After ‘Film at 11,’ Life Goes On : The Task Is to Remember How Easy It Is to Forget

I saw Gideon crying. I heard in his urgent, 81-year-old voice a frightened, guttural call for Junia, his 79-year-old wife, who stood helplessly next to him. She stroked his old gray head as he reached for her shoulders. They embraced. Still he called her name; “Junia, I love you,” he cried, wondering where his Junia was.

Gideon was lost in the corridors of his mind, reeling from the insidious disease of Alzheimer’s, wanting only to be patted and held and comforted. Again and again he called out to Junia, not knowing that she was next to him.

Junia’s tears now flowed with her husband’s. The room was silent but for the shuddering sobs of two old people in pain--silent until I said, too loudly, “Change tape!” At the foot of Gideon’s bed there was a scramble to replace the 20-minute cassette in our tape deck with a fresh one. The faster the tape operator could slam the new load in, roll 10 to 15 seconds of bars and tone, the less we’d miss of this dramatic scene. A new hush fell over the room as we resumed shooting. The coordinating producer, the production assistant, the crew and I were stone quiet, the eye of illusion refocused again on reality.

The one reality we didn’t think about was what Junia and Gideon were thinking about us.

You see, the job of a television documentarian is to get on tape the best story-telling material possible. As the producer-writer-director, my job--beyond the banal code of informing an audience--is to stir emotions. Genuinely, if possible. If I do my job well, I fully expect an audience to feel what the people on the screen are feeling. If they feel the pain, maybe they’ll do something: write their senator about funding more research, drop a few coins into the cerebral-palsy box at the corner restaurant, maybe even look a little more tenderly at someone else’s pain or problem.Maybe this will happen. Maybe not. My job is to try to make it happen.

But my job sometimes crushes me, disappoints me, makes me question my choices, my humanity. And not just me, for God’s sake. Every documentarian worth his salt has to feel this. We are intimately connected to our subjects.

We spent 10 to 12 weeks with Junia and Gideon. We asked them to tell us their stories, urged them to confide in us their most private, most intimate struggles, the fine details of their lives. We asked them to trust us. We promised not to hurt them. Along the way, we confided in them. Told them our horror stories. Whispered to them the rough edges of our own lives. They cried. We cried. They needed support and we were there to give it. At the end, like clubhouse blood- brothers we have a bond.

But along the way, something happens.

Not the taping. No, it inevitably goes well. How could it not? By the time shooting starts, a documentarian has his whole crew stoked. The passion has been building for weeks. The staff has immersed itself in stories of Alzheimer’s horror. In meetings, this is all we talk about. I’ve spent hours with the shooter, talking story and lighting and camera movement. I am a crusader, an evangelistic knight intent to eliminate the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease from the face of the Earth. I now know every expert in town. I know testing centers, doctors, victims, hospital staffs. I have knowledge! And they all know me. And their expectations are high, very high, because they’ve seen the passion in me and there’s nothing like passion to snap out a few miracles--new legislation, more donations for research, the lame to walk.

The taping goes fine. And so does post-production. We get a big and generous star to host. We wrap, and the show’s a hit. Great reviews. Good ratings. There’s a celebration in the station’s largest studio, all involved invited. Catered food.

We did it.

Along the way, something happened. I got hired for another job, another documentary. This one about drug addiction. Time to cure that societal calamity, Superman. Time to find a whole new slew of families to tell me their pain-filled stories.

But what about Alzheimer’s and all the people whose lives are inexorably tied to that disease? Where do they fit into my life now? How important are their stories now; am I interested in their pain now? Yes. Yes! But already they’re sliding into the distance. Already their voices are ghostly echoes in my mind.

This happens every time.

Of course, I stay in touch for a while. I call. I send a card. They reply. I hear that Gideon has died, so I send flowers. Junia calls to say thanks. Time passes.

And I move on.

A documentarian lives his life in passionate concentration. He gives everything he has, lives the pain--and then he bows out with a hug or a handshake.

I still wonder deeply about all those people I left behind--the abused children, the Skid Row losers, the drug addicts, the street musicians wishing for a break. Some are dead, some play on.

I wish I could have snapped out a few miracles. But that kind of thing can never be; I am not a redeemer. I couldn’t change their lives. I was merely a stranger, a fleeting image before their eyes, an odd but welcomed intruder into their world, telling and listening to tales. Then I moved on.

Sometimes in the early shadows of morning, before my safe house in the San Fernando Valley stirs, I see Gideon crying. I flip on the VCR and remember, so vividly, just how connected we really were.