‘Public’ Exposure at Brattle Theatre

In the early minutes of New Years Day, at the turn of the millennium, while most New Yorkers were partying or panicking about Y2K and its accompanying Armageddon, 150 coked-out people in orange jumpsuits came tumbling out of a Manhattan warehouse, breathing fresh air for the first time in months. These individuals were living their last hours under 24-hour surveillance in an underground bunker—complete with shooting range, communal showers, and bedroom cubicles. Behind this “social experiment”—entitled “Quiet: We Live in Public”—was internet mogul Josh Harris, who lived alongside his subjects until the cops busted them shortly after midnight.

Harris was the founder and CEO of Pseudo.com, an early 90s internet network that he predicted would take down CBS and NBC. While others were mastering the basics of HTML, Harris was instituting the first online chat rooms and becoming a multi-millionaire. Called the “Warhol” of the internet world by New York Magazine, Harris commissioned his artist friends to do as they pleased in the Factory-esque office space of Pseudo. His unorthodox management style (which included dressing up as a clown when investors toured the office) eventually led to the company’s bankruptcy in 2000; Harris even fled to Africa to avoid mounting debt. Despite his disappearance, his many endeavors have not gone unnoticed, thanks to American filmmaker Ondi Timoner and her latest documentary, “We Live in Public.” Timoner presented the film in person last week at the Brattle Theatre.

Timoner—the only person to win two Grand Jury awards at Sundance in one category (documentary)—was initially unsure about the venture when Harris contacted her. “I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about when he called me to ‘document cultural history,’” Timoner recalls. “He wouldn’t tell me.”

The director was in the process of another film at the time, but as soon as she saw the warehouse in person, she was sold. “I didn’t know what it was exactly, but that it should be documented,” she says. Not only did the residents sleep in cubicles and watch footage of each other having sex and defecating, they also were subject to periodic interrogations in a white square room, where some of the film’s most moving and vulnerable scenes take place here.

Once she signed on to the project, Timoner embarked on a 10-year journey with Harris, documenting his rise, fall, and various experiments, including one in which Harris and his former girlfriend Tanya installed surveillance cameras in their apartment and aired their lives on the internet for 100 days. At first it seemed fun, even practical—Tanya could ask the camera if anyone had seen her keys, and a viewer could answer her via web chat on the show’s website—but ultimately it led to the couple’s violent break-up. Although he accompanied Timoner to Sundance, Harris has yet to see “We Live in Public,” which features surveillance footage from his experiments, archived media coverage, and numerous interviews with his colleagues, friends, and subjects.

Timoner describes her film as a “cautionary tale,” highlighting the consequences of a technology-based childhood. Much of the film is devoted to Harris’ upbringing and his relationship with his mother, whom he refused to see even on her deathbed. Interviews with Harris’ brother, in particular, reveal how he went from television addict to internet geek to friendless, heartless mad scientist. Though Timoner refers to herself as a “freak magnet,” the film has a surprisingly sympathetic gaze, making it much more than a voyeuristic expose of a socially-stunted creep.

Timoner has a way of gaining inside access to her subjects—who’ve ranged from an extremist Christian cult in South Carolina to the Dandy Warhols on tour—by fully integrating into their world. She even occupied her own cubicle in Harris’ Manhattan bunker and is currently distributing the film herself across the country.

While there was pressure to release the film when she began shooting, Timoner is thankful for the social relevance brought on by the 10-year delay and the explosion of social networking sites. “We were running to join them as fast as people had been running to join the bunker,” Timoner recalls. “I’m glad we didn’t put the movie out back then.” As the first decade of the new millennium draws to a close, Harris’ experiments as captured in “We Live in Public” force the audience to pause and consider the bluescreen cubicles we now occupy.

—Staff writer Mia P. Walker can be reached at mpwalker@fas.harvard.edu.