It’s hard to believe, but a film about a record store in suburban New Jersey connects the following cultural heavy hitters: jazz photographer Herman Leonard; “This American Life” host Ira Glass;
Wilcha, who has lived in Los Angeles for years, spoke recently by video about the project. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. I was trying to reflect on how you can carry two contradictory feelings when you’re reflecting, I have a great life. My family is healthy. I feel very lucky, but man, my heart is a little broken that I didn’t follow through on some of these dreams I had. I’m glad I followed through on this, both the instinct to shoot all those things with no budget and sometimes no real reason except that I felt they were worth doing.
I had this sense that the world was going to forget, say, the graphic design of these matchbooks, and I had to be the archivist and that exact same instinct informed the documentary. I would take out my camera to shoot things. It’s like flypaper – a lot of stuff sticks to it. The other day I watched a tape where I held up my camera for four minutes to capture some of a lecture by. I put it in my bag and now I don’t even remember being there. I shot three songs of.
Q: In that moment, you’re narrating your documentary – was that a meta moment or did you genuinely doubt you’d finish? It drove me crazy to the point of keeping me up at night. Collecting that material and finding the connections and making meaning out of it is where the joy and discoveries reside. And in putting something out there that preserves something. It’s not in accumulating the footage – anybody can do that. It also drove me nuts not to finish it for these people I’d interviewed.