The Soloist: True Life, Book to Movie
By Bob Carolla, J.D., NAMI Media Relations Director
Read the book this summer. See the movie this fall. It’s a story about mental illness, homelessness, music and friendship that has already made the bestseller lists and could win an Academy Award. The book includes a tribute to Stella March, coordinator of NAMI’s Stigma Busters program. The movie includes several hundred “extras” cast from homeless residents of Los Angeles’ “Skid Row.”
The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music is the true story of musical prodigy Nathaniel Ayers, who developed schizophrenia while on full scholarship at the prestigious Julliard School of Music. He became a home-less person, living on the streets of Los Angeles, playing Beethoven on street corners on a battered two-string violin.
Ayers caught the eye of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who befriended him and began to write a series of columns about him in 2005. The series led to a city housing initiative for Skid Row, which provided $50 million over five years for permanent supportive housing, and also to $125 million in federal housing support.
In 2006, Lopez won a NAMI Outstanding Media Award for advocacy for the series, which also led to both the book and movie deals. Lopez’s friendship reconnected Ayers to a broader world. For the first time in decades, Ayers attended symphonies and baseball games. He moved indoors to Lamp Village, a “housing first” treatment program for homeless persons living with addictions or mental illness.
In the movie, actor Jamie Foxx, who won an Academy Award in 2005 for his portrayal of Ray Charles in Ray, will play Ayers. Robert Downey, Jr. will play Lopez. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1992 for his portrayal of Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin, and most recently has starred in the hit movie Iron Man.
The movie is expected to be released publicly sometime around Thanksgiving. The director is Joe Wright, who was nominated the past year for an Academy Award for his work in Atonement. In an interview for an article about the movie in The New Yorker magazine (may 5, 2008), Wright declared his desire to make the movie with people from Skid Row, “not just about the people from Skid Row.”
Dreamworks Productions has invested $50 million in making the picture; about the same amount that the city invested in supportive housing. About 5,000 homeless people live in the Skid Row area, 3,500 in shelters and 1, 800 on the street. The movie’s production budget represents $10,000 for every Skid Row resident. If the movie succeeds in raising public awareness and understanding about mental illness and homelessness, and putting “a human face” on individuals who live on the streets, the indirect benefits of Dreamworks’ investment to national anti-stigma campaigns could be invaluable.
There also may be individual, life changing benefits. One of the extras cast for the film, a woman named “Detroit,” was sleeping on the streets when she was recruited. A few days after shooting began on the movie, she moved into Lamp Village.
The movie was “a mirror for us,” Detroit said in The New Yorker article. “Playing the role of a crackhead, dopehead, prostitute, you get tired of it after two hours, and you think ‘How in the hell did you do that for two years?’…You’re reenacting your whole life. It’s so repetitive, hot and bad, but you were doing that on the street every day.”
In real life, recounted in the book and adapted for the movie, Lopez encourages Ayers to move indoors, reconnect with family, and renew his musical horizons. At the same time, Ayers teaches Lopez important lessons about himself.
“I was trying to help Nathaniel. But I learned it’s a two-way relationship,” Lopez said in an interview for the book’s promotional tour. “Although you give a lot, you get a great deal in return. Something as simple as the recognition when he looks at me or his daily morning phone call. I don’t have friends who call me every morning and ask how my sons and my daughter are doing. He’s excited about life and sharing time together. I hope people can be inspired by that-the power of a human connection and finding something you can be passionate about.”
Downey, who battled drug addiction in the 1990s before rebuilding stardom, voiced a similar theme about the making of the movie. Wright, the director, insisted that Downey and other stars be present at every rehearsal that involved the Skid Row extras. Downey was nervous at first.
“I’ve been in more therapy circles…than you can shake a stick at, but this has been the hugest trust exercise,” he said in The New Yorker article.
Still, the film will not “sugarcoat’ mental illness or homelessness.
“It can’t end with Nathaniel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic or playing first cello,” Lopez insisted to the producers, before giving his approval.
Ayers’ perspective: “I don’t go to movies. They are making some things related to my life but I’m pretty sure it would lead to a disaster if I were to go to a movie and take my eyes off those keyboards,” he is quoted as saying in The New Yorker, in his music studio in Lamp Village. His sister serves as conservator of a trust for him established after the sale of rights to his life story.
Ayers is skeptical about the film’s realism. “I am not crazy about acting to tell you the truth,” he reflected in The New Yorker. “It was flabbergasting to be right in the middle of a Hollywood movie…I think it was [more] about a film, about how things happen in Hollywood.”
In real life and in the book, NAMI Stigma Buster coordinator Stella march, who has led many battles against inaccurate, unfair portrayals of schizophrenia by Hollywood, played a pivotal role in helping to educate Lopez about the reality of mental illness. Lopez calls her “the one person in Los Angeles” who can best take on actor Tom Cruise’s “absurd comments” about mental illness, psychiatrist, and medication.
Ayers has told Lopez: “I would support any psychiatrist who will support me.” But he won’t take medication. Lopez hopes Ayers will eventually, but “it’s not that simple,” he writes in the book. “Thousand of persons get better, but then go off their meds, and sink back again into the grips of incurable disease.”
In true life, outcomes remain uncertain. Lopez accepts Ayers as he is-and expects backsliding, as well as progress. When you think about it, the same might be said about any person, regardless of a mental illness, as well as any community or country. “I have never had a friend who lives in so spiritual a realm,” Lopez writes.
Says Ayers, the true-life solo musician: “I want to play. I don’t know if I ever could get back to the way it was, but I want to play…I don’t want the concert to ever end.”