“Director By Night” is a documentary about composer Michael Giacchino’s Werewolf By Night, the first Marvel Special Presentation. It’s a fine enough bit of entertainment, a sort of grayscale Twilight Zone episode that stands as proof of what Marvel’s willing to try in the post-Snap era with a whole streaming service to play around with.
The thing about “Director By Night” is that it’s filmed by Anthony Giacchino, Michael’s brother, and includes some truly hilarious and relatable footage of his parents not understanding what the MCU even is (“Batman’s not in it?”). it also includes a lot of old footage of the childhood movies they made with their friends – because they were making films, doing stop-motion animation, laboriously scratching 8mm film with an XACTO knife to make “laser blasts” for the action movies they shot on the loading dock of what’s now apparently a mall.
And I saw all this after watching Light and Magic, the story of ILM, and…it’s no wonder we got Star Wars and the films that captivated GenX. Because these guys were out there making their own movies with handheld cameras, special effects one frame at a time, trying to figure out how to make squibs out of firecrackers and a block of wood and a packet of ketchup. Your average person can take an iPhone they bought on the $32 a month plan and make far, far, far more convincing movies at higher quality than these guys were wishing together out of chicken wire and M-80s. But they wanted to make movies that badly. And when they got the chance…well, we get what we have now.
In some ways, the Disney empire feels like the belated triumph of GenX – we won’t ever have political power, we won’t ever be catered to the way the Boomers or Millenials were, but by damn, cometh the hour, cometh the nostalgia, and we’re going to turn Spider-Man and the X-Men and Star Wars into billion-dollar properties that drown out everything else and YOU WILL SIT THERE AND TAKE IT, BOOMER. Back when you only got a Star Wars movie every three years, you’d watch any old load of crap. Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, old Space:1999 episodes, just trying to get a buzz. now we have an embarrassment of riches, especially since Star Wars is finally getting some distance from the Skywalkers and telling the stories of the rest of the galaxy.
But the big thing these documentaries have done is make me feel like I missed out. I didn’t go to school in my home town, never did. I didn’t know any kids in my neighborhood. I didn’t have the feral childhood celebrated in Stranger Things; I only started to come into my own once I had a driver’s license and was not at the mercy of being able to get a ride (and I lived so far the wrong direction, there was no opportunity to hitch a ride with a friend). And once I could do that, I finally started to blossom.
The Internet has been a mixed bag. Social media was clearly a terrible idea. But the opportunity to keep up with your friends at a distance, to collaborate and do things without having to rely on physical proximity – there’s something there that really matters, even if it’s been tarnished by how easy the Internet made it for the worst people in the world to link up and multiply their influence.
Of which more later, as the shaggy herd trumpets (toots?) in the distance…