For people who have successfully used the online überclassifieds marketplace known as craigslist to buy something, sell something, get a job, find a date or anything else, there is often a sense that they're in on a secret.
In part that's because of craigslist's rudimentary design -- no graphics, and simple text layouts that look like they could have been done by a 12-year-old.
But as Michael Ferris Gibson's new film, 24 Hours on Craigslist -- currently playing at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival -- demonstrates, there are a lot of other people in on the secret as well -- and their secrets may well be a tad more salacious than yours.
Gibson's film chronicles the outcome of more than 80 craigslist postings from a single day: Aug. 4, 2003. Ferris' eight film crews -- all found on craigslist -- followed people's stories from the beginning, in some cases mere minutes after midnight on Aug. 4, until the conclusion, sometimes days later.
Along the way, we're introduced to a bizarre cross section of craigslist users in search of the most mundane things -- think roommates and band members -- to the truly weird. And everywhere in between.
There is no question that craigslist, with more than 1.7 billion pageviews a month and a presence in nearly 100 cities worldwide, has changed the way many millions of people buy and sell things, meet people, and look for jobs and places to live. Yet at its core, it is just a classifieds service, and in many cases no wilder than what you might find in the ads in a New York or San Francisco alternative weekly newspaper.
For craigslist fans, 24 Hours on Craigslist is a fun and titillating look at the people who make up the service's community. And its appeal comes from pulling back the curtain on dozens of the kinds of craigslist postings regular users see every day.
But for those to whom "Reply to: anon-58771710@craigslist.org" means nothing, the film may offer little more than a peek inside the lives of dozens of strange people talking openly about things most people keep private. And all with no context, as the cut of the film playing in San Francisco is very short on explaining craigslist.
The film begins, innocently enough, with members of the band Ten Mile Tide auditioning potential new bassists and drummers, and then moves on, through a series of quick cuts, to a family selling a bunch of baby strollers, a man trying to get rid of some scooters and someone trying to find a subletter for 20 days.
The early part of the film is meant to get audience members involved without shocking them. The problem is that the cuts are too quick and the material is perhaps too tame. We barely get a chance to meet the people involved before we're rushed on to bits of the next story.
Things begin to take a turn for the strange when we are introduced to a man who posted an ad looking for a 270-pound woman to date. He reads his ad on camera, and his description of himself could not be less flattering: He's on welfare, he has three dead ex-wives and he leaves the toilet seat up.
Yet somehow, he says, people don't believe his posting. Instead, he says he's received endless messages from young, petite women, and that makes him none too happy.
"People thought that I was less than serious," he pouts. "I was really looking for someone. Two hundred seventy pounds means 270 pounds."
Soon, Ferris introduces one of his clear favorites: a man forming a band to play '70s music. The twist is that this fellow plays in an Ethel Merman get-up with some of the biggest wigs ever seen on film. This guy is a regular throughout the rest of the film.
The next round of characters includes a man advertising ballroom dancing lessons, a rent-a-husband service, someone trying to trade a dead raccoon for the first season of the Sopranos and someone trying to find a toy poodle -- "preferably on Prozac" -- to appear in a movie.
After that, the film probably loses its PG rating. First, a woman appears who posted for a "man to replace bunny." Bunny is a very pink and very advanced vibrator whose features she happily explains.
At one point, a pre-operation transsexual looking for an escort sums up what may well be the most common thread for anyone who has ever used craigslist for something a little risqué: "Right now I'm really excited about it," he says. "But after awhile it'll just be something I've done."
Along the way, we meet many vibrant people, and we're reminded that these are our next-door neighbors. They look like us and they talk like us. But sometimes, they dress up a little differently and maybe do a few more things they don't tell their parents.
24 Hours on Craigslist is, at its core, interesting. We're let into the lives of some of the service's more colorful users, and it is sometimes mesmerizing to see them talking matter-of-factly about things like gay porn, vibrators, fetish websites and more. Then again, we have to remember that this was made in San Francisco and that this stuff is par for the course in craigslist's hometown.
The problem, though, is that the film is messy and sometimes hard to watch. It cuts between the various stories too quickly, and it's very easy to get confused. Though we're supposed to be taken through resolution on the many stories, it's often hard to tell what's going on, and who's who.
Still, Gibson's point in making this film is poignant. He uses craigslist as a way of showing the many different ways people live. And it's a good reminder that the internet is a tool that allows almost anyone to get their needs met.
Besides, Gibson argues, "If you really look at people, they're really not that strange.... What is normal?"
