That 2012 Movie I'm Still Proud To Have Been A Tiny Part Of

Remembering all the love in "Get Better".

In the fall of 2011 my friend Chris White asked me if I’d do some coaching for the film he and his wife Emily Reach White were directing. Get Better had a poker night scene, and he wanted me to come by and teach everyone how to handle a stogie in manful fashion. You know, clip-clip, toast, puff-puff. Make it look authentic.

I was honored to have been asked, and of course, I said I would do it.

OFFICIAL FILM SYNOPSIS: GET BETTER follows a week in the life of Ellie Alexander (Marisa Viola) and her chronically ill father, Roy (Robert Linder). Ellie’s established routine strikes a balance between the needs of her father, the demands of her boss, Jane Preston (Lise Anzelone), and the advances of her on-again, off-again romantic interest, Mike Smith (Chris White). This delicate balance gets disrupted; however, with the arrival of her childhood friend, Pam Stuart (Monica Wyche) — a New York producer who comes to town to document Roy’s life and winds up exposing the wounds and resentments caused by Roy's disease.

I met Chris when he performed in the two-man play The Dumb Waiter for the theater group a friend and I had started. The entire play is set in one room, so we put it on in a garage. There was no stage. The audience sat against the walls as the actors did their thing. “If I say go and light the kettle I mean go and light the kettle!” I suppose I had to be friends with Chris after that, because there’s no going back from that kind of intimacy. It was either acknowledge the kiss of souls, or never look him in the eyes again.

So in the fall of 2011 I went up to Tryon, North Carolina, nearby birthplace of Nina Simone, to show some people how to smoke. I’m afraid I’m the reason there are far too many pipes, rather than cigars, in the poker scene (you can watch the entirety of the movie below, for free).

Smoking pipes at our professorial poker night.

There were several friends and acquaintances of mine present at the house where filming was taking place. They were the overlap between Chris’ Old Greenville/Carolina circle and my circle of shipwrecked former fundamentalists and random artistic evangelicals. Mostly, though, the cast and crew were strangers. They were all buzzing with the intensity and fun of the project, and I got to drop in for a while and look at it from up close but outside.

Get Better is a labor of love, Emily’s song to her father, and deeply rooted in her own experience. Her father and my mother both died in the same year. Four years later, I was just beginning to realize how much it hurt, but Emily had already written a whole movie, and it was beautiful. I was made grateful I’d only seen my mother be sick for a short time.

Get Better is a labor of love, and that love was catching. Everyone involved seemed to have it. I remember how struck I was, in just a day or two of being there, by how the cast and crew poured themselves into the work. I think the sauce of film making must be all that collaboration, all that dependence.

My wife sits in her studio and paints. She makes her thing with love. I sit on the couch and scribble, or more often, clack away. I make my thing with love. But to make a film! That’s a lot of humans, a lot of potential love waiting to come together, if the right people are at it. I’m glad I got a glimpse of what film making done the right way looks like.

Get Better is deeply personal, and will be that way for you whether you directly recognize the experiences or not. It is poetic, in that it deals in universals; it is a true imitation of life, and it will therefore make you sad and glad.

There was no real reason for Chris to invite me to participate. That’s the thing about love…it’s abundant, it overflows. He asked me to come see what he was doing, to help if I could, because he loved me. And not me especially. I think a lot of people involved in the project were like that. I’m grateful to have been asked. I still feel the love, guys.

Watch the movie. I think you’ll feel it too.

By the way, if you’re an old school YouTube Joffre the Giant enjoyer, this was the project I got that famous black-and-white intro from. The look I delivered the camera on a particular shot was so outrageously inappropriate to the scene (that is, so ridiculous) that Chris burst out laughing. To soothe my injured auteur’s spirit he made me a nice clip to use on my channel.