Who's That Knocking at My Door and I was doing David Holzman's Diary, we were both working with the same cinematographer, Michael Wadleigh." It turns out that Wadleigh was key to making David Holzman's Diary, and not simply as its cinematographer. According to McBride, Wadleigh was doing commercial work at the time, and took creative advantage of that situation to get resources for their film: It's kind of a complicated process, but we would go out and shoot something for somebody and if he had to shoot something on the following Monday, say, we'd keep the equipment over the weekend. So Mike's idea was, this movie you want to make, why don't we just use this free equipment we have on the weekends and shoot stuff. So that's what we did. We used leftover film stock. To process the film we would go to the lab under the aegis of some other project we were working on. The choice of the Upper West Side location for the film came from McBride's own life experience: "I was born and raised there and I still lived there, not with my parents but I still lived in the neighborhood long after I left home and so these were the streets that I walked, these were the things that I saw. [It] was kind of my world and I wanted to share a little bit." Distribution A highly unconventional film made completely outside the studio system, David Holzman's Diary was not distributed theatrically. However, it had early successes at film festivals, cinema clubs, and museums. It screened at the New York Film Festival and the San Francisco Film Festival, and won awards at the Mannheim, Brussels, and Pesaro film festivals. It screened in 1968 at the Flaherty Seminar and the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1973 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Regarding the MoMA screening, L. M. Kit Carson said the museum, "was not happy that we did not make the contracted book," until the film won awards at festivals. "Then the Museum arranged for a high-profile Special Screening of the mock-doc – the beginning of a film-series called CINEPROBE" and then added the film to its collection. In 1991, David Holzman's Diary was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." It has since had varying distribution