An attachment to history

Whitwell, Tenn., is just a dot on the map. There are two streetlights. One motel. Twenty-one Baptist and Methodist churches. No Catholics. No Jews. And there are only a handful of African American and Latino students at Whitwell Middle School.

With the schoolchildren so insulated in the Appalachians, Whitwell Middle School principal Linda Hooper, English teacher Sandy Roberts and assistant principal David Smith launched a project to teach diversity and tolerance through the Holocaust. The children couldn’t quite comprehend the enormity of the deaths of 6 million Jews, so they decided to collect paper clips -- with each clip symbolizing a victim -- to illustrate the scale of the tragedy.

A new documentary, “Paper Clips,” which opened in limited release Wednesday, tells the story of how the project, first launched in 1998, now reaches far beyond the school.

In many ways, “Paper Clips” is a Holocaust documentary that’s not about the Holocaust. In fact, the film contains only a few archival stills and footage from the Holocaust. Instead, the film chronicles the extraordinary journey the town made when the middle school decided to embark on its project and how the international community embraced the economically depressed burg to help it achieve its heartfelt mission.

Donors sent money. Holocaust survivors came and spoke at the school. Students and local churches joined forces to build a Holocaust museum on the school grounds, using a railcar that once transported Jews to the Nazi death camps during World War II. The paper clips poured in. Inside the rail car today are World War II exhibits and more than 11 million paper clips, 6 million to represent the Jews who died and 5 million to represent the many other groups persecuted by the Nazis.

What’s more, during the two-year production on the documentary, the filmmakers themselves were forced to shed their own stereotypes about the rural South.

By the time writer/co-director Joe Fab arrived with co-director Elliot Berlin and crew in Whitwell in spring 2001, the school had received mountains of publicity in newspapers and on TV and had already collected about 3 million paper clips. (Paper clips were chosen because Norwegians wore them on their clothing during World War II in defiance of the Nazis and in solidarity with Jews.) Fab said the community initially greeted the production with more than a little trepidation.

“When we went down there the first time we didn’t actually have permission to shoot yet,” Fab recalled. “The best we had gotten over the phone from Linda Hooper was she would talk to us, not that she would allow us to make the film. We set up an appointment with her late in the afternoon on a Friday. She was working in her office and when we went in, she didn’t even look up from her desk. She pointed at this table for us to sit down and then she kept working at her desk.”

Eventually, she looked up and -- as Fab says in his best Southern twang -- said, “ ‘What?’ as in ‘The audience has begun now. Convince me that you should be here.’ We talked for a good bit and she finally agreed.”

Hooper’s initial reluctance to have the crew follow her and the pupils around for six months was more than grounded.

“They had had a fair amount of media there, and they were really sick of it, and it was disruptive,” said Fab. “All these people would come in and make a big hit and [leave].” When she finally relented to Fab’s request, Hooper had two caveats: “ ‘If I let you make this film and you make my children look like a bunch of rednecks, I will eat your heart for breakfast. And if you make the people in this town look like a bunch of hicks, I will eat your heart for breakfast.’ ”

Needless to say, explained Fab, “she is a very strong woman.”

Fab, who grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., admits he had many preconceived notions about just who he would encounter in such a small, insular Southern town.

Perusing the Internet while doing research, he said he realized the majority of articles about the project kept reiterating that Whitwell was an “unlikely” place for such a project to flourish.

“You could see why Linda said the thing about rednecks and hicks,” Fab said. “When people describe a small town like that, they just tell you a few facts, like there are 21 churches and 1,600 people. So you start to form opinions. So there were stereotypes in our heads.”

Those stereotypes were shattered within days, particularly when the residents began to invite the crew to their homes. “Pretty soon you find out who these people are,” Fab explained. “The truth is they live the values that they profess to live, that they profess to hold.”

Don’t even mention the “red state/blue state” description of America that has permeated the media. “It’s really sort of an obscene thing to do,” Fab said. “These are people you would say are ‘red’ by the map and yet you are completely leaving out everything about who they are. Everything. I really get defensive about them and about other places that have been Crayola-ed on the map. I am going to stay in the state of mind that I don’t know about a town unless I go in and find out. I am not going to make a judgment about them. We used to talk about how wonderfully diverse we are and how interesting we are. We need to be like that again.”

The filmmakers planned to spend only six months in Whitwell but ended up working there for two years.

Though the film is now in theaters, Fab’s heart still is in the Tennessee town. He’s remained friends with many of the citizens, especially Hooper, and he’s quick to point out that the school no longer needs paper clips -- it received more than 24 million -- but it still relies on donations to keep the Holocaust museum afloat.

That the lessons of the Holocaust so transformed the close-knit town comes as no surprise to Fab.

In the end, he said, it’s not really “unlikely” at all.

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‘Paper Clips’

Where: Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869; and Laemmle’s Town Center 5, 17200 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 981-9811.