Wesley Emerson, aka Cass Paley, won the award for Best Feature Documentary at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Tx. this past Tuesday night. Emerson's heralded Wadd is a documentary about the late John Holmes.
Emerson: "I was real pleased. I beat out nine other people, and there was some real heavy-duty competition. There was a documentary on Hank Greenberg that was quite excellent. There was a documentary which came in second place to me on the leper colony in Louisiana which is the last-known leper colony in the world. That was quite fascinating. And there were a couple of others. There was also a documentary on the preservation of film. We have a screening next Thursday. We're invited to screen at the New Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Blvd. at 7:30. I got approached by one company that wants to talk to us about doing a theatrical release on it [Wadd]. There's several others who are interested, but we didn't get a chance to talk to those guys."
Emerson said the documentary involved almost two years of his life. He had seen the film Boogie Nights, and, though, he enjoyed it, felt it wasn't the "real story."
"I lived the real story," says Emerson. "I had known John briefly, and, at that particular point I said, 'Let's see if we can do it.' I put together a [10-minute] rough edit and went to Russ [Hampshire] to see if I could get some money to do a rough edit of the whole show. He said he'd take on the whole project. He did, by God, and I love him for it. I had cut like a 10-minute presentation, and I had an outline as to what I wanted to do. I had a budget. I thought I was going to ask him for a partial amount to get it to a big rough cut stage. But, no, he said he'd take on the whole thing."
Emerson interviewed over 40 people during the course of making the picture. The first rough cut was over 5 1/2 hours, and, over eight months, Emerson whittled it down to just under two hours. There was a screening at a tri-plex theater in downtown Austin last Saturday night to a sellout crowd, with people turned away. Apparently actor Matt Damon and his entourage were there at the screening, according to Emerson. "The owner of the theater told me that, later."
"I was really jazzed. I'm still trying to come down from the rush of the whole thing," Emerson says. He'd like to do another documentary, this one on a singing group from the 1950's. Other than that, he won't elaborate on details of that project. Emerson's also working on a documentary in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of American carnivals. "These are just some ideas I'm batting around."
