About Too Many Interesting Concepts to Classify

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Written by Noralil Ryan Fores   
Wednesday, 24 October 2007

Dick-George, Tenn-Tom

Outside little exception, film is an art form that begs collaboration. It’s a creative process of back-and-forth, a shifting of images and sounds, and it’s not one easily completed in a vacuum. And, so when Gideon Kennedy found himself with a script for the short Exclusive, he knew that he had to find both an actor and an editor. The actor, thankfully, wasn’t hard to find. The editor, however, was a different story altogether.

“I had written a script and shot half of a film, a short that the script would have put at 45 minutes. Is that right?,” Kennedy turns to ask his film production partner. “Fifty minutes, a hour.

“I had an idea that along with the script and how it would work, I thought, “I can’t afford big budget stuff or an expensive look,” but I figured that if on the strength of my script, I could find one decent lead to do the monologue and the editing with stills interspersed with the guy giving the monologue, you could create an interesting film for very, very cheap. So, I always knew that editing was one of the key elements.

“I found (an actor). I’d rehearsed him for over a month doing a 50-minute monologue straight, and he got it. We shot all that, so we had that material of him doing it three of four times. Then I sat on it…”

In 2004, Marcus Rosentrater would move to Atlanta and taking a job at a video store would meet Kennedy. “When he came to the video store, one of the things I was really impressed by was not that he said he was an editor but that we would watch movies in the store, and he would watch movies that were all done by the same editor. He was clearly studying it and had that much interest in it, and so based on that, I approached him with it.

“I thought it was going to be a lot easier to complete than it was, and so by the end of it, it wasn’t fair to say that I made it, and he just edited it. We really co-directed and co-produced the film,” Kennedy says.

“It took about—too long,” Rosentrater adds, the two laughing. “But, (Gideon) moved to Mobile shortly after we started, and so our partnership since then has been long distance. We produce everything apart from one another.”

With limited technical resources but with a great precision in research and crafting, Kennedy and Rosentrater here talk about their satrical documentary Dick-George, Tenn-Tom, Porky Pig-esque speech patterns of President Richard Nixon, the mystery of number stations and how magic and filmmaking are somewhat alike.

SM: What were your backgrounds in film? How did you each grow up interested in that?

Rosentrater: I spent three years at the Colorado Film School in Denver at Colorado University. I didn’t finish all the course work. I finished all the film classes and then ran out of interest. So, I didn’t finish the film school program, but before I went into film school, I’d already been working and doing a lot of editing, mostly corporate commercials in Colorado. But, I’d always been more interested in music and mostly editing probably because—a lot of it just came from the music, enjoying and seeing how it works with the music in a rhythm. I wasn’t as much into the performances, the acting, the directing.

So, that was my background. I went to film school for three years, moved down and just watched a lot of movies and still do.

SM: What kind of editors would you watch in a row?

Rosentrater: That came later. That actually came as a result of film school. I never realized that I was interested in editing as part of the process, but during film school, I had one really great professor. I went in to do cinematography, and he said, “You’re an editor, and you’ve always edited, so why not just stick with that?” He made me realize that it’s kind of the bottom. Everything ends up going there. There are a lot more interesting things that you can do on the back end of it.

He gave me a book; it was an interview of Sam O’Steen, who was an editor who did a lot the films of Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski, all kinds of guys. So, I started reading about him. He got to the point where he was in with the directors, and they would call him to the set and say, “Are you going to use this shot?” And, he’d say, “No.” It would save them money and save them time. I didn’t realize that an editor could have that much of an influence.

So, between my professor encouraging me and that, I decided, “That’s really significant.” So, I started watching all of his films, and also Tony Lawson, who does a lot of Neil Jordan. His first three movies were like Cross of Iron--

Kennedy: No way!

Rosentrater: Straw Dogs and…I can’t remember the other one. Oh, Bad Timing, which are all editing intensive. That turned me onto Nicolas Roeg and his movies with the rhythm, tone and pacing. So that’s where I landed when I met Carson.

[Editor’s Note: After 1971’s Straw Dogs and before 1977’s Cross of Iron, Lawson also edited Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

Kennedy’s middle initial is “C” for Carson. Of course, I’d forgotten to ask this at the time, and for a second imagined that Rosentrater and Kennedy had faux names for one another, much as in Gus Van Sant’s Gerry. The logical thought naturally comes last.]

Kennedy: I went to Georgia State University and graduated in 2001 with a degree in English Lit and a minor in journalism. My interest has always been writing.

My dad was a big film buff, and so we would watch a zillion old movies growing up. So, I always had the love of it. I never really thought about going into filmmaking as much just because I thought, “This is so long a process to get anything done whereas if I write, I can write short stories; I can do journalism, and future pieces so it’s there if somebody wants them done.” You don’t have to go through all this other riggamarole.

I started working at the video store. I started running movie theaters. I ran a lot of different independent movie theaters around Atlanta. I ran CineFest for Georgia State while I was there for a year and a half, two years. The first year of the Midtown Arts Cinema I was the assistant manager there. Getting those places started, being a projectionist, I’ve always had that. I always tied my love of movies into what I was doing but never really thought that that’s what I’d want to do creatively necessarily. But, then while I was working, I got some work on a really bad, crappy movie where I worked as a peon, or PA, for the art department, which was a great experience and I met good people but the movie is absolutely awful. While I was working on that, I got embittered about how much waste goes into one production, how for something so bad these great sets are built. It’s like, “Wow, that’s amazing. Someone could really do something with that if they weren’t working from an awful script.”

So, I was a little embittered about that, and a piece occurred to me, and the way that it occurred to me, I think that the form fits the story. You’ve got the story, but it really plays best in a particular form. And, when I wrote (Exclusive), it just plays best as a short film. It wouldn’t make sense to read it on the page. (laughing) And, I don’t know if it makes sense to watch it now...So, anyway, I wrote that, and that’s the one I pitched to him.

After that, when I moved to Mobile, we worked long distance on it, and I really enjoyed the collaboration. And, when I was in Mobile, I was working at a bookstore, and I ran across some free photos of Nixon’s visit. At first I was just going to mess around to learn what (Marcus) does, just to get a better connect of what he goes through. So, I started taking the pictures and putting them around, and I thought I was just going to make some silly mock documentary or write a silly script and just really make it an editing experiment for myself.

Then I started researching, and I get kind of obsessive about things when I get into research and finding out about something. So, I started researching more and more, and there’s nothing that I could have made up that would have been stranger than the actual events themselves. They’re more interesting. And, so I decided, “Why not just make a sardonic documentary about it?”

SM: One of the biggest charges right now against young, independent filmmakers, and I’ve had this conversation with others, is that we are of an apolitical generation. And so, what was funny was that when I was watching this, I wasn’t struck by the underlying politics. I just thought it was funny and was responding to the humor. Would you guys consider Dick-George, Tenn-Tom a political short?

Rosentrater: I don’t think I would, not in the context that you’re talking about. I think that’s something we even talked about a little bit. A lot of the documentaries that are coming out now, one of the things that I don’t like about them, is that they feel so dated. They’re so relevant that they lose relevancy within a matter of months or years. We connect on a level with each other outside of that. Those things are important to us, what they’re covering, those documentaries, but as far as filmmaking, we’re interested in something different.

I think we saw it as an opportunity to pack this movie full of information about all the little off-shots that come from this little meeting. All these people were involved, and you could probably dissect any political meeting or photo shoot in this way and find the same thing.

There’s a slight thing that we have with Nixon. I don’t know what it is.

Kennedy: I don’t know why that happens…Yeah, it’s a coincidence. It’s not like any obsession that I have—well, before now I guess. I’d never read a biography of him, and I don’t like Oliver Stone’s film.

To go back to the political question, I was more interested in telling an interesting story. Obviously, it’s about politics and what politics can do and how one guy trying to get votes from another guy causes one of the largest earth-moving projects in human history and kind of a financial failure that we all paid for. So, that’s interesting to me, those elements.

I’m always interested in people that I don’t like more than I’m interested in people that I do. It’s more interesting to explore what you’d typically consider a bad guy, and both of those guys are pretty abhorrent. But, I find them fascinating in the sense that you’re always looking at it from different angles and trying to see the moments when they’re not—they’re not evil; they’re human beings.

As far as current political work, I think Marcus is right…In the film world of documentary, people are just tearing stuff from headlines and going out and shooting, and I don’t always like that. I don’t consider it bad, but like he’s saying, if it’s not about the current administration, or these things, you don’t see the documentaries. I guess you do. I just get kind of tired of the cliché subject matters.

Rosentrater: It also makes it difficult, and this is one thing we’ve found, for you to get into festivals and generate interest. When people watch the movie, they’re usually interested, and they talk about it and like it. But, people don’t believe that you’re making a documentary about a photo shoot that happened 20 or 30 years ago.

Kennedy: Right. (laughing) “Why?”

Rosentrater: Whereas if you say, “I’m making a movie about my sister-in-law who’s got a brother in the Iraq War or Hurricane Katrina,” there’s a little bit of the heartthrob thing that we’re missing. It makes it more difficult. People have these expectations of documentary that it needs to be relevant, or there’s got to be a cause.

(Gideon) brought up a good point once that stuck with me when we were working in the video store. You’re in the video store, and you’ve got your action section, your drama section, your comedy, your director’s sections and all that, but you’ve got one documentary section.

Kennedy: Right, you’ve got every different section for fictional films, every sort of classification, but one section for nonfiction films. I think that’s a little odd.

Rosentrater: It’s not that the video store is influencing the filmmakers, but I think that mentality is what exists in documentary. Either you’re making a documentary, and it’s got a cause or purpose, or you’re just making a fiction and having a good time. I don’t know how we fit into that.

Kennedy: Actually the projects that we’re working on now, especially, and the projects for the future that we’ve got planned out, I see us having an exploration in the long run. What I’m finding fascinating is the gray area between fiction and nonfiction films. There’s an area where they coexist and comment on each other as opposed to being just one way.

SM: I was just talking to AJ Schnack…He’s very interested in that space. Because, like you said, outside those documentaries being made about current events, there’s a whole offshoot of amazing documentarians who are doing the opposite and studying those lines between fiction and nonfiction.

But, it’s interesting because not only are you working in documentary and are thereby relegated in the video store to one section, but you’re also working in shorts, which means you’re relegated nowhere in the video store. So, that’s an interesting space. At this level, being short filmmakers, what is that space for you to negotiate?

Short filmmakers, I feel, always seem to express to me that they get the shaft, especially with run times.

Rosentrater: Yeah, there’s a big gap in between that you can’t be.

Kennedy: Right, if you’re over thirty but less than an hour, I don’t know what you would do with your movie.

Rosentrater: And, there’s no money. You can push it, and there’s no money to get from it.

Kennedy: As far as the making of them, obviously we’d like to turn what we’re doing into something that we can get rid of day jobs and actually be full-time. So, to do that, you do feature length films. But, legitimately, the feature length film that we want to do I think is viable and can only be done at that length. Again, I think the story dictates the form and also dictates how long it is. We could have stretched this one out to however long, but there wouldn’t have been any point. It works better if it’s tight and can work as a well-oiled machine as opposed to something loose and sprawling and kind of pointless after a while. I want to be able to get in and get out. Over time, I guess I’ve become more of an impatient viewer, so if I’m going to sit down for this, even if it’s only 12 minutes, that’s 12 minutes out of my day. I want something for that.

Rosentrater: And, one thing that’s nice about doing the shorts, until it is a financial thing and can support you, to me it’s just about, “Are you enjoying it? Are you learning?” It’s just about growth. For me it’s about personal growth. Even when we watched [Dick-George, Tenn-Tom at the Atlanta DocuFest screening], I thought, “Man, I wish people could see what we’re doing now.”

If our first movie were feature length, we would never, ever make another movie because it would be so terrible.

Kennedy: (laughing) Exactly!

Rosentrater: You have to get comfortable with yourself as a filmmaker, I’m guessing, before you make a film of feature length. It’s such a long amount of time—well, at the pace we work anyway—, and six months down the road, I’m interested in a different kind of way to show an image. If you had a film like that, it would be chaotic, if you had a film that was moving all over the place and didn’t have any kind of consistency and style.

Kennedy: The other thing with the length as far as a writer, I enjoy short stories as much as I enjoy novels, and so I think they should be able to be self-contained. Not everything has to be an hour and a half. Not every story takes that long to tell.

SM: Now, I want to talk about some of the exact cuts. The first really funny sequence for me—and, the cuts are used to throw the joke away, which I thought was brilliant—was the story about the cufflinks. [While in Mobile for the speech, Nixon lost one of his cufflinks while shaking hands. A teen found it and wrote to the President to ask permission to keep it. Punch line, of course, he asked for it back.] How did you guys stumble upon that particular piece of information, and how did you later figure out how to do the rhythm for the cut of that?

Rosentrater: Should we expose ourselves?

Kennedy: The dirty secret of it? Oh, sure…Well, two things: Like I said, I get obsessive about research, and so I found it in one chronicle of when he was there in a Chamber of Commerce magazine that had a lot of pictures in it. So, it was there, and I didn’t have to dig too far for it. But, I did go through and find newspaper clippings that had pictures of her.

Rosentrater: Deborah Norman.

Kennedy: I was going to try to track down her high school yearbook, but I think we had enough, he had enough to do that one sequence. The dirty secret we’re talking about is that while I wrote it like that and intended it, Nixon did eventually send her a different pair of cufflinks and a compact as a consolation prize. Now, our point was that he still asked for the one back, and it’s still a jerk move. I don’t care who you are. You’re the President; let it go. Those should mean more to her than they are going to mean to you.

Rosentrater: It was just one, right?

Kennedy: It was a cufflink. That’s kind of cool. Even though she might be able to use the presidential compact, but—

Rosentrater: She didn’t have to call him.

Kennedy: Yeah, she didn’t have to write and offer it back. She should have just kept it, and [Nixon] decided to go, “Nah, let’s go have those back. Send this back. Here you go.” Have the secretary send off some random crap that they’d got stored in a drawer some place for just such a letter.

Rosentrater: One thing that made that joke work was that I found that picture. I think the picture was of him flying to China, and he’s in serious thought about something else. It’s like he’s contemplating, “Should I ask for them back?”

Kennedy: I only got (Marcus) the pictures of the one where the cufflink’s missing, all the stuff from the actual parade and of Deborah Norman. But, there was a stand-in shot he found of a different girl writing a letter. That’s not actually her, but it illustrates the point. So, he found that and the Nixon shot in the plane to tell the story of the letter writing. I think that’s what made it work.

SM: The other really funny section was actually listening to the conversation between Ms. Wallace and President Nixon. [After the assassination attempt on George Wallace, Nixon called with condolences. Poorly, we might add.] [You said at the screening] that it took you a long time to actually track that audio down, but what was your reaction the first time you heard that piece of audio?

Kennedy: I called Marcus right away, and I couldn’t believe that I’d found it. We’d already made the movie. We were done. I still have DVDs that are printed up with the wrong time. It was eight and a half minutes. We still have the set like that. So, I called him up when I found it, and I was freaking out. I was so glad, and as soon as he heard it, he knew. We had the exact same reaction, like “Well, we’ve got to open it up. We can’t not have this in there.” And, he’d filed everything away on his computer. It was a hassle; it was a can of worms, but we just had to.

Rosentrater: It’s really hard to understand. If we didn’t have the text up there, it would probably be hard. (Nixon) has such a low voice on the phone, and there’s so much static. So the first time I heard it, I was like, “It’s pretty good,” but then (Gideon) started pointing out a lot of the subtle jabs and how we could extenuate those a little bit by having the text up there with a little spacing.

She’d be like, “Well, he’s going to be running out there in November.” She’s really grinding on him. And, he says, “Well, Teddy Roosevelt finished his speech when he was shot.”

Kennedy: What a jerk thing to say.

And, she even mentions the trip that had been taken. She mentions the white suit from the trip to Mobile. So, that was great. It was like, “Oh, my God!,” and we tied it in there. That was just amazing, and all these little things like that. “How’s his spirit?” And, she’s like, “Well…” “Oh, that’s good to know.”

Rosentrater: It was like he was waiting for her to say it wasn’t good.

SM: You can imagine him drinking his coffee and reading a magazine.

Kennedy: Exactly!

Rosentrater: And, I think he had butterscotch. When you listen to the conversation with Colson, it sounds like he’s got a piece of candy in his mouth. He’s calm plotting this staged material—

Kennedy: And, he’s sucking on a mint. Every bit of him talking in that part just cracks me up in a new way every time I watch that segment. Or, there’s that sequence where she says something to the effect of, “Well, he’s not doing too good.” And, (Nixon’s) like, “Yeah?”…And, he flubs. He just can’t talk straight.

Rosentrater: He’s a Porky Pig. That one line, he says, “Did they have any—uh, did they have any—uh, did they do an x-ray yet?”

We all laugh here.

Rosentrater: What? Are you a president?

SM: The x-ray question was pretty funny considering, he says, “Is he conscious? Did they do an x-ray?” What is that leap? Doesn’t the x-ray come a little later down the line?

Rosentrater: I think what he wanted to ask, “Is he going to die?”

Kennedy: Exactly!

SM: Thinking about human fallibility, these conversations happen every day. They don’t necessarily happen between a president and George Wallace always but just between normal people. Are they as funny? Is the conversation only funny because you know who these people are and what their positions are?

Kennedy: Obviously, and on the side of that, I don’t know why we got hooked on (Nixon.) He showed up in (Exclusive), and, what we liked about the first one is that although it’s a fictional film, what I salvaged from it from a writing standpoint, is based on a lot of fact. It was about tabloids and tabloid media, the rise of tabloid media and about paparazzi, and so there’s a lot I liked that I found in my research that I put in there.

It was Nixon who was responsible for tabloids being in the grocery store aisles. His friend was Gene Pope Jr. who owned The New York Inquirer that became The National Inquirer. Nixon got the heads of fourteen different supermarket chains in the White House so that they could meet with Gene Pope Jr. so that he could tell them, “You need to sell my magazine on your check-out aisles.” So, when you go to check out at the grocery store, that’s why those racks are there. You look at all those tabloids because of Nixon.

Rosentrater: Didn’t he calm them down too? Up until that point they’d been crime scene murder photos.

Kennedy: It was some celebrity stuff, but it wasn’t all celebrity. It was about murders with photos on the front page, anything to get someone to buy the paper. But, what was interesting is that supposedly, you’ll be hard pressed to find a National Inquirer that ever had a bad word to say about Richard Nixon.

Rosentrater: Oh, smart. I never thought about that.

SM: Throughout Watergate?

Kennedy: I haven’t researched that. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But—

Rosentrater: Every media had a trademark, and The National Inquirer didn’t have a niche on that.

To bring it back to the political relevancy, I think that there is, though it doesn’t have the seedy music and slow motion clips of George Bush, [a sense], maybe not intentionally, that this stuff happens all the time. There’s relevancy just by being there. One example of this is that I showed it to a professor of mine back at school, and what he started talking about was, “Imagine in 20 years what someone could do with Good Goats—what’s the book called?—God Goats, the book that President Bush was reading while the 9/11 attacks were happening.

[Editor’s Note: Referenced here is Siegfried Engelmann and Elaine C. Bruner’s The Pet Goat.]

He was like, “All that was, was a photo shoot.” You could really use that as a basis and have all these other things that are going on. It’s the same kind of thing. He enters the school, same exact plot as ours, same storyline, and the fact that he thought about it brings up a lot about that connection between people in the political environment, how much everybody knows each other.

SM: Even looking outside of a political perspective, somebody could take a picture, say right here, near the brick wall, of the three of us, and do the same thing. Even though the meaning would be different obviously, because of the situation and because these people are recognized, the interconnectivity within this group, we’ve no idea about 20 years down the road. We may all find ourselves having spoken with the same people at different points. I don’t want to make this a sort of meta situation whereby one moment encapsulates what every other moment can be or should be, or where the potentiality of this moment is definitive of every other particular moment.

Kennedy: We’ve made the analogy to tributaries, these branches or offshoots of time, and we’re trying to figure out how to visualize this with what will be our fourth piece, which I’m researching and writing. How to visualize it in a different way, to try to map or define these connections where, yeah, if you’re at this point at this time, it extrapolates out to all these different people and this different area. The common line is a life.

Rosentrater: One thing in film school, they were always empathizing just to simplify. Simplify. I can see the value of that, but I think we have a lot of competition doing documentaries and doing shorts. People will go and watch 24, and apparently, it’s got four different screens that you’re watching, and they’re all packed with their own little subplot. People are ready to watch and take in a lot of information. So, I think the idea of simplifying a plot is kind of ridiculous at this point. I think that’s why in our stuff we just try and cram as much in there and keep it short. Pace comes in, but it’s taking all those tributaries and exploring them. Some people would say, “Well, that’s not your story. Just leave it on the side, and focus on your story.” That’s good, but what we’re interested in is finding a way to bring in all those connections. They define that moment so much more when you understand who this person is and their relationship.

Kennedy: The one we’re working on now does a lot of that. It crosses back-and-forth between a documentary model that goes from 1940 to the present day, exploring the history of number stations.

Number stations are spy radio stations basically. It’s not conspiracy theory. They’re short wave radio broadcasts of people reading random strings of numbers. So, they’re broadcasting from home governments to spies in the field. Why they’ve used this short wave technology up until today is that you can broadcast halfway around the world with a short wave radio. They use an unbreakable one-time pad, a single use cipher so it can’t be broken if used properly.

Rosentrater: It’s the only unencryptable method of encryption.

Kennedy: Everybody in any country can walk into a store and buy a short wave radio over the counter. It’s really hard to triangulate where a short wave radio broadcast is being picked up as opposed to where it’s being broadcast from. So, it’s used by most governments, and again it sounds like real conspiratorial stuff, but it’s not. This is used as evidence against (spies) in cases, and that’s where the history that we track is—1940 to the present, the history of spies having this as evidence used against them in their trials with each decade as they’ve been busted.

Here’s the popular example, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the Wilco album, the numbers being read on that, that’s a number station. They used the same recorders we’ll probably be using.

So, it follows that, and the narrative half is the one guy’s story on his relationship with his father, who’s a numbers station and short wave radio enthusiast, and the gulf of communication between them. How did I put it? It’s put better on the site. We just wrote a new encapsulation. As it now sounds, I say that because I don’t want to ruin it. If I tell you what it’s really about that just ruins the movie, but if I leave it at that, it sounds like some really bad NPR-guy-talking-about-his-dad story, and it’s not. It’s about how personal fantasies can turn your personal heroes into public villains—something like that.

SM: Last questions: What is one question about your filmmaking that you’ve always wanted to be asked but never have been?

Kennedy: Maybe that one. Right back at you.

No, give me a minute.

I don’t know if I’ve really thought it out too much. I try not to think of those questions because in (Exclusive), he has a diatribe against celebrity culture and projecting your personal dreams on other people and how that can be really destructive. He’s basically accusing the audience of dreaming about being interviewed or dreaming about being on talk shows. I think people do this in their own mind, daydream about putting themselves in those places.

Rosentrater: They wouldn’t be celebrities if we didn’t do that, if we didn’t exist with them in our imaginations. If we were in their shoes, there might be nothing to them.

Kennedy: So, I was trying to cut that line of thinking out of my ego, that I shouldn’t think of those things, that I shouldn’t be wondering what people should be asking about my work and should instead just be thinking about my work.

Rosentrater: I’m always so worried about answering the questions that you see somebody being asked. “Who are your influences?” I don’t know.

Kennedy: (laughing) That would be one you wouldn’t want to be asked.

SM: I presume that anyone’s who’s making art is doing it in part, and maybe this is just a phase, to be recognized. I think, ultimately the reason that people make art is because they are trying to connect with one another, but that’s naïve too because there are some people who don’t want to connect with anyone but themselves. It’s total and unabashed self-exploration. That’s fine, that’s cool; I respect that. But, I still think insidiously underneath this selfless motivation for making art, there’s an underlying thought of, “I perhaps want to be recognized for making this thing. I just want someone to realize that artistically I’m doing something kind of cool.”

Kennedy: I don’t think that’s necessarily untoward. It’s bad in the sense that if all ego is bad then it’s bad. But, I don’t think it’s necessarily harmful or detrimental. Personally, writing to me, and by extension filmmaking, its ultimate purpose is to communicate, and it doesn’t communicate if nobody sees it or reads it. It’s a message out to the rest of the world, to strangers in a lot of ways, and you want to be recognized in many ways.

The opposite of that is I’ve recently been changing my thinking a little bit. Like I don’t watch director commentaries anymore. I used to really like watching them, and then I realized that they all say the same kind of things. What I really started hating about it is that as a filmmaker and as a hobbyist, as an offshoot interest, I like magic, both esoteric and stupid coin tricks. What I think that filmmaking can do in a lot of ways relates to magic. By giving a director’s commentary or saying too much about it, you’re basically revealing the trick. And, what’s the fun in that? I don’t really want the trick revealed to me anymore. I want to be fascinated. People should stop talking about their work. (laughing) Obviously we’re not doing that here.

Rosentrater: Staring with not Dick-George but the one we’re working on now, I have a personal goal for it, and that goal is that I want somebody at the water cooler to be like, and this is it, “Have you ever heard of number stations?” That’s it. At least just ask somebody else at the office. I just think they’re so interesting.

Kennedy: To disseminate information…Not to talk about our movie but to get as excited about our subjects as we are. If we can get that, we’ve accomplished the goal.

For more information visit http://dickgeorgetenntom.com/ and http://clandestine-movie.com/.

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Noralil Ryan Fores
About the author:
Editor. A perpetual wanderer both literally and metaphorically, Noralil Ryan Fores grew up in a theater with an acting teacher for a mother and a professional videographer for a father. Right in line with her upbringing, she went on to study in the film program at Florida State University then jumped ship to grab a graduate degree in Magazine, Newspaper and Online Journalism from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. She has interned for South Florida's City Link Magazine and served as an editorial assistant for MovieMaker Magazine. Currently, she lives and writes from Atlanta.
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