Rolling: Darius Went West

Road Trip Spotlights Illness, Courage, Friendship and DIY

originally published July 18, 2007

One of the nagging prejudices about the MTV Generation (or the Millennials, the No Generation, Generation Why, or whatever label is applied to those of us born after 1981) holds that we’ve lost our actual connection to the real world. Weaned on ubiquitous technology and too young to remember a time when the information stream wasn’t on full blast 24/7, we’ve invested such a huge chunk of our lives in virtual culture - video games, Myspace, hyper-real programming, chatrooms, and so on ad infinitum - that we prefer that arms-length tidiness to the much messier stuff of reality. Even when spurred to action, it’s said, we rely on means of change that allow us to preserve our fiercely-guarded distance from the actuality of the problem and cater to our shrunken attention spans - whether those be call-to-action email forwards, Paypal-powered pledge drives, or slick 30-second spots on YouTube. There may be a kernel of truth in that claim. As the dozen Athenian teenagers and twenty-somethings who comprise the cast and crew of the multi-award winning documentary Darius Goes West richly demonstrate, however, that’s only part of the story.

“You’re here in life to make something of yourself.” - Darius

Logan Meets Darius

Thirteen years ago, Logan Smalley began spending his summer breaks from Clarke Central High School volunteering at ACC Leisure Services summer camp for disabled children and teens, Project REACH. “My mom made me work there,” he says. In the group he led as camp counselor he met Mario Weems, a young man who grew up in public housing in town and was wheelchair-bound due to Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Mario also introduced Logan to his kid brother, Darius.

“The first time I saw Darius, he was shooting baskets,” says Logan. He had just begun to exhibit the signs of weakness in his skeletal muscles that would also consign him to a wheelchair by his early teens: Darius, too, had DMD.

Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy affects around one in every 3500 boys worldwide. Though some with the disease show symptoms from infancy, one of the crueler aspects of the disease is that, as Tracy Seckler, mother of a boy in Darius Goes West who shares Darius’ disorder, puts it, “by the time they go to the wheelchair, they’ve felt that freedom.”

DMD is also the number-one genetic killer of children in the world and is 100-percent fatal. Most sufferers die in their late teens or early '20s. Darius’ brother Mario died in 2000 at the age of 19. “Before he died,” says Darius, “he asked Logan to watch over me.” Smalley was only 17 at the time, and he had little idea how to fulfill his promise.

Four years later, however, during a semester abroad in France for the Cannes Film Festival while earning his BS in Special Education from the University of Georgia, Logan hit upon the idea of filming a documentary about his friend to raise money to help combat the disease and increase public awareness of its tragic effects. The only remaining question was what the story should entail and how to ensure that it reached a wide-enough audience to have an impact.

While Logan and D (as he’s affectionately known) sat watching one of their favorite shows, MTV’s "Pimp My Ride," one afternoon, the answer became obvious. Logan began corresponding with the show’s producers. His hope, in part, was that West Coast Customs, the auto customization company featured in the show, would trick out D’s “raggely” chair with a game system, a built-in speaker system and a hands-free phone (a necessity since his condition has progressed to the point that holding his cell to his ear is nearly impossible); and enough juice in its electric motor to get him from his home to downtown - a trip of only a mile that D hadn’t been able to make at that point for nearly five years. More importantly, however, the show’s 70 million youthful viewers were precisely the audience they hoped to educate and inspire with their story.

“We were trying to make this big movement helping the cure,” Darius says. “I want to let this generation know, ‘cause they’re gonna be the one’s that change it. Me getting my ride pimped would be this thing. It would get the word out to a lot more people and help a lot more people.”

"Young people don’t know Jerry Lewis” - Darius

Impossible Dream

There were hurdles to overcome, however. For months, Logan, the 10 friends and friends-of-friends he recruited as his crew, acquaintances, family members and anyone willing to help sold barbecue and space in the film’s closing credits and collected change to finance the purchase of equipment.

“The extent to which so many people were willing to pitch in was totally humbling,” Logan says. Further, among the concerns MTV raised about the proposal, was that the show was open only to people in California. Therefore, Darius (a sizeable fellow at over 300 pounds, not including the weight of his chair), and the crew needed reliable, accessible transportation for the more than 7000-mile trip from Athens to Los Angeles and back. With a last minute infusion of funds from the generous United Cerebral Palsy Foundation, they were able to rent an RV and turn this challenge of getting there into one of the film’s most powerful thematic elements: the road trip west.

Two years ago July 22, on a day proclaimed by Mayor Heidi Davison as “Darius Goes West Day,” the group set off from town amid great fanfare. For the next three weeks, the crew documented their journey, focusing on the effect that seeing the world had on D and, crucially, the effect he had on the crowds that always seemed to surround him. During an early stop on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, for instance, a flock of young people gathers around his chair, and the crew takes the opportunity to show the movie’s audience how little is known about Darius’ disease. Many answers from the crowd prove comically clueless.

“You say muscular dystrophy to anyone over 30, and they say Jerry Lewis,” Logan says. “Say it to someone our age and they don’t know what you’re talking about.”

When Lewis’ name comes up on the New Orleans street corner, a guy with a set of beads around his neck bleats out, “’Balls of Fire,' right?”

In the documentary, the motif of going west takes on particular significance in part because, prior to the filming, Darius had never left Clarke County.

“Darius Goes West Day, it, like, did something to me,” Darius says. “Seemed like it was my destiny to go on this trip with all my friends. For the first time in my life I was going west.” His eyes glisten as he cackles gleefully in the surf of both the Atlantic and the Pacific. He tells a truly hilarious tale around a campfire in the desert of the “ball-less man.”

“That story was like 30 minutes long and was like the funniest thing I’ve ever heard,” says Logan’s younger brother Ben, another member of the crew. “We had to cut most of it out, because it would’ve changed the whole balance of the movie.”

“Vegas was one of my favorite places. I got to see all the lights and stuff, and I got to gamble in Vegas and made me some money,” says Darius. “I guess I was the lucky one.”

“I put quarters in a giant slot machine called Big Bertha for him,” Logan clarifies. “He made 50 bucks.”

D’s other favorite stop: the Grand Canyon. “That was the place I said I wanted to see. You say you wanna go to this place and then when you get there, when you’re there and you see it, it makes you feel like you made it.”

These spots along the journey also serve one of the movie’s secondary aims: highlighting the successes and failures of the push to give handicapped people access across America. A celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the belly of Carlsbad Cavern, a hot-air balloon ride, and even a whitewater rafting trip contrast sharply with their very first stop at a gas station that lacks a ramp and St. Louis’ famous Arch.

“I wanted to show everybody who’s, like, in a wheelchair what you can still do and hopefully, one day, every place will be accessible," says D. "I got an email from this guy. He was like 19 and in college and he had seen a trailer and he got the same disease as I do. He said, like, ‘I appreciate you for doing this, for making the movie for us. It makes me think, like, we were in this fight together.’”

During his trip Darius was also able to meet six-year-old DMD sufferer Charley Seckler, whose parents formed Charley’s Fund www.charleysfund.org) in his honor. “He was pretty hyper, but he asked me a few questions like about how I got into my wheelchair and what it was like and stuff, and I told him about it. I think it was pretty good, you know?”

All of the proceeds from Darius Goes West, including the more than $250,000 they raised at a Carnegie Hall screening of the film at the Tribeca Film Festival, have gone to the Fund in hopes that, as many experts predict, a cure might soon be found.

“I just wanna tell people, if you have people who care about you, and you care about them, you can do something.” - Darius

Riding And Rapping

Along the road they travel in the film, a fierce camaraderie develops among the crew that serves as the connective tissue between stops. During a sushi dinner at the San Francisco Zoo, the crew bets Darius he can’t eat a spoonful of what he calls “goslabi”. After a few minutes of spluttering he asks, eyes still a bit moist, some of the wasabi still on his chin, but with a mischievous laugh, “Where’s my money?”

“Someone that was around us felt sorry for him,” recalls driver and crew member Daniel Epting. “We’re just treating him like one of the boys; it’s the same stuff we do to each other.”

“The crew are my best friends, ‘cause they think of me as a regular person” Darius says. “It's like we're brothers. We all want to try to do as much good as we can. I don’t like people feeling sorry for me. The last thing we need is for someone to feel pity for us.”

The familiar themes of friendship, coming-of-age and the relationship between interdependence and independence run strongly through every part of the movie. These themes have effects well beyond just those with disabilities, though, and resonate especially strongly with exactly the young audience they hoped to reach via "Pimp My Ride."

“This movie is a living movie. It’s not some pre-packaged thing,” says Logan. “When you see it, you join our crew. A lot of Hollywood movies, they may be good, but you when you see this movie, you want to get involved, and you want to see the movie again.

"Jerry Lewis represents a very old model of doing things, and we felt like we could relate to a younger generation, because Darius is a part of the youth. He is the youth. It was written so the themes and the message will affect anyone, but it’s targeted at the youth. For example, in Cleveland we had this screening where we were showing it to a theater full of 300 high school students and, besides Athens, that was the best reaction that we’ve gotten. It moves crowds that are around our age, you know, our peers.”

Without doubt, the film’s tremendous success is partially a result of the continuing, intense friendship evident to anyone who has the pleasure of watching the crew interact. The connection they’ve developed is infectious due both to the shared courage they show in the face of adversity and the unabashed fun they nearly always seem to be having in spite of it.

“When Darius met Deniro,” says Logan about actor and Tribeca festival founder, Robert Deniro, “he rolled in with all of us and said, ‘Meet my fockers.’ It was hilarious.”

D has been able to attend festivals featuring his movie in New Orleans, Atlanta, Boston, Saint Petersburg, New York, Santa Barbara and elsewhere, though he’s had to scale back his trips due to missing too much school.

“A lot of the crew took the semester off to go to all the festivals,” notes Smalley. “We got a sponsorship with Delta. They agreed to fly any crew member to any festival.”

“Except for Ben,” Darius chimes in. “He broke the airplane restroom.”

“I don’t know why they have Mexican restaurants in airports,” complains the younger Smalley.

Dodge donated a van that now helps D get around town, thanks to DGW fan race-driver Kyle Petty, who presented it to them at a race many in the crew attended.

“We were at one of the socials after the festival,” Logan recalls, “and they had this little band and some people came up to us and they were like, ‘We hear Darius is a rapper. Do you think he’ll come up and do it for us?’ They set the mic up off his chair and he’s ready to go and they play the cheesiest beat of all time and D, up there in front of all these people is like, ‘Logan I’m not gonna do this.’ So we had a CD in the van with this Young Jeezy beat and he just goes. Darius seriously blew up the whole party, and everybody was going crazy. It was amazing, because everything he rapped about was stuff we’d done that day. Like about dolphins and stuff. And when the beat ended, he did about a minute acapella that was amazingly intense. The whole place just blew up. I mean, you know, they were going to clap and cheer and stuff, but I don’t think they were expecting him to be as good as he really is.”

“I can freestyle for a pretty long time,” Darius says.

“This right here is gonna open up the door for people who’s coming and people already here.” - Darius

Muscular Dystrophy Hero

Indeed, D’s rap skills that, along with beats and incidental music composed by Logan, provide most of the soundtrack to Darius Goes West, may serve as the next iteration of, as he calls himself, the “muscular dystrophy hero.”

“In that Carnegie Hall audience was a guy with an Interscope connection,” Logan says excitedly. “He talked to Ben Allen (Athens native and former engineer for Bad Boy Records and the Cutting Room Studio, as well as currently for the multi-platinum Gnarls Barkley) who saw the movie and gave D some time in a studio and donated a really smooth beat. Allen is also getting a high profile singer form Atlanta to sing on the song they recorded with D doing the verses. It’s like, he wasn’t able to reach a mic for like 15 years and now this mic is in front of him and he’s got 15 years of success and tragedy to talk about. There’s a sense of urgency and of course a huge stage presence. Everything about him is huge.” “I think with all this stuff I’ve been through,” agrees Darius, “my disease and all - I rap so people can feel my pain. I want to send a message to people that you can do something.”

Response to the film, too, continues to snowball. Former Writers & Artists CEO and currently Paradigm Talent’s top agent Norm Aladjem is, according to Logan, “on board. At Tribeca, we talked to the right people and got it in the right hands. Now, we’re just waiting on that process to run its course.”

In the 25 weeks since Darius Goes West premiered, it has screened at roughly the same number of festivals, as far afield as Athens, Greece and London, England, with plans for a trip to Seoul, Korea later this month. Moreover, the deep investment in the cause the film strives to create is clearly evident from postings about it on the Internet Movie Data Base (www.imdb.com).

“I do not say this often, but after watching this movie, I feel moved to do something towards the cause,” remarks one viewer. “This film needs to be seen,” says another.

Some of this success can be attributed to the savvy with which Logan navigates media that appeal to the youth culture he, Darius, and everyone who worked on the film seek to reach. At one point in the movie, as it seems increasingly likely MTV won’t agree to the group’s proposal, Logan goes on the offensive, creating a media blitz and saying, “sometimes you have to confront it in a very public, obvious way.”

He later recalls, “most of the time we had the right motivations in mind, but when it got really hard, when things got tricky or complicated, or we got frustrated, our motivation was to make "Pimp My Ride" regret their decision.” At that moment on their trip he asks, “Can we use the press to increase our chances? Admittedly that’s not the noblest of tactics, but sometimes the ends justify the means.”

What is so remarkable, so heartening about what Darius Goes West has accomplished and is still accomplishing is that - by combining the tools of the MTV generation with a personal, hands-on acceptance of the challenges - they’ve found, and put on display for the world, justification in their means, too.

Brandon Waddell

Darius Goes West will play at Ciné for the third annual Darius Goes West Day, Sunday, July 22 at 1 p.m., 4 p.m., 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. All showings are FREE! and donations for Charley’s Fund are encouraged. Seating is limited, reservations are recommended: 706-613-7237. DGW t-shirts, wristbands, and movie posters will be available (with all proceeds going to Charley’s Fund) and the festivities will include giveaways, raffles and discussion with the film’s crew (all screenings except the late show). Find out more at www.dariusgoeswest.com.