Film documents Golden Gate suicides

SAN FRANCISCO — For a year the cameras rolled, capturing death amid the eerie fog and shifting tides.

One by one, filmmaker Eric Steel documented the final moments of 24 despondent men and women, and the four-second fall after they leaped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

His intent, he said, was to illuminate "the darkest corner of the human mind." If he watched enough people take their own lives, he thought he could "spot the outward manifestations of their interior demons."

Steel said he once considered suicide. "It's that Humpty Dumpty moment when it's all going to fall apart," he said. "For me and many others, it didn't come. For the people in this film, it did."

His documentary, "The Bridge," which opens at a film festival in San Francisco today after debuting Thursday in New York City, has already provoked outrage.

"This is like a newspaper carrying a front-page photo of someone blowing his head off; it's irresponsible, exploitative, voyeuristic, ghastly and immoral," said Mark Chaffee, president of Suicide Prevention Advocacy Network-California, who has not seen the movie. His 16-year-old son took his life in 1998.

Misrepresented project

The film set off alarms soon after shooting wrapped in December 2004.

Officials from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area said Steel misrepresented his project when applying for filming permits, telling them he wanted to capture the grandeur of the iconic orange suspension bridge.

Instead, they said, he made what one San Francisco supervisor dismissed in media coverage as a "snuff film."

Others said publicity over the movie prompted bridge officials to pay for a $2 million study of building a pedestrian suicide barrier, a move they long resisted.

The 93-minute documentary draws from thousands of hours of footage, including interviews with relatives of jumpers, and one man who survived the 25-story plunge.

The film shows vivid footage of suicides, including a body pulled from the bay, and interviews with families struggling with the wreckage the jumpers left behind. Interspersed are time-lapse views of the bridge — coursing with traffic — through gloomy, almost ever-present fog.

Steel tells the stories of several victims, such as a 34-year-old Bay Area man depressed by his mother's death.

Wearing a black-leather jacket and sunglasses, his long, black hair flying in the wind, he is seen casing the pedestrian walkway, which he did for 90 minutes. Then he jumps atop the 4-foot railing, slowly turns and almost casually falls backward, as though taking a summer day's plunge into a backyard pool.

Also interviewed is Kevin Hines who, in 2000, survived his jump. Now 25, he speaks freely about his ordeal with manic-depression in the hope that a suicide barrier will be built.

"This film shows what a suicidal person feels like, what their family feels like," said Hines, who has seen the movie. "It shows this happens all the time."

Some 1,300 have jumped

Film-festival officials worry about audience reaction.

"The images are not immediately digestible, and people might initially be confused and fly off the handle. They may react angrily," said Graham Leggat, executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, the festival's sponsor. He plans to moderate a question-and-answer session after the showings.

Since the Golden Gate Bridge opened May 28, 1937, about 1,300 people have leaped to their deaths. In a phone interview from his Manhattan office, Steel, 42, a film producer and book editor, said he became interested in the bridge in 2003 after he read a story about its fatal attraction for the depressed.

The New York native said he has experienced his own bouts of depression. He lost a brother and a sister, one to cancer, the other to an accident with a drunken driver.

Steel wanted to know what made people hurl themselves into the roiling bay water. "One thing that stuck with me is that someone had to walk from the parking lot to one spot on the bridge before taking that jump," he said. "That walk must involve the most unimaginable mental anguish."

He arrived in San Francisco in November 2003. But when he applied for permits, he wrote only that he sought to capture "the powerful, spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge."

Steel said he obscured the movie's purpose to avoid his greatest fear: "I worried word would get out, that someone would jump just to be immortalized on film. Despite criticism I did something unethical, I feel I did the right thing."

From half a mile away, Steel began filming the bridge on New Year's Day in 2004. A crew of 12 took shifts from dawn to dusk. With one camera, the crew recorded the span and water. And with the other, crew members used a telephoto lens to scan for pedestrians.

The crew quickly learned there was no common suicide profile. "We saw lots of people crying, walking alone with hoods over their heads, their shoulders hunched," Steel said. "But none of those people jumped."

Instead, it was the woman with the nervous twitch. And a man who laughed on his cellphone until he blessed himself and pushed off the railing.

Rules for intervening

Steel established guidelines on when to intervene, instructing the crew to call emergency officials if a pedestrian set down a bag or briefcase, removed shoes or wallet, or climbed onto the rail. They intervened five times to stop jumpers, he said.

"It's very hard to watch anyone die," he said. "No one on the crew went unscathed."

The hardest moments came not on the bridge, but later.

As he recorded the suicides, Steel sought details of the dead. He then crossed the country to interview friends and relatives but did not inform family members he had filmed their loved one's suicides. Later, he acknowledged, "individual people called and were upset I didn't tell them."

Park officials also are upset. "He was not upfront with us," said Rudy Evenson of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Officials deny Steel's project influenced the decision to study a suicide barrier.

"Does anybody think this movie truly addresses mental-health problems?" said Mike Martini, a member of the bridge board of directors who says he will not see the film. "It's like saying you understand the Civil War after watching 'Gone With the Wind.'"