Two brothers, 12 months, a filmmaking dream

Logan and Noah Miller accomplished the impossible — they made a feature film with an award-winning cast and crew despite having no experience, no money and no contracts. When their father died alone in a jail cell, Logan and Noah Miller vowed that “Touching Home” would be made as a dedication to their love for him. Their book “Either You’re In or You're In the Way” captures their experience writing, producing, acting and directing the feature film that is a tribute to their father. An excerpt.

Going Home
On January 5, 2006, our father died on the cement floor of a jail cell. He’d been in and out of jail over the past several years due to alcohol-related offenses, locked up this time since mid-December. He said nobody really messed with him in there because he was one of the oldest inmates, and the guys sort of respected him for that. He was also the resident artist. Our father spent his last Christmas and New Year’s behind bars. His name was Daniel Arthur Miller. He was fifty-nine.

Earlier in the year he’d been given a seat at the table with “the guys that run the joint,” as he put it, after one of them saw him drawing on a piece of paper at lunch. Valentine’s Day was approaching, and the guy asked if our dad would draw him a Valentine’s Day card for his girlfriend. No problem. Our dad drew the guy a card. The guy sent it to his girlfriend. She loved it. Word spread through the jailhouse, and by the time Valentine’s Day rolled around our dad had drawn cards for nearly every guy’s girlfriend in there. Free walls and refrigerators all over the county were displaying our dad’s love-work.

From then on, he was royalty. Whenever he was in the Marin County Jail there was always a seat waiting for him at the “don’t mess with us table” in the chow hall.

We walked out of Loews Theater on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica after watching “Walk the Line” for the second time.

We rarely watched movies in theaters. We were broke. This was high living, and to pay for a movie twice, well, that was downright profligate.

Noah turned on our cell phone. We had three messages.

“I’ll check them in a sec,” he said. “Let’s walk around a bit.”

During the movie both of us had unsettling thoughts, pre-monitions we were trying to ignore, though neither of us shared these thoughts with the other. We’d been thinking about our dad, reflecting on his situation, how to help him.

About a month earlier we were going to take him to see Cash on the big screen. We had come home to Northern California for the week of Thanksgiving and made plans to spend a day with him. It had been a long time since we’d all hung out. We were going to treat him to a nice restaurant or his favorite burger joint, eat a good steak or greasy cheeseburger, maybe both, and then go see Walk the Line, stuffing our faces with buttered popcorn and Milk Duds, tapping our feet to Cash.

Our dad had been homeless for the last fifteen years, mostly living in his truck, until it was confiscated by the courts ten months earlier. He’d been battling alcoholism his entire adult life and was now sleeping in a thicket of scotch broom, his “hideout” on a wooded hillside in Fairfax, a small town twenty miles north of San Francisco. We had given him a pager for Christmas years earlier so we could stay in touch. If we paged him and he didn’t call back within a couple hours he was either on a drinking binge or in jail. Otherwise, he was more reliable than Swiss time. He knew every pay phone in the area.

It was cold that week in November, the temperature dipping into the twenties. Early Monday morning we found our dad walking down the road, hands in his pockets, hunched over, brittle after a night in the woods. He was wearing a thick down jacket and backpack, incoherent, muttering to himself. We were supposed to meet him in town at 11 a.m. It was now 7 a.m., and we were happy to see him early, make a longer day out of it.

“Hey, Dad-o!” Logan yelled out the window as we pulled alongside him and stopped. “How you doing?”

He was shivering. It took him a moment to recognize us.

“Get in,” Logan said. “We’re gonna have a great day.”

He got in our car. The skin under his eyes was swollen from the cold, leaves in his hair. There was no energy to him, no happiness, no warmth of life. He usually lit up when he saw us. But there was no light today.

Tomorrow, he was going to start serving a thirty-day sentence in the Sonoma County Jail. He’d never been to the Sonoma County Jail before and didn’t know how he’d be treated, didn’t know if some young punk would mess with him or any of the other bullshit that can hit you in jail.

He didn’t know anybody in Sonoma County, and he was uneasy about it.

No worries, Dad-o, we told him.

Today was his day. We were going to spend some money on him, treat him to all the good stuff, whatever he wanted. But he said he couldn’t spend the day with us, wasn’t in the right state of mind to be around people, couldn’t sit inside a dark movie theater. He was in a bad way, the worst we’d ever seen him, like an abandoned dog on a lonely street. We just wanted to hug him and tell him everything was going to be all right.

He’d been a roofer for thirty-five years. But no one would hire him anymore. He said he was practically begging for a job. “It doesn’t feel good, you know . . .”

He’d lost his pride. And that’s what was most painful to see.

“We’re going to start making movies, Dad. You just gotta hang on for a few more years and then we’ll take care of you.”

“I can’t keep starting over . . .”

“Don’t worry,” we told him. “We’ll get through this.”

“You can let me out here,” he said.

We pulled over, sad, frustrated. We’d been watching our dad slowly kill himself for more than twenty-five years. A once vital and robust man, with limitless endurance and strength, was now weak and exhausted. His teeth were rotting. His body was so dependent on alcohol now that he started having seizures when he didn’t drink. He had his first seizure alone in the woods and said it scared him pretty bad, didn’t know what it was. He woke up on his back, staring up at the trees, couldn’t remember how he got there but knew he hadn’t been drinking. Then he had a seizure in jail, and they diagnosed him and started giving him meds. The meds sedated him. It was disturbing to see him that way, a man so far behind his eyes. But when he got out, the only medication he had to prevent the seizures was alcohol. The poison had become the cure.

Alcoholism steals the soul. Perhaps the most painful aspect is that it’s a gradual theft.

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