Interview with Pete Schuermann (Director, Haze) and Michael Lanahan (Executive Producer, Haze)

On September 17, 2004, University of Colorado at Boulder freshman Lynn Gordon Bailey, Jr., ("Gordie") was found dead at the Chi Psi fraternity hourse, a just a few weeks after he arrived on campus. The night before, he and other pledges were encourage a potent mix of whisky and wine. At one point, Gordie became visibly intoxicated and was left to “sleep it off” on a couch. He was found dead the next morning, face down on the floor. No one had called for help.

In response to this tragedy, Gordie’s family started the Gordie Foundation (http://www.gordie.org) to educate students and their parents about the dangers of alcohol. The organization’s goal isn’t to make kids stop drinking; instead, its mission is to provide young people the skills to navigate the dangers of alcohol, binge drinking, peer pressure and hazing. The movie Haze is one of teaching tools; this educational documentary is meant to foster discussion. Hulu recently spoke to Executive Producer Michael Lanahan (also Gordie’s stepfather) about Gordie and the topic at hand, as well as Director Pete Schuermann. — Rebecca Harper, Hulu.com

Can you tell me a little about Gordie?

Michael Lanahan: I probably had a very objective perspective on him because he was a stepson, although he was with me from two and a half on. I always called him the Renaissance kid. He was just so talented in so many different ways, very smart. I think he missed one question on the math SAT. He taught himself how to play the guitar on the Internet, won the drama award in high school. He was also co-captain of the football team; a big guy, 6-foot-1, 230 pounds. He started on the No. 7-ranked high school lacrosse team in the country; he was very multitalented. He dealt with different universes of people. He did an acting class and they accused him of being a dumb jock; he went to football practice and they accused him of flying around in leotards, and he really didn’t care. He just laughed and just loved being around people. He was a huge people person and loved having people to come together. He hated when people argued. We have on the website a “Band of Brothers,” which was the football team.

I think that’s what the fraternity was to him. While I certainly know he drank in high school — I’m not going to be a Pollyanna about that — I know that these guys and girls always had each other’s back. This generation is much better about drinking and driving, much better about seatbelts, much better about spending the night wherever they are, certainly compared to my generation. So they were very conscious of that, but they’d always tell each other when they’d had too much, or take care of each other. I think he thought he had that at college, although he’d only been at Colorado for four weeks. I thought that he had so many talents, and once he found something that he had a passion for, I knew he was going to be very successful.

He was just very talented. I think every parent would say that about their child, but I think just a wonderful person.

It sounds like everyone feels that way about him, as well.

We don’t always reflect on a person until he’s gone, but people said that about Gordie when he was alive. It was really amazing how much they appreciated him. His senior year, it was sort of the year of Gordie at his high school. Not that he was egotistical, but he was in the middle of everything, winning the drama award, being captain of the football team. He didn’t focus on his studies, because he didn’t see what return there was on that — he didn’t really get the transition from good grades to where you wanted to go to college and all that kind of stuff — but I guess in hindsight, he really didn’t have the time to fool around with that.

Why did the family decide to do an educational piece to reach out to college kids and society at large?

I think it’s a very human response. I can only speak for myself, but you go from shock to grief to anger to wanting to change the institution that allowed this to happen, to wanting to have someone to say this is something that cannot stand. Pretty quickly, you get through the grief and the shock, and you get through the anger because you can’t live with it. You realize you can’t change the University of Colorado. The best thing you can do is make sure that his life meant something, that nobody else would die a preventable, tragic death because of a lack of education.

I think one naturally presumes, maybe naively, that if people in the position of responsibility can see the environment that is creating the danger, that those natural leaders or people in the position of leadership will make the appropriate changes. I think we all go through life thinking that will happen, and we’re always naive in that, whether it be our government or educational institutions or corporations or religious organizations. You don’t get the leadership that you deserve or that is needed to make proper changes. We felt that the best way we could help other people understand this dangerous environment and foster change is for people to talk about it, and the only way they could talk about it is to understand it. We really had many audiences.

We’re finding out it’s really striking a chord with high school parents and high school seniors. Much more so than when I was in high school, principals of high schools all feel a responsibility to prepare seniors for their freshman year in college. That could be learning how to write a check, or how to use a credit card, or how to access resources that your parents were accessing for you. I think this whole alcohol issue is an issue that is almost a forbidden topic, a little bit like sex. It’s something that we somehow presume our kids are going to get the proper education for, but they really get it on the street corner. Alcohol is one of those taboo subjects that we sort of presume is a rite of passage, because we don’t think it’s as dangerous or misused as much as it is. I sound like an expert, don’t I? [Laughs]

This is stuff we’ve learned. If what we’ve learned in a very short period of time, through a tragic loss, can help other parents, then you feel good about the fact that you’re preventing another kid from dying. It’s the same reason that we initiated litigation against the national fraternity. We spoke to them for almost two years about how they could change their business model to make it safer, and they couldn’t identify one thing they could do to change, so we initiated litigation. It was just settled a couple months ago, where they agreed to two pages of changes under threat of going to a jury trial. What a tragedy that the leaders of a fraternal organization, a group of men, boys, wouldn’t do the right thing until they were forced to. When you get a bunch of guys running anything, I think you’ve got a catastrophe anyway, but that’s a personal thing.

We’re trying to do anything we can do to make sure that people will notice a dangerous environment and make changes. I must say it’s been very rewarding and people have reacted to the film, which encapsulates the message we’re trying to get out in terms of education, but in a very visual way. High school parents just email us and call us and thank us, the kids want to take that education to college and start one of our circles of trust, which is what we call our peer-to-peer groups on college campuses. Every time we say, “We’ve got to sort of let this go; we’ve done some good things,” we’ve got these people saying “Please don’t stop.” It puts wind under your wings. It’s a lot of effort to keep some of the things going. We initiated and partly funded what we call the Leadership Award, with Outside the Classroom, where we provide a $50,000 award to the president of a college or university that was at the forefront of making a change on this issue. Initially our thought was “How can we publicize the 10 worst colleges in the country?” [Laughs] You have to justify your opinion, but you very quickly come to the other side, which is a better way to do it and more positive, let’s talk about the people doing positive things and share why we feel that. We’re looking at initiating some changes in legislation in the state of Colorado, basically just trying to make people more aware of the environment and be part of the change.

Can you talk about this Circle of Trust program that you mentioned?

We’ve gone around to a lot of high schools and colleges and one thing I know is that no one is going to listen to me, one, because I’m too old.  These kids need to hear from their peers, who probably next to their parents, are the most respected group they listen to. There’s positive and negative peer pressure, so our thought was that if we could provide the tools for education but have the kids do it on their own and volunteer to do it, then our message gets sent in the proper format and venue, and you also develop some leadership traits in the kids that want to take this on.

My contention is that there are a lot of big issues out there today, whether it be the environment and going green, you could say the war in Iraq, lots of issues that these kids could be challenged to take on, but there are very few where they could have a dramatic impact immediately. It had to be something where they could be respected by their peers because they’re not preaching and they’re not talking at them, we’re not trying to tell these kids not to drink because we just don’t think it would be heard. We had a girl wanted to introduce the Circle of Trust and the film Haze at TCU in Fort Worth here, and she had 750 people show up for the movie. That she could introduce a really good effort that was helping her peers get educated, and also get positive response from the university and students, whether they’re her age or not, that’s very positive feedback about trying to make change in an area. Alcohol affects everybody, whether it be somebody they know in the family, or a friend, or someone they met in college, or themselves, I don’t think anybody doesn’t have a story about it. It sort of feeds on itself, and we just felt it had to be peer to peer. I sort of call the Circle of Trust our platform, almost like a web platform, and our responsibility is to provide content. And frankly, it’s a very tough job. I think the most substantial [thing] we provide to that platform is the film. The card was one of the things that we did early on that got a very good response. You could carry it in your wallet and if you had a question about a friend, you could pull it out. In the confusion of somebody being passed out, you don’t really remember what someone may have said.

[We’ve gotten] scores of stories about just educating these kids that the amount of alcohol it takes to pass out is so close to the number of drinks it takes to kill you. That’s the lesson I never got, and we never talked about it with Gordie. This is pretty eye-opening stuff. I think the film Haze provides another platform where, if you have 750 kids watching this at the same time, they all leave with the same information about the topic. So if a freshman is asked to do something at a fraternity that we’ve already shown is dangerous, he or she can speak up, or a fraternity brother even feels foolish for asking someone to do it. Or if someone has found a friend that is passed out, they all have a common dialogue to deal with it. It’s not just “What did you hear anecdotally from your parents?” They all come away with that common framework, if you will. I find that really positive. It’s frankly a result I haven’t anticipated.

Below, Hulu speaks to Pete Schuermann, the Director of Haze.

What was your goal in directing this film?

Pete Schuermann: When we were approached to do Haze, we actually were not approached to do a documentary. In 2002, I had done a show along with my producer, Rob Watt, a straightforward educational piece that was hosted and scripted. That was seen by the Gordie Foundation. They called us in to do a similar program, with their goal being awareness to what had happened to Gordie, using his story to generate awareness about how dangerous drinking on campus can be. I had suggested at that point, with the resources that they had at their disposal, that we actually do a documentary rather than an educational piece. They were in favor of that, but always the goal was not only to tell Gordie’s story, but to serve as a bridge of education as to the severity of the problem that’s going on on campuses and with young people in general.

What role do you think parents and universities play in all this? Looking at some of the comments for the film, it seems easy to say “his parents should have prepared him better,” or “the college and campus police should have shut these parties down more often.”

When we started making the film, of course I had my own ideas. I don’t have any kids, but I had my own ideas as to what might be the cause, why this behavior is spiking, why incidences and fatalities are going up, and so on. None of them proved to be supported by a lot of the experts that we talked to. I kind of thought that media had a lot of influence. Everywhere we turned, there seemed to be a different opinion. Research has never been solid enough to really support what exactly is going on. It’s kind of like a Columbine incident or something like that. Everybody has a variety of opinions but psychologically, nobody really can point a finger in one direction. Through the course of making the film, ultimately the only real common denominator that came up over and over was that it starts at home with the education of parent to child. That was one thing we tried to stress because, no matter where else we might point a finger, say the Greek system is too dangerous, or this university is worse than that university. It just gives a false sense of sanctuary to a parent out there. “Well, as long as my kid avoids the Greek system, they’ll be OK.” We really wanted to avoid that because that really was not the case. Really, the only answer we felt was that the education starts at home. Not that Gordie’s parents were neglectful in how they raised Gordie, but certainly not as aware of the environment out there and how dangerous it can be. Simply starting at home and talking about the potential for fatality with alcohol is certainly a possibility.

What role do you think the Greek system does play in all this?

Personally, I think the Greek system ... it would be too easy to generalize. However, they do seem to get more negative press than positive press. There’s a lot of good and bad. The bad is they’re turning their backs to the problem, maybe in a lot of cases banking on the party environment and turning a blind eye to just how serious that can be. While plenty of fraternities are being conscious about this and trying to make steps in a positive direction, and overwhelmingly a lot of sororities are, still, if you’re on a college campus that has kind of a prevalent party life, the hotbed for that tends to be certain fraternity houses. In that case, I think it plays a large role, but certainly it’s not the only role. It’s something that needs to be looked at very seriously, just how much are you helping the situation as an organization or making it worse. Again, I can’t fully blame them, but it certainly plays a big role.

Has Haze prompted any changes at any universities or fraternities?

Yeah, I think the strongest thing that we started to change — one thing that was eye-opening to me back when I did my original educational piece — was just simply the knowledge to a lot of people that if somebody has had the enough alcohol in their system to lead them to pass out, or is becoming incoherent, this is a dangerous situation, and the simple act of lying them down to sleep it off is not a good idea, where it was commonplace to think

“Oh, just let them sleep it off, keep an eye on them.” Well, that’s when it can be a very critical time. I think we’ve been able to at least change that mindset. We’ve seen maybe two, three hundred universities, and there’s plenty more out there, but we’ve seen hundreds adopt Haze and try to include it as part of their educational process when it comes to alcohol. They’re certainly making an effort. How much it’s changing? That’s difficult to say. I think we’re happy with making a dent in the statistic for now, but it’s going to take a generation of ingraining that in children at a younger age before we start to see real effects and change.

What’s happening with this film now? I know there were some festivals and speaking engagements. Is anything being done proactively now?

Honestly, once it hit Hulu, we weren’t sure what was going to happen. In a lot of ways, that met the goal of the Gordie Foundation and [Gordie’s family] the Lanahans. We really didn’t have any aspirations of seeing this go, say, a traditional film route with a theatrical release or something. They literally were not looking for a financial return on it, either. They wanted as many people to see it as possible, so that goal was certainly met by having it up there on the Internet and free to watch. Despite that, it’s been gaining momentum in the festival circuit. We’ve had inquiries from a lot of different avenues saying “Where can it possibly go now?” because there’s still many people who might not choose to watch the movie on the Internet or are simply still not aware of it. They might find it more if it’s shown to them at a campus. The number of campuses picking it up is still growing. We made a shorter version, the high-school length version at 30 minutes, and we’ve been at four festivals to date with Newport, Rhode Island, coming up. It’s won one of those. We’re looking pretty good. The more it’s known and just the name is out there, more people have heard of it, and the more likely people will search for it.

What do you think the most important lesson of the film?

Keeping an eye out. For parents, this is not what school used to be when you were younger. It really isn’t. Every day, they’re coming up with more kind of insane games to play, things that would just boggle your mind. You can search “drinking games college campuses” on Google and some stuff that you’d never imagine to exist would come up.

Yeah, I think YouTube makes it so that you try to outdo one another, make it big and go viral.
Absolutely. That’s a point we hit on. Gosh, we could elaborate on it some more and even do a whole other film on it, the fact that everybody’s looking for their 15 minutes. The way to get it nowadays is not through achievement, intellectual ability or even sports ability, but basically by doing stupider than the next guy. We’re almost devolving in a way.
© 2009 Hulu LLC.

Before directing Haze, idiosyncratic indie-director Pete Schuermann was probably best known for a host of features and shorts, that in his own words, could best be described as "wacko." But after hearing Lynn "Gordie" Bailey's arresting and tragic story, Pete realized that a conventionally structured feature could be just as revolutionary as the experimental film he had pursued for most of his career. Rebecca Harper of Hulu sits down with Director Pete Schuermann and Executive Producer Michael Lanahan (also Gordie's stepfather) to discuss Haze.

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