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| Happy looking crew |
The documentary that I helped produce has recently won another award. "Thompson Chemical" was awarded 1st Place in the documentary category of the Alliance for Community Media's National Hometown Movie Awards. This is a great honor for all who worked on the project, most notably the lead producer Roger Mulcahy. It was a lot of hard work particularly since it was a project that had to be completed concurrently with the day-to-day responsibilities of working at DoubleACS.
I wrote a piece for the playbill that was handed out at the premiere of "Thompson" and it explains the origins of the project and what it meant to those of us who worked on it:
The Making of “Thompson Chemical”
We initially received 2 16mm film reels from the Fire Department with the intention of trying to convert them into a DVD for Chief Churchill. When we first saw some of the footage it was shocking as much because we had never heard of Thompson Chemical as for the actual scenes we were seeing. It seemed strange that such a tragic and important event could have passed one or two generations, albeit over 40 years, without it ever being mentioned.
Documentaries had been a topic of discussion around the studio for several years and we had been searching for a topic that would pique our interest while at the same time providing a benefit to the community as a whole. The idea was floated that this footage could provide the jumping off point for a worthwhile project. It would be fair to say we never anticipated the scope of what this project would become.
With permission from Chief Churchill to use the footage and from The Sun Chronicle to scour their archives from 1963-4 we started to develop a story of what happened at Thompson Chemical that night and in the months that followed. We then began the search for interview subjects and just as quickly realized that the story we thought we were creating was nothing like the reality for the people who lived through it.
A project that we hoped would take a few months stretched out over a year involving 15 taped interviews and countless more discussions with neighbors, workers, firefighters, police officers, historians, and family members that all had different perspectives on that horrible night.
The story of Thompson Chemical is not a single strand that runs in a simple, straight line from beginning to end because the story of Thompson Chemical is not about an event, but rather it’s about people and their individual reactions to tragedy. The one common factor throughout the story is a generation of people in Attleboro, raised through a world war, awakening from a great depression into a suddenly promising future that showed a remarkable ability to cope. That stoicism, that ability to manage a difficult situation, while still having the remarkable clarity of memory that all who we interviewed had, turned out to be far more dramatic than the event on its own.
Hopefully, after a year’s worth of work we have been able to properly document a slice of the history of Attleboro to ensure future generations remember Thompson Chemical but also, and perhaps more importantly, remember the people whose lives were affected by it.
