Candid Camera

Some of those dramatic documentary-style public service announcements delivered on network television in July by young, recovering drug addicts for Partnership for a Drug-Free America were directed by freelance film director, producer and editor Cabot Philbrick '86.
"As a director I have a lot to say about the visuals," said Philbrick, who conducted on-camera interviews with one addict's mother and with three young people who are successes in a drug rehabilitation program. He and another editor then constructed 11 30-second stories, each with a beginning, middle and sobering conclusion focusing on marijuana as the doorway to ruptures with friends and family, dropping out of school, crime and other drugs. (As one young woman says, pot led her to "crack, hash, angel dust, everything.") Philbrick feels his questions and responses to the young people established a rapport that produced the compelling footage. "Anecdotally was the best way to go," he said, "because it makes a connection with kids watching."
Philbrick says that going to films when he was growing up was "like going to the circus," but it wasn't until his junior year at Colby that he realized "it's not this magical thing. People actually do this for a career." The next year he took film study classes with Professor David Lubin, who opened his eyes, he says, to the classics of film history. An English major and creative writing minor, Philbrick had produced "nothing visual," however, so after graduation he took a film class in Boston to build up a portfolio, which led to a year of experimental filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1991 he earned an M.F.A. in film production from Syracuse University.
"Harry Devlin--An Artist's Odyssey," Philbrick's film on the commercial and fine arts artist whose career spans more than a half century, won the First Place Gold Camera Award for Documentary at the U.S. International Film and Video Festival in Chicago last May. Philbrick hopes to land his production on a Public Broadcasting System national rotation, although he recognizes "that would be a stretch. You can be creative and good, but it's a whole other job to market and distribute," he said. "I'm painfully freelance."
Currently living in Hoboken, N.J., Philbrick also produced an industrial documentary, "The Making of Mountain Bike City," in association with International Film Design Group Inc. in New York City. Film Design gives him an office that is "only a little shell of a place," he said, but its Manhattan phone number "makes me look bigger than I am. It's a tough road, freelance. You're never unemployed, you're just between projects."
The commercials and a "noble day job" at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, N.Y., where he demonstrates new technology and teaches school groups about filmmaking, support his ongoing documentary labors, Philbrick says. Currently he's working up subjects and pursuing funding. Although he thinks he'll make a feature film someday, his experience on the Devlin and other projects has him hooked. "More and more," he said, "I love the documentary."