‘Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me’ – Alzheimer’s, laughter and country music
Photo by Katherine Rountree
In the middle of Savannah Film Festival week, the Docs to Watch series added “Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me” to its roster. The film follows country music superstar Glen Campbell during his “Goodbye Tour” after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
Campbell made history in 2011 when he publicly announced his diagnosis, becoming the first major American celebrity to open up about struggling with Alzheimer’s. The “Goodbye Tour” was already scheduled and plans for a documentary were already being made, but the disease gave both a different angle.
The first decision James Keach, the documentary’s director and producer, and his partner Trevor Albert made was to not make this like every other grim and tragic documentary about Alzheimer’s. That wasn’t the filmmakers’ style or Campbell’s personality. When Keach first met the Campbells, Kim, Glen’s wife, started to explain her husband’s condition to him. Glen interrupted to tell her he had “part-timers,” not Alzheimer’s.
“He was immediately okay with talking about it,” Keach said. “The levity was there.”
That set the tone for the documentary – always honest, but never too serious. Keach said that even in Glen Campbell’s most vulnerable moments in the documentary, such as when he’s getting drugged up in preparation for a brain scan, he would be joking and singing with his wife.
“And he’s not aware the camera’s there,” said Keach. “He’s doing it because that’s Glen.”
One of Campbell’s mantras was “I’ve laughed and I’ve cried and it’s a hell of a lot better to laugh.” Keach wanted to preserve that attitude in the documentary.
“It’s touching, funny, uplifting, a little dangerous, a little off – something you haven’t witnessed before,” Keach said. “But it has the spirit of Glen and the love of Kim and the humor. There’s actually more laughs in this movie than in most big comedies.”
The “Goodbye Tour” was originally scheduled for five weeks. In the end, there were 151 shows over the course of two and a half years. The Campbells went public with the diagnosis so audiences would be prepared if Glen repeated himself or did something odd onstage. Honesty was important to them, too – another of Glen’s mantras was about always telling the truth. According to Keach, the audiences were very supportive.
“Once the world knew the truth, the world embraced him,” he said.
Keach’s goal was to make the documentary accessible even to young people who have never heard of Glen Campbell. The key to that was incorporating footage from Campbell’s entire life – from childhood home videos to concert footage to television appearances – so viewers could know him outside of his disease.
“We have to tell a story of who he is in the past so that we can discover who he is and what he’s become in the present,” Keach explained. Otherwise, this would become like any other Alzheimer’s documentary that tracks people dealing with their disease “in the present tense” only.
“The way I chose to frame it was I wanted to see what he remembered of his life,” said Keach.
In the hands of a careless filmmaker, the subject matter might have been too sensitive for the subject’s family’s comfort. Kim Campbell said she had no such reservations because Keach and the other filmmakers befriended her husband.
“They definitely were going to respect his dignity as a human being and as an artist,” she said. “And Glen really wanted everyone to know what Alzheimer’s was like. It was easy and natural and based on a really good friendship and trust, and so I was comfortable with it.”
“You just try to be honest and be authentic,” Keach said. He strove to make this documentary truthful and entertaining and to preserve Campbell’s dignity as though he were a member of Keach’s own family. And showing the disease as it is served a larger purpose than just telling a story.
“A message that we wanted to get across is that having Alzheimer’s is nothing to be ashamed of,” said Kim Campbell.
“This is not a movie about Alzheimer’s anyway,” Keach added. “This is a movie about a guy who was told to hang up his guitar and he said, ‘I ain’t done yet. I want to live my life as fully as possible until I can’t do it anymore.’ And that’s what every single one of us should want to do. Live our life completely. And Glen taught us how to do it.”
