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Features
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Polly Wants a Close-Up
Mark Bittner was once homeless in San Francisco. Then he discovered a wild parrot flock, and filmmaker Judy Irving discovered him.
Saturday, April 9, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Mark Bittner
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Filmmaker Judy Irving
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Strangely enough, the story of San Francisco-based filmmaker Judy Irving's new documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, begins with a cockatiel named Sweetie. The bird belongs to Irving and when she bought her fifteen years ago, Irving wasn't sure how to care for her, so she started reading Bird Talk magazine. It was there, in 1995, that she saw an article by fellow San Franciscan Mark Bittner about his passion for the brightly hued cherry-headed conures that flocked in the trees surrounding his Telegraph Hill home.
Irving, who specializes in environmental documentaries, immediately sensed that Bittner's story would make an excellent subject for a film, but the article mentioned that he would soon be moving and saying goodbye to the birds. Three years went before two friends separately told Irving that Bittner was still on the hill, feeding the birds.
Both suggested that Irving consider making a film about him and this time, she bit, although she explains during a recent interview with FilmStew that she had modest ambitions. “It was really going to be a short hobby movie,” she insists. “I didn't have any money, but I really wanted to stretch my creative wings a little bit and do something fun."
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Daniela Cossali
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Bittner tending to his flock
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Irving’s renewed interest turned out to be the beginning of what has become a rewarding partnership. The day Irving and Bittner sat down with FilmStew in the office they share in the city's North Beach, they bubbled over with enthusiasm for the gifts the parrots have given them. The film is rolling out slowly, in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, but they have a distribution plan that will see it spread out to other cities throughout the rest of the year. And Irving had to excuse herself from the interview early, so that she could take a call relating to Australian distribution.
Not only that; Bittner's book, also called The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and written independently of the movie (indeed, Bittner was already at work on it when Irving first proposed the film), has sold well since it was released in hardcover in January 2004. A paperback edition came out in January and on this afternoon, a friend has just called him to let him know that the book has landed in that mecca of the mainstream, Costco.
The fifty-something Bittner is clearly enjoying his success, achieved after years of struggle. Like so many other seekers during the psychedelic era, Bittner arrived in San Francisco in the early '70s determined to make it as a singer-songwriter. Instead, he ended up homeless for more than a dozen years, subsisting on odd jobs and the kindness of his friends and neighbors.
His lifestyle wasn't for lack of motivation, he is quick to point out. But the type of work that is more remunerative did not interest him. "I've always been really busy," he says. "I've always worked a lot, but mostly I've been working at things that nobody would pay you for."
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Pelican Media
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Grassroots marketing
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"I really wanted to learn Italian at one point," he continues. "So I studied for five years, just studying out of books. They don't pay you to study Italian. I'd do little jobs."
Eventually, Bittner went from sleeping on roofs to finding a roof over his head in a crumbling Telegraph Hill cottage. Outside his window, he discovered his destiny, becoming in the process the city's own version of its namesake Saint Francis of Assisi.
No one is quite sure where the flock came from, but they apparently arrived around the same time Bittner did back in the '70s. They might be pet store escapees; some no doubt are former pets that either made a break for it or were released by neglectful owners. Nearly all are the cherry conures or cherry hybrids, although it is a blue-crowned bird, Conner, who steals hearts in Irving's documentary.
The parrots became Bittner's full-time job, quite by accident. "I didn't get into this to devote myself of parrots," he laughs. "I just got into it because it turned me on. I loved being with them . My interest has always been, what is the mind? What are we here for? That's what I've always been puzzling over. And the birds were part of that."
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Mark Bittner
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Bittner's harbingers of the future
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At one time, Bittner would feed the flock four or five times a day. Injured birds, he would move into his house and care for until they were well enough to rejoin the others. He never considered them pets, but he admits to taking much pleasure in their company.
"You feel their joy; they have life," he observes. "That's one of the things. I talk to people about what I did and they'll say, 'Oh, that sounds interesting. I'll have to come see you feed them sometime.' And then one of the most common reactions is, 'Oh my God, these birds are wild.' They're wild animals.”
“You don't feel for an instant when you see them that they're tame,” adds Bittner. “You have that wild energy. So you get to feel that and it feels really nice and fresh all the time. They're just vital all the time."
Bittner considers the parrots who turned his life around harbingers of his future. "They really did bring me everything,” he maintains. “It's because I think I did love them and I devoted myself to that love. It wasn't like, 'I have to steel myself, I have to force myself to do this.' It was something I couldn't help but do, because I was so enthusiastic about them."
Ironically, after deciding not to do a documentary about Bittner in the first place because she thought he was moving, when Irving finally approached him, he was, in fact, close to leaving. The cottage and the house it is attached to were about to undergo serious renovation, forcing Bittner to find new digs. But there was still a year to go before he would actually have to leave, ample time to capture his relationship with the flock.
Says Irving wryly, "I was lucky in that the film had a built-in beginning, middle, and end."
It did not take much convincing to get Bittner to agree to allow Irving's camera into his life. Knowing that he would soon leave, he had been hoping that someone would want to turn his passion into a movie. "I wanted to have something to preserve my memories," he confesses.
At first, Irving thought the film would be not just a short, but a children's fable. The filmmaker quickly discovered that W.C. Fields had a point when he warned against working with kids and animals. "It's hard to work with wild animals and wild children at the same time," she says with a rueful laugh.
| But she was charmed by the stories that Bittner told the children and realized that, by themselves without his back story, those anecdotes provided the seeds of a great film. It was the birth of a true partnership as Bittner is not just the subject of the documentary, but also a key contributor to the post-production process.
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"Every shot had to be logged and Mark helped me on that, because often I didn't know what bird I was shooting,” Irving remembers. “The bird would be doing something funny or meaningful or whatever, but unless I knew what bird it was, I couldn't edit it correctly. We logged over 2,000 shots and that took forever.”
"I think it really gives the film a consistency that you might not be aware of,” she continues. “That we didn't use this bird for that bird just because it would make it easier to cut. Sophie's always doing what Sophie does; she's always playing herself. They do have individual personalities."
The film has been popular on the festival circuit and sneak previews helped add to the positive buzz. Recently, Bittner reports, the doc won over a cinema club in Yonkers, NY that initially wasn't pleased to find that a movie about birds was going to be the evening's entertainment.
| "They loved it; they were really enthusiastic,” he says. “[The film] isn't just for parrot people; it's for anyone who likes a good story.”
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Irving agrees, adding, "[It’s about] people who are searching for a right livelihood and in a sense, everyone is searching that way. 'What should I be doing on this planet? How should I spend my time? What should I do that's worth it that's creative; that I love to do?'”
“That's Mark's search. That's kind of the spiritual dimension of the film and the philosophical dimension and so I think that broadens it out beyond the folks who are animal lovers."
It is also a story with a happy ending. At the movie's end, Bittner really does move off the hill, but he's back now, among the parrots, a growing flock that now numbers 165 birds. He is working on his second book, recounting his life on the street, while Irving is currently working on a documentary about Bay Area salt ponds that are being reclaimed for wetlands.
| But San Francisco still calls to her. She would like to continue making the type of only-in-San-Francisco docs that The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill represents. "I've got a film almost half shot about the wild and crazy swimmers who go out in the bay and swim from Alcatraz. That one might be next."
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Regardless of how well the film does eventually in the marketplace, it represents a watershed moment for Irving and Bittner: the start of a beautiful and highly uncommon friendship.
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