August 4, 2003

We meet some folks who live over the edge

When manic depression tore through Bill Lichtenstein's life in the mid-1980s, the producer might have gotten to know Fountain House as a struggling homeless guy.

Instead, he first came there to shoot the documentary West 47th Street, which airs Aug. 19 on P.O.V.

"If not for my parents, I, as a person with degrees from Columbia and Brown and years as a television producer, could easily have tapped out my own finances, slept on friends' couches until their goodwill ran out and could have ended up homeless," he says. He had his own safety net, but thousands of others have been caught by Fountain House, the internationally recognized "clubhouse" in Manhattan that has given emotional support, housing and jobs to thousands of people with mental illness.

The film by Lichtenstein and his wife and producing partner, June Peoples, is part of what amounts to a new life's work for them. He left behind the hard news of his years with ABC and she left a newspaper career to specialize in psychological topics, notably by producing the ongoing public radio series The Infinite Mind. He ticks off the objectives of the film: acquainting the public with mental illnesses, making it clear that people can get better, and telling about community support programs like Fountain House.

Lichtenstein has a lot to say about the treatment of mental illness, about the mixed results of closing large-scale institutions in recent decades, and about Fountain House, which serves as model for accredited clubhouses around the world. Indeed, he had another hour of interviews and archival footage about these subjects in an earlier cut of West 47th Street. But two-and-a-half hours was too long, and his story editor, Charlotte Zwerin, the noted editor of Gimme Shelter, persuaded him to trim the film down to intimate cinema verite profiles of four Fountain House members. Interviews stopped the action dead, Lichtenstein says. "Charlotte said we had to get rid of anything that doesn't advance their stories," he says. "Ultimately, it's the strongest thing you can do. It's 'show me, don't tell me.'" The resulting film, with its four memorable characters, gives emotional oomph to Lichtenstein's multimedia campaign for understanding mental illness, plowing like an icebreaker through frozen assumptions about homeless people.

Lichtenstein has appeared at or scheduled 23 screenings and personal appearances around the country, usually in cooperation with stations, and has requests for 80 more. To cover costs, Lichtenstein Creative Media spent its PBS broadcast fee to supplement P.O.V. outreach funds and is raising money to subsidize more in-person appearances. The screening trips are "extraordinarily cost-effective" as outreach, Lichtenstein says, since they often result in major articles in local newspapers and feature reports on public radio. The project may also leap the PBS boundary into the world of big-budget serial TV. The Gersh Agency of Beverly Hills is trying to develop a fictional TV series based on the documentary, along the lines of such HBO series as The Sopranos, Oz and Six Feet Under.

Lichtenstein fits the outreach trips into the company's work schedule, which now includes a TV doc on the hepatitis C epidemic, a four-part TV series on children in crisis, and a radio project with John Hockenberry, as well as The Infinite Mind. For West 47th Street, Lichtenstein originally imagined he would shoot for six weeks. Then six months came to seem more reasonable. In the end, with Peoples recording sound, he shot periodically from 1996 to 2000.

The behavior of the four dominant characters may be off-putting to many people, but viewers tell Lichtenstein they enjoyed meeting them close-up, laughing at their humor, empathizing with their trials. He says he wants viewers to think by the film's end that they'd like to hire or live next door to his four characters, but Lichtenstein decided to include one volatile hard case, Fitzroy Frederick, an angry, strung-out man who repeatedly fought off help and medication. Fountain House lobbied Lichtenstein to follow success stories instead of Frederick, but he resisted. The management also refused initially to let the filmmakers shoot a members' meeting after a suicide, but the producers argued successfully that suicide is not uncommon and must be reflected in the film. Frances Olivero, a dowdy man in women's clothing, gradually ascends to the program's leading role and, in Lichtenstein's view, to near-sainthood, during the course of the documentary. The arc of his life peaks and crashes within a short period, giving the filmmakers what they knew was the film's climax. Only a master like Kurt Vonnegut could come up with this as fiction, Lichtenstein says, but it's been known to happen for filmmakers when they shoot cinema verite for hundreds of hours. --Steve Behrens