Unforseen Benefits

In January, Marsha and I will be in Florida. We were there two years ago and were able to look up our old friend Chris Sherman, the food and wine critic of the St. Petersburg Times. We had not seen Chris for at least 20 years. He had been a city editor at the now-defunct Shreveport Journal, an unlikely liberal newspaper in a distinctly conservative region.

We lauded him for landing such a cushy and, I must add, suitable, position. Chris was born to be a wine and food critic and looks the part: he is well-rounded and simultaneously jolly and cynical, with a great drooping mustache. He grumbled lightheadrtedly about his job — apparently Tampa-St.Pete is not restaurant heaven — but had to admit that in the big picture he’d landed on his feet.

Then we turned to our job. What a great thing, Chris opined, to be able to make feature-length films, with complete creative control, and actually have an audience for them. How many struggling filmmakers and film school graduates would not love to be in our shoes? He cited the case of an acquaintance who’d been trying to get a film together for years, battling for funding with arts councils and corporate entities.

Which got me thinking about the many perks of this job, not the least of which is meeting with friends and relations that we haven’t seen for yonks and would have perhaps never seen again. Two years ago we went to Maine and Marsha met her cousin Gary that she hadn’t seen for a couple of decades. We stayed at his house, met his family and we’ll be returning in April because we have film showings in Portland and Greene, Maine, again.

On the West Coast, we have visited with sons, daughters and grandchildren on a much more regular basis than before our travelogue days. In New York we have spent weeks where Marsha was raised, playing cards, drinking wine, and rekindling old friendships. So, too, in Michigan where we are blessed with old friends north of Detroit and new friends, the Veaches, in Jackson.

For these reasons alone it has been worth it to become travel film makers. But on top of that we get to make our own films and show them to a receptive audience. Each new film presents new challenges and a new approach to a well-trodden tradition. In our first film, “La Belle France,” we were happy to actually get it done. In our second film, “It’s Great!Britain,” we started to play with the form a little and to add a little more music.
In our third film, “Hello Louisiana,” we used music as the springboard for traveling around the state and we’re now contemplating another Louisiana music film which will incorporate our own live music. This is not a new idea for us, but it is taking a while to work out all the bugs and to find a suitable subject and form for the film part. It may happen yet.

I realize that there are various approaches to creating travelogues, from the pure filmic to the performance art, and Marsha and I tend to come down a bit closer to the latter.

For me, the travel film has been a real liberator. I started with BBC TV in the days of black and white video; moved on to musical performance and songwriting as a folk and country singer; and seized the opportunity to cut tape in the last days of analogue radio production. Combined with jobs as a waiter, barman, bicycle messenger, sewer cleaner, garbage collector, driver, bookshop manager, schoolteacher, carpenter’s assistant, and traveling minstrel, I have had all the necessary experience to make travel films.

And like Chris Sherman, I feel I’ve finally landed on my feet. And I’m lucky to have a partner to work with.