Organ Transplants: A Most Intimate Form of Sharing : Television * After his own transplant, James Redford asked a friend to make a documentary about 'The Kindness of Strangers.'

By EMORY HOLMES II

Sept. 22, 1999 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

“The Kindness of Strangers,” a documentary by first-time director Maro Chermayeff, begins with a slow montage that pans across rain-washed woods and a road. With that, Chermayeff, who is also the film’s co-producer and editor, introduces the first of a series of introspective stories whose mood saturates every frame.

Initially previewed during the Telluride Film Festival in 1998, it comes to television Thursday on HBO. The subject is organ transplants, and Chermayeff quickly embraced the project after her dearest childhood friend, executive producer James Redford, asked her to do it.

What emerges is a film woven through with powerful human themes from love and unspeakable loss to hope, sacrifice, perseverance and joy, all of which Chermayeff finds in the details of everyday life. To tell the story, she ultimately followed six families who have little in common, except the life and death experience of organ transplantation.

“It was a loaded situation, because [Jamie and I] had this long history,” said Chermayeff, who is now at work on one of PBS’ “American Masters” presentations, on Manhattan’s Juilliard School. “I pondered it, but I always knew I would do it, and that I wanted to do it. It was a great opportunity to make a film and share a vision with someone who I really had a strong, deep relationship with already.”

Redford, a screenwriter, and the son of actor-director Robert Redford, had known Chermayeff since kindergarten. After seeing his health deteriorate for five years, in 1993 Redford underwent two liver transplants within less than six months at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. During his recovery, Redford began looking for a way to give something back to the system and institution that had saved his life. His physician there was Byers “Bud” W. Shaw Jr., a working professor as well as chairman of UNMC’s department of surgery.

“In the beginning, he just thought he should donate some money to a research fund,” Shaw recalled. “That would be nice, I thought, but I had an idea that somebody with his access to talented people could approach this whole subject in a way that had never been done before.” Indeed, the ideas that would eventually become “Kindness” had already begun to incubate in Redford’s mind.

“When I came out of my experience and started to encounter, on a day-to-day basis, through television, film, radio and print, how organ donation was portrayed,” Redford, who these days regularly runs and mountain bikes near his Marin County home, said during a recent visit to Santa Monica, “I felt there was a lot of coverage of the controversies--which are there. And there was coverage of the medical marvel element of it, but systematically, there seemed to be a failure on the human front.”

Redford wanted to shift the focus to human terms, and that’s when he called his childhood friend. Working as an editor on a variety of Emmy-nominated programs, including “Frontline” and the Cine Golden Eagle prize-winning “Jime Dine: A Self Portrait in the Walls” (1995), Chermayeff had a formidable resume as a film and television editor, but had never directed a feature film.

“Maro had been a brilliant editor for 10 years. But she had been biting at the bit to make a film,” Redford said. “I knew that she had the sensibility and the sensitivity and the perceptive powers to get in there and really understand this process. Because of our friendship, we had an enormous advantage. We could speak shorthand.”

They decided to distill the stories from the lives of dozens they researched and filmed, down to a handful of otherwise ordinary individuals. The film, which cost about $600,000 to make, has no narration, and uses a cinema verite style, with the camera close in, trusting in the authenticity of the donors and recipients themselves to carry viewers along.

For six months, Chermayeff and co-producer Christine Le Goff, whose credits include Melvin Van Peebles’ “Classified X,” lived in a room in the UNMC basement, immersing themselves in the lives of their subjects and melding into the expanses of the hospital. Chermayeff’s rhythmic, methodical, visual approach contrasts infrequent bursts of alarm with “the desperate solitude of waiting.” Shaw recalled that Chermayeff and Le Goffbecame “intimate members of the families.”

This intimacy allowed Chermayeff to move closer in to the very heart of the human dramas, people suddenly and unexpectedly bound to tragedy. Two of the films’ most touching and most typical voices are the Kilmers, Kathy and Russ. Theirs is a story of an unconditional love for their daughter Meghan, who died on the rain-washed road that opens the film.

“Maro and Christine came into our homes to film, and it was almost as if they were friends of Meghan’s,” said Kathy Kilmer a few days before Meghan’s 24th birthday on Sept. 15 (two days after the New York premiere of the film earlier this month). “We had but one lifetime to love that child, but we didn’t know it was going to be her lifetime.”

Redford developed the film under the auspices of the nonprofit organization, the James Redford Institute for Transplant Awareness. He and Chermayeff completed the project with cash and in-kind donations raised from a variety of sources, which included their parents (Chermayeff’s father, a graphic artist, donated the titles for the film). “We were funded by corporations; we got support from board members; we held fund-raisers. It was all over the place,” she said. Then they discussed where the film would debut.

“Jamie and I knew we were never going to premiere at Sundance [the annual independent film festival founded by Redford’s father]--that was just a little too close to the bone. So, we asked ourselves: Where do we want to premiere? Oh, we want to premiere at Telluride, ha, ha, ha.”

Telluride typically takes less than six documentaries per year out of 600 submissions. Nevertheless, it was featured at the 25th anniversary of the Telluride festival, and went on to win the Crystal Heart award at the Heartland Film Festival that same year, before it was acquired by HBO. And it did finally have a one-time special screening at Sundance earlier this year.

Said physician Shaw after seeing a final version, “I had to watch it five times before I stopped crying myself.”

* The James Redford Institute for Transplant Awareness can be reached at: https://www.jrifilms.org. “The Kindness of Strangers” airs Thursday at 7 p.m. on HBO.

“I felt there was a lot of coverage of the controversies. . . . And there was coverage of the medical marvel element of it, but systematically, there seemed to be a failure on the human front.”

JAMES REDFORD, executive producer, “The Kindness of Strangers”