In an entry in March, I sang the praises of the gizmos I'm using to edit "MacArthur Park" (what newsletter subscriber Tracy Taggert and her son Jeremy wrote in and described as my "digital wonderland"). In the service of balance, this week I suppose it's only fair to acknowledge that much of the work of editing any documentary also involves a great deal of decidedly un-cutting-edge technology.

Transcripts are a case in point. As any doc director will tell you, transcripts are expensive to create and tedious to pore through, but in all of my documentary work I've never found any way around them. For "MacArthur Park," I shot nearly 40 hours of Citizens for Truth meetings throughout 2000. Somehow I have to choose a manageable number of minutes of those meetings to put in the film -- minutes that will tell the story of CfT without stretching the documentary to epic length (Brian Clark and I are aiming for a 90-minute doc, and of course the film is about much more than Citizens for Truth).

I could try to just watch all 40 hours of the footage and take notes, then watch them all again and take more notes, then watch them all again... But this process would take well into George W. Bush's 2nd term (wait... did I say that or just fear that?). The only thing to do is to have the tapes transferred to a form that makes them easier to manipulate, and the best anyone in the doc business has ever been able to come up with is the written transcript. So I sent off all of the VHS dubs of the CfT meetings to a service and, thousands of dollars later, assembled the resulting transcripts into this book:

But right now it's one of the most valuable tools in the editing process. What I've done with it since compiling it is read through all of the meetings,

And this is what I should be doing right now, so I'm going back to it.