The story of America is a story of rivers.
Hubs of civilization, arteries of commerce, rivers have sustained (and sometimes, destroyed) life, slaking our thirst, driving turbines for industry, and providing jobs, irrigation, transportation and recreation.
Indispensable and disposable, pristine and polluted, rivers mirror all that is noble and ignoble about our society. Their murmuring brooks and roaring rapids speak volumes about what we value, and how we view the natural world.
American River, which will be screened at Morristown’s Mayo Performing Arts Center this Thursday, March 31, 2022, attempts to tell this sprawling saga by profiling a single waterway: The Passaic.
Video: ‘American River’ trailer:
Landscape painters once clamored to depict its beauty. Generations of bathers escaped summer heat along its banks, which were dotted with boathouses and cheering crowds for crew regattas.
The Great Magnificent Falls in Paterson poured life into Alexander Hamilton’s dreams of the United States as a manufacturing powerhouse; Locomotives, colorful textiles and Colt firearms were products of the Passaic’s thunder.
Scene from AMERICAN RIVER –
Mary Bruno and Carl Alderson portage over Great Falls in Paterson – ©2021 Scott Morris Productions. All rights reserved.
Spectacular snatches remain along the river’s serpentine 90-mile journey from Mendham to Newark Bay. The Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, at the headwaters, and the Great Piece Meadows, barely glimpsed from Route 80, are idyllic.
The “Lower 17” miles are a brackish sewer, a place for hazmat suits, not bathing suits.
Here, the Passaic River is a the nation’s biggest federal Superfund site, loaded with so much deadly dioxin from Vietnam-era Agent Orange production that the government last year outlined plans for a $1.8 billion cleanup that is decades overdue.
Scene from AMERICAN RIVER – Kayaking down the lower 17 miles of the Passaic – ©2021 Scott Morris Productions. All rights reserved.
“For far too long, many of these rivers, particularly urban rivers…have been neglected,” says Dillard Kirby, executive producer of American River.
He describes the documentary as “part memoir, part history, part science and part adventure.”
Based on Mary Bruno’s 2012 book, An American River: From Paradise to Superfund, the film re-creates the author’s four-day kayak trip with guide Carl Alderson.
Along the way they meet a stream of colorful characters with their own stories to tell about a much-maligned river with a world of potential.
‘STRAINERS’ AND DEER CARCASSES
It’s the second collaboration between Kirby, a philanthropist who retired last year as president of the FM Kirby Foundation in Morristown, and director Scott Morris.
Their 2016 documentary, Saving the Great Swamp, Battle to Defeat the Jetport, depicted the David-vs.-Goliath grassroots campaign that gave us a wildlife refuge instead of an airport. It landed on American Public Television. (Jetport airs one more time on NJTV, at 8 pm on April 27, 2022.)
Dillard Kirby. Photo by Kevin Coughlin
“In the case of the Great Swamp, you see some of the very best New Jersey has to offer. And in this film, you see some of the darker sides New Jersey has to offer,” says Kirby.
Captivated by a Bruno lecture, Morris brought the idea for American River to Kirby.
The production’s journey was nearly as windy as the river’s. It started in October 2018 with four days of shooting on the river with Bruno and Alderson. This was a major undertaking: Ten 4K cameras, four drone-mounted cameras, and four Go Pros on the kayaks.
Morris returned to the Passaic in autumn of 2019 for additional scenes. The real nitty-gritty continued through the pandemic.
“Getting this down from hundreds of hours of footage to 86 minutes was an eye opener for me,” Kirby says.
Scraps from the digital cutting room floor might make for an amusing “making of” reel. Kirby loves the tale of a land manager at Great Piece Meadows chasing duck hunters with a bow-and-arrow.
AMERICAN RIVER – Director Scott Morris – Photo credit: Nick Rumaczyk – ©2021 Scott Morris Productions. All rights reserved.
“One of the best aspects of working with Dillard is that he always trusts my creative judgment and never interferes, expressing his thoughts and ideas in the most productive way possible,” says Morris, who is based in Chatham.
“It has been the most satisfying collaboration of my career and led to what I consider to be my very best work.”
The score for American River — swirling between majestic and menacing, like the Passaic itself — is by the director’s son, ben morris, who also composed the Jetport soundtrack.
Kirby and Scott Morris screened a rough cut of American River for friends in Soho shortly before COVID-19 locked down the country. Much of the pandemic was spent fine-tuning the piece for submission to environmental film festivals. They are hoping for a distribution deal with a platform such as Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Scene from AMERICAN RIVER – Kayaking through Great Piece Meadows – ©2021 Scott Morris Productions. All rights reserved.
The documentary played to sellout crowds at the Montclair Film Festival and took audience “best of” honors at the Teaneck International Film Festival last fall. It’s been accepted at environmental fests at Yale and Princeton, and several more festival berths are anticipated.
Most of Kirby’s life has been devoted to supporting nonprofits through his family’s foundation, established during the Depression by his great-grandfather, co-founder of the Woolworth’s five-and-dime chain.
His first foray into movie-making came as a backer of cartel, a provocative 2009 critique of public education.
Kirby’s passion for history led he and his wife Adrienne to support Morristown: Where America Survived other Open Spaces & Historic Places in Morris County.
Finn Wentworth and Dillard Kirby on their October 2021 kayak trip on the Passaic River. Photo courtesy of Dillard Kirby.
American River has special resonance for Kirby. As a child in Mendham, he could skim a stone at the tributary where the Passover begins. This is the first film entirely subsidized by himself – “north of half a million” is all he will say about that.
The story so intrigued him that he recruited his friend Finn Wentworth, a developer and philanthropist, for their own four-day river odyssey last October.
Their kayaks wound through 47 municipalities in seven counties: Morris (twice), Somerset, Union, Essex (twice), Passaic, Hudson and Bergen.
On day one, they paddled around carcasses of deer felled by Bluetongue disease, and portaged on muddy banks to circumvent dozens of “strainers” — topped tree limbs and clumped debris.
“It was just a hell of a day,” Kirby recollects.
But well worth it. Like American River, he believes.
“The sensibility in this case was to create something entertaining, something that would be, to a degree, a call to action as an environmental film. And…to have a hopeful message for the Passaic River. And I think it accomplishes that.”
“American River” will screen at 7:30 pm on Thursday, March 31, 2022, at the Mayo Performing Arts Center. A public Q & A session with Executive Producer Dillard Kirby, Director Scott Morris, author Mary Bruno and ecologist Carl Alderson will follow. Admission: Pay what you can, suggested price: $10. At 100 South St., Morristown, 973-539-8008.
