It’s hard to believe, but a film about a record store in suburban New Jersey connects the following cultural heavy hitters: jazz photographer Herman Leonard; “This American Life” host Ira Glass; comedy writer and director Judd Apatow; TV writer and producer David Milch; low-budget comedy performer Uncle Floyd; and music icon David Bowie.
To understand how all these characters relate to a dying shop, one that is faltering because the owner cannot or will not adjust and adapt, you need to climb inside the mind of Chris Wilcha, director of the documentary “Flipside,” named for that record store.
Filmmaker Wilcha established his own personal approach with “Target Shoots First,” a documentary about his attempt to work a corporate job at Columbia House Records. At the time, he seemed like a rebel spirit for those coming of age in the ‘90s and he would later go on to win a directing Emmy. But ultimately, the demands of life forced him into a career directing commercials, while projects about Leonard, Glass, Flipside and others sat in hard drives.
Now Wilcha has taken all of this material off his shelves, while also taking a lifetime’s collection of stuff from the closets of his childhood home in New Jersey, weaving together a moving film about what it means to create and what it means to fail.
Wilcha, who has lived in Los Angeles for years, spoke recently by video about the project. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: The documentary preserves your subjects’ stories but also includes your own, spanning your time as a rebellious young filmmaker until now. What were you hoping to show?
I had to embrace that this was going to mostly be about my failures and unfinished things and there was something humbling about that. I had to resist the urge to puff up my resume and say, “Well, I’ve actually done these really cool things.”
I was trying to reflect on how you can carry two contradictory feelings when you’re reflecting, I have a great life. My family is healthy. I feel very lucky, but man, my heart is a little broken that I didn’t follow through on some of these dreams I had.
Q: What did you learn?
I’m glad I followed through on this, both the instinct to shoot all those things with no budget and sometimes no real reason except that I felt they were worth doing. It’s rewarding to get out and act on these ideas instead of sitting at home stewing.
But when I was trying to do this all by myself, it wasn’t getting done. When I opened it up and I had collaborators like my editor and co-writer and some producing help, I started to have accountability and that created forward motion. I definitely needed that.
Q: The movie also shows you to be a borderline hoarder throughout your life. Is there a link between your urge to preserve a story on film and the stuff you collected?
I had this sense that the world was going to forget, say, the graphic design of these matchbooks, and I had to be the archivist and that exact same instinct informed the documentary. I would take out my camera to shoot things. It’s like flypaper – a lot of stuff sticks to it. The other day I watched a tape where I held up my camera for four minutes to capture some of a lecture by Jean-Luc Godard at MoMA. I put it in my bag and now I don’t even remember being there. I shot three songs of Elliott Smith performing at a New Year’s Eve show in 2000. There are these little gifts in my archive; things disappear, things change, people die and so I have that instinct to preserve and collect.
Q; You cleared out much of your physical collection but not before photographing it.
The camera phone was a very liberating thing for my collecting impulse. I can go to a garage sale and see a reel-to-reel tape player and appreciate its beauty but I take a picture and post it on Instagram and walk away; I do not need to bring it into my home or restore it. I’m a digital hoarder now.
Q: Were there things you couldn’t part with?
There was a Van Halen concert T-shirt from the “Mean Streets” era and my daughter took a Stüssy jacket I had in college, and she wears it now.
Q: In the film, you say you’ve spent a decade directing commercials and so you’re no longer a documentary filmmaker. Are you now once again a documentary filmmaker?
I am hopeful that I can start making more long-form nonfiction films again. There was something really liberating about finishing this project. It really reminded me the pleasures of collaborating with other people, being held accountable, getting something done that you care about and invested in, that isn’t just a job for hire. If I could keep doing that, that would be incredible.
Q: In that moment, you’re narrating your documentary – was that a meta moment or did you genuinely doubt you’d finish?
I still make my living directing commercials — it’s not like I finished “Flipside” and somebody knocked on the door from Netflix and said, “Hey, we’re going to subsidize your next project and you’re on your way.” So I’d say that that holds completely true. But I don’t think time has totally run out.
Q: Before finishing this film, could you find a positive side to all your unfinished projects, that you learned something or enjoyed the creative process? Or was it all just disappointment and frustration?
It drove me crazy to the point of keeping me up at night. Collecting that material and finding the connections and making meaning out of it is where the joy and discoveries reside. And in putting something out there that preserves something. It’s not in accumulating the footage – anybody can do that. It also drove me nuts not to finish it for these people I’d interviewed.
I was approaching this midlife moment, turning 50, and it was a burden to be the guy at the party where you’re saying, “I’m working on this thing” but you’ve been doing that for ten years. It was upsetting. So this was now or never. That urgency and intensity propelled me to get this project done. If I had not finished any of these projects, I might be a more bitter person.
Q: In the section connecting Uncle Floyd to David Bowie, you examine the idea that our lives zig and zag to unexpected places but it’s worth trying to figure out where you are and how to get to the next place you want to be, even if you won’t get to half the places you want to be.
I think that was a breakthrough moment in the making of this, figuring out that the zigging and the zagging through the unfinished projects to see ways they could be connected was one of the themes. And it was also an admission that while you don’t always accomplish the things you set out to do that doesn’t necessarily mean that you failed completely. Can we reexamine our failures in a new light?
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