You wouldn't think G. Wayne Miller would have time left to blink, considering the work he delivers. His bylines are familiar in the Providence Journal, where he has reported for the past 27 years, writing articles and series on such subjects as endemic poverty, the fire dangers of foam in households, and the invention of open-heart surgery. That last subject turned into King of Hearts (Crown, 2000), one of six non-fiction books Miller has written (plus a novel) on subjects as diverse as NASCAR racing and the toy industry.Now 54, unmarried, and unflaggingly prolific, he has found the time to write and co-produce a documentary film, On the Lake: Life and Love in a Distant Place.
"I spent a lot of my vacation time and weekends," Miller says about making the film. "I don't sleep a lot. I wish I could."
Now in post-production, with Miller giving input in editing sessions, On the Lake is about the tuberculosis epidemic — now worldwide — that existed in this country in the 1900s. The film grew out of his 12-part 2006 series on a TB patient at the Zambarano Memorial Hospital, in Burrillville.
The film's director and co-producer is David Bettencourt, who made the 2007 documentary You Must Be This Tall: The Story of Rocky Point Park. Miller's friendship with the filmmaker came out of a series he did 16 years ago about a year in the life of a suburban high school student, Bettencourt; that became the book Coming of Age (Random House, 1995).
"The worst of the epidemic in this country was from the 1880s until the early 1950s, when effective drugs came online," Miller said. "When you go back to the early part of that, nobody was tracking statistics. But you can safely say that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans died."
An estimated nine million people are infected with TB today, and nearly two million died in the last year that the WHO reported data, 2006.
"Globally today it's the number two killer among infectious diseases, after HIV-AIDS," Miller said, noting that like in the early days of AIDS, for years neither the cause nor the means of transmission was known.
Miller never took a journalism class, entering Harvard College wanting to be a neurosurgeon, but he was quickly distracted by courses in philosophy, creative writing, and one in filmmaking.
"I left Harvard thinking I would someday be a filmmaker," he says. "Life took me in a somewhat different direction."
Until now, that is. The Miller/Bettencourt team has two more documentaries in pre-production, one on spirituality and the other about old-money aristocracy. (For further information about his books and their film projects, go to gwaynemiller.com.)
The tuberculosis documentary will premiere at the Stadium Theatre in Woonsocket on February 13.
