The idea for Dirty Work was born the day David Sampliner visited a friend learning how to artificially inseminate cows on a dairy farm near Athens, Georgia. When David asked her where the semen came from, she gestured to a man arriving in a truck. It was the semen salesman with his monthly delivery, and when David asked him where he got his bull semen, he launched into a detailed, totally deadpan soliloquy describing the collection process. David found it hilarious, but also enlightening.  Who knew that this bizarre, salacious profession of semen collecting was connected to the meat and dairy products we consume? 

Tim Nackashi and David later discovered other little-known jobs of surprising significance, distasteful professions that most of us, whether we know it or not, depend on.  At one point they considered following two men who worked - and lived - at the local landfill, people who clean up after homicides and suicides, roadkill retrievers.  Then a friend told David about Darrell and Harold Allen, twin brothers who each owned his own septic tank company.  David's search for a person inside the funeral industry turned up Bernard Holston, a man whose habit of burying dead animals as a child led him, at age 12, to take a job at the local funeral home, and eventually, devote his life to preparing human remains. 

So David and Tim decided to do what neither had ever done before-make a documentary film.  They bought their own DV equipment, and, while Tim ran his own internet design firm and David worked as a waiter and photographer, they followed their three subjects for almost three years.  As first-time shooters, editors, directors (and in Tim's case, a first-time film score composer), they learned filmmaking on the job.   After completing Dirty Work, the filmmakers shared it with Edward Norton, who decided to executive produce the project through Class Five Films, a production company Edward formed to develop feature and documentary films.