Losing everything - David Hoffman

I had a fire nine days ago. My archived 175 films, my 16-millimeter negative, all my dad's books, my photographs I had collected, I was a collector, major, big-time, it's gone. I just looked at it, and I didn't know what to do. I mean, this was my things. I always live in the present; I love the present, I cherished the future.

I was taught some strange thing as a kid: like, you got to make something good out of something bad. You got to make something good out of something bad. This was bad, man! I was— I coughed, I was sick. That's my camera lens—the first one, the one I shot my Bob Dylan film with 35 years ago. That's my feature film, King Murray, won Khan Film Festival in 1970; the only print I had.

That's my papers. I was in minutes, 20 minutes—epiphany hit me, something hit me: you got to make something good out of something bad. I started to say to my friends, neighbors, my sister. By the way, that Sputnik I ran last year, Sputnik was downtown; the negative, it wasn't touched. These are some pieces of things I used in my Sputnik feature film, which opens in New York in two weeks at downtown.

I called my sister, I called my neighbors; I said, "Come dig." That's me at my desk—I was a desk, took 40 years to build. You know, all the stuff? That's my daughter, Jean; she came. She's a nurse in San Francisco; dig it up, I said. Pieces, I want pieces, bits and pieces.

I came up with this idea: a life of bits and pieces, which I'm just starting to work on in my next project. That's my sister. She took care of pictures, 'cause I was a big collector of just snapshot photography that I believed said a lot, and those are some of the pictures.

That something was good about the burned pictures; I didn't know! I looked at that and I said, "Wow, is that better than..." That's my proposal on Jimmy Doolittle. I made that movie for vision; it's the only copy I had. Pieces of it, idea about women.

So I started to say, "Hey man, you are too much; you could cry about this." I really didn't. I instead said, "I'm gonna make something out of it," and maybe next year I'm gonna appreciate this moment to come up on this stage with so many people who have already given me so much solace.

And just say the tedsters, I'm proud of me that I take something bad, I turn it, and I'm gonna make something good out of this— all these pieces. That's awful Leipzig, is an original photograph. I loved—I was a big record collector. The records didn't make it, boy, I'll tell you; film burns, film burns.

I mean, this was 16-millimeter safety film; the negatives are gone. Cause my father's letter to me telling me to marry the woman I first married when I was 20. My daughter and me—she's still there; she's there this morning, actually. That's my house; my family is living in the Hilton Hotel in Scotts Valley.

That's my wife, Heidi, who didn't take it as well as I didn’t. My children, Davey and Henry, my son Davey in the hotel two nights ago. So my message to you folks from my three minutes is that I appreciate the chance to share this with you.

I will be back; I love being at Ted. I came to live it, and I am living it. That's my view from my window outside of Santa Cruz in Bonnie, doing just 35 miles from here. Thank you, everybody.

They have names like Idle Time Books and Panther Coffee, with free enterprise puns like Hue and Cry and Smash Records. One Saturday a year, small businesses remind a nation of the benefits of shopping small, like the way David Kaplan at Shell Lumber shows you how to use a chop saw, then invites you back when the warehouse becomes the community theater.

Or the way Camille Rustler of Everafter travels the journey from despair to bliss with every bride-to-be on just one day. One hundred million of us joined a movement, and Main Street found its you might again and Main Street found its fight again, and we, the locals, found delight again—that's the power of all!

That's the power! That's the power of all! That's the membership effect of American Express.