Sometimes, a documentary film comes along which is so life-affirming that I have to drop all of my journalistic “objectivity” and urge all my friends to go see it. One such film was screened at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival: it combined a powerfully moving love story with an exploration of the way one man took the adverse circumstances of his life (he was born with Cystic Fibrosis, a disease in which the body produces more liquid than it can dispose of) and created art with them. Yet, I couldn’t convince a single friend of mine to see it.
I think they all got turned off when I described the scene where the man nails his penis to a wooden board.
“The question is — and I was just asking myself that today — what would have happened if I hadn’t, for example, put the penis nailing scene in, in terms of its marketability, in terms of how successful it will ultimately be at the box office?” Kirby Dick, director of the film Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, asked the day the film opened in New York and Los Angeles, “I don’t know… Certainly, that has been a real discussion point in the press. We found that even people who love the film dwell on the penis nailing scene to such an extent that it actually is scaring off audiences. Unfortunately, I find that these reviewers who really love the film and are very committed to it actually are not intending the effect their writing is having, which is actually discouraging people from seeing the film.”
Bob Flanagan was a Los Angeles based artist; his collections of poetry include The Kid is the Man (1977), Slave Sonnets (1986) and Fuck Journal (1987). With his wife Sheree Rose, he created several performance art pieces, including “Gross Revisions” (1981), “Nailed” (1989) and “Bob Flanagan’s Sick” (1991).
Dick’s film is a chronicle of Flanagan’s work, including scenes from many of his performance art pieces and Flanagan reading his poetry. Sick is much more than that, however: it explores the relationship between adversity and art; it displays the tenderness and deep love between a dom (dominant) and a submissive in a consensual S/M relationship, and; it is a reflection on mortality. Throughout, Flanagan’s sharp wit makes even the most hardcore scenes a pleasure to watch.
So, why the press obsession with the penis? Dick partially has himself to blame, thanks to his first major publicity gimmick at the 1997 Sundance Festival, where Sick won a Special Jury prize. “At Sundance,” he explained, “we had these veils around which we wrapped a little tack which said the title of the film and the screening times, and stuffed them in everybody’s boxes. People were all around, carrying them and waving them. In fact, one got driven into a bar and it happened to have the publicist’s number on it. So, he got a call at three in the morning. So, he said, ‘From now on, I don’t want my number on it.'”
Kirby Dick started shooting Sick in the beginning of 1994; shooting lasted two years. In that time, he shot about 100 hours of video. This was augmented by about 50 hours of footage shot by Sheree Rose, which included sequences from Flanagan’s video installations and private moments. “All the scaffolds, all the close-ups and S/M footage” in Sick was shot by Rose, Dick said. Given the film’s 90 minute running time, Dick had a shooting ratio of approximately 100 to one.
Much of the film was shot on a Sony TR-101, a basic high-8 video camera. This created sound problems which had to be dealt with in the editing: “A lot of it was shot with the mike in the camera, in part because I was just around him [Flanagan] with the camera and by the time I could set up a mike and all that stuff we would just lose it. So, I would just whip out the camera and shoot. I would be shooting five to eight feet, and the quality is pretty poor. This was where [sound editor] Dane Davis was unbelievable. I remember, we had this one scene where he said there was a 40 Db difference between my voice and Bob’s voice, because he was talking to himself, and Dane had to match that. He was in there for hours working on it, with complete state of the art equipment.”
The video footage was transferred to Beta-SP, which Dick used to edit offline. After several different cuts, this was then transferred to digital beta, which Dick edited online. A 16 millimeter print was struck based on the digitized cut; then, when he had more money, Dick went back to the digital version for a 35 millimeter blow-up. Although Dick saw advantages to both kinds of editing, he found the speed with which digital editing was done could sometimes make it difficult to get a necessary critical viewpoint on the material:
It’s the one advantage of working on film: when you decide to make a cut or decide to make a recut, you actually have to concentrate. I found myself concentrating for 15 minutes or half an hour on the question ‘Is it worth it for me to take the next four hours to recut this scene?’ I know that that is what it’s going to take to do it right. In the process, you start focussing on exactly what it is you want. When you’re cutting non-linear, there’s this quality of ‘Oh, I can do this in 10 minutes,’ and you find yourself just kind of doing stuff, doing stuff, doing stuff. Which is fine; it’s another way of working. But I found myself not being able to judge, when I had done five or six cuts, which was good or not. I actually had to take time away from it and come back two or three days later and say, ‘Okay, what do I have here?’
Dick started editing about six months after he began shooting. This gave him the opportunity to continually refine the film: seeing material that he needed from rough cuts, he could go back and try to shoot footage which would fill gaps in his narrative.
At the ninth cut, Dick brought Dody Dorn on to help him edit the film’s sound. Although she had more experience as a sound editor than a film editor, she offered to help him in whatever way she could, ultimately becoming film editor. “There’s always this sort of negotiating going on,” Dorn pointed out. “If it’s a documentary, or any kind of low budget project, somebody brings one thing to the table, and they have something they want to get out of it, too.” According to Dorn, Dick thought he was more or less finished when he brought her on, but they eventually did a dozen more cuts before the film was ready for release.
When she came on, Dorn brought an important perspective that helped strengthen the film. “Kirby was a little but worried,” she stated, “actually, that because he knew the material so well that he was cutting things too tight, and I loosened a lot of things up. I really think that one needs a certain amount of time to take some of this stuff in. If you go bang, bang, bang from one to the next, I think people get a little bit overwhelmed.” Dorn also helped bring out Sheree Rose’s humour in the film, something that was not evident in Dick’s early cuts, and made her relationship with Flanagan clearer. “There were a lot of things I was trying to work in to make sure Sheree’s role in their relationship was accurately reflected,” she said.
Although he had to work with several different video and film formats, as well as several different generations, Dick didn’t think the quality of the images he was working with was a problem. For one thing, each transfer stepped up the quality of the images, according to Dick. For another, the roughness of many of the images fit well with the overall esthetic of the film: “I think a lot of people actually like the kind of rough esthetic. I know I prefer seeing rougher footage as opposed to finished footage. I’m so tired of seeing perfectly lit footage. One of the things that was very interesting was that Sheree Rose had shot some footage, and she tended to shoot a lot when she was stoned, late at night, I mean, three or four in the morning. And she’s not a real camera operator to begin with, certainly not in those situations. The camera is really — the gain is on, it’s night, you have a light where something is lit and everything else is falling off into darkness, the camera is bouncing around, she’s trying to find a focus. I found that imagery very, very interesting, very compelling.”
This was of particular concern to Dorn: “There were a couple of places that really bugged me when we were working that were very old VHS archive material, and we really worked with them when we were doing the online color corrections.” She pointed out, however, that people are more forgiving of the quality of images in documentary films than they are in fiction films because they understand that documentaries include material not shot by the director over which he or she will have no control.
Despite the amount of footage he had to work with, Dick claimed that the difficulty in making the film was not what to use and what to leave out, but how to structure the disparate aspects of Flanagan’s life into a coherent narrative. “When I sat down to do the edit — and also when I sat down to consider what I was going to shoot — I would try to develop a kind of arc, even just an outline for one,” Dick explained. “And I was continually disappointed because there were so many issues involved in Bob’s work and it seemed like somehow some of these were getting cut out by this through-line that I was taking. So, I actually took a different approach in editing. Using Thirty-eight Short Films About Glenn Gould as a model, I decided I was going to try to compose short films, scenes, in essence, which would stand on their own that I could show to somebody. They wouldn’t really need an introduction from another scene, and they would have their own beginning, middle and end. They would also have their own level of fascination: people would say, ‘Wow, that’s very interesting.’ I compiled about 30 or 40 of those. Once I had those, it allowed me to play with them, their order, and allowed a more organic structure to come out. If there was something I saw in 25 minutes of footage that I thought I could bring down to a two minute scene, it allowed me to go for that without necessarily thinking, ‘Well, where is this going to fall within the whole scope of the film?'”
For his first assembly, Dick randomly ordered the scenes, putting a little black footage between them to separate them. Seeing the film this way allowed him “to take in the material as a whole in a subjective way. After that, I sort of had a sense of what was working, overall, and what was not. Then I was actually able to say, ‘Okay, I think I can now, for the first time, really lay out a script.’ So, from the second cut on, it was not random. A lot of the scenes, after I cut them, they would be refined, usually shortened, but they pretty much retained their essence. So, it was just a continual process of refinement.”
As part of the refinement process, Dick began showing the rough cut to people he knew, eliciting a critical response. “The way I do it is I start by showing it to very close friends who are going to be honest, but they’re going to be careful, so they don’t emotionally destroy me,” he explained. As he gets further into editing, he shows the increasingly fine rough cut to an ever wider series of acquaintances until he gets to the point where he is confident enough to ask for the response of other people in the industry. “It’s only when it reaches a certain level of refinement that the comments of people who are more accomplished than you are will be of most use.”
According to Dorn, Dick will accept input from any source. “Even if you are going to take into account who the person is who is giving you the comment, you would never want to shut them down, or shut them off from having their opinions,” she argued. “In other words, even if you know you’re going to go back and say, ‘Okay, this person is coming from this place, so their comment doesn’t apply,’ you at least give the person the chance to air it. Once in a while there will be a comment that comes out of that person that has a place in what you’re trying to do.”
This feedback was responsible for one of the most effective editing decisions in the film. Flanagan reads a poem called “Why” which goes a long way in helping the audience understand his behaviour. Dick always thought the scene should be placed after the scene where Flanagan nails his penis to a board; audiences repeatedly told him that it would be more effective at the end of the film. “I think the poem works better at the end of the film for one reason: that poem levels the playing field,” Dorn explained. “It makes Bob a human being like everyone else in a way that is so incredibly insightful because he recounts his experiences as a child and his experience with the human condition. I think it’s really powerful for people to watch 85 minutes of Bob’s life and then view [the poem]. It’s a very gratifying thing for people to walk out of the theater feeling like they’ve come to know Bob, know him as a fellow human being rather than to know him as a freak.”
The budget for Sick was approximately $125,000. A small amount of this came from arts grants (from Art Matters in New York and the Peter Norton Family Foundation in Los Angeles); some of it came from the sale of a screenplay (Guy, which was shot in 1996). “Part of the way through,” though, “that money was used up, so I went into credit cards, which is where I’m at at this point.”
“I had originally intended to, and did take the film to 16,” Dick explained. “It’s now on 35. It was 16 at Sundance, then at New Directors, New Films, which is where it was picked up. CFP [the film’s distributor] came in with a small advance, enough to cover the blow-up to 35 and all the costs associated with that. Up through the rough cut, the expenses were fairly minimal — $35,000, maybe. It was only after I started seeing the reaction to the film that I decided to post it at a more finished level than I had initially intended to, because I thought there was a real audience for the film.”
In order to make his money go further, Dick and editor Dorn had an unusual regime: “We had a Lightworks [digital editing system]. They were friends of mine, so I had arranged for $700 a week. Not only did we get the system, but they were right next door, so there was maintenance and training all at the same time. I was rough cutting on that, then [Dorn] came in and we were both cutting on that. Since I had no money, I said, ‘Look, instead of $700 a week, how about $100 a day? Is that okay?’ Then we went in for 24 hour periods and cut every other day. It was very interesting: we would go in and have the cycle of eight hour cycles where you’d go and be fresh for eight hours — sort of be inspired for eight hours — then you’d be sleeping, in a zone for eight hours, but you’d still be working. So, the work got processed in these different states of consciousness. Still focused, but you were in different states of mind.”
Dorn, who worked on the film from June to October, 1996, said that, as well as optimizing the rental of the equipment, working on such a schedule “allowed us to get really intensely involved with the material, with no interruptions, and really maximize the creative energy.” Dorn pointed out that neither she nor Dick would work for the entire 24 hour period; they would sometimes alternate working individually, sometimes working together. Much of what they did individually, especially towards the ends of days when they were running low on energy, was what she calls “dirty work:” making sure the tracks were in synch, for instance, or laying in music.
Surprisingly, there were few instances of one of them coming to the film and finding that the other had completely changed what they had been working on a few hours before. According to Dorn, after reviewing the available material, she and Dick “would sort of agree on a game plan. Then, certain things would have to be done which we would do together, certain things I could do on my own and certain things he could do on his own. It was very open communications, completely equitable. I never had a shred of conflict relative to our working relationship.”
How do you go about marketing a film with such an extreme subject? Dick had originally envisioned Sick as a small “arts film that would be oriented towards an arts audience, a documentary audience and a more alternative S/M audience.” In keeping with his original vision, he planned to take the film on the festival circuit: “This was perfect film festival material. In fact, this film has had, I would say along with In the Company of Men, the most prestigious American independent festival run of any film this year. Basically, In the Company of Men went to Cannes, Sick went to Berlin, that’s the only difference; otherwise, every festival that it was submitted to, it got in, except for Yamagota in Japan, where it apparently didn’t get in because of censorship. It’s a perfect festival film, and I had always intended to sell the film out of festivals. It’s a perfect environment. I never screen a film for a potential buyer in any other context than a film festival.”
Sundance was an important step in the film getting picked up by distributor CFP. “Jeff Sackman…saw it at Sundance, liked it and recommended it to Adam Rogers, who is VP of distribution, to be picked up. Adam Rogers was reluctant to because he said ‘I can’t distribute a film I can’t watch.’ But there began to be a critical groundswell around the film, especially as it started getting press preceding its screenings at New Directors, New Films. October also came in at that point, too. So, we met with CFP and October. They both wanted it, even prior to the screening, but the screening was a big success. October’s Bingham Ray, who is really quite savvy, wanted the film. October was in the process of getting acquired by Universal — I think he wanted to say to future filmmakers: ‘Look, this is going to still be an independent company. We’re picking up Sick — if we’re willing to pick up Sick, it proves our independence.’ I said to him, basically, ‘I need you to prove to me that Universal won’t bury this film.’ He did bring it up in discussions with Universal and there was a problem. I’m sure it wasn’t a big problem between them — I’m sure it was a fairly short discussion. But it was enough of a problem that he basically said ‘I can’t make that commitment to you.’ So, we went with CFP, and that worked out great.”
CFP brought DDA on to do publicity. According to Dick CFP has “a $200 or a $250,000 P&A commitment. I don’t know, but I don’t think they’re far off of that. No matter what happens to the film. If the film goes flat and they decide not to put that much more money into it, I suspect they’ve spent most of the money they’ve committed to it anyway. I think they’ve done their job.”
With the encouragement of Dorn, composer Blake Leyh and recording mixer Dane Davis, Dick began to see the potential for a bigger movie with a larger, more mainstream audience. This was driven home to him when CFP gave him money for the blow-up to 35 millimeter film, allowing the film to be shown in more commercial theatres. At this point, the promotional campaign shifted, deemphasizing the scene where Flanagan nails his penis to a board.
“Now, the poster is a photo of Bob, arms akimbo, decked out in certain S/M and medical paraphernalia, in a very funny pose, his supermasochist pose,” Dick stated. “We’re doing bandaids now — we’re going to have bandaids with the title Sick. That’s our next step, after dealing with the nailings, which was sort of a breakthrough to get the image out. The film publicity, now, will show its healing powers, if you will.”
Despite this shift in sensibility, Dick did not intend to cut the scene from the film for a wider commercial release. “There’s many, many reasons why that scene needs to be in there. I think it makes it a significantly stronger film; I think it makes it a film that people will remember and refer to for much longer because of its audaciousness. But it’s an interesting trade-off, because the film even without that would be very powerful. I had this attitude, going into this film, that because it was about Bob, I’m going to put in anything I want to put in because I’m going to make the film I want. And I did. That is the film I wanted to make.”