Jared gives an update on Life’s Waltz in the editing room from the frontlines, 7 months into the assistant editing and editing process. Full rough assembly complete!

Well, while you’ve been left to wonder, many things have happened over here that beg reportage. But let me start off with the story of how we got to this point before I get into the meat of what’s happened in the past few weeks in my next post.

Once upon a time, Ashley and Jared made a 17-minute short-subject documentary called Life’s Waltz, about life, love, and loss in old age in their final semester at the University of Southern California. Though there were definitely some hitches along the way, they emerged with an overall wonderful learning experience and a solid, very enjoyable, professional product on their hands, screening it to a theater of over 400 people who hooted and hollered in applause for two filmmakers that the vast majority of them didn’t even know when they entered that landmark Norris theater that May 3. On the heels of this small but substantial success, the high-as-kites Ashley and Jared submitted their short film to a number of film festivals. It was rejected by every single one of the 15 or so that they submitted to, except that they’re still to this day waiting to hear from 3 or 4 more. No matter. Esteem untarnished, they kept their heads high. Who cares? Not they. In the meantime, they continued to show the film to friends, family, and absolute strangers the world over, as they each departed for 3 months to opposite ends of the Earth on backpacking trips.

When Jared returned to New York at the end of July, he walked around Times Square and made a couple of phone calls. One of them turned out to be fate-sealing: the one to none other than Ashley. “Yo, doozle. I’ve been thinking. The entire time I was traveling and meeting all of these amazing people, I had the growing compulsion to do a feature documentary. It’s what I want to do. What do ya say, pardna?” And so it was that Ashley and Jared committed to making a feature version of Life’s Waltz, one that would go deeper, hit harder, mean more, and defy all expectations. Jared hit the ground in LA in mid-August while Ashley was finishing up her job at her beloved ranch. They went through 9 drafts of a treatment (film summary, outline, plan and proposal) and got to work approaching various retirement communities in Bend (Oregon), Los Angeles, and Dallas to see where they could seal the deal on an opportunity to shoot their full-length documentary at an amenable retirement community of active, independent seniors.

Of course, things always take longer than one expects them to in film, and so finally, Jared went back to Dallas in mid-October, and it was then that they finally struck the golden deal at TVND (though other communities made themselves available in Dallas and Bend, as well). After a lot of time spent researching equipment, research, and how to create and run a company, signing some business and financial agreements, and a lot more planning (and with innumerable, crucial, and invaluable help from some key players in the business and legal departments), Ashley booked a ticket for Dallas. That brings us to late November, when we actually started filming Life’s Waltz. You see, originally Ashley and I had estimated that we’d shoot for about a month while also editing to see how our film was shaping up, then edit for a little bit, go back and shoot some more based on whatever story was emerging, and then wrap the entire film after a total of 3 months. We thought, “Hey, even if nothing comes of it, at least it will have been a great learning experience and we’ll have a feature film under our belts in 3 months, and we can part ways and go about our lives, nothing lost, and a lot of experience gained.” Well, remember how I said that things always take longer than one expects?

To be continued soon…

Suffice it to say, things can tend to go over Dorothy’s head!

Jared gives a production status update for Life’s Waltz as we cap off week 8 of filming. In less than a week we’ll be done shooting principal photography. We’re stoked to begin editing!

You might wonder, as we did, if the Scotts have experienced any kind of racism while living at TVN, which, though not all white other than the Scotts and the other gentleman who moved in recently, is largely composed by white people. To answer that question, they said absolutely not. They’ve never felt or experienced any such thing there; everyone treats them very nicely and like anyone else, which is of course as should be the case anyway.

To give you a little background info, since we haven’t posted any videos of the Scotts despite shooting with them quite a bit, Mr. Scott was a principal and Mrs. Scott a schoolteacher, both from Tennessee. They met because he was her principal, and they’ve been married for almost 60 years. She’s in her late 80s, and he’s about to turn 90! They’re really wonderful (and fun) people!

Here’s a picture of Jesse (or daddy, as Mrs. Scott calls him) about to chomp down on a peppermint candy cane while mom (as Mr. Scott calls Ernestine) is eating up the breakfast we watched him prepare for her: a cheese omelet prepared in the microwave, leftover fried chicken wings, garlic Texas toast, and some OJ (she wanted cappucino but he hadn’t picked any up from the supermarket).

 

Sam couldn’t stop eating the popcorn. At one point he whispered under his breath, “I must have a tapeworm or something.” No one heard him but me, and I started cracking up while filming.

We followed Sam to his volunteering job at Presbyterian Hospital where he goes from room to room collecting used binders and bringing them back to be re-used for keeping temporary patients’ records.

And one last picture for good measure: my grandmother’s old toaster oven that she’s had for so many years she can’t remember how long, which she used to make her own special grilled cheese for me and my brother on countless times growing up. Best grilled cheese I ever had. The toaster broke just a couple of weeks ago, after all this time!

Realistically, it should come as no surprise that some of the people at TVN have dementia of various forms and at various stages, and I don’t just mean memory loss, though many people often connote memory loss with dementia. Just today, in fact, we sat in on and filmed some of the second weekly meeting of the Parkinson’s Disease Support Group. The only thing that was surprising was how people seemed to come out of the woodwork for it, but it was not unexpected that maybe 15 or 20 people showed up. Suffice it to say that dementia of any kind is something that particularly bears on the lives of those living in a place such as TVN, which at a glance appears to be an active senior, independent living retirement community. This is not to say that younger people don’t have or aren’t affected by dementia, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s been so fortunate as to reach the “golden years” who hasn’t had a friend who’s suffered from, had a spouse who suffered from, or himself/herself has suffered from dementia.

This topic was one of the two original catalysts that engendered the idea to explore the inner-workings of a retirement community. I was sitting with my grandmother a year ago, having dinner at TVN, when a couple walked by holding hands. My grandmother made some off-hand remark about how they shouldn’t be doing that (her views do not reflect the opinions of the filmmakers!) and should get a room, or something to that extent, which would be preferable to seeing that PDA. (I had to explain that PDA meant Public Displays of Affection to her.) And suddenly, for the first time, I was struck by the possibility: “Maw-maw, are people here still having sex?” My grandmother tends to make bold statements, so she automatically grinned and scoffed, “Are you kidding? Of course!” Or something like that. I was shocked. I, like so many people who haven’t reached old age yet, have just never given it any thought and tacitly dismissed the idea, either out of oversight or maybe even some kind of repulsion.

As the conversation went on, I asked her what had happened to her friend whom I’ll refer to as “Molly”, who had been there the last time I’d been by. Well, she explained, Molly had dementia that had progressed so far that she couldn’t function socially anymore at TVN. She’d get frustrated because she couldn’t communicate herself and then she’d get mad and confused when things seemed out of control, and they constantly felt that way. In this sense, I reasoned, dementia plays a social function at TVN. In kid terms, it’s kind of like your best friend as a child whose parents take a job in another city. You just have to move away. But it’s more complex than that, because dementia is not an innocent or quick animal. It’s slow and painful, as much to the individual undergoing it (if they’re aware of it, depending on the type) and also to the person’s loved ones. In this case, Molly was one of my grandmother’s best friends. She didn’t leave because of death or anything like that, but rather it was a drawn out, excruciatingly disheartening and dismal process. Maw-maw tried to take care of her friend and help her over the course of a couple of years, all the while watching her good friend’s inexorable mental decline. It calls to mind Flowers for Algernon, but in this case, it’s very real, and my grandmother’s experience (and that of her friend Molly) is not singular.

To bring things quickly full circle, there’s no telling by how many parts genetic and how many parts environmental Molly’s progressive dementia was (and is to this today). We hear often about how “there’s no Alzheimer’s in my family,” but less often about the environmental factors that may cue the onset of dementia, that give rise to it, if it’s lying in wait in the first place. And I think stress makes a lot of sense. Stress is the body’s general overdrive in response to a noxious stimulus. After studying days on end for exams without any sleep but somehow staving off sickness, suddenly a cold comes on the day after the exams end. The stress, the general immunity response of the body, prevented the sickness, but the body is worn out as well after all of that overdrive, and so it’s simple to become sick as the stress leaves the body. Why wouldn’t the same go for the mind? The brain is a part of the body like any other, and we certainly all know the feeling of mental stress. Just like bodily stress can bring on aging quicker, with wrinkles, sagging of skin, injury-proneness, etc., this CNN article reports on research showing that the same goes for the brain. Very interesting.

Fascinating to me in particular, as memory and nostalgia are such emotionally powerful parts of my human experience. Dementia is the physical instantiation of memory-loss. For this reason, we’ve spent quite a bit of time talking to our characters about what it feels like to lose one’s memory ability over time, what it’s like to live with people who have various forms and stages of dementia, and what it’s like to lose friends and family, and even the self, to such a disorder.

In the words of Sam, “Don’t lose that smile. You’ve got a great laugh. Don’t stop laughing. You’ll live longer.” Or, don’t worry, be happy. A little less stress, a little less taxing on the mind, a little more mental health as we reach our golden years.

On a humorous (it takes being able to laugh about it!) note as regards memory-loss, we’re constantly asked the same questions and told the same things at TVN, sometimes by the same people, like Sam’s quote from above. He’s told us a few times – let’s leave it at that! So let me say that what you’ve heard through the grapevine is true. For the past near two months, it’s been the following: Ashley and I look like brother and sister, Ashley and I look like such a great couple, Ashley’s really pretty, I’m such a nice young man, we both have great smiles and we shouldn’t lose them or stop smiling, we sure are working hard, we should eat some candy, if we want dessert they’ll get it for us, and most forthcomingly, we should get married!

Now if only I could get up the nerve to propose again.

Jared gives an update on Week 4 of production going into week 5 on Life’s Waltz!