Everybody Must Read 'Stones'

An unread copy of The Stones of Summer, Dow Mossman's 1972 debut coming-of-age novel, sat on book lover Mark Moskowitz's bookshelf for 16 years. When Moskowitz finally got around to reading the book, he loved it and went looking for other Mossman books only to hit a wall: There were none. Deciding to take a much-needed break from the commercial and political production work he'd been doing for too long, Moskowitz set off with a camera crew to find Mossman and ask him directly why he stopped writing after having written such a terrific first book (favorably reviewed by The New York Times, to boot). Finding Mossman turns out to be tougher than expected: It takes Moskowitz a year and a half of zigzagging across the country, chasing down rabbit trails but logging, at the same time, a series of remarkable conversations with well-known literary critics, publishers, editors, and writers about books, the writing life, and the phenomenon of the writer who writes one great book and stops. Finally, he locates Mossman in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. See the film to find out what Mossman has been up to for lo these many years.

Stone Reader (2002), at 128 minutes, is a rough-hewn, evocative, almost novelistic ramble of a documentary with far more on-camera detours, extraneous details, and elegiac cutaways than its simple story might seem to require. It's a leisurely first-person essay with the feel of a Ross McElwee personal journey film, though Moskowitz quickly waves away that comparison. "McElwee is a much more metaphorical and inward storyteller than I am," he says. "My movie is a very traditional linear narrative." And, Moskowitz insists, no matter what anyone might say, the film is not primarily about reading and the power of books -- or even writing -- but about life choices: Mossman's, other writers', Moskowitz's. Nonetheless, when a two-hour doc that devotes this much screen time to talk of the ineluctable love of books sweeps Slamdance, gets released theatrically, and is received with cultlike fervor at venues from Manhattan to Albuquerque, it's clear that we're dealing with something bigger than just a charming storyline.

The enthusiastic reaction of both critics and the viewing public to your film seems to indicate that something about the movie has really touched a nerve. What do you think people are responding to in the film?

Mark Moskowitz: The film is about the audience -- the reader -- it's not a film about writers; it's about readers, us. The title came from my wife, Clare. People will ask me why the film never talks about the book, and I'll say, you really think the film's about the book? The film's about books, not about the book. Just like it's not about finding Dow Mossman. It's about the choices we make, the choice Dow makes to stop writing, the choice I make in middle age to stop working and take a parallel course to what he did. The subordinate theme is about how books connect us, how intimate reading is, but that's not what the movie's about. When I made the movie, I was very conscious of that, but in a very inexpressible way. When I watch the movie now, I see this -- and that's why I think audiences have responded so passionately to the movie, and in such an emotional way. I didn't know that that was what it was about when it first went out, but when people started seeing it two and three times and taking their mothers and daughters and other relatives and other people they had shared experiences with, I began to see it. It's about the search, it's about the quest; all quest books are about choices. I never thought the film was about reading, the way people have made it out. When people saw the film as a polemic for reading or as an homage to reading, I was surprised. I didn't make the film for that reason at all.