Gumption and luck make stars out of West Marin twins

In the hush of the high-ceilinged Kabuki Theater, the film Touching Home rolled before a sold-out audience at the 2008 San Francisco International Film Festival last week.

At the back of the theater, two identical young men in suits sat on the floor and watched the struggles of their early 20s play out on the screen.

After being inches away from playing professional baseball, Logan and Noah Miller landed back home in Nicasio. They tested their bond as brothers and their commitment to their dreams, while coping with their alcoholic, homeless and loving father.

Logan and Noah, twins from West Marin, had no background in making movies when they decided to write, direct, produce and act in Touching Home. What they did have was perseverance learned from years of being athletes, hope, and 17 credit cards.

After two years of gumption and luck, the pair had recruited actors Ed Harris, Brad Dourif and Robert Forster; secured a Panavision New Filmmaker grant, which gave them access to professional cameras and discounted film; hired a film crew; and learned how to act.

“Many, many people told us we were insane, but we’ve always loved the people who’d say, ‘Why not? You never know,’” said Noah and Logan, who complete each other’s sentences, tossing them back and forth between them like a baseball.

EARLY YEARS, AND BASEBALL
The brothers started life fighting, they said. Born six weeks premature and weighing three pounds each, Logan had a hole in his heart and Noah’s appendix ruptured. Several surgeries later, the boys grew up tough, athletic and prepared to take on unfavorable odds.

They spent their early years in Lagunitas, gradually moving east through Forest Knolls and landing in Fairfax, where they lived with their mom as they attended Manor School and then Sir Francis Drake High.

West Marin remained their stomping grounds. They fished, hiked, and spent weekends with their father, who lived in a trailer in the San Geronimo Valley. In the summer they would pull crawdads out of Lagunitas creek, and they played baseball on every field in the area, they said – guaranteed.

“I don’t even remember the first time that we played catch,” Noah said. “I mean, there were two of us; it was just something we always did.”

They do remember one of the first places they played, though: an old horse pasture on Tamal Road, which has since been built over with houses.

In addition to playing, the boys started working early on. Their father became homeless when the boys were teenagers – but he held down a job as a roofer and construction worker even when he was living in his pickup.

“We started going to jobs with our pops when we were really young,” they said, “We would clean up shingles that fell off the roof, and used to sell them in front of the Cala Market in Fairfax.”

Versed in manual labor, the boys pinned their future on baseball. They were good, and when they graduated from Sir Francis Drake High, they were drafted into the minor leagues. Close enough to taste the big leagues, the two worked hard despite the challenges.

Eventually, Logan played with the Blue Jays; Noah played college ball for Southern Arkansas. But at age 24 the two had become old men by baseball standards, and they landed back home with a resume that included nailing shingles, digging ditches, and not much else.

So they decided to make a movie.

CHANGING CAREERS
The idea hit them when they visited a friend in Los Angeles, the twins said. They call it their epiphonic summit.

“When you’re there, the allure of the movie industry is…” Logan said, and Noah finished with, “…palpable.”

Making a movie about their lives, and their father, seemed like a crazy but possible dream. Friends and strangers had always been fascinated with their life story: their father who was homeless but went to work every day; their charisma as twins who did everything together.

They bought a book on screenwriting and finished a draft of the screenplay on cheap spiral-bound notebooks within a month. It was terrible, they said, and though they wrote 11 different scripts they never put any serious effort into turning the drafts into drama.

Then, on January 5, 2006, their father died in Marin County jail. His loss, and the undignified way that his body was treated, filled them with a sense of helplessness and anger that needed an outlet. Turning their screenplay into a film became a way to heal, and they threw all of their energy and determination into the project.
“We said, ‘We have to at least try to do something positive with that guilt and pain,’” said Noah. “We bought a whole bunch of books on movie production.”

Less than two months later, the two had been awarded the New Filmmaker grant. Two months after that, they took their movie trailer to the San Francisco International Film Festival on a laptop, with the idea of finding some way – any way – to show it to Ed Harris.

“He was the only guy to play our dad,” Logan said. “He looks just like him.”

After failing to intercept Harris on the way into the theater, and after failing to get a microphone during his Q & A, Noah simply tried to walk backstage, with Logan on his heels. Though they were stopped, an employee pass on their request for a few minutes of Harris’ time, and they wound up showing the actor their trailer in an alley, while he smoked a cigarette.

He took their script and their phone number; he read it and liked it; the rest is history.

Everything about the creation of Touching Home is improbable. The twins first funded the filming of a trailer on credit cards; then they recruited a major star, who thought they had funding; then they found the funding –and they still had to direct, star in and produce the movie.

And the film that eventually appeared in the Kabuki is a polished, tender film that may be, more than anything, an ode to West Marin.

TOUCHING HOME
The Miller brothers’ film is an emotional, allegorical version of their life. Facts are blurred and mythologized into what becomes, for the viewer, a greater truth.

Maybe the grandmother in the film was a great-grandmother in real life; maybe they worked with their father as roofers instead of at the Lunny quarry. But for the viewer, that doesn’t matter – and the twins were perceptive enough to know that.

The movie gets rolling when both Noah and Logan return home, temporarily spit out by the world of baseball.

On the long drive to California they had assured each other they would play ball again as soon as they regrouped; but failure, romance and working alongside their alcoholic dad strained their commitment to baseball and their relationship to each other.

While the plot of the movie focuses on the boys struggle to return to baseball, the emotional meat lies in its subtle exploration of the complexities of the illness that is alcoholism, and the many ways that a goodhearted man can fail himself and his sons.

To zero gravity and beyond: an interview with Astronaut Leroy Chiao

Dr. Leroy Chiao was a NASA astronaut for 15 years, logging over 200 days in space (and 36 hours on spacewalks) before retiring to aid a private spaceflight company called Excalibur Almaz and raise his 14-month-old twins, Henry and Caroline. Theme interviewed Dr. Chiao from his home in Houston. Though he went into space on four missions, most of our conversation involved his life on the International Space Station, where he lived for six and a half months with Russian astronaut Salizhan Sharipov, whom Chiao called “the brother I never had.”

Theme: Let’s start at the beginning. What does launch feel like?
Dr. Leroy Chiao: It depends: if you’re on a Russian Soyuz rocket, it’s so smooth you can’t actually feel liftoff. It feels quite different on the Space Shuttle—when those solid rockets light, it’s like someone kicked the back of your chair. You’re getting shaken around a lot and you feel the acceleration pushing you back in your seat as you take off. Then after the solid rocket boosters come off, it’s glass smooth. It’s not that uncomfortable, it just takes a little more effort to breathe. It’s like someone’s sitting on your chest.

Read interview at:
http://www.thememagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=203&Itemi
d=109