What he never said, and what I'm finding instead.
There is a mystery.
For those inclined to such things — and if you're reading this blog, you almost certainly are — I have one to offer you. I'm not going to solve it today. I'm not even going to fully name it yet. I'm just going to tell you it exists, and invite you to wonder about it with me for a while.
I'm working on a new documentary called The Quiet Man. It's the most personal thing I've ever made, and unlike anything I've made before — not horror, not fiction, not festival-circuit short. It started as a question about my own family, the kind of question a lot of people carry without ever chasing down: who was my grandfather, really, and what did he actually do?
He was a quiet man. The kind who fixed things, built things, went where the work was, and didn't talk much about any of it. For most of my life that was the whole story — a diesel engineer, gone a lot, not one for explanations. I assumed there wasn't much more to find.
I was wrong.
The chase has taken me into archives on three continents, into letters written by hand in 1947, into documents the U.S. government kept secret for decades and only recently released. It has taken me to a Cold War diplomat with a double life — a man who, depending on which decade you catch him in, was a photography theorist, a film executive, or a Soviet-aligned ambassador. It has put me in contact with the kind of paper trail that makes you sit back in your chair and say wait, what?
I won't tell you yet who that man is, or how my grandfather crossed paths with him, or what it might mean that he did. That part of the story isn't ready — there are threads I'm still pulling, and some of what I've found needs more confirmation before it's fair to put it in front of you as fact rather than possibility. Documentary work is slow like that. You don't get to skip to the ending.
But I wanted to mark this moment publicly, because it matters to me, and because this blog has drifted somewhere I didn't intend for it to go. For a while, murdockinations.com became mostly a place for political commentary — which is fine, it's a thing I think about and have opinions on, but it was never supposed to be the whole of this space.
This blog was always meant to hold everything: the films, the books, the strange research rabbit holes, the creative process, politics, the psychosocial, philosophical, the occasional rant, whatever I happen to be thinking about on a given week.
I'm reclaiming it for that. Consider this the first post of that reclamation.
Here's the thing, though: the real story — the documents, the names, the letters, the dispatches from the archive as I find them — isn't going to live here. I'm writing it in real time, as I find it, over on Substack, under the paid Studio: Documentary Lab section. That's where the actual research unfolds, week by week, mystery by mystery, with everything I'm not ready to put in front of a general audience yet.
If you've read this far, you're exactly who that's for. Come find me there. I will post things here about it. But my main orientation, my behind the scenes, will indeed be mostly there.
More soon.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
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