As is amply shown by the high volume of media attention "MacArthur Park" has received even before it has been completed, this is going to be a controversial documentary. I'd like to say that I could put out of my mind the media scrutiny--some of it sure to be hostile--that will face the movie and myself when the project is released to the public, but I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit I think about it sometimes during post-production. As far as I know, this will be the first full-length documentary ever produced about the assassination of Bill Gates. I feel a great responsibility to make sound judgments about all of the issues related to it, especially the ethical ones.

I'm sure all doc makers who take on controversial subjects encounter some difficult questions that dog them as they drift off to sleep at night. For example, if you're making a documentary about the Holocaust, how much of the available horrific visual evidence do you show before it becomes exploitative? How do you handle the existence of Holocaust deniers? If your doc is about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., how do you handle the bizarre belief of MLK's surviving family that James Earl Ray was innocent? (I'm no stranger to issues such as these; the Gates-assassination world has its fair share of assassination deniers and conspiracy theorists.)

Sometimes the very nature of still-photography or moving-picture evidence is at the heart of the ethical dilemma. How different would our impression of the Rodney King beating be if TV stations had shown the early portion of George Holliday's tape, rarely seen even today, in which King charges at the police officers? The tape was originally copied and distributed without this portion, after a single TV news producer (at KTLA) made a judgment that the early portion of the tape lacked the "technical quality" to be broadcast. That swiftly made decision may have changed the course of Los Angeles history. I'm sure glad I didn't make it.

The makers of "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," a documentary I greatly admire, faced the issue of how to interpret some infrared footage of the FBI's April 19, 1993, attack on Mt. Carmel. The FBI, despite its infamous flip-flops on the incendiary-grenade issue, has always claimed it didn't fire a single bullet during the attack. Yet the infrared footage shows images that can be interpreted--and were by "Waco's" on-camera expert--as gunfire apparently directed at the compound. The "Waco" filmmakers chose to present the expert's interpretation without substantive rebuttal from the other side. A judge in the Davidians' survivors' civil case later determined there was no evidence of FBI gunfire. The Branch Davidian potential witnesses who could tell us one way or the other aren't talking--they're dead. I still don't know what to believe.

At the start of the O.J. saga, Time magazine faced an issue similar to one that I'm facing now with "MacArthur Park." After Simpson's arrest, Time's photo department acquired an LAPD mugshot of Simpson, toyed with the darkness and contrast, and created a cover "photo illustration" (the magazine's own label). Time's image was significantly darker than Newsweek's cover using the same mugshot, and both magazines appeared side-by-side on the newsstands for all to see. A lot of people said "gotcha" and cried racism, but I've never felt that Time did anything wrong. There is no "correct" exposure for any image. That mugshot, like a lot of mugshots, was overexposed and washed out. The Time photo dept. could easily be seen as having "corrected" these flaws. They certainly made a more attractive picture. Their version directs the viewer's attention to the eyes of Simpson, rather than the washed-out, artificially sickly-looking skin tone of the "original" photo. That modification humanizes Simpson, to my view. Plus, the lighting of the modified image was more in concert with the tone of the story it illustrated--a "tragedy" (according to Time; personally, I would never put Simpson in the same category as Oedipus). This kind of image manipulation is done all the time--it's no different than cropping, or lightening a picture to use it as a background, or tinting it to match a layout's color scheme, or one of the hundreds of other techniques artists use every day to make TV and print graphics effective. Still, the editors of Time put their tails between their legs and apologized in the wake of the hysteria their cover created.

"Blurry Man" presents a problem for me. Above is what you probably recognize as the famous photograph of a figure at the top of the Park Plaza Hotel, a picture that amateur photographer Ibrahim Bothun says he snapped just after the last gunshot was fired at Bill Gates. It is very likely that this photograph shows the retreating assassin of Gates, as a spent rifle cartridge and other evidence was found in that precise area of the roof. The LAPD and D.A.'s investigators believe that Blurry Man's appearance is consistent with that of Alek Hidell, the alleged assassin of Gates.

But critics of the official version cry foul. Anyone would look dark-skinned in silhouette, they say. Blurry Man could be Caucasian, Latino, Asian, African-American--it's impossible to tell from a photograph the skin color of a person in strong backlight or silhouette. This is a fact that Citizens for Truth makes very clear on their website with the following photo, in which white, black and Latino CfT members posed on the rooftop of the hotel in the same position as Blurry Man.

I've performed the same experiment myself. It's true that you just can't tell the skin color of a person up there with the sun--or even just bright sky--behind them. I don't believe any reasonable determination of skin color can be made from the Bothun photo of Blurry Man.

However, I have discovered that the casual eye does not see it that way. When I have shown the Blurry Man photo to people and asked, what's the skin color of this guy?, I've often gotten the immediate response that the figure has dark skin. I've gotten the same reaction from a re-created, posed picture of myself as Blurry Man, and I'm white. There is something about the Blurry Man photo that gives people the instant impression that the figure in it is dark-skinned, and I think I may have figured out a reason why. Notice in the photo that there's a certain element of the building that is partially hidden from direct sunlight but nonetheless does not have a dark shadow.

I think this element may mislead the eye into believing that the lighting conditions prevailing in the photo do not allow for dark shadows (this is common on a cloudy day--sometimes there are no shadows at all).

However, what one cannot see in the photo is that the element lacking dark shadows is receiving a significant amount of what is called "fill light" from the unseen side of the building, which is of course painted white. As any photographer would easily see, the unseen vertical building face is acting as a powerful sunlight reflector, filling in the shadow in anything that is nearby.

But there is no similar reflector around the Blurry Man figure. In fact, the figure seems to be wearing a baseball cap, which would further shadow his face.

I am thus convinced that the standard Blurry Man picture--the one we've all seen on TV and in print--has a built-in characteristic that makes it misleading in a critical aspect. The human eye sees the photograph and immediately believes it is reasonable to assume that the figure in it has dark skin--no small assumption in this assassination.

The upshot of all this? I have to be careful how I deal with the Blurry Man photo, which makes several appearances in the documentary. I don't really feel like cluttering up the film with the laborious explanation in this diary entry (it would take a few minutes to do so properly, and running time is very precious in a film), so I am thinking of mostly using a severely cropped version of the Blurry Man photo. Something like this...

This version of the photo takes out the misleading soft shadow element. Admittedly, by performing this crop for this reason, I'm essentially protecting the audience from its own lying eyes. Is this paternalistic of me? It kind of feels like it. But the alternative seems worse. Let me know what you think.

Best,
Brian Flemming
doc@nothingsostrange.com