Gerald Sindell has worn many hats: director, writer, editor, producer, book publisher and business consultant. The father of four lives in California, but it was his experiences as a Clevelander that framed not only his coming of age, but also Double-Stop.
Sindell attended Shaker Heights High School at a time when the civil rights movement was showcasing the best and worst of America's collective character. As president of the Youth Council on Human Relations, a "city-wide organization that was devoted to building strong inter-race and inter-faith pathways though Cleveland," Sindell hoped to promote integration at the school level. He – and many of the council's 18,000 members – thought racism would be a closed chapter in the country's story by the mid-1960s.
A trained organist whose family facilitated a precocious appreciation of music, Sindell was drawn to the Cleveland Orchestra performances led by conductor George Szell. His family kept a subscription to box #2 at Severance Hall, and from that vantage, Sindell found great inspiration.
As a twentysomething, Sindell was eyeing Hollywood, hoping to crack the notoriously insular filmmaking scene with a feature length picture. His love of music had given way to a passion for film. "Even though I was only 23, I had been shooting 16mm since I was a young teenager," says Sindell. "I had been in Hollywood for three years, starting almost immediately as a production manager and lucky enough to work with some of the top people in commercials, and cinematographers like Leslie Kovacs and Kent Wakeford." Commercial director John Orloff became a mentor, and Sindell helped take the commercial production public, before leaving to pursue features.
His brother Roger moved to Los Angeles, and the pair began developing a film. "I taught the essentials of line production to Roger and, since he is among other things a fantastic project manager, he took on all the production responsibilities."
They divided writing duties, splitting the scene outline they'd drafted together. After a series of rewrites, working toward a single voice and single vision, they arrived at a fleshed out screenplay. The brothers were angered by racist isolation in the South and discriminatory segregation in the North, and were deeply opposed to the Vietnam War. Their perception and vision became Double-Stop. "The film expresses pretty accurately what was on each of our minds at that time, and would have been a shallower picture without one or the other’s contributions," says Sindell.
Their budget was $107,000, raised primarily in Cleveland from 57 investors, including family and family friends, according to Sindell. "That budget included $25,000 for the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, bringing and housing our core crew from Los Angeles, casting as much as possible in Cleveland and the region," he says. "We had designed a schedule to shoot the picture in the autumn to catch the fall colors, and gave ourselves four weeks."
The movie is the story of Cleveland Orchestra cellist Mike Westfall (Jeremiah Sullivan) and his artist wife Katherine (Mimi Torchin), who attempts to focus her cloistered husband's attention on the realities of the day – if vicariously through their son Pablo (Bill Kurtz). The Westfalls enlist their son in the city's school bus integration programming, soon discovering that reality is too dangerous. The raw world unraveling before them shakes the lives of their family, and indelibly shadows their views as sinister elements surround the Westfalls' dear friends, Don Streggor (Anthony Walsh) and his partner Susan (Patti Fairchild-Schaefer). A plot line of devotion, morality, civility and violence springs to vivid life with Cleveland as its backdrop. Continued on page two...
