Introducing DINERMAN!

The Hero We Need...

We are at an inflection point for filmmaking and culture in general, civilization etc., and I have been inspired by the many filmmakers sharing their thoughts and ideas on FilmStack! Thank you all.

Thanks to the recent subscribers for joining and to the “OG’s” as well. It’s been a life-changing experience to write and publish weekly. A big part of why I write is to help me clarify my thinking on film techniques, building on my teaching and set work as a cinematographer, and those times I play my cards right, director.

I think another great potential of this platform is to include viewers in the filmmaking process as well as the final output, and as I’ve previously shared completed pieces here, I would like to start sharing a work in development. This is a documentary I’ve been making since 2019, and I would like to invite you to visit the editing process as I continue to shoot and cut.

But first, the Origin Story…

Finding Dinerman

Sometimes I feel like I’ve wasted my life.

Watching the internet fill up with AI-generated video feels like the nail in the coffin for my decades of hard-won skills. Why did I learn to make a call sheet and run a set? Why did I learn to light? Why did I learn how to walk backwards while keeping a person framed and in focus and not getting hit by traffic? Why did I learn how to look a person in the eye, communicate with them, and empathize with their struggle, then collaborate on the best way to bring that human moment onto screen?

Truly a wasted life…

But then I pack a film studio into my backpack, take an hour-long train ride into Queens, shoot a scene with Michael Perlman, and things make a little more sense.

Because no AI could come up with Michael Perlman, aka Dinerman.

I became aware of Michael’s diner quest while reading the newspaper on the train home from Rutgers University. People are baffled, but I still get a physical paper delivered to my door. And if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have seen a story that changed my life.

I also read the paper by App on my phone, but the stories are always getting updated and moved around, so it’s never the same paper throughout the day. The printed paper is like a daily record waiting to be discovered. I emphasize this because after I found Michael’s story in the physical paper, I looked it up on the App with keywords, but wasn’t able to find the story online, so I would have missed it.

But what grabbed my attention?

Michael Perlman, a local reporter and preservationist, was desperate to save a diner in Rego Park, Queens, from a developer’s demolition plan. What kind of preservationist is worried about diners? I thought.

I needed to meet this guy.

Quick Diner Backstory

When my great-grandfather arrived in America from Greece, he opened a diner in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near a Ford auto-parts plant. So in some way, I owe my existence to diners!

As a child, I loved it when my parents or grandfather took me to diners - breakfast all day, pancakes on demand, what could be better?

As I became a teenage filmmaker, diners were the place for my friends and me to hang out and plot out our projects, or celebrate a good shoot (on VHS, of course!). It was great to have a welcoming place to eat or drink late-night coffee and never get kicked out for staying too long or not spending enough.

So, Michael had my attention.

According to the article, he had already saved two other diners in Manhattan that I used to frequent, The Moondance Diner on Sixth Avenue and Grand which was across the street from the Good Machine office where I first interned, and the Cheyenne Diner on 9th Ave and 33rd, across from the B&H Camera Superstore where I spent all my post-intern paychecks.

When diners were in danger from constant development, Michael helped get them onto flatbed trucks and shipped them across the country to bring cheer to diner-less communities.

Superstitious thoughts are tempting when multiple paths cross, so I took this as a sign that Michael and I were destined to make a movie together. Having spent my life searching for good stories in the paper to inspire story ideas, this opportunity jumped off the page.

Ripped from the headlines menu, if you will.

I found Michael on Twitter and sent a DM, asking if he would be interested in filming together. He was in media outreach mode and sent back an enthusiastic reply, but I wanted to meet him before committing to a full-on project. I wanted to set the stakes before we started rolling.

We met in a small Rego Park restaurant, connecting over our love of diners and old New York local establishments that were getting bulldozed for Target, Whole Foods, and other suburban monstrosities. We were peas in a pod when it came to ideas of what makes a community great - people who own their businesses and create spaces for common experience and interaction.

He was the real deal.

Michael sees diners as the ultimate public institutions, where people of all walks of life can sit side by side at the counter. He is relentlessly positive, even when he’s working against long odds, and cares deeply for his community.

His passion was infectious.

We started filming together the following week - he took me to The Shalimar Diner in Rego Park, and Michael acted as tour guide throughout the neighborhood. We followed up by visiting the locations of his previous diner rescues to see what had replaced them and explored preservation projects as varied as Penn Station and a forgotten Rego Park bowling alley.

No place was too small for Michael’s concern.

Beyond Diners

As we shot, Michael kept bringing up his other preservation projects that he was working on throughout Queens, but I wanted to stay focused on diner rescue.

Finally, he broke me down and convinced me to shoot a meeting he was having at Forrest Hills Stadium. He brought a list of 12 ideas, big and small, for public-facing projects to help the community, and I was hooked.

I realized that I had been thinking way too narrowly about my subject, and when I opened up to the greater possibilities, the project blossomed. It grew from a film about a guy who is trying to save a diner to the nature and value of preservation itself. When I let the project open and expand on its own, people came out of the woodwork to show their support for Michael.

Here is one such supporter: “I was there when he was born…he really wants to make this world a better place…”

Everyone hates change. We fight so hard to keep things the same, even when we say we are trying to change things for the better. We get upset when we return to places we loved, which inevitably look different from how we remember.

In addition to the Moondance diner’s departure, the Good Machine office I worked in no longer exists. For 20 years, it’s been an empty lot. Someday, it will be a big, ugly building. Onward and upward, New York City!

We must accept change and keep moving forward. We must open our eyes to possibilities we are closing off. We must keep building and revising our communities as new opportunities arise (like FilmStack!).

So, from that perspective, have I wasted my life? You decide!

A handy tip I have picked up from Buddhism is the non-dualist view. When you apply dualist thinking, you separate yourself from the world, seeing everything as “other” than you. But if you dig down deep enough, you realize that there is no separation. You exist because of the world, it is not “out there.” You are a part of the world. You can run away, but wherever you stop, you are still in the world. At least, I think that’s how it goes.

Without the hundreds of shoots I’ve learned on, I wouldn’t be able to shoot, direct, record sound, edit, etc. Without the hundreds of fellow film workers I’ve collaborated with, I wouldn’t have honed my ideas or learned from other brilliant minds. There is no way I could make the movie I’m making without all of these experiences.

I guess I’ll eventually have to figure out how to use those to text-to-image AI thingies, too. But not for this one.

I’ve been shooting and editing Dinerman since 2019. As you get to know Michael Perlman, I think you will fall for him as I have. He is a man of integrity, grit, and endurance on a quixotic quest to save the world from itself, one building at a time.