Cinequest

Producer-director Bill Rose’s The Loss of Nameless Things made its world premiere at Cinequest in 2004. Now this compelling documentary can be viewed anywhere in the world on DVD or secure Internet download as a Cinequest Exclusive Feature. While on the festival circuit, The Loss of Nameless Things earned Best Documentary honors at the Sedona International Film Festival, Temecula Valley International Film Festival, San Francisco Documentary Film Festival and Sidewalk Film Festival.

A natural storyteller, Rose spins the fascinating tale of Oakley Hall III, who in 1978 was a promising playwright and the captivating co-founder of the Lexington Conservatory Theater in upstate New York. The legendary Joseph Papp of New York’s Public Theater had optioned his work. On the brink of national recognition, the 28-year-old rising star and son of novelist Oakley Hall (Downhill Racer) literally fell to earth, mysteriously plunging from a bridge and sustaining massive head injuries.

Through interviews with friends and family, 16mm film footage, photographs and play readings, The Loss of Nameless Things tells a mythic, larger-than-life tale about Hall’s artistic aspirations. The 103-minute documentary offers the heightened emotion of a Victorian melodrama and the crackling suspense of a good mystery. Was the playwright’s tragic fall an accident or attempted murder?

Oakley Hall in 1978The parallels between Hall’s art and life are haunting, as though the artist envisioned the life he was about to lead before it happened. This is the stuff of Greek tragedy, of a wild child transformed into Frankenstein monster, of selling one’s soul to the devil. Rose connects the mortal man to the myths with superb cinematic artistry.

About five years ago, Rose met Hall through novelist Louis B. Jones, Hall’s brother-in-law and Rose’s good friend and sometimes screenwriting partner. A Northern California theater company had received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to stage Grinder’s Stand, the play Hall was writing about the unexplained death of explorer Meriwether Lewis when the tragedy occurred. Rose grabbed a Digibeta video package and headed to the cast read-through, having a hunch that this might be an amazing story.

“The play is beautifully written in blank verse, full of sturm and drang,” Rose told this writer when interviewed for the Palo Alto Weekly in 2004. “After the read-through, I sat down with Oakley and it was immediately apparent that the guy I was talking to was not the guy who had written the play we had just heard. Oakley appreciates the play the way I appreciate the play. We both think, ‘The guy who wrote that is really good.’”

Rose admitted that this project developed differently than his award-winning narrative (The Stars and Their Courses, Horace Chooney) and corporate work: “We didn’t know what we were doing, where the story was taking us.” Without a script and with startling revelations around every corner, he and Director of Photography Mickey Freeman (Chalk) adopted a “when in doubt, shoot it” approach. Then Rose sat down with Rick LeCompte (Dreams With the Fishes) to pare 200 hours of footage into his first feature-length documentary.

Producer-director Bill RoseThe ending is not what Rose anticipated, nor what Hall’s family wanted to accept. They still lament their own loss of nameless things—the pieces of Oakley Hall taken from them in 1978. They mourn what might have been. As Hall’s current wife Molly says in the film, “We’re not going to know what his 3rd play would have been like or his 10th. It’s a big, big loss.”

Rose described the brain-damaged Hall as both a “beautiful, magnetic and charismatic soul” and “one-of-a-kind car with no brakes anymore.” Hall can no longer discuss the structure of his plays or the internal lives of his characters, even though he gets up every morning at 5 a.m. to write. The artistic genius is gone, but the artist within still attempts to create.

With spellbinding storytelling and visual poetry, The Loss of Nameless Things is a must-see download offered online through Cinequest Distribution.

-- Susan Tavernetti