LIVING WITH AIDS

Director Terence Brown turns an educational film into art

By Desiree Stone

After viewing Terence Brown’s documentary film Bailey Boushay House: A Living History about the national example for an AIDS Hospice in Seattle, I prepared to meet the filmmaker approaching the subject.

An unassuming Nebraska-born 37 year-old man in blue jeans and a casual button up shirt of probable Irish roots sauntered into the library’s vestibule friendly, professional, ready to answer all my questions.

Getting down to business about the film, Terence Brown spoke of his filmmaking process as more of a storyteller’s medium. He explains he fell into filmmaking documentaries and that his passion was an evolution beginning after living fifteen years in Pennsylvania and graduating from Bard College in New York. His first filmmaking experience started when he taught himself how to edit after he filmed the birth of his son Jack, now five years old. This simple creative work planted the seed in his mind that perhaps making documentary films was a possible profession.

Fast forward five years and several filmmaking experiences under his belt, Brown acquired a reputation as an apt filmmaker for various organizations to call upon to convey their vision such as Microsoft, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Pravda Studios, a journey that led him to Virginia Mason Hospital, the benefactor to Bailey Boushay House. Financier to the film work Executive Producer Kathleen Paul appealed to Brown to document the hospice’s history and the people involved. Bailey Boushay started out as an in-house project for public relations, and developed into a documentary with artistic potential. With Brown at the helm along with his Director of Photography Ryan McMackin, the film project began to take the shape of a creative narrative.

A sound stage was used for the interviews, HD cameras, mini 35mm, and a lens converter with swing tilt captured in three days the small gems and human artifacts encased in the walls left behind by the dead and memorialized by the living; the story of dying with dignity at a national ground-breaking hospice turned into an oral history.

In three days at Bailey Boushay, Brown was able to gather the important history of the organization, the Seattle history through the lens of the AIDS crisis in one community. Initially, Bailey Boushay House was to be an internal film perhaps for fundraising and education but after Brown reviewed the interviews and the work of his director of photography, a shared passion about the human stories grew and Brown became motivated to commit beyond his projected time. Despite budget, and going beyond what was once a client and agency relationship, the film turned into a collaborative effort to produce a cinematic gem. The discovery that Brown had a narrative film documentary and his almost undivided attention was the bright spot; time away from his family was the hard part, with the project all-consuming. At times his wife Corrie Frasier says, “It’s like he has gone fishing in Alaska.”

Then there was sleep deprivation, the long hours, and, as his commitment became not voyeuristic but one of empathy, “It hit me in a personal way how many people were lost.” His own exhaustion in a visceral sense of made the loss and desperation known to Brown. He found through each stage of his work he could not help befriending the sick, the healthy helping the sick, and the sick who helped each other.

Not just another film to pass by once he completed his work to move on to the next, Terence Brown got imprinted by the story.

“I feel lucky to be in this profession that has allows me to pick and choose,” he says. “I would rather be in a position to tell stories.”

Brown humbly plays down his work as a filmmaker as simply a storyteller but it is not to say he does not have his favorite filmmakers that may indiscreetly influence the creative subtext of his work. The works of Scorcese, also a documentary artist, Julian Schnabel and Spike Lee with his documentary 4 Little Girls, all have had a positive effect. Going beyond the conventions as a hired documentary filmmaker for a medical facility, Brown felt it was necessary to bring a personal empathy to create a narrative that could exist as both art and legacy to its subject.

“You have to get close to this kind of work to do it justice,” Brown says. An hour and ten minutes later, the interview over, Brown admitted this was his first interview. I told him he did a good job confessing the inner workings of an artist’s sacred methods. We shook hands, I headed for the elevator and Brown drifted into the aisles of books on the ninth floor.

Director Terence Brown