Flutterby™! : In Or In The Way

There was once this in-production movie called "Winston" that I've mentioned a time or two here. When we lived out in Lagunitas they were filming in Forest Knolls and Fairfax and Nicasio, and a few evenings we went down to stand way back and watch take after take while the crew bustled around, and we chatted with Jeremy Zajonc, the line producer of the show, a few of those evenings.

That film became Touching Home, with Ed Harris, Brad Dourif, directed, produced, and acted in by Noah and Logan Miller, west Marin local boys. Their mom lived in a shack in Fairfax, and their dad, the subject of the film, lived in a shed out in Woodacre and then in a Scotch Broom grove out nearer to where we lived in Lagunitas. I'm not totally sure of the timeline, but it's likely that I gave him a ride while he was hitch-hiking home from drinking in Fairfax before he died in the Marin County jail.

The way they tell the story, during post the editor wasn't a morning person so they worked from 10:30 AM to 10:30 PM, but the Miller brothers are morning people, who got up at 5. By the time the film had gotten to editing they'd pitched the process of making the movie so many times, and the pitch always went from the beginning up to wherever they were in the process at that time, that they used that spare time to just start writing. The result is their book Either You're In, Or You're In The Way. I read it. Damn good "pull yourself up" story, decent in the tearjerker category, and the local valley boys could use a little help getting to bestseller status. Go buy it and read it.

Last night we went to see them talk down at Book Passage, got the two copies we'd already bought signed by Logan, Noah, and two more copies because this is a book about West Marin and the area we know, and it's also the type of story that some folks we know should read. Tonight we're going down to The Rafael to see Touching Home for the first time. It's (long) sold out, but they've also got this event called Bookstock 2009 that's gonna happen at AT&T Park down in San Francisco on June 6^th. To get two tickets, buy the book at a participating retailer. We'll be taking the ferry in and back.

Some clips from the movie with a little narrative by Noah and Logan at In Or In The Way, here's the longest clip from Touching Home I've found, a few updates over at Tumbler, Bookstock Twitter feed, Miller Brothers Twitter feed.

Buy the book. See the movie. Help get the movie a distribution deal.