Watching People Burn

Afterword

  I discovered the Bath School Disaster in June 2009, while researching large-scale tragedies to prove a point to a friend. The Virginia Tech shooting had recently brought back memories of Columbine. Bath was worse, but it also put the hysteria over recent school shootings into a new context: this was nothing new. The Bath bombing recalled that of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and both featured a homegrown conservative terrorist, reminding us that radical Islam wasn’t the only enemy. Kehoe’s anti-tax extremism echoed the irrational anti-tax protests then hurling violent rhetoric against the newly-elected President Obama (who hadn’t actually raised taxes). The Bath school bombing was only the middle event in three coordinated strikes, a pattern we now associate with terrorism and have trouble imagining took place so long ago. The last of these three was even a car bomb, something we associate with Iraq and similarly have trouble imagining in this earlier context. Today, Bath would be called an act of terrorism, no more a “disaster” than 9/11.

  But the story also came ready-made with all the touches that transcend a mere exercise in historical parallelism. There was Kehoe’s mother burning, a dramatic moment in a killer’s childhood that one would hesitate to invent. There was the horror of the first bombing, of how completely Kehoe had destroyed what he strove to protect, right down to binding the animals in their pens. There was Ellen Kehoe, whose illness must have contributed to Kehoe’s desperation, and how her body had been found in a wheelbarrow. There were Kehoe’s ambiguous telling comments. How he’d stashed explosive unseen in the school. How close Bath came to the second half of the school collapsing, a subject left to guesswork. There was the mystery of Andrew’s motivation, given the cash, silverware, and unused farm equipment he had left or destroyed. There were the amazing stories of a community coming together, echoing the aftermath of 9/11. There was Lindberg happening to push Bath off the front pages. There was even the way pyrotol was quietly removed from the market, echoing current debates over gun control. And there was the ultimate coup-de-grace: Kehoe’s final message, full of resonance and horror.

  How was this not a movie? It practically wrote itself. It was shocking. It was compelling. But it also had something vital to say about our own era. It offered a historical context we lacked, and in this lack we imagine our current troubles to be unprecedented – and cause for extraordinary measures. Columbine, Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech, 9/11, Iraq, conservative political extremism – it all combined into this one story, even more shocking for its rural context almost a century ago, in a time we idealize as tough but innocent. How was this not a movie?

  At the time, I was writing a novel, straining terribly under its weight, rethinking every chapter a thousand ways before continuing. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Bath. For days, I found myself researching it. I could visualize scenes in my head, and they haunted me. I started contemplating writing this script but didn’t want to be distracted from my novel. I also didn’t want to write another screenplay that wouldn’t be produced. Someone in Hollywood should write it, I told myself. But I kept seeing more scenes and how the whole could be woken together. It was writing itself, against my will.

  Shortly after midnight on Monday, 15 June, less a week after I’d discovered the Bath disaster, I found myself idly writing the film’s opening sequence. I didn’t intend to continue beyond that. I have lots of files with scene or two of a script or short story. I usually don’t come back to them. They don’t work as I intended, or the scene that follows doesn’t, and work grinds to a hault. I file them away, to be ignored or finished later. But I cruised through the entire sequence, and I thought it was just about the most dramatic opening of any movie I could imagine. And from there, I dove directly into the quieter material of Kehoe’s childhood. I thought I’d stumble, but that sequence was working too.

  Okay, I said. I’d give myself one week to write the script. Six days to write and one to revise. Each chapter of my novel was taking at least a week anyway. Tearing through this script would be a nice break and might unblock the creative energy. It would be good for the novel.

  This is usually the part of the story where six days turns into sixty, then six hundred. But somehow, I stuck to my six-day schedule. Each day, I woke up and worked until I slept, chain-smoking and breaking only for coffee, food, or cigarette runs. I mostly wrote straight through, occasionally revising earlier material, revising lines or inserting brief scenes. My brain was always working more than a full day ahead, imagining what scenes had to come and in what order, even visualizing many details. Each day, I merely put scenes I’d already imagined on paper, revising them, sculpting details, and tightening dialogue. Later days would be sketched out more vaguely, then magically solidify as they neared. The story really did write itself. I finished in wee hours of Sunday, 21 June, just a few hours over schedule. Then I spent a day revising, and I’ve only revised occasionally since.

  This was a story that demanded to be told. I didn’t want to be the one to tell it. But I was the one who’d found it. I was the one who’d seen how it could work. And it possessed me, taking over my thoughts until I had no alternative but to get it out.

  The title came halfway through, after much struggling. I could imagine the trailer, consisting of only the opening sequence in snippets. It could reveal the most dramatic material without spoiling anything but the first ten minutes. And after this real-life terrorist attack in rural Michigan in 1927, complete with car bomb, the trailer would cut to the horrifying, memorable title, in big bold letters. I couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to see this film.

  As that week went on and I immersed myself in the details of the victims, the story changed. I was initially attracted to the scale of the bombing and its contemporary overtimes, as well as the chilling touches of Kehoe’s story. But inevitably, I found myself sympathizing with the victims, whose varied responses were far more interesting. In this way, violence turned to heartbreak. I hope that readers will find this true as well: we are all attracted to violent and tragic stories, but truly engaging with them requires engagement with the full range of consequences. 9/11 and the story of the hijackers is ultimately far less meaningful than its aftermath, including how no one agrees on its meaning or what response we should have. The serial killer can be an intoxicating figure, but his victims’ conflicted responses are important to understand. As we argue, seemingly eternally, over violence in art, it’s important to depict not only the consequences of violence but the full range of emotional reaction, from hatred to shame and guilt. In this way, the historical responsibility I felt throughout the project became a way to honor the victims, and I took this duty very seriously.

  Things I Lied About

  I have taken great pains to make the script as historically accurate as possible. But the script does have a few notable omissions and takes a few liberties necessary to turn history into drama.

  The script jumps from Andrew meeting Ellen to their marriage. In fact, Kehoe left Michigan after graduation. He sent little word either to his family or to Ellen and claimed to have been working as an electrician in St. Louis. He ultimately returned to Michigan and married Ellen, who was still single.

  We know little about Andrew and Ellen’s relationship, during this time. Given that he sent her letters, however sporadically, they almost certainly remained friendly, if not in love. There’s no indication that Kehoe expected to return, forcing us to ask why Ellen, educated and from a prosperous family, did not marry someone else during Andrew’s absence. This obviously also casts her childless status in a new light, given that she sacrificed many childbearing years awaiting Andrew’s return. Did she date anyone else? Did she remain too much in love with Andrew to move on? We are left only with speculation.

  Andrew’s actions and motivations, during this period, are equally mysterious. It’s strange that Kehoe, having obtained an agricultural degree designed for future Michigan farmers, would then abandon Michigan, farming, and Ellen. To me, this suggests a restlessness later seen in his
inconsistency as a farmer and in his turn towards politics. I don’t think he returned out of love for Ellen, so this period represented yet another failure for him, further motivating his eventual actions. Kehoe had little electrical experience before St. Louis, which would help ground his later tinkering and wiring of the bombs, connecting them with his restlessness. After the bombing, rumors circulated that Kehoe had murdered someone in St. Louis, spurring his return – but there’s no evidence for this.

  Had I depicted this period, I would have used the opportunity to provide further historical context. The distance from St. Louis to Michigan seemed a lot vaster then, when news travelled much slower. Andrew did not yet have a car, so depicting his travel would have itself demonstrated how much times have changed. I would have enjoyed depicting the St. Louis of the period, which was still the gateway to the West, building bridges over the vast Mississippi. I would have shown how, as far as St. Louis knew, Kehoe could have been anyone – demonstrating that one could still go West and reinvent oneself. But this was only possible because of weaker laws, so this freedom came with less protection for workers and from poverty.

  But as much as I consider this period important, we know very little about it. It’s part of history, but its particulars would have involved so much guesswork as to lower the script’s historical accuracy. I would have been comfortable depicting Andrew’s restlessness and his electrical tinkering, implied by the story itself. But I would have been uncomfortable with spelling out the Kehoes’ relationship, which I preferred to leave for the audience to decide. Omission is less historically inaccurate than falsification. And while I would have enjoyed adding wider historical context, this reflects my own concerns and not the needs of the script, which already provides this historical context in less obtrusive ways. Ultimately, this period was really a digression from the main plot and could not be depicted without adding several scenes (at a minimum, Andrew’s departure, Andrew in St. Louis, Ellen left at home, and Andrew’s return) that would have slowed down the script considerably. From either a historic or artistic perspective, omission was the better choice.

  I also omitted several stories about Kehoe in Bath because they duplicated material already shown. For example, a story exists about Kehoe admitting to having shot a neighbor’s dog for being a nuisance. But Kehoe’s cruelty to animals was better depicted through his beating a horse to death, which was actually witnessed.

  I compressed stories about several Kehoe neighbors into the historical character of Monty Ellsworth. For example, on that fateful day, Kehoe told a different neighbor to get his family to the school. This compression avoided having to depict a whole bevy of Kehoe neighbors, who would have been shown only once or would have required additional scenes, since the audience would probably like to follow them through the bombing too. This sort of compression is an accepted tactic in historical fiction to retain historical truth while keeping the number of characters to a minimum, avoiding audience confusion.

  The real Ellsworth had a child in school at the time of the attack, so the first thing he did was ascertain the child’s safety. The child was fine, and only then did Ellsworth participate in rescue operations. While I regret not showing this, since it changes Ellsworth’s story, I also needed to introduce the idea that many children were absent that day – another compression. This also allowed me to shift Kehoe’s attempt to lure a neighbor’s children to the school onto Ellsworth which wouldn’t have made sense if his children were already in the school.

  Any historical dramatization also requires imagining the details of scenes, such as dialogue or chronological placement, that aren’t clear in the historical record. For example, the historical record only shows that Ellen was hospitalized multiple times for her condition and that the horse-beating incident occurred. By juxtaposing the two, I am able to suggest motivation without inventing a scene in which Andrew spells things out. In other scenes, I have had Andrew’s dialogue suggest his feelings or motivation without going beyond what I felt to be historically responsible.

  I have felt slightly more at liberty with the people of Bath. Their actions on the day of the disaster and their testimony at the inquiry are a matter of public record. But the details of their families and private thoughts are not. My goal is not to claim that any specific person felt any certain way, but rather to depict the full range of reactions to such a tragedy, grounded in historical statements about the private reactions of Bath. For example, Crum and his wife did turn their store into a triage unit, and classes did resume as depicted. But there’s no evidence about the private religious views of Crum and his wife, which are obviously imagined, however much I’ve tried to ground them in the Crums’ historical experiences in the first world war.

  One scene I did invent, purely for dramatic purposes, was Kehoe’s conversation with superintendent Huyck prior to the car bomb. Some witnesses reported that he said nothing, merely pulling up in his car and it exploding. This was obviously unsatisfactory, from a dramatic standpoint. But I did show a witness telling a reporter this version of events, and I hope that this points to the unreliability of eyewitness testimony – and how, because of this, so much of history isn’t certain, even where we “know” the details.

  The full text of Monty Ellsworth’s The Bath School Disaster is available at http://daggy.name/tbsd/tbsd-p.htm. It includes photographs of virtually every victim, including the injured.

  Notes on Staging

  Although a filmed version of this script wouldn’t have chapters per se, it would be nice to have a little break at those points, where there isn’t one already. A sustained image or fade out and in can let audiences pause and know that we’re moving into another “chapter.”

  While I wrote the script, I often played the soundtrack to Miller’s Crossing on repeat. That film’s theme, echoed throughout the score, mixes feelings of triumph and sadness, suggesting we’re looking at events without pat explanations. I can hear that music, as Kehoe starts his farm, triumphant, alone with the soil, yet carrying within him personal demons that will culminate in profound horror. I can hear that music as the rescue workers bravely volunteer to help fight this same horror, and as the survivors struggle through unfathomable loss to rebuild, even knowing they will never be the same again. The music evokes the human spirit’s triumph, in carrying on and doing noble things, while also recognizing the wounds we carry with us. Something of the sort should be used in the film as well.

  While this script addresses shockingly contemporary themes, it’s also a period piece. That these events took place in a farming community with old-fashioned cars creates a fascinating juxtaposition. I suspect this combination of contemporary, real-world horror with a rural American setting would be a prime marketing point of the film. But this juxtaposition must be balanced carefully, in a way that hurts neither current resonance nor historical accuracy.

  The setting helps us understand that these contemporary concerns are not new. Its distance allows us to dissect such a tragedy a little more deeply, with a little more honesty and objectivity. It may let us see that Timothy McVeigh’s rebellion against the federal government has deep cultural roots. The era’s simple religion and its repression may feel distant, but we have our own forms of these same cultural tendencies. We may react in horror at how easily Kehoe purchases explosives, or how he wasn’t stopped, only to realize that we don’t react this way when a contemporary killer purchases an automatic weapon. But the movie is not a polemic, and its setting may let us enjoy the story without recoiling at its implicit political and intellectual overtones.

  At the same time, we shouldn’t hide that the movie echoes contemporary events. In writing the chaos at the school building after the explosion, I have certainly drawn upon the chaos of more recent attacks. The dust that covers rescue workers will certainly invoke 9/11. The car bombing should not be filmed like a gangster movie but like the terrorist attacks on the news. Dead schoolchildren cannot help but invoke more recent attacks on schools, such as Columb
ine or Virginia Tech. The school’s collapse cannot help but echo Oklahoma City. It is entirely natural that we draw upon our own experiences, in depicting similar ones in the past, especially when those past events were not recorded on video.

  But every effort should be taken to film the story in as historically accurate a manner as possible, from costuming and props to vocal patterns. This is essential not only to do justice to the actual events and victims, but to preserve the audience’s emotional distance from material that might otherwise be too raw and emotional.

  Notes on Structure and Content

  The script obviously has an unconventional structure. It opens the way it does because it’s history, not a mystery. It immediately tells you this isn’t a thriller. It’s stupid to use winning the Revolution as a climax – everyone already knows. It would be offensive to use 9/11 that way. Whether people know of the Bath school disaster or not, any moviegoers would probably have heard what the film is about. So start with what would otherwise be the bloody climax. Get it out of the way. What follows isn’t a conventional story but a dissection of an event. The question isn’t what’s going to happen but how we get there – and watching unravel all the implications of this event that, while logical, wouldn’t immediately occur to us.

  Foreknowledge colors everything, but what we lose in suspense we gain in other, perhaps subtler forms of drama. Before the bombing, every line of dialogue or event can seem either potentially menacing or oddly diffusing. We can sympathize with Kehoe, only to remember what he’s going to do. He can be both a sad figure and an unsympathetic extremist. We may hate him for beating his horse to death, yet identify with what produced this deed. We understand Monty Ellsworth’s passive reaction, yet know a more active one might prevent the coming tragedy. Knowing what’s coming, we may catch ourselves wanting someone to stop him at the school, although logic tells us no one will. It’s horrifying to watch someone preparing to kill, when we know that he’ll succeed – like the anger we feel watching documentaries dramatizing the steps leading to 9/11.