Tag: Nobody

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Somebody

“It’s pretty incredible,” says Alan Spearman, laughing over the strange events that have brought Nobody, his 62-minute documentary, to the attention of daytime TV watchers. The Commercial Appeal photographer and emerging filmmaker is overwhelmed by the e-mail he’s gotten since Nobody, the lyrical film he made with fellow CA shutterbug Lance Murphy, was featured on Dr. Phil last week in an episode titled “Hobo Daddy.”

“We’ll just have to see if it leads to anything,” Spearman says, fingers crossed.

Nobody, a visually rich meditation on homelessness, won the 2006 Hometowner Award at the Indie Memphis Film Festival and was later selected to screen at the Full Frame Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Full Frame is widely considered the premier festival for documentaries in North America.

In July, the filmmakers were contacted by representatives of Dr. Phil and told that the TV therapist wanted to build an entire program around Jerry Bell, the homeless Mississippi river rat at the heart of Spearman and Murphy’s award-winning film. A month later, Murphy led a production crew from the show through a wooded area in Biloxi, Mississippi, looking for Bell’s camp.

Dr. Phil learned about Bell when Kayla, Bell’s daughter, who hadn’t seen her father since she was 2, contacted him.

“I just couldn’t think of why anybody would want to make a film of some homeless, dirty guy floating in a blow-up boat down the Mississippi River,” Kayla told Dr. Phil as she and her mother Glori raked Bell over the coals for not paying child support.

“I don’t think they were completely fair to Jerry,” Spearman says, questioning the facts and timelines presented on the show. “Besides, our goal as filmmakers wasn’t to glorify Jerry’s lifestyle or to hold him up as some kind of role model. Lance and I wanted to make a film about the life of a person you might pass on the street every day without ever even seeing.”

“Jerry had no idea who Dr. Phil was; he just wanted to see his daughter,” Murphy explains. “I did everything I could to prepare him. I figured that the show would be confrontational, and for the most part, it was.” But it wasn’t all Jerry Springer-esque either.

When Murphy and Bell arrived in Los Angeles for the taping, a producer for Dr. Phil offered to pay for a set of false teeth for Jerry “if it would make him more comfortable.” Bell said yes.

“The whole teeth thing has been an ongoing theme,” Murphy says. “When Jerry left for the Gulf Coast in his canoe, I wanted to make sure he had plenty to eat. So I’d gotten him these big tubs of peanut butter. But it was crunchy peanut butter. He said, ‘You know I can’t eat that.'”

After taping, Bell was flown back to Biloxi where a limo was waiting for him. Spearman says Bell asked the driver to take him to the edge of the woods and drop him off. “We didn’t get that on film,” Spearman says sadly.

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News The Fly-By

Today’s Tom Sawyer

Somewhere on the forested northern tip of Mud Island, there is a battered, yellow canoe covered with handwritten notes and lying in a thick patch of poison ivy. Just a few yards away, the bluff drops off steeply into the river. The nobody who owned the canoe camped here until a hard storm blew his makeshift tent into the water below.

The unfortunate river rat’s name was Jerry, the subject of Nobody, a visually poetic documentary by first-time filmmakers Alan Spearman and Lance Murphy, both employed by The Commercial Appeal. In 2006, Nobody won Indie Memphis’ Hometowner Award for best documentary film. More recently, it was selected for the Full Frame Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, widely considered America’s premiere festival for documentary filmmaking.

“This really is as good as we could have hoped for,” Spearman says, noting that this is the most prestigious festival selection for a first-time filmmaker from Memphis. Although Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow triumph at Sundance is now part of industry lore, Brewer made his first splash outside of Memphis with his film The Poor & Hungry, winning best digital feature at the strategically located but seldom heralded Hollywood Film Festival.

Although Spearman and Murphy’s film is gaining attention, its subject is still missing. The last anyone saw of Jerry were the shots Spearman took as he paddled his new canoe into the Mississippi, heading toward the Gulf. Fears that Jerry might have died in Hurricane Katrina were allayed when the affable vagabond left messages on his sister’s answering machine. But nobody knows the whereabouts of the man who tried to outrun his personal tragedies by devoting his life to the river.

“I think we’ve always kind of hoped that the movie would find him,” Spearman says. “Maybe he did what he said he wanted to do and went all the way down to Florida. Nobody is showing in Key West and Ft. Lauderdale.”

Nobody will also screen at the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis on Thursday, April 12th at 7 p.m. as part of the Emerging Pictures/Full Frame Digital Extension, which programs notable Full Frame documentaries in venues all around the country.

“There’s a digital participation award connected to the [satellite] festival,” Spearman says. “So it would be really good to get a lot of people to come out, see the film, and vote for the home team.”

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Out of Nowhere

It’s like a moment out of The Blair Witch Project. The day is racing to a close and the shadows are long and deep when Alan Spearman and Lance Murphy decide it might be best to split up. The Johnson grass is head-high on the forested northern tip of Mud Island. Old paths have been hidden by new growth since the last time the two filmmakers visited.

“Maybe we should try to get in and get out while there’s still light,” Spearman suggests, asking if anybody is particularly susceptible to poison ivy.

Spearman and Murphy are looking for a ruined rubber canoe that once belonged to their friend Jerry, a homeless man who kept his camp along the river on what would have been high-dollar real estate had he lived in a house rather than an improvised tent. It’s a spiritual touchstone for the professional journalists and neophyte filmmakers who’ve spent the past five years working on Nobody, a documentary following Jerry’s incredible river journey from Marion, Indiana, to Memphis.

“It’s over here,” Spearman eventually calls out, maneuvering through a thicket of vines and spider webs. Murphy, who had been exploring to the east, announces that he’s on his way and crunches through the leaves and branches. The two men fawn over the deflated yellow boat like a lost treasure.

“You know, Jerry used to write things on the canoe,” Murphy says. “It’s gone now, but there was writing all over it. There was a note from his son.”

Jerry came into Spearman’s and Murphy’s life unexpectedly when The Commercial Appeal photographers received a phone call from the Coast Guard, who thought somebody might be interested in talking to the good-natured homeless man who’d given up on society after the death of his mother and fell in love with America’s big river.

Jerry on the streets in Nobody

“He’s really like a modern-day Huck Finn,” Murphy says. “We wanted to show that these people that Mark Twain wrote about are still around. And still pretty much the same.”

He and Spearman work their way to the riverbank and look out over the dark waters swirling with the last pink and purple rays of the sun. They marvel at how the river can become an addiction and speak enviously of the vistas known only to those who live on the river.

Jerry is an alcoholic and a drifter but he’s not a panhandler. At one point in the film he declares, “I’m too proud to ever ask anybody for a dime.”

Nobody opens with a shot of Jerry shaving, watching his reflection in a small, jagged shard of mirror. It then moves from one breathtaking and provocative image to the next, calling into question all of our culture’s preconceived notions about homelessness and community.

From one homeless man’s recipe for cooking up pigeon and possum to Jerry’s own revealing commentaries on birth, death, and what lies between, Nobody alternately repulses and intrigues.

Spearman and Murphy have taken a formal approach to their film, and the contrived images may get under the skin of documentary purists.

“We’re prepared for that,” Spearman says confidently, brandishing a flashlight. “Now maybe we should try to get out of the woods while we can still see where we’re going.”

Nobody

(Hometowner Documentary Competition)

Thursday, October 19th

8:45 p.m.