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DAZE WORK: Zach Spicer’s latest film comes from the heart
Quite assuredly, art is imitating life for Greencastle native Zach Spicer, who is making a name for himself in the motion picture business.
The 37-year-old actor/filmmaker’s latest movie, “Ms. White Light,” is about death and dying and caregivers and spending the final moments of life with someone you love.
For Spicer, a 2002 Greencastle High School graduate, that someone was grandfather Harold Spicer, who passed away at 96 in May 2017. The last three months of his life, Zach was at his side at Asbury Towers, living at the nearby Inn at DePauw and walking over each morning to share the day, most often by reading to his grandfather who by this time could no longer read to himself. They shared their love for the works of John Steinbeck just like they shared their love for each other.
Zach wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“After we finished filming ‘The Good Catholic’ (in 2017), I found out my grandfather, who helped raise me, had to go into hospice,” Spicer explained. “So I went back to Indiana and spent the last three months of his life with him.”
Spicer was thrilled that his grandfather got to see the first screening of “The Good Catholic.” The film, featuring his grandson alongside the likes Danny Glover and John C. McGinley, “made him so happy,” Zach recalled.
“That was very difficult time for me,” Zach continued, “mainly because I didn’t really talk about it with anybody because I didn’t think that anybody would truly understand what it was I was experiencing because it was such a deep sense of loss of someone who was so influential in my life and somebody I cared so deeply about.
“The funny thing is,” he added, “the most universal thing that connects each and every one of us is the fact of death. It has so much power over us because we don’t talk about it.”
Spicer wants to change all that with “Ms. White Light,” which was released globally last month.
“That’s the beauty of what I love,” he said. “At the heart of ‘Ms. White Light’ is that we talk about it.
“The movie is about death and it’s about dying and it’s about losing people, and it’s also about what happens when you are left behind and how you treat the people in your life and how you care for the people that are still left around.”
And that’s what makes “Ms. White Light” a timely film.
“This is a really difficult time right now for a lot of people around the world,” Spicer agreed. “And you know, maybe if we start talking about what scares us about death and dying and what hurts and we’re able to reach out to somebody who’s also experiencing that, maybe it won’t hurt so much and maybe it won’t be as scary. At least it certainly was true for me.”
The Pigasus Pictures release was filmed entirely in Bloomington as the fourth feature created by Spicer and his Hoosier cohorts, including writer Paul Shoulberg, a fellow Indiana University grad who like Spicer, lost a loved one and was moved to share the experience on film. It stars Roberta Colindrez and Carson Meyer with John Ortiz and Judith Light (probably best known as the mom character on the TV series “Who’s the Boss?”). The story centers around Light -- appropriately enough -- in the role of Val.
Originally the film was to be called “Mr. White Light” and Spicer was supposed to have the lead role.
“We thought there are enough movies about white, 30-year-old men going through tough things, so we changed it up.”
Now he has the role of a psychic medium, “a bit of a con man,” he says. “He’s morally ambiguous. He thinks what he’d doing isn’t hurting anybody.”
Spicer’s experience with his grandfather and Shoulberg’s last few days with his father planted the seeds for the film.
“I was in the middle of nurses and hospice workers,” Spicer said, adding that he was fascinated by death doulas or end-of-life doulas (like the antithesis of midwives). “They’re somebody who comes in and comforts and calms the fear about dying and connects with that person.
“I hope you get as much out of ‘Ms. White Light’ as it’s given me,” Spicer said, “and I really hope that you enjoy it with the people you care about. Sharing this film with the world has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. It’s brought me so much closer to this silly little thing called life.”
He said he marveled at how well all the Asbury Towers nurses and personnel looked after his granddad during his time there.
It was there Zach sat by his grandfather’s side and read “The Grapes of Wrath.” Halfway through the book, Harold told him he had done the exact same thing when his wife passed away.
“He sat by her bedside and read ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ Life is so cyclical,” Zach observed.
“The incredible thing,” he noted, “is that right up until the last couple of days, he was a walking encyclopedia. He probably forgot more than I’ll ever know.”
With “Ms. White Light” in the can, as they used to say in Hollywood, and on more streaming services than you could name, it’s time for a new film adventure, and by the looks of his YouTube video, Spicer has grown a bushy, red beard or could that just be a product of the COVID-19 environment.
“It is for a future role,” he confessed to us, “though it does seem appropriate for the current world environment.”
Pigasus has produced “The Good Catholic,” “Ms. White Light,” the comedy “The MisEducation of Bindu” (which won the Heartland Film Festival last year) and “So Cold the River,” a thriller Zach directed that was adapted from the Michael Koryta novel of the same name and filmed in French Lick, even shutting down the famed West Baden Springs Hotel for some time just before COVID-19 shut everything down.
Film No. 5 is shooting in Indianapolis with some major film stars as the first movie that has come to them from Hollywood, so mum’s the word on location and who’s in the cast.
“You know,” Spicer said, “we said we’d make five movies in five years and we somehow managed to do just that. I don’t know if we were out of our minds or what.”
As we wrapped up our conersation, Spicer had one more thing to share about his grandfather, a longtime English professor and journalist who taught at Indiana State, DePauw and Western Illinois and won a Greencastle Citizen of the Year Award for helping keep the Senior Center open during troubling financial times.
“My grandfather meant a lot not just to me but to the people of Greencastle,” he said. “I need to figure out a way to honor him there.”
In a way, Zach, I think you just did.