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Now starring in ‘Wide Awake’: Mr. Insomniac

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Times Staff Writer

Filmmaker Alan Berliner’s lifelong insomnia was a cakewalk, even a bit romantic, compared with the bleary days and hellish nights he spent documenting it.

In his new HBO documentary, “Wide Awake,” which had a “night owl” premiere in the wee hours of Tuesday morning and opens in prime-time tonight, Berliner spends a surreal 18 months staring down his sleeplessness -- figuratively and literally.

In the film, his night-vision camera, stationed at his bedside, captures the precise moment he wakes each night with the jarring and disorienting image of Berliner watching Berliner watching Berliner.

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“From the insomniac’s perspective, it’s a kind of madness,” the filmmaker recalled in a recent phone call from his home in New York. “From the director’s perspective, it’s an incredible research opportunity.”

Berliner digs deep, consulting five renowned sleep experts, analyzing his childhood, his family heritage and quizzing his mother, sister and wife about the effects his sleeplessness has had on his relationships.

Indeed, Berliner had been married just four months when he began filming. And during the production, his wife, Shari Spiegel, gave birth to their first child, Eli, which inevitably led to a more profound level of exhaustion for everyone.

“The film took over our lives in a lot of ways,” said Spiegel. “It was just one more thing going on in our hectic, crazy lives at the time.”

Long before the baby, Berliner spent years waking some time after midnight, working feverishly in his studio until just before dawn, crashing for a few hours and then joining the day around 11 a.m. But that routine quickly clashes with Eli’s, and soon Spiegel demands that Berliner help with the parenting duties. He initially resists, proving his insomnia has deeper psychological roots than he realized.

Berliner eventually submits to an overnight stay in a sleep lab. One expert tells him he has to reset his internal clock, a lengthy process of retraining his body to wake with the sun.

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Another suggests that his habit of working at night has established a creative dependence on insomnia. In the film, Berliner calculates that in sleeping less, he has gained years of productive work time. “The smart guy comes on duty at night,” he said.

It’s a theory he applies to the work of several modern geniuses. Perhaps, he posits, insomniacs such as jazz legend Charlie Parker and inventor Thomas Edison benefited intellectually from their lack of sleep. On the other hand, Berliner points out that disasters caused by “human error” were most likely due to exhaustion. One striking fact he notes is that drivers who haven’t slept in 24 hours have the same response time as if they were drunk.

“Wide Awake” is the latest in Berliner’s densely layered, artistic but accessible films that mine his experience for universal truths. “Nobody’s Business” in 1996 explored family dynamics through portraits of his father and grandfather. In 2001’s “The Sweetest Sound,” Berliner studied all the Alan Berliners he could find as a way of examining the power of a person’s name.

Like Berliner’s other films, “Wide Awake” weaves found footage and visual metaphor with conventional interviews to, he said, evoke “the visceral dimension and aspects of sleep.”

When Berliner approached HBO with the film, the president of HBO Documentary Films, Sheila Nevins -- a fellow night owl -- said the filmmaker’s “neurosis” was “a nice fit” for her.

“Whereas more documentary filmmakers are obsessed with the world, events that happened to other people, he seems mostly concerned with things that have happened to himself,” she said. “In that sense, he’s very different and very refreshing.”

In the three years since Berliner began the film, he became a vigilant sentinel of his son’s sleep, hiring an expert when Eli was born and quickly putting the infant on a schedule.

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Meanwhile, Berliner still works with a sleep therapist. A good night, he said, is five solid hours. On a bad night, he resorts to sleeping pills. “Every night is a kind of adventure,” he said.

gina.piccalo@latimes.com

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‘Wide Awake’

Where: HBO

When: 8 to 9:30 tonight

Rating: TV-14-L (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with an advisory for coarse language)

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