On January 5, 2006, the day Daniel Arthur Miller died alone on the
cement floor of a cell in the Marin County Jail, he was only 59, and
he’d been homeless for fifteen years. Upon seeing his cut-open corpse
on a coroner’s table — “even with the blood, there was a
peacefulness about him that gave him back ten years of his life”
— his sons Logan and Noah Miller vowed to honor him
by making a film based on his story and theirs: a story of how alcohol
and gambling destroyed a working-class American family, robbing a man
of his dignity, his relationship with his wife and children, and
finally his life.
That was quite a vow, considering that the identical twin brothers
had neither a bankroll nor significant Hollywood contacts at the time.
Yet last year, their film Touching Home became reality. Written,
directed, and produced by the Miller twins, it stars such talents as Ed
Harris, Brad Dourif, and Robert Forster. (Harris, of course, plays the
dad.) How did this happen? The twins tell all about “our moviemaking
hell-ride” in their lively but poignant book Either You’re In or
You’re in the Way, which they will discuss at Moe’s Books
(2476 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley) on Monday, May 11.
“We share everything,” the Millers write. “It’s been like that since
the womb. … We have one cell phone, one computer, and one car between
us. … We’ve always been best friends and have always helped each
other, except when we tried to resolve our conflicts by punching one
another.” Each calls the other Bro, and they don’t even fight over
women. “If there’s only one princess, then Bro can have her. We cook
for each other and serve more food to the other guy.”
They hadn’t planned to be filmmakers. They’d planned to be baseball
stars: “It had been our dream since we had dreams.” But when “baseball
didn’t work out … we had no backup plan, limited education, no
résumé for any job above manual labor.” (Tellingly, they
write “résumé” in the singular, as if this, too, would of
course be shared.) So, while working as bingo callers and club
bouncers, they started writing a screenplay about their youth in
Lagunitas — “a town of a couple hundred outlaws and outcasts
doing their best to live off the grid” — and Fairfax, where their
mom was a gardener and their dad an alcoholic roofer who went so wild
that the boys considered him “on Mars” while under the influence.
When they last saw him, two months before he died, they told him
about the screenplay. “Who’s gonna play me?” he asked the twins. “He’s
gotta be good-looking.” 7:30 p.m., free. MoesBooks.com
