Her journey began with a terrifying diagnosis and an epiphany about toilet paper. Or perhaps it began with a phone call from a “wish” organization to the set of the first Harry Potter film on behalf of a dying child. Then again, it may have started with a conversation between a young film producer and the parent of a terminally ill child about isolation.
Or maybe just maybe, some beginnings — like Paula DuPré Pesmen’s — are miraculously cumulative.
The award-winning film producer who has shepherded first-time documentary filmmakers to success is also the founder of There With Care. The Boulder-based, nonprofit organization tends to the needs of families with critically ill children.
“I never would have planned this path,” says Pesmen. “And if I was going to sit down and draw it out, I never would have said this is where I’d end up.”
If your wish is to do works beneficent, artistic or both, then Pesmen provides proof it can be done. Though it may require some tight scheduling. On a recent five-day span she traveled to L.A. for her latest documentary, returned to Denver for There With Care, went back to L.A to teach a film-producing master class. A few days later, she flew to New York City for an awards-season screening of Alan Hicks’ “Keep On Keepin’ On.”
What’s next?
The 37th Starz Denver Film Festival red-carpet matinee of “Keep On Keepin’ On” at the Buell Theatre at 2 p.m. Saturday.
Hicks’ debut feature celebrates the relationship between jazz legend and teacher Clark Terry and pianist Justin Kauflin, who’s been blind since age 11.
In April the Weinstein Company’s Radius division picked up the debut feature for theatrical distribution after its successful world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. Hicks won the festival’s best new-documentary filmmaker award, and the film took the audience award for documentary feature.
There With Care
A chilly November afternoon found Pesmen at the Denver location of There With Care. The office is tucked away in a strip mall on Colorado Boulevard. The walls are flush with framed photos of children. One of a boy named Thomas greets visitors as they come in. He was 2 when he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He was 4 when he died. Two weeks later, his mother came to There With Care to volunteer.
Walking through the space with its pantry of care bags, shelves of dry goods and refrigerators for perishables, Pesmen stops in front of a framed, impossibly tiny diaper.
“That’s a NICU (neonatal-intensive-care) diaper. Isn’t it so sweet?” she says in her calming cadence. It’s smaller than her hand.
“Sometimes we’re with a family for a few months. Sometimes we’re with them for years. We are with the family through the whole crisis. So if they have a relapse, we’re going to stay. We don’t overstay, either.”
There With Care works with 15 hospitals and hospice agencies. About to celebrate its 10th year in Colorado, the organization has served nearly 1,800 families. There’s a 3-year-old chapter in Palo Alto, Calif., and plans for a Los Angeles office.
There’s a telling intimacy built into There With Care. And Pesman understands that people need to know they make a difference and that families want to feel recognized.
“If you bring a gas card in, that’s not a gas card,” she says. “That’s a ride to the hospital. That’s a mom who couldn’t go to the grocery store because she knows she needs that quarter tank of gas to go to the hospital, that she has to keep it on reserve.”
Help is in the details.
“Everything that people bring to our door is easing someone’s stress,” she says. Laundry detergent. Cereal. Wipes. You know, the surprisingly expensive basics. Soap. Diapers. “Kids going through chemo go through twice as much,” Pesmen says.
She then shares this anecdote, not as a way to drop a name — a rather big one — but as a way to underscore the humbling lessons of vulnerability, the transformative value of making connections.
“When (husband) Curt was sick, I remember staying at Chris Columbus’ house in San Francisco — they were in London — and there was no toilet paper. And I remember bawling and when I started this, I was like, ‘Every family’s going to have toilet paper.’ ”
And, she adds, “families say it a lot. It’s a weird thing. It’s a symbol really of how the basic necessities get lost in crisis.”
A wish-granter is born
While Pesmen was an associate producer on Columbus’ “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” Curt was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer.
“It was not operable at first. And it was really scary,” she says. “We went through nine months of that.” (“He is doing well,” she likes to say of his status these days.)
Her first day back to the production in London, she got a call from a wish organization on behalf of a child who wanted to see the Harry Potter film before she died.
Pesmen recalls telling the woman, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know why they gave you to me. I can’t help you.” But Pesmen heard her out. She went to Columbus.
“We figured out a way to do a rough cut. We got a screening room in San Francisco. We did a screening for this little girl, Gillian. Her picture hangs over my desk,” says Pesmen.
“She shot me out of a cannon, basically.” Pesmen began doing wishes on the Potter sets. “It became my reason to go to work.”
More than 65 kids visited the sets of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”
“Everybody got involved,” she says. As the actors became more comfortable with their young guests, Pesmen had more time to spend with parents. On one such occasion, she said to a father, “You must have so many people helping you.”
“Are you kidding?” he replied. “We’re living a parent’s worst nightmare. People don’t know what to say or do, so they don’t do anything.”
His response haunted her. It led a young up-and-coming producer to leave a dream gig only to re-create a dreamier one.
“I was walking away from something I loved. I loved working on films. I loved supporting the team. And I worked 16 years for the nicest company. You don’t walk away from a perfect job.” And yet, she had to.
Pesmen leapt.
“My heart had experienced their isolation,” she says. And so There With Care was born in her Boulder home, midwifed by neighbors, by Curt, and in many ways by young sons Joshua and Jesse, now 12 and 9.
See it as a sign of esteem: Columbus and the president of his company 1492 Pictures, Michael Barnathan, supported her and joined There With Cares’ nascent board.
“Curt and I would open our door in the morning, and there would be garbage bags all over our porch. Somehow people had heard they could leave donations. And they did.”
Joint projects
The same week Pesmen left 1492 Pictures, she got a call from a dear friend in Boulder, where Pesmen has lived since 1995. He told her he was starting a not-for-profit and film- production company. Would she be game?
Yes, she said, as long as she could do There With Care.
That friend was photographer and filmmaker Louis Psihoyos. The film they embarked on: the 2009 Oscar nominee for best feature documentary, “The Cove.”
Entwined, the filmmaking and caretaking have grown apace.
There With Care outgrew the Pesmens’ home. Three years into “The Cove,” Pesmen had coffee with nature photographer James Balog, whose striking, dogged work documenting the receding of the world’s glaciers became the basis for first-time filmmaker Jeff Orlowski’s “Chasing Ice.” In September, the movie won an Emmy for outstanding nature programming.
While Pesmen was at the Sundance Film Festival with “Chasing Ice,” a young Aussie named Alan Hicks tracked the producer down to discuss the documentary he was making about his mentor, Clark Terry. The trumpeter and teacher was in his 80s at the time and struggling with diabetes-related ailments.
When Terry’s wife, Gwen, was considering green-lighting the project, having a production in their home, their lives, she checked out the There With Care website.
“I think so much of There With Care is in the movies,” Pesmen says. “And so much of the movies are in There With Care. They just kind of evolved together,” she says.
“I was a control freak as a producer. I had to get everything done, everything perfect. I don’t do that anymore. I think Curt being sick changed all of that for me. I didn’t have a choice anymore. I saw how quickly things could change and be taken from you. That’s probably why I love documentary so much. You think you’re making this movie and you’re not. You’re making this one.”
At Saturday’s festival screening of “Keep On Keepin’ On,” Pesmen will be joined by the film’s editor and co-writer Davis Coombe and co-producer Karl Kister for a post-screening interview. Quincy Jones — Pesmen’s producing partner in making the film — may chime in via Skype. Pianist Kauflin is set to perform.
“I’ve never known anyone like him,” says Pesmen of Clark Terry. “It’s in his soul — positivity. It’s not a way of talking or being. It’s who he is. He truly makes you see the world in a different way.”
The same might be said of Pesmen.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
