[lively upbeat music]
[traffic going past, projector whirring and clicking]
- That sign, that was big advertising.
It helped make Lawsonomy a...
...a common word almost.
'Course it wouldn't get in the dictionary for a long time
but... [chuckles]
When I was here, people would come in here,
"I've gone by that sign a million times."
They'd finally give up and had to stop.
- Ryan: How many people would just stop by
once they saw the sign?
- You mean going by the farm?
- Yeah, did you get people to stop?
- Not many. Curiosity-- Curiosity's gone.
[intense contemplative music]
- Hi, welcome to Director's Cut .
I'm Pete Schwaba
and we just saw a clip from ManLife .
If you've ever driven between Chicago and Milwaukee,
you've probably noticed a sign in a big open field
that reads, "University of Lawsonomy,"
and if you've seen it, like most of us,
you've probably wondered what it was.
Well, you're about to find out thanks to this fascinating film.
ManLife follows Merle Hayden,
a man with undying loyalty to his idol,
an American original, Alfred Lawson.
I'm joined today by the film's director, Ryan Sarnowski.
Ryan, welcome to Director's Cut .
- Thanks for having me. - You bet.
So, okay, tell us about ManLife .
How did you find this project and tell this story?
- Like you said, many people have driven by that sign.
I'm the person who stopped
to try to find out what it was about.
And I didn't really stop-- - Pete: Did you want to enroll?
[laughs]
- No, what happened was I wanted to get to Chicago
to meet another filmmaker friend of mine,
and I was speeding along the corridor
between Racine and Chicago,
and the Racine Highway Patrol politely pulled me over
and told me I was going over the speed limit.
And while I sat there waiting for my ticket,
I was right across from that sign.
And I started to think, "What is this place?
And who lives here?"
So I went back to the farm and no one was there.
So I just stuck a note in the door
and said I wanted to know about Lawsonomy.
And I kinda forgot about it.
A couple of weeks later, I get a call
and this gentleman says,
"I live out on this land.
"The organization isn't here anymore.
"I'm just renting the space.
The guy you want to talk to is Merle."
So he gave me Merle's number and I called Merle,
and he didn't tell me that
Merle vacations in Florida for the winter.
So I just left a message on Merle's answering machine
and again I forgot about it.
Months later when Merle returned,
because he didn't know how
to get his machine's messages from Florida,
I get this call.
And he's like, "So, you want to know about Lawsonomy?"
And I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I do."
So I went down and I met Merle in his apartment in Racine.
And for four hours, he talked my ear off
about this thing called 'Lawsonomy.'
And this sort of alternate history,
and this life that he had dedicated to this movement
and my producer, Terry, was with me,
and we said, we've got a story.
Let's get a camera.
- Let's take another look at a clip from ManLife.
- Merle: One of the last times
I drove Alfred Lawson someplace,
and I don't remember where it was,
he says, "It was my one hope that great men
"will spring up in the future to take hold of this work.
"That they will be willing to devote their lives
"in an endeavor to put the whole human race
up on a footing of equality."
But I worked with Lawson right under him, you see.
That's how I really got to know him,
and to know his thinking.
Lawson had international acclaim in five separate fields.
In aircraft,
he was the lead educator worldwide for seven years.
Lawson built the first airliner,
and he put the word "aircraft" into the dictionary.
He laid the foundation of the industry.
He could have been a multimillionaire,
he could have been a billionaire,
before they started talking about it,
but when the Depression hit in '29,
he renounced ownership of wealth for himself,
to spend the last of his life,
coaching the people on how to save their country
and built a better human race.
- Alfred Lawson: Roughly speaking, 99% of the human race
have very little or no accumulated wealth.
The 1% control the great bulk of it.
There is a mighty good reason for this state of affairs.
The American people have been lulled
into a deep sleep by the financiers.
It is my duty to wake them up.
- Merle: He could see the injustice and the corruption
of the system and he started organizing,
and we had over 15 million people coast to coast,
marching against the financial system.
And yet, in all the history books,
try and find his name even.
It isn't even there, see?
It disappeared.
- So I'm amazed,
when I was watching your film, all these things Lawson did,
like Merle says, he was accomplished in five separate fields
and put the word aircraft in the dictionary.
How come we don't know more about him?
Like, I Googled him.
Even his Wikipedia page isn't that detailed.
Why don't people know about Alfred Lawson?
- Do you want my version or Merle's?
Cause... - A little from both of you.
- Okay Merle would tell you that he has been written
out of history by the financiers that he fought against.
- Pete: Okay
- My version of it is that, you know,
Lawson was one of many
sort of eccentric American renaissance men
who dabbled in many different things.
There were many at that point in time.
You know that had their hands in a lot of different fields.
We compare him to guys like you know Howard Hughes,
and stuff like that.
And he did have one legitimate success,
which is what he's kind of still got his name
out in the world for, and that's
that he invented the first aircraft,
or airliner in America.
His success in the other fields was not so strong.
And so maybe that's why we don't know about him,
because of his not having achieved as much success
in the world of baseball,
or in the world of finance reform,
or even in the world of philosophy.
- Yeah, it's interesting though, like,
that I'm sure that's true what you're saying,
but to have all those followers,
and not know much about, you know.
Still it's surprising that he's not that well-known.
Maybe he will be now.
Did you know right away?
You said you went and met with Merle
at his apartment for four hours.
Was that kind of pre--
Was that kind of an investigative meeting?
Or did you already know you wanted to make a documentary?
- Well, my partner, Terry, and I,
we knew that we want to do something.
We had worked before and we were like we need a new project.
And so this was just a potential idea.
And it wasn't until Merle talked our ear off,
and we saw the massive collection of material,
that Merle had squirreled away in his apartment.
We didn't even know about the stuff
he had stored in other places.
It was just in the apartment.
It was the combination of that,
and it was also the fact that his--
who we had learned was his high-school sweetheart, Betty,
sat in the corner the whole time
while we were getting our ears talked off,
and she just knitted away, kind of silently smiling,
and laughing because she had heard it all before,
and was just thankful somebody else was having to hear it.
- Oh, that is fun.
I'm surprised-- Did she chime in much?
Because she is very funny when she's in the film
- Here and there, and we could get the glimpse
that she was quite the character,
and that there was some interesting dynamic
between her and Merle that needed to be explored at well.
- How long was this shoot, like, start to finish?
Just the shooting actually.
I'm sure the post-- - The shooting itself
was really only about two years.
Of shooting with a sporadic-- - Pete: Only two years, wow!
- On and off, maybe a couple additional pickups after that.
The focus of it is really around a couple
air show visits that we did with him.
One in particular.
And then visits, with him,
to kind of see what he had in his apartment.
What took a lot longer than that was also
just getting Merle to warm up to us,
and open up to us, and mostly trust us.
- Pete: Okay and did he do that fairly quickly?
Like, he seems, like-- - No
- Pete: Really
- No he was pretty slow to worm up to us.
He's very quick to share information.
- Okay
- But to get underneath the surface and decide--
to figure out what was driving Merle.
And not just information about Lawson and Lawsonomy,
took a lot of time.
- What made him, like--
What made him open up to you finally?
Was there a moment,
was there a revelation or something
when he finally just?
Or was it just a matter of spending time with him
and getting him.
- I think it was more of an erosion.
We just slowly got him to warm up to us.
I think it also was how committed we were to this film,
and to this project - Pete: Yeah
- And it was also just how
honest with we were with him.
About the fact that we were trying to do
our due diligence and portray
a rather unbiased version of the truth of the story.
But that, you know, we also had to tell him, like, you know,
we have to kind of present multiple sides to this.
And he appreciated that in time.
At the end of the day he still probably wishes
we had made some 18-hour long
just recitation of Lawsonian text.
- Pete: Right
- But I think by the time he saw the premiere, he realized
that what we had to offer was more engaging
and could at least deliver people to the text
if we weren't gonna deliver the text to the people.
- Very well said.
Let's see another clip from ManLife.
- You wanna pre-- Just call Direct Credits for everybody.
- Call what "Direct what" for everybody?
Ah, Direct Credits for Everybody .
- Man in Hawaiian shirt: So he was also involved in,
basically, economic things?
- Oh yeah, that's what wiped his name out of existence.
- What do you mean?
- They don't care about aircraft.
They don't care about Lawsonomy.
But this they're afraid of.
Now the little 60-some page book I claim
is still the broadest education
in the fewest words of any other book ever written
because it doesn't deal just with money.
And everybody could see that something was wrong
in the Depression.
But nobody understood why.
And with just opening a book, there was the answer.
I can remember '29 and my dad built his own home.
He lost the home to the banks.
Well I was 13 when he got the Direct Credits book.
We had a paper route and pulled into this farmer's yard,
and said, "Hey, here's something you oughta be interested in.
"It's a program that proposes justice for everybody
that harms nobody."
And if he had been a cat or a horse or something
his ears popped right up.
His whole attitude changed.
He says well that's interesting.
What you got?
He started working in the organization right away.
So, by the time I was a senior,
my dad took seven of us to Columbus,
and that's where I first heard Lawson.
[crowd murmuring]
- Alfred Lawson: Man has done many queer things heretofore,
but none quite so stupid as chaining himself
to this suicidal orgy of finance.
I am ready and willing to show the people
every trick the financiers and their touts
practice on them.
Join the Direct Credits Society
and help stop the thief now before it' too late.
- Okay, so, I have to ask you.
In fact, I think I asked you this before.
What are 'Direct Credits?' How do I get some?
- I wish I could answer that for you.
Direct Credits was-- from what I can gather--
going to be a form of credit money
that was going to be issued by Congress,
the way the Constitution originally had set up
our financial system.
Was that Congress was going to be the one
that prints and institutes money.
Not the Federal Reserve.
How you get them?
You'll have to read Lawson's book,
Direct Credits for Everybody ,
but from what I can distill out of this,
and I'm sure Merle would be looking down and correcting me,
is that it's
a...
form of credit based on
how good your idea is,
or how good of a worker you've already been.
If you can prove yourself, you can get more Direct Credits.
- Mm'kay - Type of thing
But in a way it's unlimited,
it's endless,
it's just based on your value and your worth
and stuff like that,
but it was never clearly spelled out or nailed down
in a way that I could understand.
- Did Merle have a good understanding of it
to the best of your knowledge?
- He had a good understanding of being--
He could recite what Lawson wrote,
and I could read what Lawson wrote,
and could tell that Merle was being diligent
with his recitation of it,
but I still could not fully see how it would play out
if it was put into action.
- You introduce Betty first,
but they were apart for a long time.
60 years or something like that?
They were high school sweethearts
and then they got reunited.
Then later you introduce Margie, who was Merle's wife.
Talk about that decision as a director.
Why the order?
Why that storytelling of it?
- I think it's just because that's how we knew them.
- Okay
- Like we met Betty first.
And it actually took a while before,
it took somebody else tell us
that, you know, Merle had this wife.
- Pete: Hmm, okay - Before Betty
and him got back together.
And so we were just introduced to Betty,
and Betty was a living character
in our story while we were filming for a while.
So we just sort of got to know their relationship,
and it just felt that's the comfortable way
to present it.
It also helped to introduce Betty early on because,
even though we haven't seen her yet in any of these clips,
Betty is the character that I think our audience can most
understand or gravitate towards.
Because Betty doesn't fully get Direct Credits either.
She doesn't understand Lawsonomy either.
So when we were throwing all these
rather convoluted terms or ideas out to our audience,
we didn't want them to feel like they were missing out,
or we were failing as storytellers to tell them.
It's okay.
Betty doesn't get it. You don't get it.
Just go along with the ride.
You're gonna be in for a treat - Pete: That's great.
So I think that's why we had to introduce Betty
before we could do Merle's first wife Margie
because Margie was like Merle.
She was a devout follower.
She knew it front to back, heart and soul.
Believed it and didn't question any of it.
- It's interesting too because Merle's a unique guy,
as was Lawson.
And Betty really is kind of our access character.
- Yeah. - It's like, "Okay,
"we're seeing these two guys through her,
and she likes this guy so we like this guy."
- Exactly.
That's exactly why we brought her in first.
- Yeah, interesting.
So you shot in Florida,
Racine, Oshkosh.
Talk a little bit about
the biggest challenge making this film.
You have a lot of older people,
anyone following Lawson to this point,
Merle, Betty, what was your biggest challenge?
- I think the biggest challenge,
was just keeping all this different elements,
and storylines into some sort of cohesive
and understandable format.
I mean Lawson himself was working in like
four or five different fields.
We had to explain what those were.
We had to explain sort of Merle's own history,
his life,
we had to explain these two relationships he had
with these two other women.
It was a lot of different pieces of string
that we were trying to weave together.
That was the hardest part.
And that's what took the most time in the edit room
was, you know, myself,
my editor, Jessamy Meyer,
both of the producers, Terry and Susan,
just having these long,
wonderfully healthy
collaborative debates about what serves our story best,
and the order that we put all these different pieces,
and so that was the hardest part.
After that I can tell you--
technical, logical problems.
- Pete: Yeah technical shooting stuff
- We had left and right.
Yeah lots of strange things happened
along the way.
- Well let's see another clip from ManLife .
- Alfred Lawson: Man must now prepare
for another step forward in his continuous march
towards a higher state of intelligence.
Man's growth begins with exercise,
builds up with nourishment,
and recuperates with rest.
The men and women of the future who study and practice
pure Lawsonomy principles will evolve into giants.
Physically, mentally, and morally.
- Mark Metcalf: Lawson was always concerned
about his health, and so he re-conceptualized
all of physical activity in terms of suction and pressure,
and he developed lots of rules for daily living.
Rules about how one should sleep in the nude,
change the bed sheets every day, took cold baths every day.
The emphasis on vegetarianism, on living a clean life.
Bringing about a dramatic change in the human condition.
- That's a secret about this.
- Lawson had different philosophies.
Nutrition was one.
When we first got back together,
I knew that he didn't,
that he never ate much cooked food.
And to this day he likes raw food.
Probably wouldn't hurt me to do that.
I probably would lose a little weight,
if I'd stick to raw foods.
- The more natural food you put into your body,
the better the mental organisms, the menorgs,
can and build a better formation.
They think in creatures within man,
they call them mental organisms,
these thinking creatures with in us
are actually living as much as we are,
in the greater sphere.
- The mental organisms called 'the menorgs'
are matched by the disorgs, the dis-organizers,
they're also submicroscopic.
You can find also in the current doctrines,
this notion of little entities that can cause trouble.
Scientology, for instance,
has the concept of the theta beings,
and they're just like the disorgs.
They cause all kinds of problems,
and the way to deal with them, of course,
is through Dianetics or Scientology.
Sounds rather Lawsonian to me in a way.
- So your narrator is Mark Metcalf, you said.
Tell us about Mark and how he got involved.
- So Mark provided the voice of Alfred Lawson.
One thing we learned pretty early on in going through
all of Merle's materials was that,
while we had 8 millimeter films,
we had slides, we had stills, we had text,
we didn't have Lawson's voice.
No one had recorded Lawson giving these great speeches
that we had typed out and published.
But we needed a voice and Mark and I had worked together
through a documentary about a project he was doing
with Milwaukee film.
And so I knew him from that.
And he had done an interview with me early on,
when we were running a Kickstarter campaign for
this project.
And I just happened to kind of float the idea by to him.
"Hey, would you be interested in being
the voice of Alfred Lawson?"
And he said, "Sure, great." - Did he know who Lawson was?
- Yeah, 'cause at that point I had showed him
some of the books and talked to him about it.
About the project I was working on,
and so he thought that was great.
And so we worked it out and we were able to get
you know a deal with the Screen Actors Guild,
and Mark came in and did the voiceover.
We took text and made him speak it verbatim
as Lawson had spoken it from the published things
and we went through a bunch of them,
and then kind of used parts in the film.
- So I should explain Mark Metcalf,
for those of us in the film community,
everybody knows who Mark is,
but he was in Animal House . - Yeah
- And he's back in Milwaukee now right?
And he loves to work.
As I understand it.
- Mark's been out of Milwaukee for a while.
He actually was in Milwaukee for a bit,
then he moved to Montana,
and now he is living in Ohio.
He's there with his son who is in grad school
- Pete: Okay - In Ohio.
But, yeah, Mark, for a while, was a pretty prominent figure
in the Milwaukee movie scene.
And he was very generous. - Yeah.
So, okay, Lawsonomy.
The pursuits all seem very noble.
You know, everybody--
Success for everybody, natural law,
taking care of one's body and health.
If there's a chink in the armor of Lawsonomy,
where would you think that is?
- Um. - Pete: Or did you--
In your research, did you see anything where you're like,
"Ooh, that' a little strange there."?
- Well, I think that where Lawson gets faulted often
is in the scientific fields.
A lot of the ideas he have are just not provable
by the scientific method that most scientists use
as a way to turn, you know, a hypothesis into a theory.
They can't be recreated.
They can't even be kind of tangibly recorded.
And so I think that's where he usually
tends to be getting pushed into the field of "kook."
These ideas of little entities living inside of us.
Menorgs and disorgs
and that has not yet been proven.
Who knows?
Maybe down the road, we'll find out he was right,
and he knew what he was talking about.
Some other things he's predicted,
have sounded, like, better.
I mean he was promoting good ideas.
He was promoting eating, you know, unprocessed food,
eating vegetarian food, eating raw food.
Ideas that are now coming back as being in vogue.
And like why would we have ever not done this.
- And that's what's so interesting kind of
and almost endearing about him as a character.
It's like, yeah that makes sense.
And this was decades ago that he was saying this.
Why do you think he-- or did Merle know this--
why he introduced religion?
That seemed to come about later
where it was not part of Lawsonomy early on.
Was that kind of just expanding the organization, or?
- I think so, and you know Merle addresses this in the film,
as does one of our other characters in our film, Jim Newman,
who says that you know Lawson didn't actually brand it
Lawsonian Religion until the very end.
And it was when kind of a group within the organization
was looking for a religion.
Cause many people would study Lawsonomy
but also go to church.
And so it was the idea of bringing them all
under one umbrella.
And the other thing is that there might have been
a reason to become a religious organization for tax purposes
- Right.
We have to get to another clip but quickly I want to ask you:
the title ManLife , where's that come from?
It comes from one of Lawson's earliest books,
which was sort of the guide on how to live your life.
And so when we were going through titles,
and we went through a ton of different titles,
we kind of finally settled on ManLife ,
because it was both about a man's life, Merle's life,
and sort of like Merle using Lawson as a way
to live his own life.
- We'll talk more about Merle after this.
Another clip from ManLife .
- Merle started taking the reins after Lawson died,
because Merle was living on the property,
and everyone else would just show up once a month.
It was Merle and Margie that became the voice,
and face of the organization for all intents and purposes.
Finally, at some point the board said,
"You're not in charge."
It's supposed to be run by the board and not by Merle alone.
And so, when they finally decided to assert their control,
it led to a lot of bad blood.
[intense moody music]
- Merle: They voted me out in '97 and Margie out in '98.
There was no discussion.
No charges.
Nothing about it.
They conspired against me and they just did it.
Coup d'état they call 'em.
It was all a matter of the money deal.
It was 300 and some-thousand that they sold
for just 20 acres here.
The only comment she ever made about the group
that took over the University was that
she never wanted to see any of them again.
So that, that's Margie and I
more or less on our own.
[slow melancholy music]
So we just moved into Racine.
And went on our own,
and kept going up to Oshkosh,
and that's where I really carried it.
They wanted me to turn over the Oshkosh booth to them.
But I wouldn't do it. I kept it.
- So, who do you find more interesting?
You're the director, you got kind of like
two leading men here
Merle, and his idol, Alfred Lawson.
Who's more interesting to you? - Merle
- Really? Can you explain that?
- I just-- I'm fascinated with why people
would follow something, anything.
Especially when you might realize,
that you're kind of at the end of that following.
And that passion and that dedication,
the not-- refusing to quit even up to his last days.
That, to me, is far more interesting.
Don't get me wrong.
Lawson, from a historical perspective,
I find just as fascinating.
I'm a, you know, bit of an eccentric history buff
so, like, when I stumbled upon Lawson,
that intrigued me as well,
but for me, it's just about someone as dedicated as Merle.
- Okay. So did Merle see the film?
You said he passed away.
When did he pass away?
And what was his opinion of the film?
- So we premiered on June third of last year,
2017,
at the Chicago underground film festival
and Merle was able to make it.
- Pete: Oh, great - His health was failing
at that point, but he was able to get there.
He saw the film.
He had seen earlier cuts of it, and he like I said
gave us more notes about how we needed more Lawson,
less Betty.
He didn't see why she was part of the story at all
because she wasn't a believer.
But when he saw the film at the festival,
he told us that it was excellent.
And that was probably the best we could get.
And he passed away about a week after that.
- Really? - Yeah.
- Wow, well it's nice he did get to see it.
What is Lawson's legacy?
Where is Lawsonomy right now as a practice
now that Merle's gone?
I mean, he was kinda--
- Well now that Merle's gone there are still a couple of
like second, third, generation followers out there.
They don't really meet. They don't--
They're sort of like very private
in their practicing of Lawsonomy.
And, you know.
So, there are a few out there
that still read the books and kind of getting together
and carry on.
But no one carries on like Merle.
No one carries on in the way that
this child of the Depression,
you know,
who dedicated everything of his life to this movement
is out there.
So Merle, in that way, was the very last of that sort of era
that grew up with Lawson and followed in Lawson's shadows.
As a legacy for Lawson,
I mean, he exists now in this film.
There's been two books written about him.
One of them from the author Lyle Henry,
who's in our movie.
There's another one by Jerry Kuntz.
It's about more of Lawson's baseball years.
So there's little bits of Lawson's history out there.
You know, we still have a memorial marker in Milwaukee,
about where the first airline flew out of.
But you know we're losing part of
Lawson's legacy all the time.
The farm is now gonna be gone.
It's gonna be raised and there's gonna be a Foxconn factory
where the Lawsonomy farm once was.
- That's where Foxconn is going?
- It's part of their plot of land.
So, read into that what you will about progress, but...
- Yeah
- That's what's gonna be of the new home of Lawsonomy.
- Well, I will say this:
I'm glad you got a ticket right by that farm
so you could tell this story to us and be here today.
Thanks so much. - No problem
- Pete: It was great having you.
And thank you for watching Director's Cut .
For more information on ManLife please go to
wpt dot org and click on Director's Cut .
While you're there send us an email
or find out how to submit a film.
I'm Pete Schwaba.
I'm hoping next we can find someone to make a film
that explains the bong rec area.
Now sit back because ManLife
on Director's Cut Presents starts now.