Inside "Bryan Loves You"

Tony Todd in "Bryan Loves You"

What is it like to be forcibly admitted to a mental hospital by your family? Read on.

I didn't fit in. I didn't have many friends or close family, and definitely felt like I didn't have control. To this day, at 31 years old, it affects me.

Parents had a messy split. I can vividly remember the day my mom threw my cheating dad out. It was a particularly loud and violent display. Shortly after the split, my mom split with my sister and me from expensive New York to a then-cheap Arizona, circa 1988.

Going to school in rural parts of Metro Phoenix was like this: Who is that Jewish kid? His family can't eat pork, right? Didn't his "people" kill our God? Jews are cheap, right? On top of that, I was a severe late bloomer and didn't start hitting puberty, or even anywhere close to 5-foot-normal-inches until midway through high school.

Outsider. Freak.
Did. Not. Fit. In.

In the early '90s, my father died and I started to experience panic attacks that prevented me from sitting in a classroom at high school. I felt trapped and had to get out. So sometimes I'd cut class rather than deal with the embarrassment of busting out of there in the middle of a lesson. At home, I didn't do enough chores, according to my family. Wasn't pulling my weight, in their eyes.

So one day, because of my anxiety at school and lack of labor performed at home, my family drove me to Camelback (Mental) Hospital in Scottsdale and told me we were there to look at the facilities to scare me straight; show me how bad I could have it.

head covering of the Bryans

Wrong. Yes, I was taken there, but it wasn't to look. It was to stay. Tricked into becoming an in-patient at a secure facility, I stayed there for two months and was programmed to believe I was admitted for being "oppositional at home." (Most of the other in-patients were being treated for drug/alcohol abuse, some for manic depression, some for bi-polar disorder. Nobody was really crazy, but everyone had some kind of friction at home.)

I asked when the f-ck I could get out. They said that was just the attitude that would keep me in. Ah ha! Really? Finally my insurance ran out and suddenly I'm cured?!! I'm discharged and lying to people when I tell them I learned my lesson. Really I was just confused as to what I was supposed to have learned - to clean the garage and hall closet more often?!

During college, I started to come out of my shell. It was a more diverse environment with more ideas and people from all over the world. I liked it and finally started to feel like I fit in. I took to writing. I started stringing for newspapers. I got fired from the Arizona State University student newspaper, along with two fellow writers, for faxing a crude message to some hack at The Arizona Republic whom we spotted one day plagiarizing his cross-town paper colleague. Couple years later I was writing for that same Republic.

Cults are in the news sometimes in places like Arizona. Lots of open space, lots of time to plot, I guess. Combine my fear of the motivations of others - culled from my years growing up - with some of the real-life cults in the media, and BOOM: your feature film Bryan Loves You.

Which cult is actually depicted? I can't tell you that. That nefarious shit reported on your movie's homepage and intermittently in the media: Did that happen? Yes. Is it just marketing? No.

"You made the movie for peanuts yet you have honest-to-god actors such as Tony Todd, George Wendt, Tiffany Shepis and a host of others. How?" This is my eighth year in Los Angeles and my second movie (my first one was a comedy about why it's funny to eliminate fast food chains and mock corporate greed; distribution pending). Since I abandoned my initial profession of newspaper scribe after a career epiphany, I've had no life to speak of because it's been nothing but pure unadulterated work since I moved here in 2000.

I acted for most of my life, so I know how actors like to be treated (simply give them room). I respect and nurture our crews and I think that makes them stick around. Show people respect and give them something of merit to be a part of, and I think things will fall into place. Or at least that's what I hope is happening for our movie.

Shoreline Entertainment recently signed the movie and for the next few weeks is presenting it to the marketplace at AFM in Santa Monica. By the new year, we should have a release date. When people watch Bryan Loves You, I hope it's one of the creepiest things they've ever seen. Living through the events that inspired the movie certainly creeped me out to the point that I'll never completely rest easy.

The film Bryan Loves You screens at the AFI Fest now in progress.

top image: Seth Landau, left and George Wendt in "Bryan Loves You"