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during post-production?) The synch-sound breakthrough led to an even more important philosophical shift: a filmmaker could now make a documentary that transcended mere news reports or history lessons. The term “nonfiction feature film” was coined to describe this new world of storytelling.
    Most TV commercials use actors and scripts that are approved by the client. My idea was to have Albert and David do unscripted, spontaneous commercials. This has become an increasingly common method for commercials over the past decade or so, but it was quite rare when we asked the Maysleses if they’d be interested in deploying their signature style for these American Express spots. We wanted them to do a variation of American Express’s long-standing “Do You Know Me?” campaign. Instead of tightly scripted commercials, we would make unscripted minidocumentaries about various famous and semifamous cardholders.
    Albert and David liked the idea. During the production of these commercials, David (who suffered a fatal stroke a year later) and I hit it off. I told him that I wanted to get out of the ad business and into film production. He let me know that they’d love to get more commercial work to help fund their films. Iquit my job and went to work for the Maysles Brothers as their executive producer in charge of TV commercials. My job was to use my knowledge of the ad business to get commercial work for them. In the five years I worked at Maysles Films, Inc., I treated it like my own personal film school. I tried to learn everything I could about how documentaries were made. I became obsessed with verité filmmaking, from Wiseman’s Titicut Follies to the Maysles Brothers’ own Salesman and Grey Gardens. 1
    It was during my tenure at Maysles Films that I met Bruce Sinofsky He had been working there for eight years as an editor of TV commercials. In 1989, I decided to make my first short film, “Outrageous Taxi Stories,” a humorous look at New York City cab drivers. I called in a lot of favors to get the film made with virtually no budget. I talked Bruce into editing the film for free. Bruce and I really bonded in the editing room—not just as friends but also as zealots of classic cinema verité films. In the editing room, we lamented the fact that Albert and David were so busy doing paying gigs that they were no longer making the kind of nonfiction feature films, like Gimme Shelter, that had made them famous (perhaps I was doing the world of cinema a disservice by doing too good a job at getting the Maysleses commercial work). We were also inspired by Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, which had just been released theatrically Although Morris’s film was not a verité film (because it relied heavily on dramatic re-creations), we were excited that people were starting to go to the theater to see documentaries, a rare occurrence in those days. (Michael Moore’s Roger & Me wouldn’t appear for another year.) Bruce and I made a pact to find a human drama to film in the spirit of the classic ’60s verité films like Salesman and Gimme Shelter, and vowed to get it released in movie theaters.
    It took us almost a year to find the right story. One morning in June 1990, I noticed an article in The New York Times about Delbert Ward, a barely literate elderly man in upstate New York who was accused of murdering his ailing brother, Bill. The Wards seemed like they were from another era. Bill and Delbert lived with their two other brothers Roscoe and Lyman, in a dilapidated shack with no running water or heat, except for a portable kerosene stove, and they never changed their clothes. Delbert, who had an IQ of 72, had allegedly smothered Bill with a pillow in the bed that they shared. The town was rallying to Delbert’s defense, even raising the money for him to fight the charges, which grew to include a bizarre theory of incest gone bad. The townspeople believed Delbert, with his low IQ, had been coerced into signing a false