In Production: Sickness and Stardom in You Are Not Alone

Cindy McCreery on the set of the upcoming Austin-made movie You Are Not Alone (photo by Tori McCarthy, courtesy of You Are Not Alone)

Remember that old saying that those who can't, teach? You Are Not Alone, the new family drama from two staff members for UT's Department of Radio-Television-Film, aims to prove once again that their lessons come from practical experience. Professor Andrew Shea (best known for documentaries like Portrait of Wally) is in the director's chair, working from a deeply personal script by his colleague, associate professor Cindy McCreery. In 2009, all the world was focusing on the L.A. coroner's office where Michael Jackson's body was lying after his death. But McCreery was more concerned about her brother, Scott, who was undergoing treatment for bladder cancer at the neighboring USC Medical Center. In the film, fictionalized versions of the siblings – Jasmine Batchelor as Grace and Ryan Cooper as AJ – go through a similarly surreal experience, knowing that the megastar is dead just down the street.

With Austin filling in for L.A., the Ascension Clinical Education Center on Red River doubled for USC. Normally packed with trainee medical staff, in August the facility was between classes, so the production moved into the upstairs teaching wards, filled with blank-eyed training mannequins; but downstairs, there are still clinics and patients. McCreery said, "There's these people going through all these real life-and-death situations, and we're here making a movie."

Some productions are a little leery about letting the writer on set ("They have to in this movie," laughed McCreery), but having McCreery right there gave the cast a rare opportunity to connect with the inspirations behind the story. "Actually knowing there's a living, breathing person in the room actually makes my job a little easier," said Batchelor, "because I get to observe her humor and get to know what she would do in those similarities."

Having McCreery on set also helped Cooper, with details like knowing where she could touch her brother without hitting one of the pain points that would leave him doubled up in agony. However, he also got to spend time with Scott, to parlay his side of the relationship into his performance. "He turns up the volume on his cheekiness with his sister," he said. "When I got to speak to Scott, I could hear him starting to get choked up, but he covers that with his humor, and his teasing."

McCreery first drafted her experiences as a script in 2012, when she was working on projects for Nickelodeon and Paramount. She wrote what would become You Are Not Alone as a play over a long weekend, "as therapy," she said. "I didn't write it to sell it, and then Andrew asked me if I had any scripts lying around that could be worked on independently, and that was the only one I could think of."

Shea quickly saw its potential, and then Barbara Morgan, CEO of Austin Film Festival, came aboard as a producer. She described the family medical drama as a universal story "with this Michael Jackson thread running through it. Because the truth is, regardless of the ups and downs and the legacy of the man, the reality is that he connected tons of people with his music."

That's how it was for McCreery. She recalled that one of the times she was closest with her brother was when Jackson's album Thriller was dominating the charts and airwaves, and that it was "super weird" that they reconnected when "he was so sick, and all around us were helicopters and mourners."

You Are Not Alone is now in post-production.