24 Hours on Craigslist

You know craigslist—it’s the secret engine that drives the Bay Area economy, the place where, if you live anywhere near San Francisco, you likely found your last job, apartment, car, couch, band-mate, dance lesson, bankruptcy attorney or Friday-night date. I started using craigslist back in 1997, when it was briefly called listfoundation and, like many Bay Area filmmakers, I often contemplated making a craigslist movie because, well, if you live in this area for any length of time, you discover that virtually EVERYONE has a craigslist story. It's the ultimate urban touchstone, a digital "commons" where people from essentially all walks of life converge to connect over not only the basic necessities (jobs, housing etc) but also just about anything you could imagine (and many things you can't.)
"24 hours on craigslist" started by accident. In June of 2003, I had recently finished my first feature, a sci-fi noir titled "Numb" and I was hitting the keyboard again to try and write a follow up. In my first night of scribbling, I wrote about one page of dialog, and then got a block. Staring blankly at my computer screen, I could go no further, and, so like many, many screenwriters all over the world, I began to procrastinate by surfing the net. Definitely in the Bay Area (and from what I understand more and more now in New York and LA), one of the primary ways computer users kill time is by browsing craigslist. Not only can you search for practical things you might need, you can also read entertaining snippets contributed by tens of thousands of individual writers, all trying to find a date, a pet, a date for their pet, or maybe just venting. The "Best-of" in and of itself is a fine way to kill dozens of hours. For this particular round of procrastination, however, I decided to get a little creative. Instead of going straight for Missed Connections (which is always a daily source of amusement), I decided that I would browse through every category at least once: Pets, Jewelry for Sale, Childcare, I mean, EVERYTHING. Why I did this, I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps in the back of my head I wanted to measure the potential effectiveness of each category should I ever need something from that area, or maybe, like climbing a small cyber-mountain, I did it "just because it was there."
The whole systematic operation took about two hours, although admittedly I spent a little more time in "Personals" than I should have. As my fatigued eyeballs found their way up into the tiny clock in the upper right-hand corner of my computer screen to see what times it was, my first thought was "GOD! I just wasted two hours on my life when I should have been writing!" and my second thought was "but that experience was everything a good movie should be: entertaining and enlightening." Indeed, I had been riveted for two hours, even on posts that were fairly mundane, and as I stepped back from the experience, I not only felt a sort of voyeuristic satisfaction, I also felt that I had learned something new about my community: a sort-of evolving gray area of humanity that could really only be observed by completing such an exercise. It was something that no one craigslist user would ever realistically encounter, and in fact it was probably something that the craigslist staff, as there are only currently 18 of them and almost 50,000 posts added to craigslist daily, would ever see either. It was part entertainment, part sociology, part anthropology and entertaining as hell. With inspiration having struck, I spent the next three hours writing up the proposal for "24 hours on craigslist." The treatment was about 8 pages, and outlined specifics that essentially foreshadowed exactly how most of the production would go (a rare experience for me in the film world): from a single post on the San Francisco Jobs craigslist I would assemble a crew to go out and document a random day on the site. Also, from this same post, entitled simply "We're making a Movie About Craigslist!" I would also get all the music used in the film. Basically, from my experience using craigslist over the years, I knew in my gut that I could probably pull this off (when I had posted looking for an editor for 'Numb', I got back nearly 250 responses, many of them highly qualified).

After putting the proposal together, I emailed it directly to craig@craigslist.org that very night. I had never met Craig Newmark personally, but I knew that he did indeed exist. Sightings of him had become somewhat legendary throughout the tech community in the city, and I myself had even caught a glimpse of him at an Anon Salon party a few months prior. The moment I sent the proposal, however, I couldn't help but be struck by a slight sinking feeling: what was I doing? Was this really going to go anywhere? There must be dozens of people trying to make films about craigslist, why should they care about my impulsive proposal? But something about it felt right: there was no script, no agenda, I would just let the community tell its own story without any glamour but the simple grassroots vibe that only CL could provide. But still-- did I just waste five hours of my time? Oh well, it was too late to worry about that, and now it was even too late to stop procrastinating and go back to working on the sci-fi script.

Wondering if I had really accomplished anything, I went to bed.
Two days later I heard from Craig. Not from craigslist, or someone from craigslist customer support, but actually from Craig Newmark himself. I would find out in the weeks to come that this kind of response really wasn't unusual: despite the heavy traffic of millions of craigslist users, Craig often addresses customer service issues himself, and this project, unlike dozens of other film and TV proposals that he indeed had been submitted in recent years, was something he was interested in. About a week later, I found myself in a very surreal lunch meeting at the Canvas Cafe in the Inner Sunset district of San Francisco, about a block and a half away from the slightly-run-down victorian that craigslist.org calls home. Craig Newmark is a very polite, soft-spoken character, diminutive in appearance, and with an air of mellow acceptance that seems uncommon for men in their early-50s. Equally mellow, but in stark contrast to Craig, is Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of craigslist. Jim stands about 6'6" and, while he shares Craig's community-oriented, open-minded outlook, he clearly has a scrupulously pragmatic attitude towards the operations of his site. The two of them make a sort of progressive-tech odd couple, but it's also easy to see how they get along: Jim the do-gooder mastermind, and Craig, well, in movie terms one can think of him as the ultimate extra; he could be placed into the background anywhere: on a bus, at the ballpark, in the library, a cafe, and, somehow, even in an S&M dungeon, he would probably fit right in. Like the site itself, Craig has a sort of an inherent, nonjudgmental efficiency to him, the very nature of which connotes an almost saintly goodliness (or at least as close as one can get in the modern world), and Jim does what he can to bring this innate quality to cyberspace, probably even in spite of Craig himself sometimes. The two of them liked the idea of the "24 Hour" documentary: it was unpretentious, non-exploitative and generally sought to celebrate the community that I myself was a part of. They probably also liked the fact that I was going to make this film totally independent of them; I wasn't looking for funding and no one could accuse craigslist of making a feature-length "advertisement" for themselves. I suppose the fact that I was a local, independent filmmaker didn't hurt any either, and I had recent credits on the docs "Confessions of a Burning
Man" and the award-winning "Straight Outta Hunters Point" as well, both local community-oriented projects.

They seemed to like where I was coming from and were pretty much ready to move ahead, except for one thing: when the day came, Jim didn't just want me contacting whomever I chose from the site to ask if they wanted to be in a movie. Basically, one of the tenets behind craigslist is that people who post on the site should only be contacted regarding the specifics of their posts, and nothing more. That is, if someone was posting to find a new toaster, they shouldn't be contacted to be in a film. This rule could make things sticky: if I couldn't contact anyone on the day, how could I make the movie? Jim came up with an easy, but some what risky, solution: for a single twenty-four hour period, as people created their ads, a check box would appear at the bottom of their posts which would simply read: "A documentary is being made today about craigslist, if you'd like to participate click here and someone from the film crew may contact you."
This made things interesting: people would have to volunteer to be in the movie.

This also made me a little nervous: what if, after weeks of preparation and preproduction, no one clicked on the box? This issue was going to haunt me for a while, but in the meantime, with a greenlight from the people up top at craigslist, I had plenty of other things to do. First, I had to find this craigslist film crew. I placed one ad under jobs on the San Francisco craigslist site announcing that the film was going into production in the next couple of months, and that essentially we were looking for three things: an office crew, a field crew, and a soundtrack for the film. Within two days my mailbox was filled with almost three hundred people to be on the crew, and within a week I had a stack of over 300 CDs piling up in our little SOMA production office. From all this I put together a crew that, on its largest days, would number about 30: eight camera crews (camera, sound, and a production assistant) and six people for the office. To save money, I only hired camera and sound personnel who could provide their own equipment. It was a down and dirty way to film a doc, I know, but it seemed to fit the no-frills style that the site itself exhibits. The crews were also of various experience levels, and no two had the same camera (although everyone was working with pro-sumer level miniDV), so it was going to follow that the techniques, styles and even colors captured would all vary from crew to crew. Once again, this didn't really bother me; I knew we were going to get a spectrum of stories, and just as everyone that uses craigslist has their own style and ability to write and post, it made sense to me that this eclecticism should be reflected cinematically.

Now, for the day: as pre-production was going on in mid-June of 2003, I printed out a series of dates starting with July 4 and running through mid September. I put all these dates in a hat and literally had Craig Newmark pull a day out of it. July 4 would have been a pretty interesting random day, but as it goes, the date turned out to be August 4, 2003. This gave us about six weeks to get the production ready, select the crew, train the crew to do the proper sort of interview (because obviously I couldn't be eight places at once), and for me to lay awake at night wondering if anyone was actually going to click on our little box when the day came.

That first day of shooing, at least for me, was a 40-hour day. Although I did nap twice for about 40 minutes, it's the longest period of time I've gone with so little sleep. I got to the studio at 12 noon on Sunday, August 3, and didn't head home until Tuesday at about 4am. Sunday was spent on numerous last-minute preparations in the "Control Room" which consisted of six borrowed computers all hooked into the same DSL hub. These computers were each manned and were to be used to sort through marked posts as they came in. I knew that I wanted to get as broad a spectrum as I could from craigslist, so the big priority was to not "over-shoot" stories from certain categories. I had anticipated about 150 hours of footage, and so the editor (Jennifer Russ) was standing by with about a terabyte of hard drive space. The production manager, Nancy Jones, was also prepared, with two cell phones, four walkie-talkies and a large freestanding white board, ready for subjects, locations, and anything else that could come up.

When midnight came and the first minute of August 4 started I tried to be ready for anything: a flood of interested posts, or perhaps nothing. What I got was "Ode To The Guy Who Sh*T on My Face". Posted under the category "rants and raves", it the first "okay to contact" post clicked post at 12:08am. It was essentially a verse poem written by someone who, while engaging in a consensual act of bondage with an anonymous partner found on craigslist, suddenly found himself the non-consensual receiver of a facially-targeted defecation. The offending partner then ran off, leaving the writer in an awkward (to say the least) position, and apparently poetically inspired. Although amusing to the production staff, the writer never responded to our email, and our first story (perhaps thankfully) never made it into the film. Soon the marked posts started trickling in. "Paul's House of Junk" at 3:16am was the first shoot that I went out on, and it was pure craigslist: where else could you find a mid-40s, paunchy fellow in a bright purple shirt selling used security cameras out of his Mission warehouse space in the wee-hours of the morning? Turns out Paul was an ex news stringer who was used to keeping odd hours, and in between showing off the "junk" he was selling he would regale us with stories of how he used to stalk the streets of San Francisco after hours, videotaping accidents, fights, prostitutes or anything else the local news might be interested in. As much as we might have hated to admit it, we felt a strange kinship with this eccentric loner, and on our way back to the studio we ourselves stopped to film our own drunken brawl between two screaming men at the corner of 6th and Market.

By mid-morning I was back in the studio, and the trickle of marked posts was rapidly turning into a flood. Our tiny crews were scattered all over the Bay Area at that point, and Nancy was running back and forth, blurting into her walkies, and frantically scribbling maps and schedules on both sides of her enormous white board. I didn't leave the studio for the rest of the day as I reviewed footage and juggled in my mind exactly what is was the crews should be filming. By 9am, my fear of lack of subject matter was quickly vanishing, replaced now with another fear: how do we capture it all? Of the almost 30,000 posts placed by the Bay Area community on our day, 1,992 clicked on the "contact me" box.

Ultimately, I believe the box was a good thing, if only by virtue of the fact that by limiting our pool of potential subjects, it made it that much easier to focus. But focusing in and of itself was still an art: do we shoot the ad-hoc "burrito-swap club" or do we shoot the Ethel Mermen drag-queen looking for a back-up band for her Led Zeppelin covers? We ended up filming 121 stories from August 4, 2003, and after follow-ups and interviews with the craigslist staff, our eight film crews ultimately generated almost 200 hours of footage. Tuesday morning, at around 4am, I had one of the PAs drive me home, despite the fact that I was still wide awake. Due in no small part to the numerous cans of RockStar energy drinks that I had swilled down for the past forty hours, my mind was still awash with millions of thoughts. Jennifer had already begun cutting together footage, and we both knew at around noon the first day that we had much more material than we could squeeze into a reasonably-length feature film.

Just from this single twenty-four hour period, we were going to end up with enough footage to create an entire season of a half-hour TV show, with footage to spare. Of course, that project may still manifest, but in the meantime the "24 Hour" feature had to stay in focus. By the time I arrived home and was drifting off, I could see what we would have to do: since DVD was always going to be our primary outlet for this film, it was really going to have to be a double DVD to accommodate all we had to show: one disc for the film (with commentary, "making-of" etc) and a second disc for "extensions" of all the stories (or at least those stories worth extending). By mid-August, when we had a rough cut of pretty watchable material at about 3 hours, my thoughts were confirmed. Our final cut would end up around 90 minutes, and there was just too much juicy craigslist material to leave in the edit bin. The rest of the week was no less hectic, although the hours were much more normal. After about four hours of sleep in my own bed I returned to the studio, and to a smaller team. Instead of 8 film crews, we now only had 6, still scattered to every part of the Bay Area, checking at our SOMA headquarters only to drop off footage, pick up some portable food, and head out with another assignment. Progressively through the week the number of crews would diminish until by Friday it was just me and three other people driving around in a PA's car. It was a wild shoot, and I know a lot of crew had as much fun as I did; every day presented a new set of subjects that couldn't have been more diverse if we had tried. One morning we started in Pacific Heights at an apartment straight of "Town and Country" with a woman looking for a photo assistant and from there went to China Basin, a desolate and remote part of the city but home to SF's premiere heavy metal club, The Pound, for a story on the "Metal Chef." After that we made a stop on Nob Hill, to interview a New Age author on the steps of the majestic Grace Cathedral, and that night we ended up in the basement of a rundown Victorian where two zonked-out tweekers were trying to host a "sex party" which never happened. Yes, it’s true what you read: it all seems to happen on craigslist.

The shoot was everything I knew it would be: from the practical and dull to the frivolous and eccentric, and I have to admit I miss it sorely. We started shooting on August 4, and finished our last day at the Castro Street Fair in early October when we shot Ethel Mermen finally performing, among many other power hits, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (with a band she found entirely on craigslist) in front of hundreds of adoring fans in the street. Although obviously many of these stories were filmed in the days after August 4, the fact remains that they all came from one twenty-four hour period, and that is what has always kept this project interesting to me. If Craig had pulled August 5 out of the hat, we would have had a completely different movie. This purposefully dates the film, and this was my intention from the very beginning. One can't really make a definitive movie about craigslist, because craigslist by definition is in a constant state of change. Not only has the interface gone through various gradual transformations over the years, the content itself shifts by the minute, and even the site's culture and vocabulary varies radically from city to city. This was my primary motivation in leaving Craig and his staff almost entirely out of the film: I didn't want there to be any "grounding" effect, or any definitive voices telling us what the community is all about, other then what the community itself could articulate on that particular day. I spoke with Craig about this after a preview screening we did at the South by Southwest Film Festival in the Spring of 2004, and in a way he seemed somewhat relieved at his lack of footage in the film. Craig, despite his growing celebrity status, really isn't the type of person who craves the limelight first and foremost. If he was, craigslist would be a very different place. Instead, Craig, like the site itself, prefers everyone to have a voice and I think the film is a fundamental product of that: the only consistent factor being a certain spirit, a special down-to-earth quality that celebrates the gray area of human nature and seems to say by its very existence that, despite all the perverts, tweekers, and trolls out there, people are basically “good.”

“a whirlwind tour” – “a colorful mosaic” – “crowd-pleaser” “engaging” – “zippy” – “sharp” - Variety “It’s an absolute blast” “24 Hours on Craigslist is the ultimate people zoo.” - FilmThreat.com “hilarious” - Eye Weekly “fun and titillating” – “mesmerizing” “this film is poignant” - Wired News