My film CONNECTED featured in SF Weekly blog

Many thanks to Sherilyn Connelly for digging up my ol' documentary, Connected, which was about the SF Net online (and offline) community in San Francisco in the '90s. It was, as she says, an early form of social media, or:

Social Networking Before Your Mom Found It: Connected Looks at SFnet

It was the kind of thing that I'd been heavily into in Fresno in the '80s, but on which I'd burned on by the time I moved to San Francisco in 1994. As a result, I never used SFnet, but I know a lot of people who did, some of whom were interviewed in the 1997 documentary Connected, produced and directed by Craig Phillips.

The interviews were all conducted before anyone knew that SFnet was going to shut down in August of 1997, and quite a few of the SFnet users were also involved in the local goth scene, though as near as I can tell none of the goth folks who were in Connectedwere also in the goth documentary I wrote about last year, Sex, Death & Eyeliner. And I'm sure they're relieved about that now.

She then goes on to post a series of clips from my film, along with some interesting comments. 

All this came along serendipitously as I was thinking of the film recently, and in particular about whether or not to revisit it. While I don't want to be the George Lucas of low-budget documentaries and go back in and upgrade and update a lot of the original film (though it's tempting), I am more tempted by the idea of doing an epilogue. Sadly, several of the people interviewed or photographed for the film have since passed away, and in general it would be interesting to do a brief Michael Apted/42 Up-style revisiting.  But first I'd need to get my act together, and raise a bit of money, and so on. First, I'll try to make some more copies of the film so interested parties can see it in its entirety.

If nothing else, it serves as quite a time capsule. 

 

Comments

[Jorm]

Kickstarter, son.

[Craig P]

I know, seriously. I just need to get organized, find the time and then figure out how much it would cost. Perhaps not that much, to do just a post-script of sorts (need to get you and Wikipedia work in there) and remaster it. Hopefully the fact that it often looks like crap will be charming to people. ;)