The Berkshire Edge, June 23, 2019 by Hannah Van Sickle

Lucky Milo film to raise awareness of veterans’ lives after war

The filmmakers are embracing the full reality of what happened to Milo Imrie, and very much linking his death to the staggering suicide rate among veterans.

South Egremont — Edmund Marcus has a keen eye for detail, a skill honed after hours upon hours of writing, directing and shooting films. As a freelance documentarian and videographer, Marcus has been tasked with conveying the respective visions of numerous arts organizations and theater companies through film. Last year, when his close childhood friend died by suicide after a lengthy struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, Marcus saw this as an opportunity to put both his passion and talent to work, this time to increase awareness of the problems facing 18.2 million veterans in the United States and myriad others worldwide.

Earlier this month Marcus, along with his parents Donald Marcus and Lisa Milligan, reached their Kickstarter goal (a whopping $60,000 in 24 days). The team of local filmmakers, united by their love for and admiration of the late Milo Imrie, is now poised to begin filming a feature-length documentary, the title of which, “Lucky Milo,” pays tribute to a Marine’s return home and his search for sanity and redemption.

“In speaking with his father, I received a trove of Milo’s eloquent writings, photos and video diaries which chronicle his astonishing experiences and search for answers,” Edmund Marcus explained in a recent interview. Working directly with Imrie’s family and this archive, Marcus plans to make a documentary that focuses on Imrie’s life as well as the continuing struggle of veterans everywhere. His focus will lie in, “connection points—synaptic points—that we all can understand,” he said, drawing particular attention to the fact that “[there is] a massive sliding scale” among those suffering with PTSD, with many individuals near suicide all the time while others are functioning really well. “By degrees of separation,” added Marcus, “[the subject] affects us all.”

“A major goal of the film is to document and promote mental health solutions that are actually working or could work with better support,” Marcus said. The trio’s mission—to help as many veterans and PTSD sufferers as possible through the medium of cinema—will channel all funds raised toward that aim.

As to the personal connection? Edmund Marcus and Milo Imrie grew up together. and the prologue of their friendship hinged on summer camp. “We were living in England,” recalled Donald Marcus, “and we wanted to be sure [Edmund] stayed connected to his American roots.” They sent him to summer camp in Michigan and his first year, when he was just 11 or 12 years old, he met Milo. Acknowledging the various ways in which we become friends with others, Edmund Marcus can distill the genesis of his friendship with Milo down to a simple pair of words: bunk beds. “You couldn’t find someone who wanted to sleep on the bottom bunk,” he said with a smile, recalling that’s exactly the spot Milo chose all those summers ago. “But what [ultimately] united us was our curiosity for things,” said Edmund Marcus, who remembered, “Milo was really smart.” In fact, he was reputed to have beaten Henry Paulson (the secretary of the treasury under George W. Bush) in a game of Boggle when Milo was just 8 or 9 years old. This “customary insight” and inclination toward being a “budding public intellectual” is how Edmund Marcus remembers his friend, adding “his interpretation of events is quite interesting to listen to.”

The documentary hinges on the vast archive Imrie left behind: hours of video and hundreds of written pages chronicling Milo’s struggles delivered with his customary intelligence, honesty, humor and eloquence. Those close to Imrie, following his active tours in Afghanistan, watched him struggle with substance abuse, an assault charge and imprisonment (a portion of which was spent in solitary confinement and on suicide watch). Miraculously, Imrie was able to shake the proverbial darkness and turn his life around. He began working at a dog shelter, he became a vegan, he got engaged. “He got his life back on track,” Edmund Marcus said, acknowledging that, at the time, he hadn’t seen Milo in seven years, and the two were in touch only occasionally to swap interesting articles every couple of months. When they did connect again, the two young men easily circled back to their time at camp and began to build a “newfound, more adult friendship.” Marcus recalled a particularly lengthy phone conversation lasting four or five hours in January 2018. “His voice, his whole accent, had changed,” Marcus said. Milo was taking classes at Los Angeles City College and he had since separated from his fiancee. And he was experiencing bizarre visual-aural anomalies. “Like strange visions in the corner of his eye,” Marcus remembered, “whispering to him.” Milo spoke sanely about these occurrences and began blogging about them. But he was going nuts as far as he knew. Milo genuinely loved Marcus’ work as a filmmaker and had reached out to him again in June of last year. Marcus was shooting a movie in Egremont—a scene depicting a seance, with candles, deep in a basement—when he took a break to check his phone. It was then that he saw a post from Gordon Imrie on Facebook: His son had been found dead in Arizona.

“Milo’s whole story constantly feeds into this entire narrative,” said Marcus of his film’s scope. “The block of marble just showed up on the doorstep,” he said, pausing slightly. “We would be crazy not to take up the reins [when they presented themselves].” So now, Edmund Marcus and his parents will hit the road. Their aim, to tell Milo’s remarkable story, will require traveling to California and the Midwest in order to gather interviews with Milo’s family, childhood friends and fellow Marines as well as representatives from the Department of Veterans Affairs, PTSD recovery specialists, mental health experts and government agencies. Furthermore, they will create a fitting tribute to Milo by furthering what came to be the dominant aim of his life: helping others.

“Milo excelled in leadership and pastoral kinds of qualities,” Milligan said of her son’s friend. And, he was a Marine, an organization with the motto “Semper Fi,” or “always faithful.” That said, “one of the big things for vets is community,” said Milligan. And when returning from active duty, veterans often feel isolated. The film’s title plays on this inherent irony: Milo Imrie, in the course of his deployment, went to Korea, Germany and Afghanistan. As is often the case, he was regularly transferred to various units; it was quickly noticed that every time Milo showed up, the unit would stop suffering casualties. It would be like an incredible stroke of good luck. The Marines started calling him “Lucky Milo” for that very reason. The bittersweet part of the story is that, in the end, there was an incident in a narrow alleyway. Milo saw a metal object, not quite big enough to be an IED (improvised explosive device), glinting on the floor, and that did, in fact, explode. While he was unscathed, his translator died in the incident—the final trauma Milo carried back home with him after his years-long deployment.

“Luck is the residue of design,” is how Edmund Marcus sees it. Milo worked really hard and demonstrated a sincere attempt at recovery. “He didn’t have to go up the river,” Marcus said. The filmmakers are embracing the full reality of what happened to Imrie, and very much linking his death to the staggering suicide rate among veterans. According to the VA, “the current analysis indicates that an average of 20 veterans a day die by suicide,” a number Edmund Marcus considers to “technically [qualify] as an epidemic.”

This is the place from which the project stems: “Immediately, it just seemed very obvious—because Milo excelled in so many ways, extraordinary ways—it was just sort of knocking at the door of consciousness … the documentary,” Edmund Marcus said. “We find Milo a very compelling story,” added Donald Marcus. “Others will, too.”