24 Hours on Craigslist | Michael Gibson | Talks at Google

When I was inspired to make this movie in 2003, when I was trying to write a screenplay, a science fiction movie, and I got writer's block, so I went onto the Internet and started procrastinating. And one of the places I go is Craigslist. And I was going through all the sites, you know, the misconnections and the personals and casual encounters and things like that. And I was going through it all. I thought, boy, you know, this is so fascinating. This could make a movie. You know, if you just took one moment on this site, you can make a movie out of it. So anyway, I wrote out a treatment for this and I sent it off to Craig. I'd never met Craig, but I'd seen him at some parties and stuff. So I knew that he was indeed a real person. And it's just a whimsical thing. And I placed an ad on Craigslist saying, hey, I want to make this movie. It's going to be a day in the life of Craigslist. Who wants to help me work on it? You know, I need camera people, I need crew, I need sound, music for the film. I'm going to need money. If anyone has any money they want to give to the film. And you know, I went to bed that night still having not worked on my screenplay and sort of thought about it, but I figured that was probably just a big procrastination thing. Woke up the next morning, had about 500 emails in my inbox from people saying, this is a great idea for a movie, I want to work on it, I have a camera, I'll bring my own stuff and all this kind of thing. So I ended up assembling these crews, basically eight different film crews. And I remember thinking, boy, this is cool. This is really going to happen. This is going to really be like a real film. But we still didn't have any money. So then one of the cameramen actually had a friend who actually helped me pay for the project. So it all came together, all from a single post on the site. And Craig himself actually picked a day from a hat. And we made this film, this was in June of 2003. So what you're about to see is a feature film made from a 24 hour period on Craigslist. Ended up being in August. The random day he picked was August 3, 2003. And then this film premiered at festival in June of 2004 in south by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Went on to play in about 15 festivals throughout the world, had a limited theatrical Release of about 15 cities in North America was played in London too. And here we are for this screening. One of the reasons I wanted to come down here is because I wanted to raise, raise a little bit of awareness for my next movie, which is about Wikipedia. Unlike the Craigslist movie, which was a very low budget film made almost entirely through volunteer type of efforts, the Wikipedia thing, as soon as I started doing some research and I'm sure as a lot of you know, Craigslist is the 9th biggest website in the United States. Wikipedia is the 10th biggest website in the world. So the scope of this next project is much larger. And in fact there's a film crew right now, they're probably in Jakarta by now, I think traveling basically from. They started here, they went down to Los Angeles, they went to Beijing, China, to Seoul. They're basically going to fly around the world, going through India, interviewing Wikipedians, people about free digital knowledge, you know, the open source movement and the whole thing, and trying to wrap it all up into one single film. We shot about 20 hours of footage. I'd say that's about 5% of what the total is going to be. Last year in 2006 and we cut together this little trailer here. So just thought we'd play this as a little special feature and if anybody likes the film and they want to donate, it's a non profit production. So anyway, please enjoy. And here it is. Thank you very much. Hopefully that'll be out like are probably hitting film festivals January of next year, January 2008 and then, you know, depends on the situation with distribution. It could be anywhere from April to August of next year, if all goes according to plan that that film is actually released. But as I say, we've only shot about 5,6% of the footage so far. We have a lot more to go. It's a long way to go. So anyway, we're about to start the feature film tonight, 24 Hours on Craigslist. I'll be back for a little q and A after the film. It's short, it's about 85 minutes long. And we're gonna do a little. There's gonna be a little trivia giveaway, a few copies of the movie, and I'll answer any questions you might have. So thanks a lot for coming and enjoy. Thank you. Special screening. So yeah, this was. I haven't watched this movie in a little while. It's kind of cool to watch it again. It was a lot of fun making this movie, as you might imagine, just having all the crews assembled and Trying to figure out how we're going to shoot it, how we're going to get across the city and where we're going to go and all this kind of thing. But does anybody have any questions? First of all? Yeah, right there on the white. I think you just touched on my question, which was going to be around. You shot all this in 24 hour span. No, actually, because there were certain things like, you know, the Ethel Merman drag queen, you know, you see her, him doing the rehearsals and then finally building up towards a performance. We knew there would sort of be these arcs that would happen in the making of the film. So all of the posts were based on a single day. And we tried to film as much as we could within that day. And then if there were certain things like when that couple met at the museum and the guy had the little flower and the vase for her and stuff, we knew we would have like, that was two days after the 24 hour period. So really we filmed, I want to say probably about 40% of the film ended up being beyond the 24 hours. But they're all based on that single day. They all had a post which, you know, originated in that moment. I mean, in theory I could still be filming stories that were, you know, you know, extrapolated from that single period, but, you know, at some point you gotta finish the film. So. But I still actually, I still follow up with some of these people. Like this guy, like, you know, the two guys that were on the couch, Mike and Lee, who are the kind of the goofy roommates. Like, Mike still like writes me all the time and just says what's going on with his life? And hey, so I'm in a band now and so do you want me to be like in another movie? Like, what's up? You know, it's kind of like just kind of goes on and on and he'll probably do that for the rest of my life, actually. And actually, I still talk to Leah Rose, the woman who plays the guitar in that one scene. She's a really amazing singer. She is in a new band called Built for the Sea. And they. Her boyfriend lives in Europe, in Amsterdam, so she goes back and forth. She plays at the Rickshaw stop up in San Francisco about once every two months, I think. So this film's sort of an ongoing drama for me, but that's how Craigslist is. You know, it kind of goes and goes. So. Yeah. What kind of stuff ended up on the cutting room floor? Well, a lot did. You know, even with the three Hours of special features. There's still a lot of things, but, you know, it's like, it was really hard decision to make. I mean, in some ways, it's sort of like, you know, I've toyed with the idea recently of taking all the footage and releasing it into the Creative Commons and putting it out on, like, on the Internet Archive, you know, this next movie, the Wikipedia thing, has gotten me involved with Brewster Kale and the. The sum of all human knowledge being available to everybody. And thinking about that, I thought, oh, I got all this footage laying around I should do something with. And so. But the. I don't know, you know, the boring stuff, I guess, is sort of the easy answer. But some of it really wasn't. I mean, when I made this film, I announced, you know, remember how I said at the beginning, I placed that Craigslist ad saying, hey, I want to make this 24 hours on Craig's movie. I got all these responses to it of people who wanted to work on it. Well, I also got 11 different notes from people saying that they were gonna sue me if I made this movie because they had the idea of a Craigslist movie first. And of course, you know, they had. There's no legal basis for that at all. I mean, it's. You know, they had no signed agreement with Craig or anything like that. But it was interesting because they all approached me saying, you know, I have this. You know, I have this treatment for this film, but I've been pitching it to Universal, and we're gonna make it all about the Craigslist personals. It's. This movie is just called Casual Encounters. We're gonna follow people around for a year and make this blah, blah, blah. And I said, that's great. You should go make that movie, because there's a bazillion movies you could make from Craigslist. This. For me, what was interesting was just taking this one little moment. Like, just taking. I mean, originally, when I was procrastinating on it that one night that I was inspired, I thought it could just be one second on Craigslist. You wouldn't even need to make it a full day. You could just take one single moment, freeze it, and then sort of make a film based on that. So it's a different kind of a kind of concept. But in knowing that, I kind of knew that even those mundane stories, like the woman selling the stroller would sort of become kind of fascinating when you put them up next to the guy having the sex party in his basement and kind of Knowing that it's all going on simultaneously at the same time at essentially the exact same period. And just that sort of surreal portrait of mankind, or at least San Francisco's version of mankind, was what attracted it to me. So I guess for me, when I went into the edit and was approaching all those hours of footage, I really wanted to sort of take snippets of all different kinds of stories, even if they seemed boring or seemed mundane. It was important to have all those things in there. So I don't know if that answers the question, but yes. In the back. Yeah. After going through all the different underbellies of Craigslist and seeing different sides of humanity coming out from the strollers to the sex parties and everything else, like, I'm wondering how that changed your view on humanity. Yeah, I mean, it was probably not super as transformative for me, this film, as it was to say, my grandparents, when I showed it to them. And actually, what's kind of interesting was not so much my grandparents, because they live in Virginia, you know, like rural Virginia. But a friend of mine who I grew up with in San Francisco, his parents are older, they're in their 80s, and I showed them this movie and I said, isn't this a cool movie? It's got all these little wacky moments. It's kind of interesting. And they were like, so this is like. They were so mortified by this film. It was the most shocking thing they could possibly have seen. And they sort of felt this whole, like, even the golf guy, like, even the one character seems sort of decent. He just wants to put his tongue in some girls, but I just can't. And it was so. For them, their perspective was. It was just so shocking to them, you know? And I guess for me, maybe growing up with the Internet or whatever or it's a different. A generational thing. I. You know, it wasn't. Wasn't too shocking for me. It didn't change my perspective too much. Although the guy in the basement was pretty weird. And that was not something that even in my most adventurous days, I had realistically come across with the formaldehyde in the corner and all this kind of thing. And the weird thing about that was, too, is actually when we were there, so clearly no one actually showed up, right. But when we were in there actually filming, I think this is on the special features, because that scene went on and on. We were in there filming, and we're talking to this guy, and all of a sudden we look and it's like, you know, it's like 2 o' clock in the morning, right? And then there's these sort of. These two girls wander in and they're like, I'm looking, I'm like, they must be 15 or 16 or something. And I'm like, what are you doing here? You know, did you come because of Craig's? Like, oh, no, no. We thought you guys were having a party and you had the camera and you're making a movie or something. And they realized what was going on in the scene. And this guy in this bed and like one of them was like, oh, this is just weird. Okay, this is not what we thought it was. We're gonna leave. But then the other girl was like, oh, this is cool. Oh, this is. Oh, you know. And I've never really had this feeling before, but I had this feeling like this is somebody's daughter. You know? You know what I mean? And she like. And she didn't. They did not come there because of Craigslist, but we actually had a. Had like an early of this edit where we sort of cut it together and we showed it and it made easily could have been interpreted in that way. And it was very much a reasonable thing. Now this is 2003, right? And Craigslist has grown on this exponential curve along with the rest of the Internet, really up until mid-2006. And Craigslist is, I don't know, a hundred times bigger than it was when this film was made. And there's, you know, there's endless more traffic and everything. And you do get those cases coming out now on Craigslist of someone was underage prostitution or something like that. It didn't happen so much in 2003. But there's just such a critical mass of individuals using it that even like one out of every thousand, 10,000 ads has this sort of dark side to it. And that's something which is, I think, become more of a sense in the popular culture. People can. They think MySpace, they think, oh no, there's these sexual predators using it. That happens on Craigslist too. But it's much more of a. In general, this sort of consensual libertarian kind of perspective. But yeah, there are weird things that happen on there that I don't know. That was a little shocking to me. I guess that was probably the one thing that made me start to think, if I ever have kids someday, I'm going to be like, be careful when you use that Craigslist. I'm going to be checking the browser. What are you doing? Anyway, this was about. We filmed 121 stories for this movie. You saw 88 in the feature length version. So there are some that aren't represented in this film whatsoever. But they are. A lot of those are represented on the special features. They're shorter and it's sort of hard to see how they would have fit into the overall portrait of the film. Some of them are pretty good. There's funny little standalone things where somebody reads this. Like he had a post that was put in the Best of and it just takes him a while to read. It takes about five minutes. And it was just really funny what his whole post was. So he was like, okay, well we can't really just let the movie run like that. But anyway, so there are more things. But yeah, I thought it was really interesting how you went about collecting people to interview for the film. Oh, how do we pick them? Well, actually, to a certain extent, the people had to pick us because. So I approached Craig to make the movie and I said, I put out this post. There's all these people that want to work on it. I got someone who's got some money. I really think this could read a real film. It'll be like independent film. It won't be part of a studio thing. He's like, cool, cool. All right. So we actually met and we talked about it and he said, all right, well, I'll do this thing for you, but when your day comes, I don't just want you picking anybody that you think has an interesting post. And I was like, all right, well, how are we supposed to make our movie? Like, how are we supposed to contact these people? And he said, and I'm like, this doesn't. And he said, well, the whole point of Craigslist is that people are only meant to be contacted for the purposes of whatever the post was. So if someone posted for selling a toaster or something like that, they don't necessarily want to be contacted to be in somebody's movie. And I said, well, how am I going to make this movie? Then he said, well, for a single day I will place on each post as it's made, a little box. And the box says, if there's a documentary being made today and if you want to participate, please click here. And people can click on this box and then it'll sort of flag their ad. You can search for these flagged ads and then you then have permission to contact this person. So he sort of had to set up this mechanism for us in order to make it a consensual type of A thing again. Of course, I got a little worried because then the day came and it was a Monday coming up. I had these eight film crews together, all standing by, you know, midnight hits. And I'm like, what if nobody clicks? I'm not going to have any subject, not going to have a movie. But fortunately, on that day, there were, you know, There were about 30,000 posts in the San Francisco Bay Area, Craigslist. Today, there's, you know, there's a couple hundred thousand easily, I think about 250,000 now on a daily basis. But they. But of that 30,000, 1992 clicked and said, okay, it's all right to contact. So then it became this thing of, like, all right, now I gotta pick, because there's no way I'm gonna film almost 2000 different posts. Of course, a lot of them, it was interesting. We did actually contact people. A lot of them turned out to be kind of fake. Like, they were like, oh, I just thought it was a joke. Like, I heard about this movie and I was like, that's very typical Craigslist. Like, that sort of flake factor that can kind of come into it. People saying, oh, I did this crazy thing, and blah, blah, blah. They post it on, you know, missed connections or anything. And then I. And I said. And then they, you know, they clicked. Sure. And so I would contact them and they would say, oh, I just made it all up. Sorry about that. And I was like, that's. That'd be an interesting test. You'll probably never know the truth of is how many of those misconnections are actually false. You know, of like, oh, I saw you on the bus and you were this beautiful blonde person or whatever. They're all pretty funny on there, but who knows? So that was essentially how we did it. But, yeah. I'm sorry, what was that about? The traffic? Yeah. I don't know if. Yeah, I noticed that. I haven't read anything about this or anything, but Craigslist really started in 1994, grew about 100% every year, sort of following Moore's Law, I mean, perfectly. And I'm kind of one of those guys that goes on to Alexa.com a lot and compares these things, especially because I tend to talk about Craigslist a lot. And I really noticed that, yeah, the last six months, it's actually declined. I mean, first of all, it leveled off by the end of the second quarter, and now it's actually gone down a little bit, which I'm not too sure why. I mean, I think some people Think somehow the ebay has diminished their value somehow and affected their listings. I don't think that's too realistic, but I think a very simple thing would be MySpace. And a lot of social networking sites have classifieds now so that when you are looking to buy something or sell something, you can go to your traditional social networking thing and actually see who it is that's selling this bike or renting this apartment or doing this whatever. And that kind of, you know, that kind of accountability is attractive to some people more than through Craigslist. Or they just unconsciously do it because people seem to spend more time on social networking sites now, especially younger people, you know, who wouldn't even know what Craigslist was. But they all know exactly what MySpace is and they all know like, oh yeah, you can actually buy like a bike off of MySpace because you go to your local classifieds. And it's all sorted by the regions too. So things like that have snuck in and I think have kind of eroded Craigslist's market to a certain extent. They've expanded quite a bit. As I mentioned, there's 450 cities now. There are only about 33 or whatever. I don't know if anyone remembers from the special feature in the intro it actually mentioned it, but yeah, no, it actually is slowing down. It actually is slowing down. I don't know what the future of Craigslist will be. I mean, there's only 23 people that work there, so it's not like their overhead is massively expensive or anything like that. I mean, they donate some of their server time to local nonprofits too. I mean, they're not like straining for server time or anything like that. So I don't know. I don't really know why that is, but maybe someone here knows. This would be an interesting room to ask. Why does a site where you can just let anything happen suddenly start to diminish? Maybe. So. Yes. Did you get over the writer's block? No, no. The question is, did I get over the writer's block? No, I still got to write that screenplay. No, in fact, my first, the movie that I. I did a science fiction movie in 1997 that only now came out on DVD. And right away some people contact me. Yeah. So what's the follow up to this? Like, oh, man, if I had three years to write it, I still haven't done it, but I know what it's about. No, I still in that thing and then I get caught up in these other projects like this, like this Wikipedia thing. Has gotten me. I'm going to go home after this and work on that all night too. So that's just kind of. And that's a much, much bigger thing. I mean this movie was eight film crews all over San Francisco. I mean this thing is dozens of crews all over the world. I spent all day yesterday trying to get these train tickets from Varanasi up to, up to New Delhi. And just the website itself was like four hours of time anyway. But it was, it's going to be an amazing film, so please look for it. I think the scope of it will be much bigger than Craigslist and it'll be much more of a high profile film. You know, we'll see. Looking for that celebrity voiceover to propel it onto the next level. So. Yes. Have you thought at all about making Craigslist into a regular television series? Yeah, actually, yeah, Craigslist, this as a TV series actually was approached by PBS to do exactly that. But dealing with PBS was such a hassle. I mean this was such a non. This is such an experimental, interesting, individualistic thing. It was like, just put out the post, got the money, there's only one person to deal with. He wrote the checks. You know, it wasn't a lot of money, you know, then you know, you know, like it all got put together. PBS is like, you know, you have to fill out forms and bureaucracies and deal with. Well then you have a sponsor and like, where's the grant money going to come from? You have to wait six months for your grant. I mean, if I had waited, you know, this movie was conceived of and all and completely shot within three months, you know. And with the PBS deal, I would have had to wait six months after the proposal just to get the money, much less to assemble anyway. So I, it's not how I'm able to work, so, so I turned on that. But I did think about doing the similar type of a film with other cities because it's not that expensive to do just getting individual investors and do like in New York, like 24 hours of Craigslist in New York City. Then maybe move on to others, you know, maybe do a Seattle, a Vegas, Tokyo, Paris or something like that. But once again, Wikipedia has sucked me in so I can't look back. But I welcome anyone to do this. All you gotta do is place the right ad and you'll get all the resources you need. Which is kind of interesting. You should look at YouTube for distribution. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Hard to make money off that though. That's the one thing. But you know, maybe. Are they going to do the rev share soon? What's the deal? I don't know. That'd be great. Maybe make more sense expanded to features. I don't know. Yeah, this movie actually will be available and the special features on itunes, you know, for a commercial release in about. There's a whole bunch of scenes on YouTube from it. Probably about 20 minutes worth of the movie actually. But the whole thing will be available on itunes I think in about a week or maybe or two weeks or something. I'm not too sure. It took a little bit longer than I had hoped to get it finally out there. But you know, you got to do what you got to do. Anything else? I could talk all night about this film. It was great. You know, it was all shot on prosumer cameras in standard definition. So. But I think our next project is going to be high definition only moving forward. So I was trying to think if there's any other facts and figures I could tell you about this film. But yeah. Oh, how much did the film cost? Probably in the end, by the time we picked up a couple more funders towards the end and it probably ended up being about $200,000 around that, you know, and then, you know, it's made its money back in a little bit. But it hasn't been super lucrative because I tend to do things like this. I do a lot of free screenings. I just kind of like to give it away, which is why my next film is a non profit because I think that's just what I'm a little more suited to. It's hard for me to deal with the aspect of just always concentrate on the box office and trying to make money off of it and this and that. And dealing with those traditional avenues of distribution has always been not that interesting to me either. I was approached by Think Film of all people to release this project, but they wanted me to recut it so it was nothing but personals because he's like, well, you have 200 hours of footage, you can make a 90 minute movie. Just about the other person I'm like, this is Think Film. This is like supposedly like the documentary people. I was like, no, but I don't know. I offered to sell them the footage and they could do it themselves. But still going to release my film too though. So this movie actually is going to be. We are just finalizing the Creative Commons license for it now too. So it'll be available for non commercial use, I think probably even now. I mean, I'M sure you could do it if you wanted to use it for a project or anything like that. And then we're going to release all the extra hours of footage as well. So there'll be tons of interesting facts if anyone wants to do like an anthropological study of Craigslist or something like that. So we'll see. Yeah. Oh, the Wikipedia thing actually, if anyone is interested in getting involved in that. The production website for the film itself is a, is a wiki. It's so you can go there and contribute and contribute ideas for the film. You can contribute media if you own the rights to it or if it's. Or if it's available under a free license. And it's wikidocumentary.org it's just one big word. And even music too. We're still looking for music too. So it's not going to be some things we will have to license. I'm sure it won't be an entirely, you know, open source, free content type of project, but that is one of the themes of it. So we have to make the film available in that particular manner as well. But this will probably have a similar theatrical release to Craigslist. It'll be, as I mentioned, be hitting festivals probably next January, then with, you know, North American theatrical release probably in August or something like that. But it is a non profit project and we are taking donations. So if anyone would like to donate. If you donate $50 to the production, you get the DVD when it's. When it's released in 2008 and you get your name in the credits so you can be forever immortalized on the adventure of free universal, universal knowledge. Do you guys want to watch the trailer one more time? Does anyone want to see it again? Show of hands. Nobody. One, two, three. All right, well, okay. Can you play the trailer for us in there? Here it goes. You can probably tell this is a much more of a traditional type of a documentary. You know, it'll involve, you know, since you probably won't see any flash mobs or any, you know, porn stars or you probably will see some porn stars actually. But, you know, it's in some ways much more of an historical piece that tries to place its subject in a sort of larger perspective. Unlike the Craigslist film which was just. You're just in it. I'm actually not directing this movie. I'm just the producer of it. So. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you get any kind of insights from Craigslist themselves or whatever about how much. Yeah. How many scams Are there like, how often do people get ripped off, things like that, or. Well, but in another sense, there is a lot of accountability. I mean, everything that goes through Craigslist is like, is recorded and it is, you know, and there are, you know, these IP addresses and things like that. So there are actually are a fair amount of stories in the media. And as. Did you come in with the. When we had that sort of intro, the behind the scenes, the guy was talking about his motorcycle that was stolen. So you get things like that where someone specifically says, I had this item stolen from me. Then someone would see it and they'd go like, whatever. And if you were trying to sell something you stole from somebody, well, it's easy enough for the owner to go on Craigslist and do a search and then find it, or even a search once the item is actually sold, even if it was a week ago, and, oh, I should have looked on to Craigslist. He can actually find the IP address, find the person, see if there's any back and forth. You can contact the Craigslist staff. I'm not trying to defend it. I'm just saying this is what things that. It's easy enough to find a paper trail because you can actually contact all the people that responded to the ad and say, hey, did you actually buy this item from this particular person? And if so, where did you meet them? Where did they look like? Like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, and they do they cooperate with the police? I mean, I mean, readily. I mean, Craig, you know, has his. His particular kind of libertarian perspective, which is, as you can tell from certain things like the 420 nurse and the prostitution issues, it doesn't always follow the letter of the law. Exactly. But when law enforcement does approach them specifically about things, they, you know, they're always complicit. You know what I mean? I've never heard of a case where they've resisted a police investigation of some kind. So there are, you know, but there are things that happen, you know, there was a recent case in Pleasanton, I think, of a guy who said, oh, come and buy these T shirts, you know, for me. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the person showed up and they actually mugged them. Like the person who placed the ad was a mugger. And the person's like, oh, my God, I just got rot. You know, he like pulled out a gun, said, give me your wallet. You know, and the person, you know, reported to the police. They went onto Craigslist, found the guy's, you know, IP address, tracked him down and busted him within six or seven hours. But. So I don't know quite what the guy was thinking. But, you know, criminals all have one thing in common, below average intelligence. So. And those that use Craigslist are, you know, no exception to that. So, I mean, it's. It's. I think what gets more tricky are things like those Nigerian money scams because they're so sophisticated. I mean, some people here probably know there's a whole mob system that's run out of these remote areas which are very sophisticated now and employ hundreds of people to create these scams for people to wire money to them, and then they create fake websites and the whole nine yards. So Craigslist does get involved with those from time to time, but it seems to be like they're fighting a somewhat winning battle. I'm not too sure, though, but we'll see. Yes. You're waiting for your dvd, huh? Well, I think that there is one left right here. So should we. Executive directors. Do you know him? Ian? Yeah. How do you know? Oh, I thought you knew. Okay. No, I mean, how about if you answer one of these questions here? These are important questions. Yeah. How about. Okay, what percentage. This is one. I know. What percentage of Craigslist ads in San Francisco on the Bay Area website are personal ads? 30%. It's more like about 25%, but that's close enough. We'll give you DVD as long as we have one for Gabe, who put this all together. Well, thanks everyone, for coming. If you have any more questions, you can ask me. And if you want to do an interview for the next movie, let me know because we do want to talk to some Google people.