New Yorker's Weiser film project continues

by Rob Ruth

With Fiddle Week’s arrival comes the renewal of friendships among the musicians and non-playing music lovers who regularly throng to the annual event. While the routine may seem natural to those who have it, to someone whose samplings of the Fiddle Week experience have been separated by decades, the Weiser tradition’s endurance and depth come off as nothing short of remarkable.

Thus it was for New Yorker Greg Lehman, a guitarist who camped outdoors and played in Weiser a couple of years during his free-spirited youth in the late 1970s, then didn’t come back for another Fiddle Week until a quarter of a century had elapsed. Jamming out-doors again here in 2002 and 2003, it was as if he were viewing the local scene through an entirely new set of eyes, and being a part of it at this point was like some kind of epiphany.

“The thing that really startled me was the longevity of the relationships and how connected they were to the music,” Lehman said.

Lehman, as many old-time fiddling fans are already aware, is currently embarked upon a multi-year project to tell the story of Fiddle Week to a wide audience. Beginning in 2004, he took a prolonged break from his established career in financial management to begin work on a feature length documentary film. It mainly explores the human dimensions of Fiddle Week but also pays attention to the lively festivities and the tradition’s appropriate setting — a community along the Oregon Trail, the route which bore the music westward.

Leaping from Wall Street to the storyteller’s lane may sound like a radical departure, and in some respects it is. For Lehman, the project has necessarily been a learn-as-you-go proposition, and he concedes he has had to at times throw away the book on how you get these projects done. He says accomplished documentarians identify four distinct stages to the process: research/pre-production; production (includes shooting the tape); post-production (includes editing); and marketing and distribution.

Circumstances induced Lehman to slip into stage two long before his first-stage work was finished. He felt a need to almost immediately begin collecting his raw foot-age. “I could either spend 14 months researching [without shooting] or spend two months and get up to speed in a hurry,” the filmmaker said. He later added: “Now I’m two years into that process. In my mind, I’ve brought it to the close of that first stage.”

Some aspects of the overall project benefit handily from Lehman’s business world experience, however, and, yes, it looks like we’re jumping ahead here to stage four: marketing and distribution. The filmmaker appears to have taken a giant stride in this area with the recent launch of a website, www.weiserfilms.com. It’s designed not only as a vehicle for selling DVD copies of the documentary once it’s done, but more generally as a resource for musicians and fans, regularly highlighting the work of individual fiddlers and accompanists, spotlighting other filmmakers’ projects about old-time music, and incorporating Lehman’s personal blog, which of course will talk frequently about the Weiser project. Visitors to the site can use most of it without registering (registration allows you to post comments to the blog), and Lehman strongly encourages visitors to sign up for his e-mail newsletter furnishing project updates.

With around 200 hours of footage already accumulated for his documentary, which figures to be only around 100 minutes long, Lehman says the website will also serve as “a vehicle for me to share some of that research with my audience that won’t end up in my project.”

Fiddle Week 2006 will mark Lehman’s third straight year of shoot-ing in Weiser. He says this year’s go-round will be largely about “closing the loop” on some of the musician subjects who will probably be included in his story line. “I’m at that point now where I’m moving on,” Lehman said. “I’ve identified some of the likely characters in the finished film.” Some of the people have been interviewed on camera but haven’t been filmed performing. Others have been shot per-forming but haven’t yet been interviewed. (Those interviews, by the way, don’t all occur in Weiser; Lehman has been traveling to subjects’ hometowns.)

Although Lehman is the sole creative force behind the documentary, he does enlist the help of technically trained and minded college students during the week of intensive shooting. Assisting him last year were three young people, two of whom, Sam Michael and Kaijsa Bellon, were local. This year’s assistants are Saysha Blazier, a Weiser High grad currently in her senior year as a biology major in Peoria, Ill., Buffy Naillon, a student in BSU’s film program who also works for National Public Radio, and Joe Spadafora, a Washingtonian and son of Scott Spadafora, a swing guitarist who has attended Fiddle Week in Weiser many times.

This year, after he packs up his gear and heads back to New York, he’ll be looking for employment in his familiar financial management field (full-time or part-time — he’s not sure which yet), a necessary measure to replenish project funds. He says a “conservative” timeline for the project’s ultimate completion runs three to four years, meaning it could be finished sooner.

Lehman’s commitment to the undertaking has remained unwavering and, if anything, has only grown stronger. “It’s its own reward to work on something that you just believe is the right thing,” he said.
 

--WEISER SIGNAL AMERICAN
6/19/06