The Diaries (1986)

• 43%
• 1986
• Wheeler Dixon

"The Diaries is a split screen movie. It has two projectors running at once, at least for most of the film. I was influenced here by Warren Sonbert's later films. What Warren did was something that infuriated everybody that knew him, and in fact still infuriates people today. He made early films like The Bad and the Beautiful (1967) and the Tenth Legion (1967), and then he would re-edit them into other films later. But he wouldn't preserve any copies of the originals, which would then cease to exist. I did the same thing. The Diaries was an attempt to reshape material that's in my early films; I decided to go into the cutting room and just put the stuff together. It's really all of the key moments, I think, from all of the films that I no longer felt were individual entities or didn't deserve to be, or weren't strong enough, compiled into two reels. I edited it around 1976. It's really an evocation of all of my experiences in life up until that period.