Changing the World… One classroom at a time.
Something amazing happened in the town of Whitwell, TN; a town where the population peaks at about 2,000 people and where the word "skyline" is epitomized in breathtaking views of the rustic Smoky Mountains.
The citizens of this rural Tennessee community are almost exclusively white and Christian; the town was not accustomed to cultural diversity.   But in 1998 that all changed with a classroom project at Whitwell Middle School.  The "Paper Clips" project sparked one of the most inspirational and profound lessons in tolerance, in one of the most least likely places. 
Linda Hooper, the school's principal, created the project out of her desire to help students open their eyes to the diversity of the world beyond their insulated valley. What ultimately happened changed the lives of the students, their teachers, their families and the entire town forever, and by the end, they had a new goal:  to open the eyes and hearts of people around the world. 
"Paper Clips" is a moving story about these students and their emotional journey as they begin to learn about the horrors and tragedies of the Holocaust.  Despite the fact that they had previously been unfamiliar with the Holocaust, their dedication was absolute. With a promise to honor and memorialize every lost soul, the students decided to collect one paper clip for each individual exterminated by the Nazis.  By the end of the project, the students not only collected 11 million paper clips, but were able to house them in a donated WWII railcar, so they would always have a permanent tribute to the millions who were lost and a permanent memory of the time their small school in Tennessee changed the world one classroom at a time.

About the Production
The town of Whitwell, Tennessee (population 1600) may have only two stoplights and one motel, but it has more heart and courage than can be measured.
Once a thriving coal-mining town, an accident shut down the industry 30 years ago.  "Now it's known as a 'depressed community,'" Linda Hooper, principal of Whitwell Middle School for ten years, says with a note of disdain.  "We are poor," she adds defiantly. "We are not depressed."
The Holocaust project began in 1998. Assistant principal, history teacher and football coach David Smith suggested to Hooper that they use the Holocaust as the basis for a program on tolerance. In this school of 425 students, there were no Jews, no Catholics, no Asians, one Hispanic, and only five African-Americans - not exactly the definition of ethnic diversity.
"This area isn't known for its tolerance," acknowledges Smith. He chose the Holocaust as a focus of study because "there are no Jews here. These kids don't know any Germans. It was easier to teach them tolerance by teaching them about people they don't know anything about."
Smith also said students, having never been exposed to life outside their town, were going off to college and having a hard time fitting in with other ethnic groups.  "Our high school students were rooming on floors with people of all different nationalities and religions…They couldn't handle it. They came back after two weeks."
The idea to collect paper clips was born when a student asked, "What is six million? I've never seen that before." The administration suggested that it might help the students to visualize the staggering number of people lost in the Holocaust by finding an object to collect. The students did some research, and discovered that citizens of Norway, where paper clips were invented, wore them on their lapels as a sign of patriotism and resistance against Nazi tyranny during World War II.
Initially, the project flourished. But by the end of 1999, "it could have gone either way," admits Smith.  At one point early on in the project, students received a shipment of 100,000 paper clips, but their joy and optimism were short-lived.  Soon they were going through weeks of lulls where only a few letters would arrive with small numbers of paper clips. Teacher Sandra Roberts, co-director of the project with Smith, estimated that at this rate, it would take ten years to collect six million paper clips.
As fate would have it, the project got a much-needed shot in the arm from Peter and Dagmar Schroeder. Lena Gitter, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, researching the Internet, alerted the German White House correspondents to the project. The Schroeders visited Whitwell and fell in love with the students and the town. They would eventually crisscross Germany searching for a WWII era railcar to house the memorial--but first, they gave a boost to the project's PR effort. Soon articles featuring Whitwell's mission were splashed on the pages of publications around the world. An article soon appeared in The Washington Post.
It was this April 2001 article that would bring McLean, Va.-based The Johnson Group into the picture. Little did they know this article would lead them into a life-altering commitment that would stretch over two years.
"Producer Ari Pinchot's wife saw the article and showed it to him. Then he brought it to us," recalls producer/director/writer Joe Fab. "We loved it. But the question became, can you make a film out of it? At that point Whitwell had been working on the project for years.
"One view was that this was just a good segment for a magazine show," continues Fab. "But it stayed with Ari and me. We just needed to find a filmable aspect of the story that showed that it wasn't confined to the town, and it wasn't just about letters coming in."
They found their 'filmable aspect' in the form of four Holocaust survivors from New York who were planning to visit Whitwell. "We convinced Bob Johnson, the president of the company, to commit some money and send us down there so we could see what we could get from this."
The visit of the survivors from the Greater Five Towns Y Holocaust Survivor Group, based in Cedarhurst, New York, yielded cinematic gold. Some of the most heartbreaking and unforgettable moments of the film were captured during this extraordinary event.
One man shared the story of how he was brought to a concentration camp one night with his mother and two brothers. The next day, he asked a guard where his family was. The guard simply pointed to smoke coming from a crematorium.  "There are not enough pencils and paper in the world to write down what these survivors went through," declared another survivor, choking back tears.
Seen through the anguished eyes of a quartet of Holocaust survivors, the magnitude of the Whitwell project was clear. Berlin and Fab then cut a seven-minute demo of the film. "The demo convinced everyone that we had a film here," says Fab. "We decided that this was worth doing."
Fab credits Bob Johnson, a veteran broadcaster in Texas and Washington, D.C., for his unfailing commitment to the project. Fab and Johnson met in the 1970s, and they've been working together ever since. They formed The Johnson Group in the late 1990s with the intention of doing more creative projects.
"We had to keep following the story until it played out, and that's expensive," says Fab. "Bob was the guy at the beginning who said, 'I'll make sure this is paid for.'"  The next step was to secure the cooperation of the authors of the project--the students and administrators of Whitwell Middle School.
At this stage, the filmmakers had no idea what to expect in Tennessee. They were uncertain about where the story would take them; in fact, they didn't even know if a story worth documenting still existed.   "When we read The Washington Post article, Whitwell had collected between two and three million paper clips. So when we started, we thought the story would be, 'will they get six million paper clips?,'" explains Fab. "By the time we got to Whitwell, they had 16 million paper clips! It was really moving then."
Co-director Elliott Berlin eventually came to see this unforeseen development as an opportunity. "We really had the chance to follow this story as it unfolded for close to two years," he explains. "It's the truest form of documentary. Its not quite verité, but it was the ideal--filming things as they unfold and putting them together with a minimum of your own interference."  And again, Bob Johnson stepped in with encouragement. "It was Bob who said, 'keep going, there's another story in there,'" says Fab.
Five weeks after reading The Washington Post article, Fab and Berlin traveled to Whitwell to face a reluctant Linda Hooper. "At that point, they'd had enough of the media," says Fab. "We had to get permission from the school board and the school, and releases from the students. We had to win the school over."
"Linda and I were both very skeptical. The South often gets portrayed as ignorant. When the press comes to a small rural community, they always seem to find the most uneducated people to interview," laments David Smith. "We had kids who weren't movie stars or used to being on TV. We knew if this project got into the wrong hands, it could make us look bad."
"Linda is savvy enough to know how people in the media can twist a story," says Berlin. "Luckily, we're not interested in the kind of filmmaking she was worried about."  When the filmmakers met with Hooper, "I really felt like I was in the principal's office!" jokes Joe Fab. But Fab assured Hooper that he wanted to tell the story with sensitivity and respect for all who participated. He promised her that the overriding message of patience, perseverance, empathy and tolerance would be central to the piece. 
"We must have gotten through," he says, "because it was about five o'clock, and she told us we had a meeting with the school board at 6:30."  "When Joe came and spoke to Ms. Hooper and me, we had our doubts," says David Smith. "But by the end of the meeting we were very confident. We saw that The Johnson Group was a class act and had a lot of character."
At the school board meeting, Linda surprised Fab and Berlin by becoming an enthusiastic advocate for the film. "The board took a vote, and it was unanimous in favor of the project," recalls Fab.  Even today, however, the words of Linda Hooper echo in Fab's ear: "'If I let you make your film here,' she said, 'and you make my children look like rednecks, I will eat your heart for breakfast.'"
With a green light from Whitwell, the filmmakers began brainstorming how the film would be organized. "We read all of the letters," remembers Joe Fab. "They had a big impact. We wanted to incorporate them but we needed to figure out how, and how many."
However difficult it might have been to pick and choose among the thousands of heartrending letters, the crew decided to feature only a few they felt were most stirring. One, written by Sheila Gluck Levine, poignantly illustrated how the Holocaust robbed so many people living today of aunts, uncles and grandparents. Another was sent by George Jacobs, who revealed a painful story that he had kept secret for 50 years. After the war's end in 1945, the young Air Force navigator found himself in Linz, Austria, at Mauthausen, the last concentration camp liberated by the Allies. Jacobs' encounter with Malka, a thin Jewish woman at the camp with huge dark eyes who would later pass away during his visit, is one of the most eloquent and moving accounts in the film, and a testament to the impact of the Whitwell project.
"We were ridiculously lucky, because we found out Sheila Levine and George Jacobs both live in Maryland, very close to our offices in Virginia," says Fab.  Elliott Berlin directed most of the shooting, which was done in Betacam and DVCAM format. He shot about 25 percent of the film himself, including the entire journey of the German railcar from the port of Baltimore to Chattanooga and ultimately to Whitwell. "That was a point where the significance of this project really came together for me."
During the interviews, students and administrators opened up to the filmmakers, demonstrating remarkable candor and expressiveness. The interview with David Smith in which he discloses his father's racist language and the new legacy Smith hopes to leave to his children is one of the film's most compelling scenes.
It was the unit's fifth interview with Smith, says Fab, who recalls that the moment was made more powerful because Smith's epiphany was unfolding before his very eyes. "He had never spoken of his father this way before, and never made the connection between his father, this project, and his sons in this way before," remarks Fab. "It just shows the unbelievable generosity of these people."  "When we filmed that, I was sitting in the room with tears running down my face," says Elliott Berlin. "For me, that moment sums everything up… the kind of change that this story is about."
The moment would never have happened if it weren't for the filmmakers' genuine efforts to befriend their subjects. "If it had been early on in the process, I wouldn't have shared the story," admits Smith. "But I think feeling close to the film crew and with Joe made the difference."
This rapport was crucial to the success of "Paper Clips." "At first we were just experimenting and seeing what might work, then we built trust and developed relationships. We really got to know these people," says Berlin. "I think that led to some of the more intimate shots. Over time, people acted less and less, and became less and less aware of the camera."
Smith hopes his frankness will have a positive effect on audiences. "The culture that we've grown up in is changing, and all I'm trying to do is show the kids here that there are other ways of doing things," says Smith. "Just because something was said in the past doesn't mean it's the right thing."
As filming continued, Fab and his team began thinking of the best way to deliver this touching story to an audience. "Originally we were going to do it as a show for PBS," explains Fab. When negotiations for the show dragged on, the filmmakers had no idea it would work to their benefit.
The delay allowed enough time for Producer Ari Pinchot to contact his childhood friend Elie Landau at Ergo Entertainment, based in New York City.  Landau and his partners, Donny Epstein and Yeeshai Gross, founded Ergo in 2000 to develop, finance and produce both film and theatre projects (the company recently associate produced the 2003 Tony-winning revival of "Long Day's Journey Into Night" starring Brian Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave), but Pinchot knew Landau only as a "theatre person".   
"Ari learned that we had a film called 'Let it Snow' that went to Sundance," recalls Landau. "Ari heard about us promoting that film. He said, 'I didn't know you were into film! You need to take a look at this.'"
All three of the Ergo partners grew up observant Jews attending Yeshiva High School in New York City. All had family members who had been lost in the Holocaust. 
"They had a lot of raw footage and the seven-minute demo at the time," says Landau. "After we saw it, we knew that if there was ever a project to be involved in, this was it."  Epstein added, "We each watched the demo individually and within minutes, were on the phone with each other, choking back tears.  Unanimously, we agreed then and there that we needed to help get this made and get it seen."  "Growing up in a Jewish home, you're inundated with Holocaust literature and films," continues Landau. "Over time, you become a bit impervious to the feelings, even complacent. This project was initiated by non-Jewish people who had no other agenda but to do good. You can't help but be touched by it. To see it initiated not from within but from without is an inspiration."
Landau was also attracted to the universality of the story. "It's an inspiration to Jews, non-Jews, religious people, and people who aren't religious," stresses Landau. "It's a human story."  In addition to their fundraising on the film's behalf, Ergo would then provide the bridge to Miramax when Epstein took the film to another Yeshiva high school alum, Matthew Hiltzik, a senior vice president of corporate communications at the studio, who knew Landau since childhood and had attended summer camp (Camp Raleigh) together with Epstein and Gross. 
Epstein remembers, "We all agreed the movie needed to be seen by as many people as possible.  And a partnership with Miramax was our dream scenario to accomplish that goal."  Hiltzik watched the demo and agreed to come on board.  "Matthew said, 'This is the kind of project you hope you'll find one day,'" recalls Landau. 
"I've learned a lot about the Holocaust throughout my education," says Hiltzik. "To me, this was a film that brought a really fresh new perspective to the topic--one that all Americans could relate to.  The beauty of the film is that it isn't just a memorial to those who died in the Holocaust," he continues. "It's a celebration of tolerance, respect, pride, commitment, the public school system--everything that's good about America that you don't hear enough about."  Agrees Landau, "It's an absolutely extraordinary story. The lengths that the students, the administration and the reporters from Germany went to to make this thing a reality were amazing."   The introduction of the studio "was a critical point" in the evolution of the documentary, says Joe Fab. "With Miramax on board, the film really got an important new burst of energy."
The students of Whitwell Middle School completed their Holocaust memorial in 2001. It was dedicated in an emotional ceremony on the anniversary of Crystal Night. Kristallnacht, or "the Night of Broken Glass," took place on November 9, 1938. During Kristallnacht over 7,500 Jewish shops were destroyed and 400 synagogues were burned down. Ninety-one Jews were killed and an estimated 20,000 were sent to concentration camps on the orders of Adolph Hitler.
Ergo's Gross attended the moving event and recalled "the overwhelming kindness and goodness of the students, the teachers and indeed the entire town of Whitwell was palpable.  It was the kind of genuine goodness that was 'infectious' - spreading immediately on contact and making everyone who was touched by it into a better person."

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