Paul produced, directed and edited his first feature-length film. SlamNation had its World Premiere at SXSW, premiered theatrically at Film Forum in Manhattan, and was broadcast on HBO: 

“I was still pitching my TV pilot, Slammin’, as the Portland National Poetry Slam approached. The Nationals were basically the Super Bowl event for slam poetry and I didn’t want to miss it. But there was no buyer for the series yet. So I went to Portland on spec and shot the whole event in anticipation of selling the series. 

I hired multiple camera operators to cover several simultaneous events over four days. No idea what we had collected when I brought all those tapes home. I rented an Avid editing machine, installed it into the second bedroom of my Manhattan apartment and got to work. 

Sifting through that material was like taking a journey of discovery and occasionally finding treasure. Back then, slam poetry was a completely new phenomenon, so some of the treasures were breathtaking on first view. Those moments energized and motivated me. I abandoned the TV series idea, convinced that I had a breakthrough feature film on my hands. 

But there was only one way to prove it. Luckily the competition provided the obvious dramatic structure for a short-form editor working on his first long-form piece. I became a hermit for the next year or so: Wasn’t able to give up my day-job editing gigs, so every spare moment was spent immersing myself in both in slam poetry and developing a workflow for editing a feature-length film. 

This was in the days when Avid was not just a piece of software you could install on your laptop. It was a huge turn-key edting system that included lots of expense hardware. Media was on tape and had to be imported in real-time. The image that Avid generated was low-resolution, so the editing was off-line. The final step of the process required going back to the original tapes for an online conform of the offline edit. 

Hard drives were huge in size, tiny in storage capacity and incredibly expensive. I remember a big, heavy Avid hard drive that had a capacity of 9 gigs cost $2000! I had so much material, I was constantly running out of space. My cousin Vince Sherry (Executive Producer of Forensic Files) was a Consulting Producer on SlamNation. I remember his disbelief when I came back from a lunch break one day, after dropping 2 grand on a new hard drive without hesitation. I had become obsessed. 

Those drives were also unreliable. I spent countless hours recovering from failed drives. The impact was like shooting shrapnel through the project - media offline throughout. That forced me to become an expert in media management of large projects. The techniques and discipline I developed then, serve me to this day. 

As the edit stretched on, I decided to buy that system instead of renting indefinitely - a major investment back then. Which meant I had to work harder at the day job edits as well. Slowly but surely, I narrowed down my cast of characters from a huge number of competitors and pieced together a story. Then I hired more camera people across the country to shoot follow-up interviews with my main characters to fill in the gaps. 

SlamNation’s success had a huge impact, both on my career and the popularity of slam poetry. My short-form experience In sports broadcasting and music videos came in very handy and was often highlighted by reviewers as essential to SlamNation’s appeal. Hopefully those skills are evident in this trailer as well.”