JR: It's good to be the first, isn't it?

TB: If we look at ourselves like, I wouldn't say as Lewis and Clark, but like pioneers in the covered wagon stage, there's still no IHOPS out there. So when you get there, it's cold lonely and you're hungry and you have to start everything on your own. That worked against us in many respects, but at the same time we benefited. There's always perks associated with being first. On balance, I'm very happy with how things are going. The Greencine VOD is another example of trying something new.

Part of the idea of this project was it's a first movie. We're not doing it for the money. We're not going to take on anything we can't afford to lose, and it's all about experimentation and having fun with it. And we're not getting uptight over money. That design has held up well, and it's still a pleasure.

JR: But what if Dave Freidman and Dan Sonny had, in fact wanted to be taken seriously as filmmakers?

TB: I did the movie because they were funny. They were refreshingly unpretentious filmmakers. Since my forte is comedy and I did a documentary because of the limited technology and funding I had, I thought the early DV technology was much better suited for nonfiction programming, still do. But I really wanted to make a comedy, so what the piece is really is a radio piece, an audio piece. It's really tightly edited to their comedy. Because I now that character from Bernie. I knew how to cut to time their beats. Instead of having a voice over or a serious UCLA professor telling us what we should know, the approach was to use music to drive it without a narrator, and then have Frank Henenlotter (director of cult classics Basket Case and Frankenhooker.) who knows more about these movies than anyone else, but still keeps it safe for the audience, and has fun with them, was perfect.

The guys aren't going to talk about their movies. That's the whole point. They're not going to reflect on disappointment, or reflect on their movies either. They're not going to go there. Dave talked a little bit about it, he said 'I'm not ashamed of anything I did. I wouldn't apologize to anybody.' That was defensive. He was talking about the totality of his career. He was the one who called me on the phone about "The Pickup." He said 'get a copy. I'm in it, and he's getting a blow job in this movie, and I was thinking 'wow. I guess it's OK to use this.' As he says, he was one of the founding fathers of the sexual revolution. He likes to brag that he used to call Hefner at Esquire when Hefner worked as a writer over there.