust of the news media. I remember the precise moment where I saw a news story on TV about Sean Penn and Madonna breaking up; this was a reporter talking on a kind of E.T. kind of thing. The reporter's talking about Sean Penn beating up Madonna, and they cut to footage of a re-creation, of people in shadows portraying Sean Penn beating up Madonna. It's not Sean Penn and Madonna, but just a kind of re-creation to make the story more legible, and then to raise the ratings.

This was when reality TV started, with shows like 911 So, 911, you know, did an amalgamation of the real 911 call of the child whose hand is caught in the drain of the pool--and you see the tape recorder, you hear the voice, and then you cut to the emergency medical team coming, you cut to an actress playing the mom hysterical at the door, you cut to the kid underneath the water, you cut to the real mother in a documentary interview talking about how it felt to be in this situation, you cut back to the actress playing the role. This didn't happen before. The networks gauged at a certain point, about 15 years ago, that our boundaries of actuality and reality were more much blurred than a kind of convention that had existed previously. I was shocked. It was at the same moment in which academia couldn't say what books you should read if you're an educated person in the West, that that was contested by challengers asking which books, and in what society, and from whose point of view?

Our multicultural society, which I'm all for, has produced a series of ripples about our sense of what's real, what's important, how we define ourselves, what's our identity, what's actuality. And the battleground for all this, in a way, is in nonfiction filmmaking; nonfiction filmmaking is the frontline for this engagement with actuality. Whether people are aware of this or not, there's a way in which seeing that engagement on the screen collectively and discussing it afterwards helps us think about the world around us.

AG: There may be more documentaries out there on theatre screens, but on TV actuality coverage -- "news" -- is often about promoting something or someone, or spinning a more flattering angle to some scandal--certainly on the local level, "if it bleeds, it leads."

RM: What you're describing is the ascendancy of entertainment over everything else. If it's entertaining, then that wins the day. Then, the question would be, are the documentaries that are being screened guilty of that, or are they different?

AG: Must they be entertaining?

RM: Is it the fact that they're entertaining that they're working, or is it that they have a point of view? I don't know. Capturing the Friedmans has this lurid whodunit quality that's interesting and quite entertaining; Winged Migration is just birds flying--it made four million bucks; Spellbound has a narrative arc; something like The Weather Underground has made $500,000, and that's amazing. I don't know how to read the landscape. But people coming out, going to the movies to see documentaries -- if there wasn't money to be made, exhibitors wouldn't be doing it.

AG: Although they're two very different films with different distribution patterns, The Same River Twice and an earlier documentary The Cockettes both show us something we rarely get to see in the movies nowadays—natural nudity. Are documentaries standing in for the foreign films of the 70s by providing an opportunity to see flesh-and-blood people in the flesh? It seems to me that the more we wage war around the world, the more we wage war at home in our culture on our bodies. In a way, watching these films really does feel like opening a time capsule, because it's so foreign to anything else we see on the screen now.

RM: I think this insight that documentaries are in some way serving a similar purpose to foreign films in the 60s and 70s -- I think that's really good. That they're more corporeal, they're closer to the vest, they're more personal as well, they speak to the moment in a way that Hollywood has kind of lost track of. Hollywood's not always lost track of the moment; sometimes there are periods in Hollywood that are very much in the Zeitgeist. But you're saying documentaries are doing something of that now, doing something about it--maybe something about our bodies that European films seemed to do in the 70s, presenting our bodies in different kinds of ways. That's pretty interesting and may be a good way to think about it.

AG: Do you think of yourself as an activist filmmaker?

RM: I don't think of myself as an activist filmmaker, although the next film I think will be an activist film.

AG: What are you thinking of doing?

RM: I want to make a film about the empire of classified secrets, in that there's this giant industry of making secrets and keeping them, housing them, reading them, and putting them away, and putting them out of circulation, that is huge, HUGE. That there are five times as many papers of information put into the classified world as are put on library shelves that the major libraries support. Fifty million pages have been added to the Library of Congress this year; 250 million pages have become classified this year. It's a huge industry: 4 million Americans have clearance to read secrets; there are 4,000 original classifiers whose job it is to say what's a secret. They don't have to ask anybody about it because they've got that clearance. By contrast, there are 550,000 Americans who are university professors. That's eight times as many people--more or less—who have clearance to read secrets than there are university professors.

Some secrets need to remain secrets. Some scientific things aren't secret until they can be turned into a weapon, and then your research immediately goes into classified, and you can't know what you know. It would take 8,000 years just to read all the information that's been classified right now, with the current staff. What the situation basically says is, if everything's secret, then nothing's a secret, that it completely devalues the whole idea of national security, and it takes all these things off the table. So much so that we can't conduct business--you know, our scientific research, our academic research, our ability to be citizens and make good judgments about our elections. I mean, things are put away! Anyway, I don't know what the hell I'm going to film--because everything's all a secret--but people are willing to talk to us because I don't care what the secrets are, I want to talk about the architecture, and how it all goes together.

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The Same River Twice opens March 12 at Los Angeles' Landmark Nuart Theatre, and the following week on March 19 at LA's Laemmle Colorado Theatre, while continuing its rollout in other cities.

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