The Final Leap (20 page)

There is someone else who is equally responsible, however. To be precise, there are multiple someones: the board of directors of the Golden Gate Bridge District. Their complicity and failure to implement reasonable safeguards over the past seven-plus decades has as much to do with bridge suicides as the mental and emotional state of the victims. Yet few members of the general public even know who the bridge directors are, much less their qualifications or how they operate. These are other elements of the story that have gone unnoticed. Like the tragedy itself, it's time to bring them out of the shadows.

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. The fifth edition, due out in 2013, will include a section on suicide assessment for the first time.

I wanted to focus on whether we choose to see things or not see things.

—Eric Steel, producer of
The Bridge

Although Golden Gate Bridge suicides aren't a secret, they have received considerably less press than tragedies like this usually generate. Historically, except for a brief flurry of articles whenever the Bridge District commissions a new barrier study, or when the Marin County coroner issues a report, bridge suicides haven't been covered by the media and the extent of the problem has remained largely unknown. That's just the way Bridge District officials want it, and it has helped their cause that the California Highway Patrol and the U.S. Coast Guard follow policies of silence as well.

This situation started changing in 2003 with the publication of Tad Friend's article “Jumpers” in the
New Yorker.
In words that were poetic, perceptive, and melancholy, Friend wrote about people who leaped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge. Few national publications—and none with the stature of the
New Yorker
—had covered bridge suicides before. The result was that Friend's article opened many people's eyes to the problem for the first time. Two years later, the
San Francisco Chronicle
published a seven-part series on Golden Gate Bridge suicides. The series, “Lethal Beauty,” was featured every day for a week on the front page, with multiple interior pages devoted to it. The last day, the
Chronicle
included an editorial calling for a suicide barrier on the bridge.

Around the same time, a movie titled
The Joy of Life
premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Produced by Jenni Olson, a local filmmaker, it was inspired by the death ten years earlier of Olson's close friend, Mark Finch. Finch, thirty-three, directed the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and his death haunted Olson. No one witnessed Finch's jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, in part because it was a rainy day. His briefcase was discovered mid-span, however, and six weeks later his body was found—twenty-five miles south of the bridge. “In the decade since Mark's death,” Olson said, explaining her film, “I have alternately avoided the bridge and felt compelled to discover more about it. What I've learned is simple, true, and deeply melodramatic. If there had been a suicide barrier on the bridge, Mark would probably still be alive today.”

Olson's movie added to the discussion of bridge suicides; however, it was overshadowed by another movie that came out right after it. It was a movie that brought the horror unapologetically and with disturbing force into theaters and people's living rooms, focusing a spotlight on the problem that people couldn't ignore or forget. This was because
The Bridge
by Eric Steel showed real people jumping to their deaths from San Francisco's world-famous span.

A New Yorker, Steel was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. From his office window, he could see the twin towers of the World Trade Center engulfed in smoke from the terrorist attacks. He could see people on the top floors leap to their deaths rather than burn in the conflagration. Later, when he read Tad Friend's article, Steel thought back to 9/n. He thought about the deaths he had witnessed. He thought about what prompts people to kill themselves, the frame of mind a person must be in. Although jumping from a tall building to escape flames is different than jumping from a bridge to escape personal demons, there's a connection. It's a choice, in all likelihood the last choice a person will make.

Steel also thought about a painting by Peter Breughel,
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
Icarus was the figure in Greek mythology who tried to escape from Crete wearing wax wings made for him by his father. Icarus flew too close to the sun and his wings melted, dumping him into the Aegean Sea. The only evidence of Icarus in the painting is in the lower right corner. A pair of legs is disappearing into the water with so little splash that it goes unnoticed by other people in the painting. Even museum goers can miss it. Steel imagined that this must be what Golden Gate Bridge suicides are like, and he decided to make a movie about it.

A graduate of Yale, Steel started at Walt Disney Pictures, moved to Cinecom, a major film distributor, and was a producer of the movies
Angelas Ashes
and
Shaft.
He hadn't directed a movie before, but he was ready to. Moreover, he was familiar with tragedy. His brother died at age seventeen from cancer, and his sister was killed a year later by a drunk driver.

In thinking back to that time in his life, Steel told a British reporter, “I didn't feel suicidal, but I never felt it was all that far away. I knew there were people for whom the idea entered their heads and was there all the time. These were not people who felt foreign to me.”

What did seem foreign to Steel, or at least different, was that most Golden Gate Bridge suicides took place in broad daylight, in front of others. While other suicides tend to occur in private settings—locked rooms, garages, closets, motel bathrooms— people who jump from the bridge don't mind being seen. Steel wondered why. He also wondered if it was possible to deduce their intent while they walked on the bridge. If so, what would that walk be like, from one end to the place where they decided to jump?

From the outset, he planned to combine observed footage of people on the bridge with their personal stories. The movie would include wide-angle views of pedestrians as well as close-ups of individuals jumping, plus interviews with surviving family members.

Steel imagined that Tad Friend's article didn't receive a lot of play on the West Coast, and was all but forgotten except by those who are in the business of suicide prevention. It's easy to forget something we read, but it's a lot harder to forget something we see, especially if the images are shocking and shown repeatedly. Who can forget the sight of commercial airliners flying into the World Trade Center? Because of their visual regularity, the images are burned into our consciousness. Steel hoped that his movie would do the same thing for Golden Gate Bridge suicides.

“I had a sense,” he told a reporter, “that we would first show you the picture-perfect, postcard day at the bridge, with billowy white clouds, and people would say, ‘That's beautiful.' Then ninety minutes later we could show you the same shot and you'd expect to see a splash. I wanted people to walk out of the theater and challenge the notion of the picture-perfect postcard.”

The problem was that local officials would never allow it. They rarely even acknowledged that suicides occurred from the bridge; there was no way they would let camera crews set up and film people jumping. Moreover, if word got out that someone was shooting a movie about bridge suicides, it might increase the number of attempts. Given the media frenzy that took place years earlier, prior to the five hundredth and one thousandth deaths, the last thing anyone wanted, including Eric Steel, was to induce more suicides.

Steel flew to San Francisco, scouted locations, advertised for crew members, and applied for permits. Since disclosing his true intention was sure to result in rejection, he said that he was making a series of movies about national monuments, and the Golden Gate Bridge would be the first. According to the permit he filed with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA; his cameras would be placed on GGNRA land, not on the bridge), he aimed “to capture the powerful, spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Steel's permit, costing $65, was approved. At the start of 2004, he placed two cameras at different vantage points and began shooting. One camera was in a fixed position and had a wide angle lens to capture the expanse of the bridge as well as the water below. All that the operator had to do was change tapes every hour, from sunup to sundown, and press the record button. The other camera had a powerful telephoto lens that captured individual people as they walked across the bridge. This camera was trickier to operate because millions of people walk, run, or bike across the Golden Gate Bridge every year, oftentimes obscured by heavy fog. The camera operator—more often than not Steel himself—had to choose which individuals to focus on, using whatever instincts he had.

From the outset, Steel established guidelines about when his camera operators should be observers and when they should intervene. It was important for everyone to remember that they were human beings first and filmmakers second, he said. Anytime an attempt seemed imminent, authorities were supposed to be contacted.

We understood that if someone was walking alone, if he or she looked sad, lingered too long at one spot, or paced back and forth, this made them logical subjects to be filmed, but did not mean we should call the police to take them away. There were simply too many people who fit this description. We decided that if someone set down a bag or briefcase or removed shoes or a wallet—warning signs, we knew, from the article in the
New Yorker
, that the Bridge patrols paid attention to—or if someone made a real move to climb onto or over the rail, that trying to save a life was more important than getting footage. The bridge office was put on all of our cell phone speed dials.

The first two months of filming, Steel and his crew didn't observe anyone jump. They only knew that a suicide had occurred when smoke floats were dropped into the water and the Coast Guard responded. Later, in his office, Steel reviewed footage from the camera with the wide-angle lens and saw splashes in the water. He couldn't connect them, though, with any of the thousands of people captured on the telephoto lens. Then things changed.

I [Steel] saw the first man actually climb onto the rail and jump. I am not sure to this day why I filmed him. He looked like he was enjoying a spring day. He was wearing a tracksuit and sneakers. He walked briskly as if getting some exercise. He talked on his cell phone. He laughed heartily. And then he put down his phone as I called bridge police. He sat on the rail for a few seconds. He crossed himself. And then he jumped.

Over the ensuing months, Steel had a lot of time to think as he was sitting behind the camera, in all kinds of weather, looking at the bridge. “I thought if I stared at the Golden Gate Bridge long enough,” he said, “I might crack its code, understand its fatal beauty. If is often undeniably stunning, awe-inspiring, but the bridge's most striking power is its ability to seemingly erase time. Within moments of death, it's like it never happened. Things return to normal, just like Breughel's painting.”

There were twenty-four confirmed suicides from the bridge in 2004. Steel's cameras captured twenty-two of them (the two he missed occurred on the opposite side of the bridge, along the bike path, away from his cameras). Six are shown in the movie. Viewers see close up, through the telephoto lens, a person climb the railing and jump, with the wide-angle camera capturing the impact and splash. The only audio is the violent sound of the body hitting the water, sometimes in near darkness.

Steel said that he wanted to make a movie “about the human spirit in crisis, that showed but did not judge.” He maintains that in six instances his crews saved lives by alerting Bridge Patrol officers in time to prevent a jump.

One of the most powerful images in the film is when Richard Waters, a visiting firefighter from Pittsburgh who was taking photos on the bridge, sees a woman who has climbed over the railing onto the chord. “She did it so casually,” he told his home-town newspaper, “I was almost surprised.” Seeing that she hesitated on the edge, he set down his camera, grabbed her by the jacket, and hauled her back to safety. In that moment, he said, “You don't even think about what to do. You just do whatever comes naturally.”

She wasn't happy to be rescued, though, and started kicking him and screaming. He pinned her to the ground and called 911 while people—to his astonishment—passed by without asking what was going on. When the police came, he retrieved his camera and walked away, stunned by the experience. He estimated that he had been on the bridge no more than ten minutes before this incident occurred. Later, Steel informed Waters that the woman he saved was thirty years old and spoke seven languages.

The aim of Steel's interviews with the jumpers' family members was to make their loved ones real and their grief palpable, as well as to enlighten audiences about the challenges of mental illness. One family member says of schizophrenia, “It's like watching TV with 44 channels on at the same time.”

Undoubtedly the most controversial segment in the movie concerns a thirty-four-year-old man named Gene Sprague. Tall, slender, with long, straight brown hair that continually whipped across his face, Sprague walked the full length of the bridge, starting at the south end. It was late morning, sunny, the air crisp. At different points Sprague, dressed in a leather jacket, stopped, looked out, and fingered the bridge's cables. When he got to the north end, he turned around and began retracing his steps, walking a little more quickly and making less of an effort to brush the hair out of his face. Steel's camera followed Sprague the whole time, for ninety-three minutes. Footage of him walking on the bridge is woven throughout, supplemented by interviews with those who knew him. When Sprague returned near his starting point, he hopped on the rail and sat on it, facing traffic, his back to the water. Moments later he stood on the rail, turned around, and in a position reminiscent of Christ being crucified, fell to his death. Not coincidentally since the movie starts and ends with Sprague, ninety-three minutes is the run time of
The Bridge.