Albert and David Maysles in production on "Salesman," 1968. Photo by Bruce Davidson.

In the past month, I finally joined Twitter (as 1basil1). One thing I began to do, as I screened documentary submissions, was write Tweets headed “Dear Documentary Filmmakers:” - a way to both gripe about (and occasionally even celebrate) things doc makers do in their films and how film programmers react to them. I meant these notes to be funny, in a curmudgeonly way, but also instructive, born out of 13 years of watching thousands of film festival submissions of all types and of all lengths. I purposely omitted any information that could be used to identify either the films or filmmakers, or even for what entity I was screening these docs for.

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