Part road movie, part meditation, Stuff finds true moments of illumination in its search for the meaning of what it is to be a son and a father. Stuff will include live action and animated sequences.

“Larry Johnson has made a very personal, touching and often funny film about his unresolved relationship with his dead father and the mysteries uncovered when he inherits box after box of his dad’s meticulously organized “stuff.” As we learn about Larry’s father, we begin to see that the film is as much about the filmmaker and his own foibles as it is about dad. A very brave, passionate, and creatively executed memoir that wrings recurrent and universal questions about childhood, family life and the experience of “becoming a man” from the recollections, emotions and detritus of very specific lives.”
-Jim Blashield (Suspicious Circumstances)

Lawrence Johnson’s beautifully plain-spoken “Stuff” explores the filmmaker’s relationship with his recently deceased father through the voluminous amount of ephemera collected by his parents over the decades; fearless about facing questions of mortality, faith and personal failings, the film was made as Johnson was drifting into homelessness.
-Stan Hall, The Oregonian

“Larry Johnson’s film STUFF contains subjects, multitudes, so dear to my heart.  How can we as unfathered men learn to father ourselves and others?  What does being a man mean in a culture of discarded and dying notions of masculinity, with new notions still being born?  STUFF asks these and related questions with wit and elegance, fierce transparency and artfulness, raw pain and unguarded heart.  Who among you is not touched by the wounds of fathers and sons?  We all are.  See this film.”
-Frederick Marx , filmmaker (Hoop Dreams, Journey from Zanscar)

7th Art Releasing plans to screen STUFF on the winter festival circuit followed by an early 2012 theatrical release.

Link: http://www.7thart.com/Human-Nature/Stuff

LAWRENCE JOHNSON
SELECTED FILM AND BROADCAST VIDEO

Celebration! The Plains Indian Museum Powwow -  2006.
three possible scenes – 2002
Coming Home was Easy: The West Coast Salmon Troller – 2003
The Mustache – 2001
Hand Game – The Native North American Game of Power and Chance – 2001
Arrow Chain – Reclaiming Our Heritage – 1990
Mas Fever – Inside Trinidad Carnival – 1989
Work Is Our Joy – 1989
Steam Whistle Logging – 1987
Remembering Uniontown – 1985
The Ghostwriter – 1981
R.V.N. – 1973

MUSEUMS AND INTERPRETIVE AUDIO/VISUAL

“Range Creek:  Archeology of Place” Utah Museum of Natural History – 2006
“Oregon, My Oregon” Oregon Historical Society – 2004
National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame – 2002.
Oystering on the Chesapeake – 2001
Plains Indian Museum – 2000
Boonshoft Museum of Discovery – 1999
Tamustslikt Cultural Institute – 1998
Sunny Valley Applegate Trail Museum – 1998
In The Presence of the Past: The Miami Indians of Indiana – 1998
Washington History Museum – 1996
Sea Album – 1995
Sacred Encounters – 1993

NORTHWEST FILM CENTER RESIDENCY PROJECTS

Alien Invaders – 1997
What Is My Homeland Now? and So They Will Know Who I Am - 1994
Wetland Neighbors - 1993
Science for the Real World – 1992
The Hidden City – 1991
Restoring C. S. Price -1990

AWARDS & FESTIVALS

2006 – Honorable Mention, Experimental, Kansas City Jubilee Film Festival
2004 – Best Live Action Short, RiverRun International Film Festival
2003 – Telly Bronze Award
2002 - Bearded Child Film Festival, Grand Rapids, Minnesota
2001 – Northwest Film Festival, Spokane, Washington
2001 - Native Peoples Film & Video Festival, Montreal
2000 – Opening event, American Indian Film Festival, San Francisco
2000 – Native American Film & Video Festival, Smithsonian Institution, New York
2000 – Five Rivers Film Festival, University of Montana, Missoula
1999 – Certificate For Creative Excellence, U.S. International Film and Video Festival
1998 – Gold Apple, National Education Media Network
1998 - Cine Eagle
1998 – Certificate of Merit, Outdoor Writers Association of America
1997 – Muse Award, Second Place, Cultural Studies, American Association of Museums
1996 – Second Place, World Populations Film and Video Festival
1996 - Finalist, Cascade Awards, Documentary
1995 - Golden Muse, American Association of Museums
1995 - Muse Award, First Place, Cultural Studies, American Association of Museums
1995 - Muse Award, Third Place, Interactive, America Association of Museums
1994 – Young People’s Film & Video Festival, Certificate of Achievement
1994 - Cascade Award, Best of year, Multi-media
1992 – Best of Show, Student Category, North American Association for Environmental Education
1991 - Muse Award, Third Place, Artist Programs, American Association of Museums
1991 – Golden Reel, Local Documentary, National Federation of Community Broadcasters
1990 - Gold, Houston International Film Festival
1990 - American Association of State and Local History, Award of Merit
1988 - American Association of State and Local History Certificate of Commendation

Over the last two hundred years, the father’s role in the family has been gradually minimized.  The colonial father was head of the house and involved in all levels of the family.  After World War II, the father’s role had been reduced to breadwinner and occasional disciplinarian.  Many baby-boomers grew up in households in which the father was either emotionally or physically absent and the mother was in charge of the child rearing.   Hence, the natural relational development of boys from the world of the mother to that of the father was often interrupted.  Of the 7,239 men surveyed in the Hite Report (1981) “almost no men said they had been or were close to their fathers.”   This, coupled with the baby-boomer’s rebellion against traditional family values in the sixties has lead to, among other things, an epidemic of depression across all sectors of our society, a rise in divorce, violence and dysfunction, and the overuse of medications as a replacement for parental love.

Through the interwoven stories of the filmmaker and his friend, Phil Wilson, STUFF will re-enact this drama of interrupted development and show how it may have affected the protagonists’ growth as men.  It will also show how a father’s sickness and death stimulates an urge in a son to seek the fulfillment of an unanswered need for intimacy with the father.  Phil Wilson:

“You know, it seems like there’s just no way to resolve the fact of somebody being so utterly gone to me.  I don’t know if anybody can ever do it. … Like last night I walked down stairs and I saw something, which hit me, which made it hit me that I’m fatherless.  And I just couldn’t except it for a moment until I just looked away and didn’t deal with it anymore.”

Phil and the filmmaker attempt to connect with their fathers through different ritualized acts.  Phil undertakes a journey across the country — a kind of pilgrimage to his father’s hometown — and enacts the ceremony of returning his father’s remains to the earth next to his mother’s grave.  This brings a sense of completion to his grief.  The filmmaker, on the other hand, connects with his father through his father’s stuff, his home movies, pictures, books and tools.   He moves the stuff from California into a storage unit, then moves it again.  The stuff becomes a burden.  He tries to sell some of it, and it starts to get mixed up with his own stuff as his life starts to disintegrate.  It seems this search is somehow connected to a crisis of self-awareness in the filmmaker’s life.  Soon, the film itself becomes a means to find his father and himself, as he integrates the ideas of the film into his consciousness.  The act of making the film liberates the filmmaker to look at himself and his relationships with fresh eyes.   For the audience, these thought-provoking stories will catalyze similar self-analysis.

STUFF will also explore the problem of Alzheimer’s disease and the stress it puts on families of those suffering from the disease.  The filmmaker’s mother, a victim of Alzheimer’s, will be featured in STUFF, as the filmmaker visits her and attempts to communicate with her.  Robbed of her opportunity to grieve for her husband by the lack of comprehension caused by the disease, she lives with only seconds of memory, doomed to a kind of purgatory of the moment.  According to the Alzheimer’s Association, over 5,000,000 Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, and a new person is diagnosed with the disease every 72 seconds.  By 2030 the cost of caring for those with Alzheimer’s will approach $400 billion, enough to bankrupt the Medicare system.  Building public awareness and support for Alzheimer’s research is a necessary and worthwhile cause.

“Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some resolution which it may never find.”-Robert Anderson, I Never Sang for My Father

Here they are:

Christopher M. Ramsey
Jackie Weissman
James Westby
Michael Gandsey
Dean Walch
Pamela Chipman
Todd Freeman
Cheryl Strayed
Peg Johnson
KatiePush
Start Productions
Sue Arbuthnot
Martin John Brown
Richard Blakeslee
Enie Vaisburd
Ruth Ann Reynolds
Brian Lindstrom
Bill Burcham
Todd Robinson
Steve Mattsson
Gus Van Sant
Tom Booth
Sean Cearley
James Winters
Glenn Micallef
Andrew Saunderson
Beth Harrington
Claire Stock
Meg Larson
Shelli Jury
Lewis Winter
Patty Katz
Dean McCrea