I knew he understood why I was doing this.” He shared with me that he’d lost his brother Alex in a drunk-driving accident a few years prior, and I could feel the bereavement in his voice. “I had spoken with several other candidates for director, and none of them seemed to give off any vibes of ‘Hey, I empathize with your loss and really do give a shit about what you’re trying to accomplish.’ Nate did. “I knew he was our guy before I hung up,” Lindley says. They hadn’t really talked, though, until now. Lindley remembered meeting Townsend at parties he’d gone to with Candice, whose easy warmth got him invited all sorts of places. When their initial GoFundMe raised $10,000 overnight, then sailed past $33,000, the team member called Townsend again: “Hey, dude, I really think you should look into this.” So he and Lindley spoke by phone. When a member of the Project Wake Up team first mentioned the documentary to Townsend, he was a little skeptical that a group of college kids could pull it off. Part of the reason is Nate Townsend, a Clayton High School grad just a bit older than Kerth and Lindley. Representative Joe Kennedy, well before his cousin Saoirse Kennedy Hill died by suicide.) They also raised a ton of money-and then a ton more (around $525,000 at last check), because what had started as a low-budget educational film was growing into an intense, artful documentary with a nationwide sweep. They did a lot of the early work on this film themselves, lining up interviews with academics, activists, and politicians. Now, as we pull up to the Wilshire Screening Room, they fall silent, taut with anticipation. They also want to submit the doc to all the major film festivals… They want, above all, to pitch Netflix, noting the two years it took the company to remove the graphic suicide scene from 13 Reasons Why and the 29 percent rise in adolescent suicides the month after the show debuted. On the flight to L.A., they dreamed out loud, hoping to finagle a last-minute cameo by Lady Gaga or Selena Gomez for the celebrity factor. They throw any spare energy toward Project Wake Up, the nonprofit they formed to produce this doc. Now Lindley’s a lawyer at McCarthy, Leonard & Kaemmerer, and Kerth’s working where his father once did, at FleishmanHillard.

Feelings that had been repressed and not mentioned for more than a decade-” When he heard that Lindley wanted to make a documentary, he signed up fast. But the suicides of two friends-first Carolyn Dolan, then Ryan Candice-snapped him out of that complacency.Īwareness hit Kerth much earlier, after his father, well-known civic leader Al Kerth, died by suicide.

Mental health wasn’t something he’d ever had to think about. Lindley once had the healthy self-absorption you’d expect from a tall, affable Mizzou student with a ready sense of humor, a sweet disposition, and big plans for his life. It’s a tribute to one of his best friends-and a wake-up call to the rest of the world. What he’s about to see isn’t just an indie doc with Hollywood shine and his name on the credits as producer. For somebody in a hurry, he’s gone a long time, and when he comes back, he’s pale. Finally Kerth, who’s marginally calmer, asks for the check, and Lindley excuses himself. They steal glances at their phones parking might be tricky, and they’ll only have the studio for two hours. Louis, Alex Lindley and Danny Kerth are too polite to interrupt the chatty waitress, too modest to tell her they’re on their way to the first rough-cut screening of a documentary they’ve been working on for five years. Because their manners were hammered in years ago in Catholic boys’ schools in St.

Even with all the traffic, L.A.-lined by palm trees and retro signs, aglow with endless sunshine- manages to look serene. But inside the dark-paneled West Hollywood restaurant, the tension’s spiking.

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