Scanning the upcoming Mill Valley Film Festival lineup, I feel like a proud uncle. Back in the 1990s, I had the foresight to hire (and the pleasure to work with) three terrific documentary editors on the public television series Neighborhoods: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco. Now all three editors are getting recognized as multi-talented filmmakers in their own right, and, in a kind of festival trifecta, all of them are featured this year as DIRECTORS of fascinating documentaries, which I urge you to catch next month in Mill Valley (or elsewhere on the festival circuit).

Dawn Logsdon—whose gifts with archival imagery and footage made her an ideal editor on The Castro—not only edited but also co-directed the exuberant profile Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton, an eye-opening portrait of the complex filmmaker/poet and quintessential Radical Faerie.  If you missed it at Frameline this year, the film is itself a big joy.

Seeing these three talented editors take wing in new roles is, of course, thrilling to me (I am after all the poster child of artist-wearing-many-hats), but also, I confess, dispiriting. I mean, why do they need to leave the pigeonhole that I have happily consigned them to? They are damned good documentary editors—a rare and ornery breed. Once they’ve flown the coop and started to soar into the rarefied air of directing, well, they may never come flying back into the dank editing suite. Some great documentary editors—Jeffrey Friedman, Yael Hersonski, Debbie Hoffmann—flew away and seem rarely tempted back.

Then again…documentary directing/producing is not exactly a paradise. Perhaps after a few miserable dawn-to-midnight shoots…or the 20th rejected funding proposal…or the 50th headache over uncleared music rights…perhaps the pure content focus of editing will lure them back to their chair.

That’s a long shot. Try as one might to pigeonhole these rare birds, the fact is, talent will out.  And with these three talents—not to mention a name like Gosling—they are bound to fly.

Nearly 10 years ago, my friend and colleague, the noted film scholar B. Ruby Rich, asked me to speak to a group of film lovers on a Sunday morning about a new Israeli drama she had programmed for them to see. It was a film that hadn't opened yet theatrically--Nir Bergman's Broken Wings--but I was excited to talk about it with others.
    "Is it a film class?" I asked.
    "Well, not exactly," said Ruby. "It's a club. We screen new movies and then talk about them, sometimes with guest speakers. You probably know some of the club members, there are about 150 film fans from around the Bay Area."
    Straightforward enough...but then Ruby added the twist: "Just don't tell anyone beforehand what the film is. The whole point is they don't know what movie they're seeing until they show up at the theater."

    That screening with Ruby turned out to be the beginning of a long relationship with San Francisco's chapter of The Cinema Club--a nine-city network--because the following year I joined Ruby as a co-moderator (I was later joined by my colleague from the San Francisco Film Society, Rod Armstrong). I've been co-moderating now for about eight years, and we've had the pleasure of early screenings of Slumdog Millionaire, The Artist, A Separation, Silver LInings Playbook, No, and Melancholia, among many others, programmed from the home office in Washington, DC, with input from several of us moderators. Sure there have been some clunkers along the way, but the conversations afterwards are invariably stimulating.