This video explains the overall concept behind The Waiting Room, a social media/documentary hybrid that tells the story of Highland Hospital, a county “safety-net” hospital located in Oakland, CA. At the core of the idea is an interactive story booth that will be located in the waiting room. This prototype will be tested and refined over the next year and then replicated in other waiting rooms around the country.
The project includes:
- THIS BLOG which features waiting room stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes information about the project.
- A feature-length DOCUMENTARY FILM called The Waiting Room (see film description below) that will follow several characters who pass through the waiting room.
- An INTERACTIVE WEB SITE (later this year) that will feature content gathered from an INTERACTIVE STORY BOOTH that will be placed in the waiting room and will allow patients and hospital staff to view, record, and share stories.
FILM CONCEPT
The Waiting Room is a character-driven documentary film that uses extraordinary access to go behind the doors of an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients. The film – using a blend of cinema verité and characters’ voiceover – offers a raw, intimate, and even uplifting look at how patients, executive staff and caregivers each cope with disease, bureaucracy and hard choices. It is a film about fighting for survival when the odds are stacked against you.
For millions of Americans, the unraveling of our health care system has caused acute pain. There are now 30-47 million uninsured Americans, and the numbers are climbing. Where do these people go? What do they do when they get sick? Most go to the waiting room, where they get emergency care at public hospitals. These hospitals are the last line of defense for millions of Americans – the safety net.
Our story takes place at Highland Hospital in Oakland, CA. It is the primary care facility for 250,000 patients of all nationalities, races, and religions, with 250 patients crowding its emergency room every day. Young victims of gun violence take their turn alongside artists and small business owners who lack insurance. Steel workers, taxi cab drivers and international asylum seekers crowd the halls. Young, pregnant women wait beside patients with exotic, advanced-stage disease. These patients and their caregivers each have something important to teach us about the vulnerabilities we all face and the heroic efforts that are often made to overcome pain and tragedy.
The ER waiting room will serve as the grounding point for our film, allowing us to capture in vivid detail what it means for millions of Americans to live without health insurance. It will lay bare the struggle and determination of both a community and an institution coping with limited resources and no road map for navigating a health care landscape marked by historic economic and political dysfunction.
The film will capture the strength and faith required to keep a public hospital alive – through the eyes of both the people who run it and rely on it. We will meet the hospital executives charged with what has been described as an “impossible task” – running a public hospital amidst the current system we have for delivering health care to the uninsured. We will also meet caregivers who approach their work with a level of empathy and commitment that seems capable of healing a nation. And we will meet the patients who are at the heart of this story. But this raises critical questions: Is the safety net really safe? And can one institution really heal the wounds of a community challenged by poverty and violence?
STRUCTURE, STYLE AND THEMES
On any given day life at Highland Hospital begins and ends. Babies are born, hearts fail, families are comforted and wounds are healed. Our film will use the structure of a 24-hour period to weave stories from multiple viewpoints. The film will emphasize the repeatable and relentless nature of events that put pressure on the institution and show how America’s health care policy has manifested itself in this one public hospital. We will capture this 24-hour arc by filming over the course of four months. The film will then be edited to portray a representative day-in-the-life of the hospital.
Structurally, the film will begin with death in the morgue and end with life being born on the 9th floor maternity ward – in essence the arc of life in reverse. We will follow several main characters throughout their day including a social worker, a first year resident, the CEO, an ER nurse and several patients. In some cases we will follow them outside the four walls of the hospital, whether it is on a city bus at 4 a.m. beginning a journey to the hospital waiting room or at a high society fundraiser being attended by the executive team. Each character will reveal a different point-of-view on how our public health care system operates and whether it is working. CEO Wright Lassiter and his team are trying to keep the hospital – essentially a community of caregivers and patients – afloat. Caregivers are trying to save lives. And patients themselves are just trying to survive day to day.
Each character – some intersecting with others – will meet challenges that unfold over the course of one day at the hospital. These stories will show the parallels between caregiver and patient by juxtaposing the struggles for survival of both the institution and the community. The verité approach allows these stories to arise organically from a day in someone’s life. They put in human terms what is really at stake behind the headlines and the current debate about health care reform.
Supporting the narratives of our main characters will be a surprising cast of secondary characters that work every day – often in anonymity – at the hospital: a housekeeper, a volunteer, a morgue attendant, a local sheriff. At the same time the waiting room and the people who fill it every day will provide texture and context to the key stories that we follow.
We will employ a character driven storytelling style using a hybrid of cinema verité and character voiceover extracted from separate interviews never seen onscreen. The film will be shot in high definition often using prime lenses to create a shallow depth of field. This will give the film a more cinematic look and allow us to avoid blurring out unreleased background characters in post. The visual aesthetic of scenes shot inside the institution will feature a slightly de-saturated, cool color palette that will allow us to emphasize certain colors (blood red for instance.) Scenes outside the hospital – for instance at home with a patient – will feature a much more vibrant, saturated color palette. The film will move back and forth between these distinct visual tones.
Sound design will be used to help bring the hospital to life and capture certain events and scenes that cannot be filmed due to patient privacy limitations. Because of the richness of this approach, we will not need to rely on a dominant score but rather the rich sound tapestry of the hospital itself and the community beyond. We will use our score in subtle ways to complement natural sounds captured with an ear toward storytelling. The sounds of the hospital will reveal in many ways what visuals cannot.
As the title suggests, the waiting room itself will play an important role in the film. After all, it is the gathering place of a community that reflects the entire spectrum of the human experience from death to life. By returning time and again to the theme of waiting, the primary stories will be contextualized by the day-to-day experience of this community.
