Cake for Matt Damon

I was a little surprised this morning when I saw Yahoo's main page featured a story on one of our current projects.

Running the Sahara is a documentary we're producing along with Matt Damon's Live Planet. It follows 3 ultra-marathon runners as they attempt to run coast-to-coast across the entire Sahara Desert.

The reality of such a superhuman effort is hard to absorb. Kinda like hearing the amount of money that goes into the Iraq War. It wasn't until someone told me it breaks down to something like $140,000 a minute that I was able to stop and think about it.

So if you want to stop and think about what these guys set out to do, look at one week. That's 14 marathons a week.

-2 marathons a day.
-Everyday.
-100 days straight.
-In the friggin desert.
-Matt Damon is doing the VO.

Hopefully that last line feels out of place. Sadly, it was the only thing I saw. "Sweet, I can't wait to tell Christy that I'm working with Matt Damon"...then I imagined my family having his family over for dinner and cake.

These guys are running across the fucking sahara desert and I'm thinking about Matt Damon reading lines in a VO booth. (To be fair, Matt is doing more than reading lines. He cares about the issues in Africa and hopes this documentary raises awareness.)

Even more pathetic was my recent reaction to hearing they actually succeeded. I was in a meeting discussing schedule and upcoming projects. My executive producer told me that I'm on project X for the end of Jan. Then in early Feb it's on to this and that, etc.

"Oh, also, you've got Running the Sahara coming up. That should have an extensive amount of graphics, so go ahead and start thinking about how you'd like to approach things."

My response was "is that going to overlap the other project? I hope not because it will probably require an unhealthy amount of client feedback and approval. I won't have the time to divide resources between Sahara and project X."

And that was it. Nothing remotely close to "That's amazing. I can't believe they fucking did that!" I walked out of the meeting and went on with my day.

It wasn't until I read the Yahoo article this morning that the reality of their adventure hit me. Why didn't I connect with the story before? Is my company going to stop for 5 seconds to give props to these guys?

Now if they died while attempting this run, things would be much different. Plenty of attention. A somber meeting and announcement, moments of silence...and then a meeting the following morning to discuss how we'd revamp the tone of the documentary.