Ray Carney responds

Ray Carney has emailed a response to the accusations against him. The final paragraph reads:

...In line with my continuing ethical commitment to “take the high road,” and not conduct a war of counter-accusations against Mr. Rappaport in public or private—and additionally not to open myself to the kind of selective misquotation and wholesale misrepresentation that Mr. Rappaport has previously employed against me to falsify the meaning of past communications with him or others—I would ask that you not otherwise circulate or publish this email, which is intended to be read only by the recipients and other, directly involved, senior Boston University officials.

I don't know how Jon Jost got hold of it, but he posted the full text on his blog.

And Carney made a pretty good point in the email. He's had the stuff for eight years. Is it really believable that he agreed to store Rappaport's stuff indefinitely for years on end ready to hand it back at a moment's notice? Can you imagine storing anything for anyone that long? It could just as easily have been fifteen or twenty years before Rappaport decided he wanted it back.

The fact that the better part of a decade went by before Rappaport asked for the stuff tends to indicate that he had no foreseeable use for it when he handed it over to Carney.

Carney's story was that Rappaport told him he had already donated all the good stuff to different museums and archives. What he had left was crap he was going to toss in the dumpster unless Carney wanted it. So, what the hell. Carney took it. It included actual films which had to be properly stored. 

Rappaport's version was that he was fretting about what to do. He was moving to Paris, but what was he going to do with this stuff? Put it in storage? He happened to bump into Ray Carney on the streets of New York and he jumped at the chance to store it for him. Which...seems sort of odd that anyone would jump at the chance to store another person's belongings indefinitely.

But it's possible that neither one remembers accurately. Rappaport had no foreseeable need for the items and Carney probably figured he would be saddled with it from then on whether it was given to him as a gift or not. It just wasn't important at the time.

This started with Rappaport's request that Carney return digital tape masters which he needed to make his films available through streaming video. Carney was "off the grid", as they say, working in his summer cottage or whatever it is in Vermont. He didn't get the messages and didn't know about it until he got served with papers demanding the immediate return of ALL the stuff.

If Rappaport had gone to court only for the digital masters, would Carney have returned them?

When this thing first started, someone talked about raising money for Rappaport to continue his court case against Carney. It would have been a lot cheaper to raise money for Rappaport to simply make a couple of new digital masters of the films or to pay Carney the amount he asked for to cover his costs for keeping the stuff all these years.

Arthur Vibert has now suggested the same thing in a comment on Jost's blog:

1) Let’s determine what amount of money will make Ray feel comfortable about turning over the materials. Obviously we would need Ray’s input on this.
2) We start a Kickstarter fund in Mark’s name for that amount. All of us contribute. I’ll be first with $50.
3) Once that amount is reached Mark is free to do what he wants with it – give it to Ray to get his materials back, or go make another film. If we want to limit this to retrieving the materials we can put it in a 3rd party’s name who will orchestrate both the giving of the money to Ray and getting the materials to Mark.

The suggestion was part of a longer comment. Jost responded to the comment but ignored the suggestion.

This situation could have been cleared up six months ago if they had done it then.