SeanPaulMurphyVille: In Memoriam: Tom Brandau

Monday, March 8, 2021

In Memoriam: Tom Brandau

My old friend Tom Brandau died of cancer on March 3, 2021.

I am shocked by the news. This was not Tom's first battle with cancer. He found himself on the brink of death five or six years ago. Death seemed so certain that he put up a moving goodbye post on Facebook. It was an excellent and thoughtful farewell I wish I had kept, but it seemed unnecessary. Tom ended up in an experimental program that put the cancer in total remission. Or so it seemed.

I met Tom in the Film Lab at Towson University in the early 1980s. We were both Mass Communications majors, but my initial area of concentration was journalism. I switched over to film halfway through my sophomore year. Not that it mattered one way or another. I never intended to work in the field. I anticipated working as a computer programmer at the Social Security Administration after graduation like my father and his brothers. So why not study something I enjoyed? Movies, not newspapers, were my obsession.

Film was nothing like journalism. In journalism, you worked alone and that suited me fine. But you needed the help of your fellow students to make films, especially in the higher level courses. You needed to make friends or die. So I made friends. It's funny. I can't remember the names of any of my fellow students from the journalism classes I attended, but I remember all of the serious students in the film program. Like Tom.

Tom was already well-established in the Film Department. He was a serious filmmaker in every sense of the term. He was serious about his studies. He was serious about film theory. And he made serious films. Tom wasn't content just to thrill someone or make them laugh. He wanted to make people think as well. That separated him from the rest of us. He was the kind of guy who would hang quotes on the wall from Godard like "Film is truth at 24 frames a second." That was Tom.

The Film Lab was very competitive. Everybody worked on everybody else's films, and everybody wanted everyone to succeed... But not necessarily as much as they did. As ridiculous as it may sound, some folks from that group still measure themselves against their college rivals nearly forty years later. I don't think Tom did. I know I don't.

Being more of a hobbyist in the department than a serious contender, I got to enjoy everyone's work on its own merits. I will never forgot the first film I saw from Tom. It was a short, black & white film shot on 16mm about a World War I period firing squad execution called At Dawn. It was very arresting. Thankfully he put it on YouTube. Here it is:

If you needed a rival, Tom was definitely the guy to beat. He jumped to the head of the class with a documentary about the whaling industry called Whales, LTD. Talk about ambition! A college student from Baltimore flies to Iceland to make a short documentary about whaling. Really? But that was Tom. He'd risk everything for a film. And this opportunity that paid off handsomely. The film was nominated for a student Academy Award. Here it is:

Our paths continued to cross after college. Tom was one of my first screenwriting collaborators. Tom and fellow Film Labber David Butler had visited the Soviet Union together. Discussing it later, Tom had an idea for a comedy about the communist leader of a small Eastern Europe country experiencing freedom for the first time while in New York City to address the United Nations. Tom didn't have time to write the script itself -- I believe he was leaving to LA to attend the American Film Institute -- but David and I finished it. The script got a lot of reads, but ultimately didn't sell.

Another commonality we shared was musician Mike Lane. Mike was Tom's best friend since childhood and he was also a high school buddy of mine. Tom directed a commercial/video for Mike's band The Sunday Cannons where I appeared as Mr. Melon Head. Here it is:

I could go on and on about the projects we worked on together. It was fun, but that all pales in comparison to one sentence Tom said to me at the funeral of my sister Laura, who killed herself in 1994. He put a sad hand on my shoulder and said, "Now you're a part of the Brotherhood."

Here's the backstory. Tom's father killed himself a decade earlier. He was the first person I met personally who had lost someone to suicide. His father's death was something he talked about as a fact -- and as a motivation -- but we never really discussed it in a truly emotional context. However, it was clear the incident cast a deep shadow over his life. He knew suicide and its effect on survivors.

At that moment at my sister's funeral, Tom sadly welcomed me into an organization no one volunteers to join: The Brotherhood of Suicide Survivors. I knew what he meant. He was saying, "I know what you're going through. I've been there, too, brother, and we're both going to get through it." On some deep but very real level, Tom shared some of his grief with me and took some of mine with him. We were part of a Brotherhood.

I don't think we ever discussed it again. We didn't have to. We were both artists and we dealt with our emotions through our art. I dealt with my sister's suicide in my memoir The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God and my brother Mark's subsequent suicide in my novel Chapel Street. Tom dealt with his father's suicide in his only feature film Cold Harbor.

Cold Harbor had a long history. The initial financing came from the inheritance Tom received after his father's suicide. There was some concern among his friends about Tom spending all of this nest egg on a film, but Tom was Tom. He was willing to put everything into his work. The story was about four brothers closing down their father's beach house after their father's death. It was a very thinly disguised roman a clef.

I read the script long before it became a film. I didn't give any notes. Although Tom would give lip service about wanting to make a film that would achieve success on the indie market, I knew the truth: This was a ghost he had to exorcise. Any notes would be irrelevant.

I wasn't involved in the shoot. Nor was there any thought that I would edit the movie. That job belonged to his old friend Wayne Hipley. Wayne edited the movie on film. However, I got involved near the end of post production when they switched over to the Avid system. My exact contribution is now lost in the haze of time. I know I worked on the trailer. There might have been a preliminary version, but I fine tuned it. I also re-edited a number of scenes throughout the film and reworked the climatic boat burning sequence.

I might have stayed on the film longer, but I was perhaps too insistent that Tom cut out a scene at the father's funeral I felt was ruined by a terrible performance. My philosophy is that you have to expect a wobbly performance or two in a low-budget indie, but you can't have one in the first five minutes. Tom was loathe to cut the scene because it was based on a real incident that made a point about grieving that wasn't echoed elsewhere. For him, it was the embodiment of Godard's philosophy that Film was Truth at 24 Frames a Second.

When I handed the editing reins over to his former student Mike Flanagan, who is now an important writer/director in Hollywood, I asked him to please find a way to cut that scene. When I went to the premiere, I was relieved to see that the scene was gone. Mike obviously had magic I did not possess. Here's the trailer:

After that screening, I congratulated Tom and asked him about his marketing plans. He shrugged off the question. It was never really about money or success. He said, to him, the most important thing was that now future generations in his family would know what happened and what he and his brothers went through. That's the way I feel about my books. That's the way we roll in The Brotherhood.

I saw less of Tom after he moved to teach at Minnesota State University, Moorhead, but we remained in touch. I was delighted when he found his wife Janet, and finally embraced the love he deserved. My heart goes out to her, and his family and all the students he impacted. I got teary-eyed reading all the tributes he received on Facebook from the people he touched. His life was shorter than it should have been, but it was important and well lived.

Rest in peace, my brother. Thanks for being there when I needed you.

Be sure to check out my memoir The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God, published by TouchPoint Press. It is my true story of first faith and first love and how the two became almost fatally intertwined.

Here are some sample chapters of The Promise:

Chapter 1 - A Photograph

Chapter 2 - My Death

Chapter 3 - Childhood

Chapter 4 - Saved!

Chapter 5 - The Promise

Chapter 6 - The Mission

Chapter 7 - Mission Accomplished
Chapter 15 - Quarter To Midnight

Be sure to check out my novel Chapel Street. It tells the story of a young man straddling the line between sanity and madness while battling a demonic entity that has driven his family members to suicide for generations. It was inspired by an actual haunting my family experienced.

You can buy the Kindle and paperback at Amazon and the Nook, paperback and hardcover at Barnes & Noble.

Learn more about the book, click Here.

Watch the book trailer: