Jeff Ornstein 0:02

Hi everyone, and welcome to Next Act with Jeff Orenstein. I am Jeff, and on this show we celebrate people on the cusp of greatness, those building on past successes in some of the curious and inventive and sometimes unexpected ways they have achieved those, and stepping into moments that could define their legacy. We'll talk about current projects, lessons learned, and the extraordinary opportunities ahead. So the best is yet to come. Today's guest is Emmett H. Floer, award-winning disabled filmmaker, a Delco Award-nominated actor, and founder of Wabi Sabi Productions Inc., a blonde-based nonprofit creating films and performance projects that turn real-world issues into tools for community change. A stroke survivor and former New York City police officer, Emmett has built a powerful second act in storytelling, blending activism, artistry, and resilience through documentaries, theater, and media work. Welcome, Emmett. That's quite a set of accomplishments. I'm very impressed.

Emmitt H. Thrower 1:04

Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.

Jeff Ornstein 1:07

Well, I gotta tell you, it's very coincidental because we had another retired, one of New York's finest detectives from the Bronx, who became an actor as well. So maybe there's something in the water in the Bronx that's turning you, you cops into movie stars. We're very impressed. Now, your transition started with an injury that prompted you to leave uh public service and go into the arts. Is that right? Uh yes. Had you been active in theater as a younger person or throughout the course of your life?

Emmitt H. Thrower 1:40

No, not really. The switch was part of a succession of transformations that I had gone through. Like there was 10 years of being the actual stage actor, and then I had a stroke. And uh and that uh interrupted things, and that made theater acting no longer really an option. So I was forced to reinvent myself after a lengthy recovery. And four and a half years later, I transformed back into producing theater through a not-for-profit I founded, Wabi Sabi Productions Incorporated. I continued as as a theatrical storyteller, but eventually I totally transformed into strictly a filmmaker. Those experiences taught me that life is about change, and I had the ability to adapt to those changes and grow.

Jeff Ornstein 2:27

That's excellent. And that's exactly what this site's all about. Letting people understand that there's there's nothing holding you back than making changes and becoming someone who you didn't know you could be. So there is a common theme in your work about social awareness and activism and holding people to the higher standards of moral codes. Is that does that come from your your time as a as a one of New York's finest? I think that came from my upbringing. Uh-huh.

Emmitt H. Thrower 3:01

So I took that to the police department and the way I interacted with the community. And so I allowed them to be themselves. And as long as they were law-abiding, then I was not to interfere with them being able to live their life in a way that made them happy. So that's that that transformed me into everything I did in theater and film. That is the basis of how I are.

Jeff Ornstein 3:28

I see. And so Wabi Sabi is your baby then. You founded it, huh?

Emmitt H. Thrower 3:33

Yes. In uh 2005, after I recovered from my stroke to enough, it was time for me to get back out there after four and a half years. And I had always wanted to start a production company and do theater. And that's how Wabi Sabi production was was uh created, you know, to satisfy my creativity and my activism.

Jeff Ornstein 3:55

So you need a lot of tentacles to start a company because you need all the production crew and the talent and the people who help with sets. I mean, had you were you able to reach out and get and cross many different uh fields and draw from those pools and help you put Wabi Sabi together? No small feat.

Emmitt H. Thrower 4:15

Well, the thing was in my many years in theater, in the theater community, I made a lot of connections. So I knew a lot of people, I knew a lot of producers, uh, and so I was well engrossed into you know networking with actors and directors and technical people. So that's where I drew from. Plus, I knew I want to deal with people who also acted but had no experience. So I enjoyed that aspect of it. So I brought in a new, a lot of new artists and technical people to get some experience. And that filled the boy for me to do Wabi Zabi.

Jeff Ornstein 4:52

Yeah, so that's uh you're uh you're stepping into a mentoring role, bringing people who hadn't done it before. And that goes to your social activism as well. I could just totally see that. So that was based in the the Bronx?

Emmitt H. Thrower 5:02

Yes. I was living in Brooklyn. When I had this stroke, I wind up moving to the Bronx because at that time my my wife, who was my uh fiance at that time, was living in the Bronx. So I sold my house and when I had to stroke, I sold my house in Brooklyn and moved to the Bronx. And so I centered everything around the Bronx when I came back four and a half years later because that was my new community.

Jeff Ornstein 5:26

Right. Now, getting something like that off the ground also takes money. So were you able to turn to local charities or did you have a patron who said, you know, I can help fund these things for you? How did you find the funds to make some of these things real? A lot of people struggle with that.

Emmitt H. Thrower 5:43

I never factored that into it because I realized a lot of times for a small not-for-profit, there wasn't a lot of money available, right? But I'm I'm saying that's not going to be the thing that stopped me.

Jeff Ornstein 5:55

Right.

Emmitt H. Thrower 5:55

So I found creative ways. I had to learn a lot of things. Sometimes I would produce three plays and open them the same night.

Jeff Ornstein 6:03

Wow.

Emmitt H. Thrower 6:04

And what it was was that my wife was assisting me, Barbara, and my son would assist me. And literally I wrote the play, I did the lighting, I might do the directing, and sometimes I even wrote a role for me in the play. So I literally would have to do the lighting, go up on stage, do my thing, get off, and come back. So you just have to be creative because you can't let things stop you from your passion.

Jeff Ornstein 6:30

Right. So between acting, directing, writing, technical career work, I mean, do you have a a passion for one over the other, or just all bits of it appeal to you?

Emmitt H. Thrower 6:41

Well, I was in love with the theatrical acting because of the fact that it was always in the moment. So I didn't really I really had stopped doing film and totally focused on uh theater. But, you know, things changed, things happened, and because I could not do the acting, which is was my passion, the way I wanted to do it, and so that forced me to adjust and really adapt film and bit parts because I was used to doing leads.

Jeff Ornstein 7:09

Right. Yeah, well, I mean, obviously you're dedicated to the theater, so that that's very clear. So, New Borning, a Bronxdale award-winning autobiographical documentary born from an unfinished photojournalism collaboration and adapted into audiobook, ebook, and film. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Emmitt H. Thrower 7:29

Yes, that was an accidental autobiography. Accidental. Because I had sworn that I would never do my documentary, my story. But what happened is this uh young photojournalist from Prague came and a friend introduced me to her, and she had this impression of the Brox, and so did the people back in Prague. She wanted to dissuade them and show them that it's not what they think. And so, because I was busy doing uh some filming and teaching seniors a film we created together, so she followed me around, photographed everything, and was going to do a book. She was gonna do the, she's a photojournalist, and she was gonna do the photography, and I was gonna write the words. I wrote up all the words, very poetic, all that stuff, and then COVID happened. And then her mother got sick, and she went back, and we never got around to doing that collaboration. But I had this great, I had this great material. I said, you know what? Let me try and do an audio book. From the audio book, that's how we came into doing the film. Because as I was having this uh voiceover, uh Gilderman do the voiceover for me, I was in my uh final cut and realized, let me just put some images to these, to what he's saying. And that's how it was created accidentally.

Jeff Ornstein 8:51

That's very cool. It's sort of you reverse the natural course of events, but that's dedication. And it's actually really cool when cultures can um, you know, unlikely cultures, Prague, South Bronx, come together and then you can share and you can learn something about one another through the art of film, acting, writing, you know, production. So I think that's terrific. Where is Hope? The Art of Murder. I love murder, national documentary on police brutality and profiling against people with disabilities, available via Canopy. So that sounds a little dark, Emmett. Can you share something about what's the genesis of that program?

Emmitt H. Thrower 9:30

Yes. Actually, there was another accidental documentary. I met this gentleman when I was doing a film. I was doing a film about a player, brother, about Hurricane Katrina that I wrote as well. It was a hip-hop multimedia musical. And I put out press releases, and this disabled gentleman named Leroy Moore, who's the founder of Quit Hop Nation out in uh California, San Francisco, you know, uh seen the press release, and so I met him. His dream was to do uh a documentary about police brutality. And when he brought it up, he had got together some artists to do an album uh from all over the world artists, the same musician. And I said, well, if you're gonna have some impact, you need to do a documentary. And so I volunteered with no experience doing documentaries, I don't know how I was gonna do it. That's how that happened. It took us over four years to do that documentary. I thought it would take a year, but we got uh no support, organizations that were organized to fight police brutality, they didn't want us to participate with them. So we were left on our own, but I did it after four over four years, and that's how that happened.

Jeff Ornstein 10:42

Right. Did you have any personal experiences from your time as a police officer that were part of that story, or was it all very current and and news stories that you encountered and unveiled?

Emmitt H. Thrower 10:52

It was all very current and news stories. I mean, my years on the police department, I can only recall one time that someone attempted police brutality and I was present.

Jeff Ornstein 11:03

Right.

Emmitt H. Thrower 11:03

And the one who did it was a young rookie, and we're we were in a crowded family dispute, and he was gonna take his nightstick and hit this pregnant woman. And I stopped him. And that was the only time, you know, it didn't actually, because I prevented it, we would have been, I mean, we were surrounded by family. So that was the only time I really seen it uh happen. So I was very skeptical about uh the national problem of police brutality because I never really seen it. But then when I started doing the work, I really, wow, I didn't know it was this big. And so that's how I got passionate about doing that process.

Jeff Ornstein 11:44

Now, you've built this company, you've you've built your production company, Wabi Sabi. What advice would you give to a younger person or even you know, similarly age person who is going to embark upon the same task to create a production company? Have you learned any lessons that if you had to start all over again, you wish you knew then what you know now?

Emmitt H. Thrower 12:04

No, because I live in the moment, and I would advise people to live in the moment. Don't, if you put obstacles like, oh, where's the money coming from? I'm not gonna do this, you'll never do anything. Right. So what I did is I just two things I tell people, just keep moving. And if you keep moving, you'll get somewhere. But if you put obstacles in front of yourself, like if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have Wabi Sabi Productions. I wouldn't have a lot of things I'm doing now. I refuse to accept that I can't find a way to get it done with or without money.

Jeff Ornstein 12:36

Right. Well, you you definitely seem motivated because you've taken on a lot of different projects when um, you know, you came from a whole different world earlier on, so I'm very impressed with that. You call uh films an entertainment, but you call them tools. Your films are entertainment, but you call them tools. So, what's the difference between a film that moves people and a film that actually changes what people do next?

Emmitt H. Thrower 13:00

Okay. Um traditional documentaries may entertain you. They're not designed to change what a person does, they're designed to bring about awareness or to teach you about something. My films are designed to be used as tools. Now, they may be entertaining, that's just the nature of the beast. But from the very beginning, you know, I'm building it so that people, if they see it, can take this film and organize around that film to bring community together, people in the talk. It's a mechanism to start the process for change in the community, to bring opposing sides together and let's talk about it. So the commercialization design of the film was not a major part of the creative process. See, traditional documentary films alone, they just do not consistently accomplish a measurable action outcome beyond butt in the seats or eyes on the screen. So currently, myself and and some others from six different states, we're building a framework and a startup company that will revolutionize documentary filmmaking, that will have measurable outcomes. We facilitate outcomes using a system that creates measurable impact data in ways not previously done. Our startup is LLC called Film the Faith in Action and is built to get people moving.

Jeff Ornstein 14:23

You know, you speak so passionately about this, and we we live in some troubled times right now. And the fact that this is like, you know, multi-regional effort, I mean, people come from different regions of the United States, they face different challenges. But the fact is, as a nation, as a country, and as a world, we've got a lot of issues right now that are require some attention to equal the playing field. So is there a particular one particular issue that you're hoping you can get your message out and maybe will affect some minds to think of things differently?

Emmitt H. Thrower 14:55

Well, one issue that from my younger days has always been a focus of me, and that's homelessness. So I find out I started out as a poet when I was younger. I wrote poetry about homelessness. That's all that's I really wrote a lot of poems. And so that has always been a theme of me, the of people who don't have a place to stay. And there's a lot that goes with that. No food, no medical, no, no, no, no real life. And that's a tragedy. I mean, we are our brother's keeper. So that's the issue that people could find some way in their personal life to support or help the cause of homelessness or houselessness, then that would that would really make me really happy.

Jeff Ornstein 15:41

And, you know, homelessness, the face of the homeless, has changed over years because of the skyrocketing cost of just living. You know, homeless used 30 years ago was an individual, and now it can be families. And like you say, it affects affects their their health, it affects their education, it affects their ability to get a job or to keep a job. And, you know, with the cost of living being what it is, homelessness or houselessness is a growing threat to just the fabric of society. That's a very powerful statement because it's sort of, if we can kind of like get a grip on that, kind of take head care of our neighbors, which is sort of you know a common theme that runs through what's important to you, that could make a big difference. I also see this very interesting. Beyond the limits explores disability through a Twilight Zone lens. If the entertainment industry truly embraced disabled creators, what kind of stories would suddenly become possible that audiences have never seen? That sounds fascinating. Can you share something about that?

Emmitt H. Thrower 16:40

Right. Well, beyond the limits, I was always a big Twilight Zone fan for the original TV series. Loved it. But I always wanted to try and do something like that, but I never really had a concept, I believe, was worthy of uh trying to do something to vibe trailing with a genius created. So I didn't do it. Then I started getting more involved with disability projects outside of everything else I do. And it dawned on me that they don't create films for people with disabilities to just enjoy as entertainment. It's always about their disability or they overcame something. It's always basically the same kind of storyline. But people with disabilities, you know, they had to laugh, they like to see horror, and so why not put them in those stories? Let them create those stories, let them write those stories, let them produce those stories because that's such an untapped community. I mean, you got a quarter of the population have some kind of disability, and so you eliminate a quarter of the population from the creator of community.

Jeff Ornstein 17:48

Right. Yeah, you know, you're absolutely right. They're often cast as victims. And they don't have to be victims. They can be heroes, you know, they can they can be comics, they can be artists, they can be lovers, they could be one of a million things. And I think that the film industry and theatrical industry and a lot of industries have overlooked that. Of course, we're going over because I talk too much and I love here listening to you talk. But I do have one more question. The spray can stories, this sounds fascinating, uh, started as one documentary now and wants to become a series. What did graffiti artists teach you about visibility, identity, and being underestimated?

Emmitt H. Thrower 18:25

Graffiti artists are part of the hip-hop culture. They are the original element. And what I discovered is these guys, over 40 or so years, many of them, they have been have lifelong friendships. They're very respectful relationships, they have a supportive community. And their effort to build up their community is what they're about. They're not there to destroy it, as people, you know, uh label them. And now that they have global visibility because of their art that they were chastised and arrested for back in the day, and they did it out of passion. They were letting people know we're here. You're trying to eliminate us, but we're not invisible. We're here, and we all we have an identity. And they never underestimated themselves. It was the other side of the world, outside of their world, who underestimated them.

Jeff Ornstein 19:20

Well, some of the work is absolutely breathtaking. I have to wrap it up. My producers kill me and when I always go over. That's that's me. Emmett, you are a joy to me. I'm going to keep my eyes open and set my computer to ding me when um anything that pops up about Wabi Sabi or your all your other endeavors. I'm so impressed. You've got so much energy going in so many different directions. I wish you all the best of luck. And I don't even think you need luck. You know, I've that that's all the great uh opportunities land in your lap. You deserve it. Thanks for tuning in to Next Act with Jeff Orenstein. Follow, subscribe, and stay connected to your favorite socials at www.nextdackpodcast.com. Keep chasing your next act. The best is yet to come.