Dallas was great--an amazing screening! Very nice people and great food...

We did an interview with NPR--of which I have the transcript.

Or listen to the full length podcast at:

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=5183228

KRYS BOYD, host:

You're listening to THINK on KERA 90.1, I'm Krys Boyd.

How do you imagine you'll spend the final years of your
life? Many young people don't really think about it
unless
they're faced with caring for an elderly loved one.
Andrew
Jenks is an exception. In an effort to really understand
the experience of people in assisted living, Jenks
convinced two of his friends to help him make a
documentary
about residents of Florida's Harbor Place Community.

Such facilities have been captured on video before of
course, but Jenks and his crew went a step further by
actually moving into the facility for more than a month,
sharing meals, entertainment, joys and sorrows with the
residents. But what made Jenks so remarkable was that
what
he didn't have in common with Harbor Place's permanent
residents because when he made the film, he was a healthy,
active 19-year-old just wrapping up his freshman year in
college.

The film that documents the experience is called "Andrew
Jenks, Room 335." You can see it tonight at six at the
Angelica Theater Center in Dallas. Filmmaker Andrew Jenks
will attend that screening and he joins us now to talk
about the project.

Andrew, welcome to THINK.

Mr. ANDREW JENKS (Filmmaker): Thanks a lot for having me.

BOYD: Where did you get the idea for this?

Mr. JENKS: Well, there was a couple different factors. I
had a granddad--a grandfather who I was very close with
who
I spent a lot of time with and I was with him during my
freshman year, I spent some time with him and he quickly
got some bad dementia and sort of fell very badly very
quickly and he was in assisted care.

And this guy who I had known for so long who was this
great
tennis player and inventor, worked for GE for 40 years,
all
of a sudden couldn't remember my name. So, I started to
kind of think about the other side of the spectrum and
then
while this was happening, I was also living in a freshmen
dormitory with 300 18-year-olds, so I kind of put two and
two together and thought, 'I wonder what it would be like
if you put 300 80-year-olds together and what their life
must be like.'

BOYD: What did it take to get a facility to consider
letting you in for something like this?

Mr. JENKS: Well, I think we were honest from the get-go.
We didn't try and kind of scoot around what we were doing.
We wanted to document the experience of living there for
the residents, and so it took, as you'll see in the movie,
it took a while to get one of the assisted living
facilities to comply and agree to what we were trying to
do. We called at least 30 to 40, and then eventually one
was on board.

BOYD: And then you started out after a while you would
call them and say, 'Do you have an age restriction?' Was
that the first sort of roadblock that they would throw up
for you?

Mr. JENKS: Yeah, we first approached it just as if I was
without the idea of a movie and cameras, so it was first
just asking, 'Hey, if a 19-year-old wanted to move in,
would you let that happen? Is there an age restriction?'
And surprisingly, a lot of them said, 'If you're not older
than 65, we don't accept you.' So that immediately
discounted a lot of places.

BOYD: And you paid your way, or was it a case where the
facility said, 'OK, you can stay here while you make the
film?'

Mr. JENKS: Yeah, we didn't have any movie, we were
college
students, so we needed a room to stay in, so they gave us
a
room that they had vacant at the time. We were only
there--well, we were there for about five or six weeks, so
they let us stay there while we were living there.

BOYD: There's noticeably little footage of the staff.
Was
that part of the deal you worked with them, that the film
was really about the residents as opposed to the way they
were handled with staff?

Mr. JENKS: No, not at all. We just--that's kind of how
our experienced turned out. We got to know a lot of the
residents. The residents were the ones that, you know,
lived there and eat there, play BINGO, got out on the
trips, so they were the ones that really spent most of the
time. But we knew the staff, but we just didn't interact
with them as much.

BOYD: How comfortable were you around older people when
you went into the project?

Mr. JENKS: I'd say just as comfortable as any other
average 19-year-old. I think probably going into it, I
talked to my grandparents a little bit differently, you
know, you kind of put up a little bit of a guard when you
speak to them, you try and be a little bit more proper,
whereas now, you know, coming back and speaking with my
grandparents, I'm a little bit more myself. And not just
my grandparents, any senior citizen, I say, 'Yo, what's
up?
What's going on?' just like I would with any other of my
friends.

BOYD: What did it take for you to win the trust of the
residents there?

Mr. JENKS: Well, I think there's a certain point when we
realize that these were people and they weren't residents
or senior citizens or old people, they were people. And
we
started to develop really authentic relationships with a
lot of them and just like any time you befriend someone,
there's a trust level that augments as time goes on and
that's--that was the case while we were at this assisted
living facility.

BOYD: One of the residents at one point in the film
refers
to you as the boy that sleeps all day. I'm wondering
about
this sort of--what it took to adjust to the kind of bio
rhythms of people who were, you know, 60 years older than
you are.

Mr. JENKS: Sure. Well, I think a part of--a big part of
the movie, which hopefully comes out, in our experience
also was that we were ourselves, we weren't trying to be
someone else, someone different. I mean I wasn't. And
so,
you know, we didn't always wake up at 6 AM for the early
morning breakfast.

And you're talking about Bill, who would always bother us
that we woke up an hour too late and that was because, you
know, we were up probably way later than anyone else was.

There's a funny story where I was once called into the
general manager--or the manager's office of this facility
and she was very serious and I thought I was in trouble
for
something, and she said, 'Andrew, you know, there's been a
lot of complaints about you,' and I got really nervous and
I thought we were going to get kicked out or something.

And I said, 'Yeah, what's wrong?' And she said, 'Well,
you
know, when we're in the dining facility, you have to wear
pants and there's been a lot of complaints over the past
two days that you're wearing shorts and if you want to be
a
resident here, you have to wear pants.' And so, I think
that was cool. They wanted me to be a resident and I had
to follow the rules.

BOYD: Were you--there was definitely times when there
seems like there were certain rituals and ways of doing
things that became really important to these people, who
were, for the most part, spending most of their time
within
this facility. Did you start to understand why those were
so important?

Mr. JENKS: Why their rituals or how they went about doing
things?

BOYD: What the comfort was in the rituals or why they
seem
more important to the residents there than they might be
to
younger people or people sort of out in the world?

Mr. JENKS: I think that--I'm not sure if I'm answering
your question, but I think that there's a high level
of--they really want to kind of maintain their
independence
and they want to make sure that everyone else knows that
they're living their lives and that they have things to
do.

So for instance, there's residents who at 7:00 would take
a
walk just around the facility or make sure they'd watch
"Larry King Live" at 9:00, or make sure that they played
BINGO every day at five. They wanted these sort of
certain
things to do at different points during the day just like
we all do at a job or with family.

BOYD: Yeah, that's interesting because you really get the
sense that they structure their lives in some ways. They
were all retired, but they structure their lives in a way
that is reflective of what they were probably like before.
They have certain times to be places and certain things
that they're born to do and people they meet at
particular--for a particular occasion.

Mr. JENKS: Yeah, exactly. They all like to plan their
days. Of course, there was a board out in the front lobby
which said what activities were going on that day and--so
there was definitely a high level of interest from all the
residents to maintain activity.

BOYD: You asked them some really piercing questions, were
you surprised at how frank they were willing to be with
you?

Mr. JENKS: I think I was surprised, but then as time went
on we realized that, you know, in a lot of ways they had
nothing to lose. They wanted to show who they were and,
you know, they don't really get a chance to talk a lot
about themselves to other people. And I think they were
just happy to have us around and have these young guys
asking them questions about who they were and, you know,
who they were in the past and what they'd be in the
future.

(Sound Bite of "Andrew Jenks, Room 335")

BOYD: That was Tammy, one of the residents that you got
to
know pretty well. And, you know, I'm struck by--and this
happens with her throughout the film--she's just revealed
something to you that is not easy to talk about and
instantly she jumps into being funny, which is something
she does really well. And a lot of these folks are just
wickedly funny.

Mr. JENKS: Yeah, they're all funny in their different
ways
too, and I think they all had different kind of coping
mechanisms or ways to deal with their past and in this
case
Tammy losing all of her family and friends. And I think
she started to go down that path and think about it and
that was her way of kind of dealing with things was
telling
a joke and making sure that she got everyone to laugh and
everyone to kind of perk up.

BOYD: Do you think that was her way of dealing with it
for
her benefit or for yours?

Mr. JENKS: I think in a lot of ways for other people just
as much as for herself. Tammy physically wasn't able to
do
a whole lot, she had to sort of roll around in a
wheelchair
quite a bit, she couldn't lay flatly when she went to
sleep, and she had an incredible ability to kind of roll
around in her wheelchair and go from one gloomy table to
the next and just tell a joke.

And by the time she left, everyone was laughing, everyone
was smiling. And I think in a lot of ways she kind of
took
it upon herself to kind of put a little bit of a punch
into
that place and kind of cheer everyone up a little bit,
which she certainly did.

BOYD: You know it's really interesting, you talked about
a
college dorm where you have hundreds of 18-year-olds
living
all together and we all know what the social climate is
like there. And the difference there is that most of
those
people haven't grown up together. And it's the same
thing,
I would imagine, in a retirement home where people have
age
in common, but they don't have a shared past. Do they
spend much time talking to each other about what their
lives were like or do they tend to focus on the here and
now?

Mr. JENKS: What I found really interesting was that
almost
all of the residents there hardly ever talked about their
past. Of course, there's always an element of dementia
with some of the residents to be fair, but I think that
was
one of the more extraordinary parts and something that we
sort of cover in the film in that we never do talk about
their pasts.

The characters that we really get to know and become, I
guess you'd say, main characters in the documentary, we
never really explain who they were in the past and what
they had done because that's not something that we really
covered. They had to focus on who they were that day and
what they'd been trying to do tomorrow, and I found that
to
be very interesting.

BOYD: Did it give you thought--did you start thinking in
different ways about your own life would be and how you
would look back on what your past was?

Mr. JENKS: In a lot of ways, not to sound too trite, but
in a lot of ways I think so. They had an incredible
ability to focus on the moment and even though their
friends and family had left or sometimes abandoned them
and
they were by themselves in this assisted living facility
with these big wall surrounding them, in a lot of ways
they
were kind of separate from, you know, society, kind of put
away in a way. It didn't impact them. They were able to
focus on the moment and become friends with different, you
know, the people they were living with.

BOYD: Filmmaker Andrew Jenks is my guest. His film
"Andrew Jenks, Room 335" will screen tonight at the
Angelica Film Center in Dallas.