Letter from Mr. Miller to Mr. Todd:
"About billing, I'd rather the film be seen as emulsial -
that is, distinctly non-video and photo-graph-ic (as in "light drawing") than like an exquisite corpse.
Exquisite corpses come from painting, right? But painters can't do with paint what we did with emulsion. I think that's important.
Fact is, the words (or rather, the chemical *potential* for the words) were resting on (in?) the emulsion for a year before you interlaced them with your cousin (like a gazelle in a herd of women, but why do I feel like they're running from, not to?) in the race.
Also, what I find drastically relevant is the science behind the film. Someone explained Dolby Noise Reduction to me once and I think it went the same way Latent did.
I shot the text on Plus-X, had Martin Baumgarten rewind, reload and finally file the S8 film cartridge so that your (and every other) S8 camera would recognize it as Tri-X film and subsequently underexpose your image by two stops. Then, by pushing the processing two stops, we brought your image up to an appreciably coherent level while maintaining a two stop hierarchy of the text above the image. Therefore, the text -which needs to be complete- does not run the risk of being washed out if, say, rob todd points his camera to the
heavens and fires off a whole roll of the sun, which, incidentally, would not be entirely out of character and, also incidentally, I am deciding right now would be such a beautiful film (sun film) that I'll make it tomorrow."