Brian Lindstrom sent me an email out of the blue last October, asking me to come to a screening of Finding Normal at Cinema 21. I’d heard about the film being made and hadn’t talked with Brian for a couple of years so I wrote back immediately and said yes. The subject of his film, peer support of addicts, is a favorite of mine. I looked forward to seeing old friends in old haunts.
And I was very impressed by Brian’s film. Young directors are often like the shoot-first point guards fresh in the pros, impressing some girl, some agent, some future horizon, and losing the respect of their team mates and perhaps the game. Brian lets the subject dominate, finds strong personalities, strong principles and holds on tight while rolling tape. Quite remarkable, considering the typical hostile nature of addicts and addiction treatment agencies to cameras.
Brian’s has the ability to be semi-invisible, just a regular guy, standing there, carrying a camera. You look at him and say to yourself, uh huh, and look somewhere else. This is an underestimated talent for documentary filmmakers, carefully cultivated by the great talents like Les Blank and Frederick Wiseman.
I was wrapping up a year commitment to talk publicly about what happened to my friend Jim Jim, who we decided to call James Chasse, in part because the media was using that name, and in part because his father is Jim Chasse. Jim Jim’s family called him James.
Over the year we created a web site for James, accumulating all the public documents and news articles about what happened to him. With Dan Handelman and Katie Kincaid, we helped create a memorial for his friends and family members at First Congregational Church. We answered a couple of thousand questions about what happened to James from students, the media, to bureaucrats and politicians.
After the screening Brian and I had a cup of coffee and caught up. He was intrigued with the Chasse story and I asked him if he could make a film about what had happened. Brian said yes immediately.
