BBC Four: How would you describe your reading habits?
Mark Moskowitz: They have become more eccentric since I turned 40. At some point I think you realise that you're not going to read all these books so you become more selective. I stopped finishing things if I wasn't totally compelled to finish them. I can be reading four or five books at a time, some I'll read right to the end and ignore the others, other times I'll just read bits and pieces of each one. I like starting new things. It's like a mid-life crisis when people have affairs - it's the falling in love that's fun. It used to be that if I liked the writer I would try to read everything by them. Now I don't do that.
BBC Four: That old habit of reading everything by an author is really what fuelled the origins of the film isn't it?
MM: I think so to some extent. Here was a book that afterwards I thought I've got to read all the other stuff by this guy but there wasn't anything. I was really astonished - a book like this I at least thought I'd have read an essay about. There weren't even articles about whatever happened to this guy. I thought he may have died early or become a screenwriter or gone into advertising; maybe he'd published a couple of books under another name.
BBC Four: What was it like when you realised there was nothing on Dow Mossman?
MM: I remember finishing the book, I was in bed at night, and the book was in pieces. I stood up and picked up the fragments because I wanted to reread the beginning. Then I went downstairs to the computer to see what happened next and read some reviews. I was down there until about 1am and my wife came in and asked me what I was doing. She then sat with me for another hour and everything was a dead end. Later I learned it was because he had no credit card, he had gone through a recent divorce, he had no property in his name, he had no cell phone numbers, but not only that, his actual name wasn't quite the same or even spelt the same way.
BBC Four: Why a film? Presumably you could have tried to find out more about Dow without filming your quest.
MM: When I started shooting I didn't know I was making this film. I wasn't a feature film director, I make commercials. I started it as lark - the beginning scenes weren't intended to be a film. Then I went to the library and shot there and I really wanted to say a lot about books. I thought perhaps we could use this footage to try and sell an idea for a series about lost books. I presumed that when I mentioned Dow to various critics and professors at least one have them would have heard of him. That didn't happen so I eventually got intrigued and went in the direction that you see in the film.
BBC Four: One of the things I like about the film is that it's a voyage of discovery for your interviewees as well as the audience.
MM: I didn't want anyone to know I was looking for Mossman. I was hoping for that moment that eventually happens when someone lets me know on camera that they've actually heard of him. It moves the film forward in a fiction-like way that documentaries don't often have the chance to do. What I didn't realise was that all the failures I had on the way [that no one had heard of Mossman] was what was interesting. For instance, Joseph Heller's editor Bob Gottlieb doesn't know who Dow Mossman is but he tells us about Catch-22 and editing books.
BBC Four: That the film is so personal and quirky in places might also surprise people expecting a dry film about literature.
MM: I realised that the best way to tell this story was as a tale. I'm telling you this story and you're seeing it unfold. In editing the movie there were parts where I had to let you know what was happening to me personally at the time. I couldn't finish editing because my father died. There's also that scene where I say that I haven't yet seen the footage that the audience will have already seen by that stage which is slightly Nabokovian.
BBC Four: You wanted to interview Joseph Heller in the film but then he died during filming. What would you have asked him?
MM: I sat with the letter for six months and never sent it because I was so afraid of what I would have asked him. Now I've seen footage of Heller I realise he would have been a very easy person to talk to. I would have asked him after writing Catch-22, why it took so long for him to write Something Happened. I was going to talk to him about what it takes to write the second book and that would have given me an insight into what Dow might have faced. But Heller was an example of a writer who had an amazingly successful first book and I thought that contrast would be interesting if I ever did find Dow. Perhaps their feelings would have been the same.
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