It's hard to pinpoint the origin of Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness. In one sense, the idea originated with the Landmark Six arrests in December 2003, and the resulting media coverage - which were the first introduction and exposure to urban exploration for a lot of people, including director Melody Gilbert.
Calling the Landmark Six incident the inspiration for the documentary is, however, oversimplifying things. The scouting of the disused brewery on Saint Paul's west side took place during "Mouser Week IV", a roughly-annual regional gathering of explorers started in the late 1990's by one of the fathers of midwest, or at least Minnesota, urban exploration - Action Squad. At the outset, Action Squad were little more than a local group of college students engaged in "roof and tunnel hacking", a time-honored pasttime whose origins, or at least enduring popularity at campuses across the country, can be attributed to students at MIT. The flashy Action Squad website, the urban legends, their cult status as semi-mythical, larger-than-life figures would come later, amid the increasing exposure and popularity of their chosen pasttime.
Early Mouser Weeks had a dozen or so attendees; recent ones have brought together more than sixty people from a number of states; even visitors from other countries. Similar gatherings elsewhere - including those seen in the documentary - have attracted even larger numbers. Websites, forums, and chat rooms about UE litter the internet. Books have been published, television shows have been produced, and more people than ever know about and understand, if not accept, this hobby and it's participants.
But that's the state of affairs today, and it really doesn't really explain how Into the Darkness came to be.
For me, it began with a missed phone call. It was January of 2004, just weeks after the Landmark incident, and I'd been out one evening exploring and photographing something - a storm drain, I think - with a few other explorers. I returned late at night, to learn from my wife that "some filmmaker" had called for me. The next morning, armed with Melody's first name, a phone number without an area code, and the word "Hole", as which my spouse had mis-heard the name of Melody's earlier, critically-acclaimed documentary "Whole", I set to work on the internet, trying to find out what I could about Minnesota's most charming filmmaker. It wasn't much, but it seemed encouraging, and I proceeded to return Melody's call, curious what she wanted.
There are two things anyone who has been around Melody for any amount of time will tell you. The second, which I wouldn't discover for several months, is that Melody knows everybody, it seems, in the Twin Cities area. The first thing everyone knows about Melody I discovered for myself about two minutes after dialing her number - she's always perky, posessed of an infectious enthusiasm that knows no bounds. (Even later, when losing the battle against claustrophobia in a tight sewer tunnel under Minneapolis, or struggling against fog, humidity, cold, and white noise in a storm drain, Melody remained perky. It's uncanny, if not unnatural.)
We spoke for a few minutes, and arranged to meet that weekend at the Black Dog, a coffee shop in Saint Paul's Lowertown district. Melody seemed enthused about the notion of a UE documentary of some sort, but at that point, that's all it was - a notion. We didn't discuss specifics, or details, and I don't think there really were any, then; they would only come later.
I freely admit that my attitudes and opinions about urban exploration are not only a little different than those of the rest of the community, but also that they've caused no small amount of friction. Given that my views about the media are at best idiosyncratic, I didn't want to antagonize anyone by jumping into an unpopular project alone, nor commit Melody into a project that other explorers wouldn't support. My fears would prove to be unfounded, but caution was the name of the game in those early months.
Thus it was that I met Melody one morning in the spring of 2004, in the company of a handful of fellow explorers I know and trust. We spoke for two hours, Melody's perkiness - to say nothing of her enthusiasm and eagerness - having left us with a favorable impression.
She had seen, she explained, the coverage of the Landmark Six incident a few months earlier, and had become interested in doing a documentary on it. We aired our concerns - technical, legal, political, and otherwise - and found Melody agreeable to our restrictions and responsive to our concerns. We decided it was worth doing a test shoot, after which we'd see how things looked.
A week or so later, a number of us met Melody and Adi, her untiring cameraman, in the parking lot of a Saint Paul park, and they got their second hands-on experience with urban exploration at nearby Phalen Creek, a night I would write about on my website a year or so later. Having recently re-read that account for the first time in quite a while, I'm struck by the learning curve we all faced - we explorers learning the ways of documentary making, and Melody and Adi getting a crash-course on the often peculiar world of urban exploration. It was quite the experience all around, a successful, enjoyable, and auspicious start to a project that quickly came to take on a life of it's own.
The film would eventually span the course of three years, take Melody around, across, and under the Twin Cities, off to a half-dozen states and as many countries, and involve scores of explorers. Close to a hundred hours of digital footage would be shot by Melody and her assistants, though only a small fraction of it would eventually be distilled - with the more-than-able assitance of Charlie at Channel Z - into the final, finished film. Despite the seeming glut of footage, to this day there are still dozens of things that all of us would like to have filmed, but didn't. Who knows; if Melody is willing, and there's enough incentive, there might one day be a "director's cut" with added footage. On the other hand, if she begs off, who can blame her? Certainly not I.
Nobody really seems to remember how the film got it's title; for a long time, it was just "the documentary", or "Melody's film". That said, I think I can accept blame for the name; in March of 2004, Melody emailed me asking for digital files of some of my photographs, to use in promoting the still-nebulous film to a television station that shall remain nameless. I emailed her a couple of images, including one to which I'd half-jokingly added text, as seen here. The television deal came to nothing, and that was the last I ever really thought about the matter, until I saw the title of the film at the first fundraising party in 2005.
The conditions the movie were shot under were often inhospitable, to put it kindly, and while we certainly tried to warn Melody about what she was getting herself into, I'm not sure she really understood the environments she'd be shooting in until it was too late. The sand, water, mud, sewage, and other environmental factors took their toll, eventually turning her $2,000 camera into a scuffed and battered objet d'art. Nor am I sure we really adequately prepared her for the amount of physical effort involved - the climbing, the crawling, the slithering and sliding, and above all the walking. (Ask Melody, if you get the chance, about her ideas for marketing the "Urban Exploration Exercise Program".)
A documentary of this size and scope should probably have had a crew of assistants, however impractical they might have been. Instead, Melody suffered thru much of it alone, with the help of one or two other people, and of course the assistance of her subjects. She endured subzero weather, a humid Florida swamp, sagging floors, broken staircases, wet and dirty underground tunnels, and much, much more with only an occasional complaint.
Lighting proved to be a constant difficulty. It's somewhat in the nature of what we do that it rarely happens in bright, well-lit areas during daylight, and the lack of powerful lighting was a persistent challenge. Most explorers carry two, three, or even more flashlights of one sort or another; in many locations these proved to be the only light available. This is much truer to the "real urban exploration experience" than had high-power floodlights been used with any frequency, and adds a special "feel" to much of the footage, but the varied color balances of all the lights made for some tedious post-production, I gather.
It's impossible for a movie of any length to offer anything more than a brief glimpse into the world of urban exploration, or to provide anything like a truly in-depth depiction of the activity. Many, many times over the years something interesting, exciting, or simply humorous has happened and we've all regretfully said "Damn, I wish Melody were here to film this". It was impossible for her to be everywhere, and rarely convenient for her to drop everything and accompany explorers - even local ones - on short notice. It's one thing to suffer for one's Art; another to make one's husband and family do so as well.
Truth be told, though, anything approximating a truly exhaustive look at urban exploration would be extraordinarily boring. If the documentary glosses over the late-night brainstorming, the long road trips, the hours spent in front of microfiche readers at the library, the online research, the often-fruitless reconaissance and scouting of locations, and all the similarly unglamorous activities that comprise the bulk of all things urban exploration, and instead concentrates on the interesting, exciting, and sometimes fun and playful parts of the activity, it's definitely to the benefit of the audience.
That said, as an introduction to urban exploration, the movie performs admirably. It covers the high points, and enough of them, while showing what it is that sets we explorers aside from others who are interested in history, photography, urban planning, and so on. By concentrating on some of the people who take part, rather than their activities or the locations they explore, Melody has succeeded in capturing the human-interest side of the hobby; this - and the excellent soundtrack - keeps the film from seeming too much like a grade-school filmstrip or television history program.
If it all looks easy and care-free, though, rest assured that's just the camera performing it's magic. You don't see the failed attempts to enter buildings, the less pleasant encounters with homeless people. You don't see the scrapes, cuts, bruises, strains, sprains, and other "morning after" souvenirs of a an evening well-spent somewhere you aren't supposed to be. The documentary doesn't show Melody and I hiding in a park in Saint Paul for nearly half an hour, waiting for a police car to move; it doesn't mention the forty-eight hours the "Landmark Six" spent in jail without a shower, still covered in sand and sewage. You don't have to scale a fence to see the movie, walk half a mile thru shoulder-height tunnels, slither down a sandy hole, or pop a manhole cover in the sidewalk in front of someone's house... and that, believe me, is how it probably should be.
The movie premieres in competition at the 17th Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, California; the dates and times are here. The first local screening of the finished film will be at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, on March 16, 2007, with a second screening the following evening. Check their website for more details, and mark your calendars; you definately don't want to miss the fun.