David Holzman – L. M. Kit Carson Penny Wohl – Eileen Dietz Pepe – Lorenzo Mans Sandra – Louise Levine Woman on the subway – Fern McBride Sandra's Boyfriend – Michael Levine Max (Penny's agent) – Bob Lesser Cop – Jack Baran Writer-Director – Jim McBride Camera – Michael Wadley (now Wadleigh) Additional Photography – Paul Goldsmith and Paul Glickman Production Film critic Richard Brody writes that, "This ingenious, scruffy 1967 metafiction by Jim McBride is an exotic fruit grown in New York from the seed of the French New Wave." Jaime Wolf writes that, "At once a fictional narrative within a recognizable documentary setting and a kind of essay on the conditions of filmmaking, David Holzman's Diary stands as one of the few American equivalents to the work which Godard was doing at the time." The French New Wave clearly was an inspiration for this film, but there were others as well. One influence was The Diary of a Lost Girl, a book published in 1905 as a supposedly authentic diary of a prostitute named Thymian, but actually written by its "editor," Margarete Böhme; it was later adapted into a popular 1929 German film starring Louise Brooks as Lulu. This is what David refers to in the beginning of his film when he cites "the famous Lulu's diary" as an inspiration for his work. Jaime N. Christley notes some other cinematic influences, saying that, "the real point of origin is either Peter Watkins's docudrama The War Game (which won the documentary Oscar for 1967) or Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread, depending on where you draw the fault lines." James McBride identified his more immediate American context for making the film: I entered the world of movies when cinema vérité work like the Maysles brothers' and Richard Leacock's and D. A. Pennebaker's was new and exciting, and when a lot of underground filmmakers were trying to use the medium in a more poetic way, as an exercise in different kinds of liberation—you know, from personal liberation to liberation from the classical forms of filmmaking. So there were a lot of alternatives to Hollywood moviemaking then. These movies were all trying to find a new way of looking at life. And I was a young, idealistic filmmaker dealing with these same questions. You know: what is one supposed to be trying to do in the movies and how ought one go