MOVIE THERAPY : ‘Spirit Realm’: One Filmmaker’s Gift to Kids Has a Message

If some folks challenge the premise that violence on the screen finds its way into our lives, producer Chako Van Leeuwen isn’t one of them. Her 16-year-old son, a top-ranking student at Beverly Hills High School, took his life in June, 1987. The act, she’s convinced, was precipitated not only by adolescent Angst but by watching “The Exorcist,” “The Tenant” and “The Thing” the night before.

“Keith was under a lot of pressure,” recalls Van Leeuwen, who, before her 25-year producing career (“Piranha,” “Tender Loving Care”) had been a leading actress in Japan. “He was stunning to look at and everyone wanted a piece of him. People were pushing him to go into movies and music. He got into Stanford--but not Berkeley, as he had hoped. The last morning of his life, he seemed tired, pale and lost. Seeing those horror films, I’m sure, pushed him over.”

Van Leeuwen also assumes part of the blame, however. Making films--in front of, or behind the camera--has been the focus of her life since an early age, she explains. Career commitments siphoned off energy that should have gone to her son. Still, when it came to working through the pain of his death--and that of her sister, brother and father, all of whom died within a year of Keith--she once again headed for the big screen. Films with positive role models can, she believes, reach young people sorely in need of spiritual guidance and bolstered self-esteem.

In the first film she has made since the tragedy, she hopes to address that need. Tentatively called “Spirit Realm,” the $7.5-million supernatural suspense thriller stars Michael Pare (“Eddie and the Cruisers”), Sean Patrick Flanery (TV’s “Young Indiana Jones Chronicles”), Diane Ladd and Shelley Winters. It tells the story of two young musicians drawn into a worldwide peace organization controlled by sinister forces. Though Fuji Television quickly agreed to finance the project (“very fast . . . like a bullet train”), no American distributor has yet been lined up. According to Van Leeuwen, Disney, MGM and Universal have expressed interest in the project, which wrapped in late December.

“This movie is therapy for me,” says the auburn-haired Van Leeuwen, an animated 50-year-old dramatically attired in a floor-length crushed velvet jacket-dress. A massive jeweled cross hangs from a choker at her neck--an adornment, she says, she is never without. “I want to show young kids that drugs, demons exist, but that you can step on them and keep going. After my son died, I felt so sad and guilty that I almost drove over a mountain but, by some miracle, put my foot on the brake instead.

“Soon after, I knew I needed to make this film. Slipping the power of the individual and God into a movie full of rock ‘n’ roll and love scenes . . . it’s like giving kids chocolate with a message inside.”

Born in an artists colony two hours outside of Tokyo, young Chako was pursuing a career in ballet when, at 16, a collapsed lung led her to opt for a less physically taxing career. Trying her hand at acting, she walked off with the Japanese equivalent of an Oscar for her portrayal of a nun in the film “Shundeini” two years later.

Determined to be more independent than her mother (“a sweet, beautiful Japanese doll who wore kimonos, no makeup and always obeyed her husband”), Van Leeuwen was one of only two women in her class at Keio University, which she attended for two years before pursuing film full time.

In 1968, with 40 Japanese movies to her credit, Van Leeuwen moved to the United States and shifted her gaze to the production end. That year, she produced, directed, scored and narrated “Young Americans,” a documentary dealing with the lifestyles of youth in Los Angeles and New York. In 1974 she hooked up with Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, producing “Tender Loving Care” in which teen-age nurses straighten out a corrupt hospital through what the promotional material refers to as “love therapy.”

Four years later, again with Corman who by then had become a mentor, she co-produced “Piranha”--a $1-million “Jaws” send-up, directed by Joe Dante (“Gremlins”) and written by John Sayles, which went on to gross $24 million worldwide. Her fourth film, never released in the United States, was “Forever and Beyond” (1980), the tale of a young boy who comes back to life after a futile struggle against leukemia.

When in Los Angeles, Van Leeuwen lives in and works out of two modest houses adjacent to each other on a quiet Beverly Hills street. The inscription on the door of one is “His House”--a reference both to the Lord, she explains, and to the fact that it was where Keith used to live. Frequent trips to Japan enable the producer, whose marriage dissolved shortly after her son’s death, to oversee the Tokyo-based production company Chako Film International, which secures financial backing for her films. Serving on the board of directors of Ibaraki’s Taikanso and Itsuura Hotels, which her family owns, supplements her movie-making income.

After “Spirit Realm,” Van Leeuwen plans to make “Obsession With Marilyn,” an $8-million movie financed by Dentsu--a Japanese advertising firm. Her own bond with Monroe, explains Van Leeuwen, is a strong one. The actress, she says, was baptized at Angeles Temple, part of Foursquare Church, where Van Leeuwen currently serves as an associate pastor. And Keith died on June 1--the same day both she and Monroe were born.

The Japanese-financed “One Heart, One Love” is also in the works. A biography of Van Leeuwen’s son, it’s a picture she’d like to direct.

“It’s my story,” says Van Leeuwen who co-wrote the screenplay, “so I should be the one guiding the truth. Making movies is what God meant me to do. I don’t cry for my son anymore. I feel like he’s in heaven helping me. Keith is very much a part of all this.”*