4. Director's Statement

       In 1990 I went out one night to see a film for which I held no great expectations, METROPOLITAN, at a theater where I had never been before, the 3-Penny.  So powerful was the experience, the next night I felt compelled to go back and see the film again.  Recognizing a true lover of film seeing me back, the owner, Jim Burrows, offered me a job and in the midst of the final days of the true Golden Era of American Independent Film, I finally had a job in the industry.  In fact that night led to many things.  The janitor gave me my first editing job on a motion picture; and now BLACK  MAIL stars the actor who blew my socks off that night, Taylor Nichols. Unfortunately the shooting of BLACK MAIL also turned out to be the final hurrah for the doomed theater.

        And the demise of the 3-Penny turned out to be a symptom of the demise of the American Independent Cinema in general.  Once the Oscars and the Indie Spirit Awards start honoring the same films you know "independent" is just another marketing category.

        But maybe it's cinema itself whose time has passed.  Oh it'll hang on like opera or theater, but just as the stage will never see another Elizabethan England to give us another Shakespeare, so too film is no longer the main action.  The giants, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Godard and John Ford give way to creators diminished by the age of the tiny, solitary you-tube square.