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Twin filmmakers trade baseball for books

By Loren Keller

Identical twin brothers Logan and Noah Miller would be the first to admit the irony of their upcoming appearance at the inaugural Iowa City Book Festival this weekend.

“Growing up we did not read,” says Logan Miller. “We were always outside playing baseball or running around the hills or working. Being inside and reading was almost torture.”

Despite their working-class upbringing —and that fact that neither holds a college degree — the brothers wrote Either You’re in or You’re in the Way: Two Brothers, Twelve Months, and One Filmmaking Hell-Ride to Keep a Promise to Their Father, a book about their experience making a movie "with no experience, no money and no Hollywood contacts."

The brothers will introduce two screenings of their film “Touching Home” during their visit to Iowa City this week, at 10 p.m. Friday and at 4 p.m. Saturday in the University of Iowa’s Shambaugh Auditorium. (Both are free and open to the public.) As told in their book, published by HarperCollins in May, the novice filmmakers persuaded actor Ed Harris to play their homeless, alcoholic father in the autobiographical film that details the brothers’ struggle to make it in big-league baseball.

Much has been written about the 2008 feature and how its lead actor got involved – you can read about that in more detail on their web site – but how the 34-year-old brothers came to a life of reading and writing is an unusual story itself.

“If you look at the resume we put together for HarperCollins, it’s quite comical,” the brothers say. “Ditch-digging, house painting, carwash, janitor. We’ve done every manual labor job there is.”

(Reached via speakerphone at their home in Fairfax, Calif., the brothers are difficult to tell apart by voice and often finish each other’s sentences – hence the more generic attribution used here. “We tend to jump in on one another,” one of the brothers says, “but as long as one of us said it, we don’t really care who’s attributed.”)

Before their turn as readers, writers and filmmakers, the brothers’ first love was baseball. Both had some success in the minor leagues — Logan spent the summer of 1993 living in Red Oak, Ia. and playing for the Jayhawk League — but the majors never came calling.

“Baseball had always been our love and once baseball didn’t work out we had no idea what we were going to do with our lives,” the Millers say. “That had been our dream since we had dreams.”

All they knew at that point was what they didn’t want to do: “go back home and pound nails, which was pretty much all we were fit to do, at least on paper.”

The brothers eventually landed in California, where they crashed on the floor of a friend’s apartment in Hollywood. “We really started thinking, as we were walking around each day, what can we do and what do we love?” As for what they loved, they settled on people, storytelling and movies. Then they bought a copy of Lew Hunter’s book Screenwriting 434 – which one brother describes as “the manual to our brain that had been missing” – and in about a month completed the first draft of the screenplay for “Touching Home.” Lacking a computer, the brothers wrote the draft in longhand, mostly in a San Fernando Valley park.

It was also during that time that the book bug bit with a vengeance. With the help of a list provided by a former professor of Noah’s at Southern Arkansas University, the brothers dove into literature headfirst and studied it with near-monastic discipline.

“We just said, look, if we’re going to take this seriously, we need to apply ourselves the same way we applied ourselves to baseball. We need to get up and work at our craft every day and read and write as much as we can,” the Millers say. “We would get up at 5:30 and read and write all day.

“We really had to start from the books you’re supposed to read as a sixth grader, just to get our comprehension.”

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was an early favorite; the brothers say they could relate to the struggles and insecurities of the character Pip, a “common laboring-boy.”

Jack London is another largely self-taught author the brothers admire. “Not only did the writing transform our emotions at the time, but what they were able to accomplish gave us hope. You don’t need to come from a literary family or have a degree in writing. We’re all storytellers and I think it’s just a matter of working hard, sitting down and putting it on paper.”

Other books they read and loved included Dante’s The Inferno, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. From there they moved on to reading the Greeks — Plato, Aristotle, Socrates — and other canonical authors such as Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes and Locke.

Beyond reading, the brothers say, they’ve written 11 screenplays in addition to “Touching Home.”

A pre-festival dinner will be held Friday in the UI Main Library’s North Exhibition Hall, with cocktails beginning at 6:30 p.m. Christopher Merrill, director of the International Writing Program and a key player in obtaining Iowa City’s UNESCO designation as the world’s third “City of Literature,” will deliver the keynote address.

Tickets are $30 per person and guests are invited to stay for the Miller brothers’ screening of “Touching Home” at 10 p.m. in Shambaugh Auditorium. The brothers will screen their film again at 4 p.m. Saturday.

Also appearing Saturday as part of the Shambaugh Author Series will be Iowa Poets Laureate Marvin Bell, Robert Dana and Mary Swander; The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa editors Marvin Bergman and Loren Horton; and The Oxford Project collaborators Peter Feldstein and Stephen G. Bloom.

Presented by the University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Press, the festival will feature a mix of local and regional booksellers with new and used books for sale, a music stage, children's activities, food vendors, book arts demonstrations, readings and panel discussions. Most activities outside of Shambaugh Auditorium will take place in Gibson Square, outside the Main Library’s south entrance. Other events will take place inside the library.

Discussions will focus on how to find or start a book discussion group; how to get involved with adult literacy programs in Iowa City; how to write a literary blog; how writers use libraries and archives to research; and how to work with a writers' group. The workshops will provide hands-on opportunities to use library resources to find consumer health information, add historical context to genealogical research or read reviews of the latest best-sellers.

A complete schedule is posted here.