Is it just us, or does it seem that you can hardly pick up a national magazine or a newspaper without reading something about Ann Arbor? Whether it's a famous person who grew up or spent time here, or an attention-getting spectacle like the Naked Mile or the Hash Bash, or a new technological innovation at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor seems to grab the headlines more often than you would expect a small Midwestern town (pop. 114,000) to do.
What's going on? What's so special about Ann Arbor? Why does it seem to be a focal point for so many fascinating people and cultural phenomena?
We think it's high time someone made an attempt at answering these questions. So we've decided to take our camera and go out and talk with people to see what we can learn.
Because people are what it's all about. A town without people is just a bunch of empty buildings. It's the people that make Ann Arbor special. It's through these people that we will unravel the myth and mystery of Ann Arbor, Mich. We'll gather their thoughts, opinions, and recollections, and dissect, combine, arrange, and re-arrange them until we have a compelling, enlightening, and widely-appealing film. The kind of charmingly offbeat entry that the Telluride judges will adore.
Unconventional, Unconstrained, and Unscripted
The film will be a bare and truthful document of what we discover. Its style will be direct, its development adaptive. There will be no script. We'll take our camera and go talk to the people. It sounds simple, and in some ways it is. It's easier to get started if you don't have a lot of pre-production work to do. Later on, though, when you've got miles of footage to edit down to ninety minutes, the process can become quite maddening.
But it's really the only way to do a film of this type. We're looking for an answer that we don't know ahead of time, so we've got to be able to revise our thinking at any point during production. For example, halfway through someone may tell us something that changes our whole way of thinking, and sends us down another path. We need to be able to respond quickly to something like that. This is the same approach we used in making Frank Allison: Small-Town Music in a Big-Time World, and it served us very well.
The Concept
At this point our conception of the film is that it will be something of a cross between Errol Morris's Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control and Night of 100 Stars. Like Morris, we'll spotlight five or so interesting, representative individuals from Ann Arbor, follow them around town, get to know them pretty well. They may be members of city government, faculty or staff at the University of Michigan, hi-tech entrepreneurs, back-to-nature ecologists, restauranteurs, store owners, or political activists. They'll tell us their feelings about Ann Arbor, what it represents to them, how it has changed over the years, where they see it going. Each of these people will have something different to say about the city, its people, its culture. In fact, some of their ideas and opinions will undoubtedly be in conflict with those of the other interviewees. But at the same time there will be commonalities which will help us to understand, and perhaps solve, the "myth and mystyery" of Ann Arbor.
Between these sequences we'll show interviews with celebrities who have a link to Tree Town. The celebrities are what will help us to get a national audience. There's nothing like a list of recognizable names to attract the interest of festival judges and television programmers!
Thankfully there's no shortage of these types available. Lots of famous people have a connection with Ann Arbor: Tom Hayden, John Sinclair, Ken Burns, Lucy Liu, Bob Seger, Iggy Pop, the Unabomber, Tom Monaghan, Larry Page (co-creator of Google), Adam Herz (author of American Pie), Thomas Knoll (co-creator of Photoshop), Rick Snyder (chairman of Gateway Computers), Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw (founders of Zingerman's Delicatessen), Ann B. Davis (Alice from the Brady Bunch), Jon Hein (co-creator of the expression "Jump the Shark"), Robin Wright (television journalist and writer), and many more.
Not to toot our own horn, but we've had quite a bit of success over the years in getting interviews with celebs. In connection with other film projects, we've interviewed Todd Rundgren, Eric Idle, film directors Mike Leigh and Ken Russell, former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and conductor Sir Charles Mackerras. It's really not all that difficult. With skill, persistence, and a bit of luck, we should be able to score interviews with most of the celebrities on our list.
A Community Effort
But it's not just the famous people we're interested in. We want to talk to anyone who can help us to understand the myth and mystery of Ann Arbor, Mich. And that's where we'd like you to help. If you know of someone we should talk to, please tell us about it. Use our e-mail message form, or send your own e-mail to:
Try to tell us as much as you can about this person. Give us an idea of how he or she can help us to figure out what Ann Arbor is all about.
And of course if you know of some famous people with a connection to Ann Arbor who aren't on our list, you can tell us about that, too.
We want this to be a community effort. It'll be a long journey, but also a rewarding one. Hopefully we'll all learn something about our town, and about ourselves as well.
We all know that Ann Arbor is special. Now it's time for the rest of the world to find out!