Interview: Ted Beatie

Ted lives right near my home, in Massachusetts. I shot over, met his family, and we sat down for an interview. Except the interview, which yielded an hour, took quite a few hours to complete, because it turned out that Ted and I shared a metric TON of friends. I could name people who I'd known in the are and he would say "Oh, yeah, him! He was like this.." and I'd go "Yeah, when I was at that party!" and he'd say "Yeah! I was at that party too!" It was really crazy, because we'd never talked or met before, we just kind of floated in the same circles for years and years. His voice is very low on the tape; not low in volume, but low in pitch. I used multiple clips from our interview (even with the all the stops and starts we had from it) and in each one, his voice kind of booms forward from the tape. There's also a cat in the audio track, if you listen for it. He had one of those cats that meowed to get into a room and, once let in, meowed to be immediately let out of the room. Basically, cat wanted open doors or nothing. Everything else was an affront to the cat's feline sense of justice. All in all, good times... and easy access to home. Naturally, I shied away from just walking around the Boston area and filming my cronies and calling it a "documentary", so this didn't happen too much.