FROM THE PEORIA JOURNAL STAR
MAY 28, 2004
If you're a school official in central Illinois and you believe that, yes, even here in the heartland we're not immune to a Columbine-like situation, then you owe it to yourself to view The Only Way. It's a student-produced film about the causes and consequences of bringing a weapon to school and turning it on your classmates and teachers. There's one more showing, tonight at 8 in the Metamora High School auditorium.
The 80-minute movie is uncommonly sophisticated, powerful and professional for a student production. Two years in the making, it started when a couple of students walked into Principal Greg Christy's office, concerned that their classmates hadn't taken a mock drill regarding a Columbine-like situation seriously. What followed was a script and a desire to put it on film from Levi Obery, a 17-year-old junior, and David Zimmerman III, 19, an Illinois Central College student now. Eventually, some 35 cast members and more than 300 extras - all students, staff and family members - worked on the project.
The film follows Devin, a student at a high school in largely rural Edgewater, Ill. - "the perfect place, the perfect town for this kind of incident" - through the spring semester of his senior year, culminating on a sad day in May.
At first Metamora High officials had some trepidation about the project, as they didn't want "the teachable moment" to "be lost over just the blood and guts," said Christy. To the credit of all involved, that moment isn't lost (though the movie is not suitable for young children). Indeed, unlike a lot of Hollywood films of this genre, it focuses far less on the violence than on the causes - the non-stop bullying, a tragedy at home, a breakup with a girlfriend, an altercation with an insensitive coach, the use of alcohol, the general emotional roller coaster that can be adolescence.
Then it addresses the consequences - the stunning reality of violent death, the almost immediate remorse, the arriving police, ambulances, the media broadcasting the chaos, the knee-buckling grief of victims' family members, the funeral, the imprisonment. Through the clever use of foreshadowing and flashbacks, the shooter confronts what he's done. Through some artistic license, victims testify to all he's caused them to miss.
You see the shooter as an old man, looking back on the waste he's made of his life. "I overreacted," he says. He wishes he could rewind "back (to) the way it was, before." In a nice touch, the film explores how the outcome might have been different had students and staff responded in a more constructive way. It ends on a hopeful note, showing that young people can learn from the mistakes of others.
"We were trying to say violence isn't the only way . . . that your actions don't affect just you but affect everyone," said Obery. "The news doesn't show all the stuff we have in the movie."
The Only Way belongs to Obery and Zimmerman, who created the $8,000 film largely on their own dime, with some critical help from high school officials. They plan to enter it in some film festivals and to market it, perhaps to other school districts. It might be a useful tool. It's the kind of piece that almost begs for a group discussion afterwards.
But credit also belongs to Metamora High School for lightly guiding and trusting in these students the way administrators there do, and for trying to cultivate the budding Steven Spielbergs who walk the school's hallways. Not every high school in these parts would have taken this kind of risk.
In the end, there is another way, in all sorts of arenas.
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