In the course of being a socially-concious filmmaker it's usually not possible to ever know if your work is really making much of a difference.  This week, though, I had the chance to clearly see that happening.

In 2007 I made a documentary about Dry River Radical Rescource Center, a local infoshop here in Tucson. The film was called "Radical Resources" and I managed to get Free Speech TV to license and broadcast it.

 At some point Doug Martsch, lead singer/songwriter of Built To Spill saw the half-hour doc on TV and was actually inspired enough to get in touch with Dry River and propose that the band play there as a benefit. This is a huge deal, as Built To Spill is a legendary and very popular indie rock band that usually plays venues about 100 times larger than Dry River. But over a year later as part of their current tour, BTS stopped their huge tour bus on Main and University and set up (themselves, no roadies still!) their gear on the stage in the back courtyard that Dry River folks had built just for this, and they played a show, and over 400 people showed up.  With the suggested donation being 15-20 dollars, that is some great financial assistance for a struggling little underground community center!

 At the show this Wednesday, I recorded most of BTS's set, and you can listen to it on my other site, Phonophila.With a minimum of equalization it sounds pretty good, even though the cobbled-together PA was not really up to the standards that Built To Spill deserves (or that anyone deserves) - before one song you can hear one of the guitarists tell the crowd "if you want to hear the vocals better you should stop back - actually what you should do is donate money for a better PA.  Really."  Maybe part of the good things the money earned will be put to is a better sound system?

Anyway, I don't want to go on and on about it, but it does feel good to see
something great happen that can be clearly attributed to some media I
made.  It would be great if more projects turned out with such tangible
results.

Here's the doc to watch:

Radical Resources: A Story of the Dry River Collective