To whom it may concern:
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The article states, “Tributary started in 1996 as a collaboration with [Dan] Sutherland, Jeff Economy, and Darren Hacker, but that partnership soon dissolved.” Margasak has an unusual way of defining “soon.” Shooting on …An Incredible Simulation (not Tributary) commenced in 1996, and the four of us worked on the film as a collective until late 1998. Over 50 hours of footage was shot in that two-year period. The partnership was never formally dissolved; Forster took it upon himself to terminate his involvement with …An Incredible Simulation (AIS) by walking off with approximately 25 hours’ worth of raw footage belonging to the partnership (not him as an individual) from the studio where it was being edited. He did this without anyone’s consent.
Making a documentary film is a lengthy, time-consuming, and emotionally and financially exhausting process, and the assertion that we would spend literally years of our lives dedicated to the sole purpose of deriding the work of others is incomprehensible. We view documentary filmmaking as an avenue of artistic exploration, not a bully pulpit. Again, Margasak was (and still is) welcome to view AIS in order to decide this for himself or to solicit our point of view, but he made no discernible attempt to do either.
Darren Hacker
Forster claims he introduced the “roundtable discussion” concept as an “editing tool” to put the band footage into context, since many of the musicians weren’t very reflective. He says that when his partners dismissed this suggestion he proposed using outside “experts”–a psychologist, a rock critic, and others–to serve the same function. Forster says that after the other partners rejected this idea as well, he had no hope of finding a solution. He says he wrote a letter explaining his decision to return the footage shot by the others and saying he would use the footage he’d shot to make his own film, though he’d be willing to make that footage available to the others so long as he received proper credit and compensation.
