Filmmaker Todd Haynes had had it up to here with cinema's "straight white boys' club" (Photos: STV)

For a few hours on Saturday, anyway, Cooper Union was pretty much the NYC film-dork place to be as Tokion Magazine's 2005 Creativity Now Conference kicked off in the school's cavernous Great Hall. In its third year, the two-day gathering has gathered a certain cool allure that draws both names and a high indie profile (I still kick myself for missing David Gordon Green's appearance last year) even as it challenges you to justify spending $75 for maybe two or three appealing panels and Q&A's.

Although in fairness, this year's line-up offered a more genuinely stunning variety of participants, including Todd Haynes, Jonathan Caouette and Ondi Timoner from the film world, as well as comedy crossovers Neal Brennan, David Cross and David Wain and photography legends William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Richard Prince. The Reeler caught Haynes' act Saturday afternoon, when he rapped fairly comprehensively about the struggles attending his early experimental career and how one New York venue after another turned down his Barbie-carving Karen Carpenter opus Superstar before Richard Carpenter effectively got it banned from any distribution whatsoever. (Haynes also passed down the double-super-secret handshake implying where to find bootlegs in the city, adding additional bang to conference-goers' big bucks.)

Caouette, Timoner and Bruce Sinofsky followed Haynes with a relaxed chat of their own, ostensibly about documentary filmmaking but really not much more than a succession of anecdotes that could have been (and, in some cases, probably were) lifted from DVD commentary tracks. Timoner recounted the oft-told nugget about DIG!'s Anton Newcombe--in the height of his "wear-white-and-come-when-I-call-you" phase--dragging along eight or nine acolytes to threaten Timoner's only investor with death, while Sinofsky splooged some less-cool-than-he-thought righteousness about turning down a $75,000 TV directing job because reality-TV diva Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth was producing.

(L-R) Ondi Timoner, Bruce Sinofsky and Jonathan Caouette regale each other with tales of guerilla doc oneupsmanship

On the other hand, Caouette professed his love for documentaries while insisting that his epochal life story Tarnation--with at least three re-shot endings--is not a documentary at all. Rather, he ascribed a more general "personal cinema" label to the film, the scope of which became clearer as he made the festival rounds in 2004. "I realized that it was a film that was starting to transcend across the board in a lot of ways that I never thought would happen," Caouette told the audience. "Even with the Q&A's--they were becoming these therapy sessions over and over again. ... It had attracted a lot of people that had come from dysfunctional atmospheres or who had relatives who had problems [with mental illness].

"But it wasn't like the typical Q&A; it wasn't like 'Why did you shoot with this DP?' 'Tell me about your production designer choice.' It was like, 'How's your Mom doing?' or 'How are you doing?' It was so weird. I had to really find this interesting balance to try to justify myself as a filmmaker and separate my own attachment to it. It was the hardest thing I ever did."

Sadly, The Reeler could not make it to the Brennan/Cross/Wain circle jerk, which surely unfolded in rollicking fashion with Brennan dodging the deeper truths behind the demise of Chappelle's Show (which he co-wrote with Chappelle) and Cross cracking on the Bush Administration before all three had a go at Sunday night's keynote warbler Antony and the Johnsons, who I also missed. My loss, as always.