City Lights: Exploring boundaries
A few years ago, a colleague invited me to join a project started by one of her friends in Long Beach.
He called it the Free Conversation Booth, and its format was simple and flexible: He set a circle of chairs on a downtown sidewalk in the evening and invited passersby to sit and talk about anything on their minds.
For more than an hour, a group of us — sometimes three, sometimes nearly a dozen — sat together and let the discussion take its course. At one point, the host posed a hypothetical question and asked each member of the circle to answer in turn. When a musical group passed by, he implored members to pause and play us a song, which we rewarded with hearty applause.
I only visited the Free Conversation Booth once. Most of what we talked about that night has slipped my mind. Still, the concept has stuck in my memory, and I thought of it while watching Jason Blalock’s “Sawdust and Sand: The Art of Douglas Miller,” a half-hour documentary that will play this month as part of the Newport Beach Film Festival’s “Made in California Shorts” program.
Blalock, a Laguna Beach native, got the idea for his film when he spotted himself in a photo that a friend posted on Facebook. The photographer, Miller, was a distinct memory of his childhood: Blalock recalled watching him roam Laguna with his camera and snap candid portraits of people and places. Now living in Oakland, Blalock contacted Miller and ended up filming him four times over the course of six months.
“Sawdust and Sand” follows the artist — who, with his slender frame, glasses and long, whitish-blond hair, bears a resemblance to Andy Warhol — as he makes his unassuming treks, camera slung on a strap over his shoulder. We see him capture images of the ocean, flowers by the beach, people on the street and boardwalk. In between those shots, we get an array of his old black-and-white stills: a solemn-looking boy under a Pepsi sign, a couple in a car, two girls gnawing on the same apple.
During the heyday of his project, Miller went through seven rolls of film a week. Many of his subjects were strangers when he approached them, but he made sure to learn at least one thing about them. In one scene of “Sawdust and Sand,” he shows a diary in which he recorded the names of those he photographed. Later in the film, Miller shows off another social-outreach project: a painting in which he wrote the names and birth dates of thousands of passersby.
“What they represent is this galaxy of people that you can meet in your life, of thousands of people that come by,” he says. “Everybody has a little story, and there they are. This is people while they’re alive. Someday, this will be an epitaph.”
Curious about the status of his project, I contacted Miller and asked if he still keeps up his tradition of spontaneous outreach to strangers. He replied that in recent years, he’s let the idea go. Over the years, he drew mixed reactions from his photo subjects, and in the social-media age, he’s often put off by “so many nuts out there making embarrassing videos.”
After a while, he contented himself with photographing people he knew and uploading his old photos on Facebook.
A few months ago, I met another Laguna resident who initiated a project similar to Miller’s. David Makela, a local business owner, took it upon himself to interview and photograph a person each day of the year. Lugging his camera around town, he chose random strangers for his subjects, and he kept protocols in mind: If he wanted to interview a girl, he had his wife approach her first.
I look at Makela’s blog and those old shots in “Sawdust and Sand” and ponder the social boundaries that we face every day. My own job requires me to go out and talk to people whose existence I wasn’t aware of even a few minutes earlier. But there’s a formality to it: I’m there to get information from them for a particular story, and our schedules — not to mention our sense of privacy — determine how long the interaction will last and how deeply it will probe.
Even on the best days of our lives, we face life with a huge amount of hope and an undercurrent of fear. We lock our houses and our cars when we leave them even for a few minutes. We protect our computers and handheld devices with passwords. Stories about the Ariel Castros and Andreas Lubitzes of the world reverberate in our minds even when everyone in the vicinity looks harmless.
And sometimes it’s not fear so much as habit that maintains our boundaries. In the narratives of our lives, we allot close confidants and casual acquaintances, familiar haunts and uncharted territory. As Miller points out in the film, everybody has a little story, and it’s likely to be fascinating. The unwritten rules that we live by, though, keep most of those stories unheard.
Many of us, apparently, are content with those rules. Democratic utopias have never worked — watch the documentary “Woodstock” for proof of that — and not everyone would be receptive to a stranger approaching with a camera or list of questions. But I recall the pleasantly bemused reactions at the Free Conversation Booth, plus those chipper faces in “Sawdust and Sand,” and wonder what a service people like Miller and Makela provide.
Given the guidelines needed to make it through a day, we find ourselves constantly shutting doors, both literally and figuratively. Those doors can feel impenetrable, and sometimes, when we least expect it, someone reaches out to open one. We run a risk by accepting, but we might wind up with an unlikely friend and a chance to share our story. We might even get a close-up at the Newport Beach Film Festival.
MICHAEL MILLER is the features editor for Times Community News in Orange County. He can be reached at michael.miller@latimes.com or (714) 966-4617.
If You Go
What: “Made in California Shorts”
Where: Edwards Big Newport 6, 300 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach
When: 5 p.m. April 27
Cost: $14
Information: (949) 253-2880 or https://www.newportbeachfilmfest.com