Shedding.

I’m consolidating the Life in a Box archive to ship to Minneapolis to join the Y’all archive at the Tretter Collection. It’s mostly digital media—video, audio, images, etc.—but there’s quite a bit of paper, too: notes, transcriptions of interviews, release forms, contracts, publicity materials, financial stuff. I’m sitting here reliving the joy and optimism of the whole thing but especially the last few months when we were getting closer and closer to finishing and feeling more and more certain that it was going to be very good. I couldn’t wait for people to see it, for it to get out to a wide audience it seemed certain to reach. I couldn’t imagine that it would not.

One of the big lessons of the period of my life and career depicted in Life in a Box was that that feeling of inevitability does not make it real, that no feeling of inevitability makes it real. I thought I had successfully and fully learned that. And yet, as I worked on the film over those two years I let the feeling creep in again, came to trust it, and by the end, even though, and just as, I had drained the resources and patience of our investor dry, I started making the same kind of irrational decisions Jay and I had made over and over for ten years waiting for Y’all to hit big. I used credit cards to pay for the final edit, color correction, sound mix and edit, marketing; I accepted funds and in-kind donations from friends; promised deferred payment to collaborators who’d already put more time and work into the project than I had any right to expect of them. I never considered any other way except to plow through to the end knowing that when we signed our deal with HBO everybody would get paid and then some.

And we finished it, and it was really really good. We all knew it. Festival audiences loved it. We got lots of excellent, perceptive, and generous reviews, the attorney representing the film had meeting after meeting with distributors, cable networks, and we tried so hard to sell the film, kept trying for years. But it didn’t happen.

Life in a Box was the last time I had that sense of inevitability. It was the last time I allowed myself to have it. Not only is the disappointment painful and unnecessary, but all the emotional and psychic energy put into it is a distraction from the work.

Who knows why it didn’t happen, but I have theories:

* The film premiered in the San Francisco Int’l Film Festival in 2005. There were two scheduled screenings. The first one was lightly attended, but it started some buzz and the line for the second showing was long and excited. Just before the scheduled time, someone from the festival came out and said that the power had gone out in the theater and the screening was cancelled. Who knows who was there to see it and didn’t?

* We entered the film in the San Francisco Int’l Film Festival, and also Frameline, the long running San Francisco lesbian and gay festival. The SFIFF contacted me first, offering us a premiere. I was thrilled but we all thought the more high-profile premiere for a gay film would be Frameline. We tried to get an answer from them but they wouldn’t commit, so, not wanting to end up with neither, we said yes to SFIFF. Soon after, Frameline said yes, but they gave us terrible time slots in a theater across town, ignored me—the organizer of the festival looked at me and then turned his back to me at the welcome meet and greet events. Maybe he was miffed that SFIFF got the premiere? I don’t know, but it was weird. Then, and I don’t know if this was connected, but both Newfest and Outfest (the New York and Los Angeles LGBT festivals) rejected the film. (But it screened in maybe 10 or 12 other queer festivals all over the U.S. and Europe and every single one treated the filmmakers with kindness and enthusiasm.)

* The old saw that always worked against the act itself. The perception that gay audiences don’t like folky old-time country music and people who like folky old-time country music don’t lke gay people. It’s a myth we literally shattered in our career and in the film over and over, but

* I suspect most people who screen films for distributors, or festivals, or cable channels, or media don’t watch more than the first 5 or 10 minutes of anything. Life in a Box doesn’t tell you everything at the very beginning (personally I hate films that do, but I understand why filmmakers do that, and novelists, and artists who make any kind of art with duration).

* The song contains a big chunk of the Johnny Cash song I Walk the Line. I anguished over the decision to use that footage, but I knew it was perfect for the story, so I trusted that it would work out. Cash’s catalog was (maybe still is?) administered by the family, so it wasn’t hard to get someone on the phone to ask. The person I spoke with was extremely skeptical. I sent him stuff about the film, the edited scene that contained the song (it’s just us in the camper practicing and arguing), talked to him three or four times. I literally begged. I felt at the time like he was pretty horrid, though it’s likely I was oversensitive in a hard business. I actually cried on the last phone call, and I think that’s what got the guy to grant me a limited festival license. I’m not sure the presence of the song was what gave distributors pause, but it’s possible.

More than likely the reason is more pedestrian, and also unknowable. Some combination of all those possible reasons and also dumb luck. Anyway. It’s a massive disappointment in my life, but I’m extremely proud of the work. And I’m happy it touched a few thousand people before it disappeared, which is pretty much the same way I feel about Y’all. Maybe some young person 50 or 100 years from now will dig it up in the University of Minnesota library and give it another life.