Documentary filmmaker Dan Keller with a digital disc and an old film reel. STAFF PHOTO/PAUL FRANZ
Documentary filmmaker Dan Keller, of Wendell, in his editing room. STAFF PHOTO/PAUL FRANZ Blackberry Herbicide
Dan Keller was an Amherst College student in the 1960s when he enrolled in an independent study in film.
The kid from Laconia, New Hampshire, opted to shoot a documentary about an institution for mentally-challenged people near where he grew up. At the time there was a lot of criticism of those types of institutions, which often treated patients poorly. But the one he had lived close to was essentially a farm, where the patients were happy and respected.
“A lot of them really enjoyed being there,” he said. “And so that was my, sort of, theme.”
The end result was “Different Places, Different People.” This served as the humble beginning of Green Mountain Post Films, the film and video production and distribution company Keller operates from the roughly 50-acre farm property he shares with his wife, Nina, and their family off the beaten path in Wendell. Keller’s productions have been broadcast nationally and have played on screens at such venues as Lincoln Center and Madison Square Garden in New York City, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. And it all started with an upbeat 25-minute film about an institution that was so happy with his work that it used it in promotions.
Keller shot the film on a 16-millimeter camera and edited the footage himself. His work got some attention and some funding for future projects.
“I guess you’d have to say that it really took off with Sam Lovejoy – ‘Lovejoy’s Nuclear War,’” he said, referring to the 1975 one-hour documentary about his Amherst College peer who toppled a 500-foot weather tower erected by Northeast Utilities in Montague as part of a plan to build one of the largest nuclear power plants ever. “It went worldwide. It got translated into over 30 languages, something like that, and it was a big hit in Japan and in other countries.
“We tried to make it an apparently neutral presentation of the subject, so we tried to get a good number of people from the other side. And that was a little bit unique in terms of propaganda films, because propaganda films, especially in the ’60s, tended to be pretty one-sided,” he added. “Two people from the utility company were suckers enough to be interviewed by us and that sort of gave it some credibility in terms of your average audience.”
In February 1974, Lovejoy took a crowbar, loosened three turnbuckles and toppled the weather tower before immediately hitching a ride to a police station and turning himself in, taking full responsibility for his actions and saying he had to do it for the public’s well-being. He was tried but was acquitted on a technicality in Franklin County Superior Court.
“And the trial was very spectacular,” Keller recounted, “because he had Howard Zinn come to talk about civil disobedience and he had John Gofman come, who (was) a nuclear scientist to talk about the dangers of nuclear power. So he had an expert. All of this is chronicled in the film.”
Keller explained Lovejoy generated a public speaking career that culminated with “No Nukes: The Muse Concerts For a Non-Nuclear Future,” a five-night concert at Madison Square Garden in 1979 featuring acts such as Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, Carly Simon and James Taylor, the latter two of which “did this amazing duet.” The concert became a movie and an album.
“It raised a fortune for the ‘No Nukes’ movement,” said Keller, now 75.
The five-night concert was organized by Musicians United for Safe Energy, or MUSE, an activist group founded by Raitt, Nash, Jackson Browne, Harvey Wasserman and John Hall. The musicians hired GMP to create “Save the Planet,” an 18-minute film projected onto a giant screen at Madison Square Garden.
“(It was) during the concert, at intermission, which was considered a big challenge because, usually, rock ’n’ roll fans don’t like intermission or movies or anything that’s going to interrupt the music,” Keller said. “So it was a bit of a challenge but we had a lot of help from the international film community.
“And it was a great success,” he added. “People loved it, and it got the message across.”
Through his collaboration with MUSE, Keller met documentary filmmaker Jacki Ochs, who Keller said was friends with two military veterans suffering the effects of Agent Orange, an herbicide the U.S. military used during the Vietnam War to defoliant tree cover that could conceal the enemy. It has since been learned the chemical is extremely dangerous and can cause a variety of physical ailments from ischemic heart disease to Parkinson’s disease. Keller is now working on re-issuing “Vietnam: The Secret Agent,” first released in 1983.
“It’s a pretty powerful one-hour documentary that we put a lot of time and energy into,” he said, adding that it “did a lot of good.”
Keller said his company interviewed veterans across the country and documented their health issues and that of their descendants. He said he met one veteran whose child was born without arms.
“It was not a pleasant war to be in, that’s for sure,” said Keller, who as a young man in the 1960s knew a lot of guys shipped over to Southeast Asia. “And a lot of them didn’t come back.”
Keller said “Vietnam: The Secret Agent” is an example of respecting the warrior even if you don’t support war.
He said GMP has produced about 25 films since he founded the company and has also been hired to produce and distribute movies of all genres.
Keller was an English major whose interest branched into photography and, in turn, crossed over into film. One year he and a roommate photographed every Amherst College senior shaking hands with college President Dr. Calvin Hastings Plimpton as they received their diploma at graduation. The pair blew up the photos into 8-by-10s and sold them. Keller and that roommate started a classic film series every Friday night on campus.
He eventually got hired by a South Hadley man to film Dartmouth College football games, usually with two cameras – one color, and one black and white. He had to drive to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, or wherever the football team played its away games.
“And then I’d have to speed back to South Hadley at night and get it into the bath,” he recalled in a reference hearkening back to the old days of photo development. The color film was alumni posterity and the black-and-white one was for game study and strategy, “and they want to be rolling that on Monday.”
Keller graduated in 1969 and bought the Wendell property with classmates Tom Hoffmann and David Yaghjian (two artists who have since moved on but have their work lining the walls of Keller’s home) and started farming.
Keller’s fate was perhaps sealed when his parents dropped him off at Amherst College and he met anti-war Marshall Bloom and Bloom’s roommate. Bloom was Keller’s dorm advisor, a senior who guides a freshman through their first year, and worked as the editor of The Amherst Student, the campus newspaper.
“So you can see that he steered me in the right direction,” Keller said with a laugh.
In 1967, Bloom co-founded the Liberation News Service, billed as The Associated Press of the underground newspaper world. Keller explained there was eventually a political split in the group and, in an overnight move known as “The Heist,” Bloom took half the staffers and the printing press to Montague and founded Montague Farm, where Lovejoy eventually settled. The Montague headquarters soon failed and Bloom committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning on Nov. 1, 1969. Some – including Liberation News Service staff and future Athol Daily News writer Allen Young – theorize he took his own life due to the grief of being a closeted gay man.
More information about Green Mountain Post Films is available at: www.gmpfilms.com.
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