That's what this video is about.

Before I show it you let me just tell you about the situation at the time.

So I made this film for my sons and my daughter so that there would be some record of what I lost in a fire.

In 2008.

I was living at the top of a mountain Santa Cruz Mountains and got up one morning to go to work.

I was consulting to Google.

My wife calls panicked.

I looked back and I can see over the hills Smoke coming up and it's my house on fire.

Come back home with 100 miles an hour to see my archive with all my film.

My collection's everything I had got a gathered in my life as my legacy crash between the second floor on the first floor burned.

Well, what do I do?

It's a moment.

Amazing moment.

I'm sitting up there watching this, my wife, my two Children, and I say to my wife, it's gonna be okay.

This is gonna be good.

Something good is gonna come from this.

We're losing everything.

She loved that house.

Am I crazy?

Well, I'm going to tell you after what happened, but basically, what got me to do?

This is one thing.

I'm in New York City in the 1977 blackout.

I'm working on the eighth floor.

Everything's dark.

Go walk downstairs.

Walk outside thousands of people walking home along Sixth Avenue in the dark.

Uh, maybe some car lights, but no cars are moving.

There was some bars that have candles, and I woke up the street and there's these Jewish guys, um, Hasidic Jews selling flashlights for a dollar.

And I said, That's absolutely brilliant.

First of all, when they get him second, well, I bought one and third of all.

The guy says to me, Brilliant.

He said, Don't you know the phrase?

And I said, No, make something good out of something bad.

Never forgot that phrase.

You're about to see my story.

The story was made not only for my Children, but anyone who's had a hard time and lost something of value.

I've been a collector for a very long time.

I have used my collections to create my 175 documentaries, my 18 books to create LP records, greeting cards.

These things have a purpose with a little change of pace.

Now you know, the sessions called What?

His Life.

There's a lot of ways of answering that question.

I got a tester here who had to answer it in an incredibly intense and personal way in the last few days.

Um, this is a story.

David Hoffman.

Ah, I had a fire nine days ago.

My archive.

175 films, My 16 millimeter negative, all my books and my dad's books.

My photographs I had collected I was a collector major big time.

It's gone, boy, I'll tell you.

Film burns film Burns.

I mean, this was 16 millimeter safety film.

That's my camera lens.

The 1st 1 the one I shot my Bob Dylan film with 35 years ago.

That's my feature film.

King Murray.

One con film festival in 1970.

The only print I had That's me at my desk.

Ah, this was bad, man.

I was sick.

I just looked at it and I didn't know what to do.

I mean, this was was I My things always live in the present.

I love the present.

I cherish the future.

That's my wife, Heidi, who didn't take it as well as I didn't.

My Children, Davey and Henry on Epiphany hit me.

Something hit me.

You've got to make something good out of something bad.

I called my sister.

I called my neighbors.

I said, Come, dig, dig it up.

I said, Pieces.

I want pieces, bits and pieces.

And I'm going to make something good out of this.

All these pieces always makes you gotta make something good out of something.

You've got to make something good.

No, I don't like coming here.

I came up with a date because I had to, because somebody has to tell the story and it's in my brain.

If I don't say it, it doesn't get recorded.

I understand that you don't want to be photographed.

That's the story of the 100 some films I've made and the story of the insane desire to get stories.

I'll defer 10 years, and I, uh this is where my paper was that I collected since I was a boy in New England.

Um, my photographs, my magazines.

I could find you a Nash right out there right now.

I could tell you where that came from because I knew every picture, every book, every painting, every piece of writing.

I mean, you don't understand unless you're a collector.

What?

Losing everything that you had assembled.

They will put in places like I had him.

Like, right over there were Jesus pictures.

Because I feel Jesus is really powerful over here.

I had snapshots of women being photographed by other women.

I was gonna do a book on that beer.

I had pieces of dolls, heads that I was gonna make a wall of just heads, hundreds and hundreds of heads.

Everything was organized in this collections room.

And if you look out over here, you can see to fire people, men and women.

They tried to save everything.

They tried to throw everything out the window.

Everything is just dumped.

Which is how I wanted it left.

Kind of like a mausoleum, like a memorial.

They say it was electrical.

Maybe that lamp right there, Who the hell knows?

I don't really care what itwas care what it did.

So many things.

My first films since the millimeter.

Uh, It's hard.

It's history.

That value.

One morning, one morning it was gone.

But I'm not here to cry.

I'm here to honor this place and what I did here what I collected here so that I could step out tomorrow and make another movie and use it and make that thing for my sons that I could not do if I just kind of died today.

It never made this movie.

When the fire hits that morning, I wasn't here.

I was here maybe 30 minutes later, and Heidi was here.

She ran out the front door with the Children.

The explosion blew right out the window and she ran thinking the neighbors were gonna get burned because the trees were gonna burn down.

And she looked back and she saw my second floor film crash right through.

Everything burned.

40 years of my work up in smoke.

I was in a state of shock.

This was a trial.

What will you do?

And in my mind, I calculate the present and the future.

The past has no meaning because it happened.

The present is what I'm in.

I gotta figure something out.

The future is where I'm going What can I do with this than 24 hours of the fire?

I went through everything out here, every inch of this stuff with my daughter and my sister and neighbors helping me, we'd hold out little pieces of remembrances with a mean anything to anybody else.

No, I certainly have no value anymore.

But they meant something to me.

So I sifted through everything every single week.

I was up here three in the morning, four in the morning, looking through the boxes.

I'm filing that box.

I'm gonna use that in this film.

I'm gonna use that idea.

I'm gonna send this idea to another guy because I can't do it.

But I know it should be done.

I dug like a crazy man, and I knew what I was looking for.

Pieces of the memories that I could share with someone else, particularly my sons.

I'm going to just film the place where Henry was born.

This is where Henry was born right now with his clothes on it.

But in that chair, Henry was born.

It was really amazing.

I was there.

He came into my arms on he walked around.

This is what he saw my father's rock.

He saw himself in the mirror.

Yeah, I got that kind of rough this morning, unshaven, but, you know, and it was I think it was middle of the night.

The lights come back on.

The chair was right here.

And of course, that's what we see out our window.

They have two sons.

Henry, he's six.

He lived here, was born here in that room, up there on that chair that's going and Davy, he's too.

And I don't have a lot to leave him.

And I'm an old man.

Look at my hair and I wanted to leave them my father's paintings and my films.

That was where I felt my asset was.

That was what I could leave these boys so that they would know their dad because they could see his films and they had all this history.

So when you lose your history and you're not young and you want to leave something as meaning that carries the values of you, that's a hard loss.

My sister, she took on the job of saving the photographs.

His album rescue some of his photo albums, one.

So I got these thousands of curled up pictures on what to do with him.

Right now, I'm interested in still photography because I believe that stills capture moments in time and that you can look through the still into much more than is there the images I collected with ones that said more than the face or they scene or the light something deeper?

I know women have the power, the heart, the soul, the emotion.

Women are more than interesting.

1000 a 1,000,000 different emotions in ways and looks.

So I collected women photos, and I like the ones where they express themselves to each other.

In other words, the camera person was a woman rather than the ones where they were posing for a man on.

I got by collecting these things where I could see the difference, like oftentimes could see the shadow.

And it was a woman's hair or at front objects have beauty.

It's beautiful.

In a way.

I'm intrigued by burned.

It was amazing.

It was like the fire was adding not to the value of these things, but that wasn't really what I wanted anyway.

But I really wanted was the image in the power of the image in the burn added to it.

Keep looking at the negatives burned And, uh, you could still see that.

Wait a minute.

Hold on.

That is That's me on an oil rig in the North Sea.

1974.

I'm filming Mobil Oil television commercials and play with a fun way in that time when I went out there, these people were adventurous explorers, really doing the heavy lifting strain when you're writing the tones on the pipe.

But it's rewarding.

It's hard work.

I loved being with these guys.

I love flying a helicopter with flying into west of Iran up near the Iraqi border.

I love being dropped on oil rigs going through the jungle in all of it, from the first people that come along have to cut a line with their Parang Sze knives and cut through the jungle.

Okay, I was adventuring and I was capturing their adventure and it ran on primetime commercial television, and my commercials actually got reviewed by The New York Times.

It was like the best of all worlds.

16 millimeter.

This is the story, man.

This is what the story is about.

16 millimeter 10 realer.

They used to call it a won reelection.

It's 10 minutes called a one reeler 400 feet A projector now 60 millimeter projectors.

You still know what they are.

And I love I had quite a few.

I loved 16 millimeter projection, even the sound.

Everything About 16 millimeter The machine, The rewind, the rewinds when I was early.

Filmmakers.

Early twenties You have races who could wind the damn film?

Fastest you had, um, Synchronizer lined up the soundtrack in the picture.

He had a scope.

I had a role upstairs here.

Everything.

I had a whole 16 millimeter rigging.

I was working 60 scope, which had counters on it.

He had Spicer's different kinds of spices, glue ones and tape ones.

This was my camera case.

Ah, 16 millimeter 26 27 £28 maybe on your shoulder.

Automatic zoom control and focus control with electric little electric motors.

Uh, sometimes a mike.

Although if you were smart, you had a sound man movie making the way that I loved It was spectacular.

Ordinary people just going through some experience and letting you accompany them and ask them questions and some good music.

I was 23 when I did this in South Turkey Creek, North Carolina in the home of 82 year old banjo picker singer basketball, Marlon's free, There's a basket and his wife, Frieda.