Alzheimer's disease doesn't leap to mind as a subject likely to draw many TV viewers, much less draw them for a four-part series. But it's tough to turn away from HBO's exhaustive and bracing look at the illness through the lives of people enduring it and the scientific breakthroughs that could change everything.
"The Alzheimer's Project" marks the third time HBO Documentary Films has made a focused attempt at public health education. In 2000, there was the Peabody Award-winning series "Cancer: Evolution to Revolution," followed by the "Addiction" series in 2007.
About 50 million people accessed the "Addiction" series via TV, the Internet and a companion book, series producer John Hoffman said, a number that HBO executives considered staggering. So producers quickly looked for other health issues that might warrant a series that could fill gaps in public health education and help raise money for scientific research.
"The question was where is there a need?" recalled Hoffman, who helped produce all three series. "Where is there hope in the public health area, but where is there a lack of knowledge? And it kept coming up that Alzheimer's was the area where great advances were being made, and at the same time we had a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety."
"The Alzheimer's Project" debuts tonight with the film "The Memory Loss Tapes," which features seven patients in various stages of the disease. Joe Potocny, a 63-year-old computer genius, blogs through the onset of Alzheimer's disease, noting wryly that he helped invent DVDs and now gets lost in his own front yard. Yolanda Santomartino, 75, lives in a nursing home and befriends her own reflection, believing it to be a new resident named Ruth.
HBO filmmakers gained access to the world's top Alzheimer's researchers and to families during some of the most vulnerable periods of their lives, even capturing the death of 77-year-old Cliff Holman, a retired Alabama TV show host.
"I thought of it as short stories about forgetting," said HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins, executive producer of the series. "To me that show was really a lesson in caring if nothing else and oddly not as depressing as everyone expected it to be. The love of some of these people is quite extraordinary."
Nevins also involved First Lady of California Maria Shriver as executive producer. Shriver's 93-year-old father, Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps and 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2003.
More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease. That figure accounts for one in every eight people over age 65, according to the Alzheimer's Assn. And those numbers are expected to balloon as the baby boomers reach retirement age.
"It's the second-most-feared illness after cancer," said Hoffman, echoing a line repeated in the series.
The project's producers quickly discovered why. As each film in "The Alzheimer's Project" demonstrates, Alzheimer's dissolves the very traits that distinguish us from one another. It steals the personality, shaving off memories so gradually at first, like the name of one's spouse or the meaning of a stop sign, while preserving enough intellect to give the patient a profound sense of his or her loss.
"I wake up some mornings and don't know whether I've been asleep at all," Alzheimer's patient June Vasse, 63, says in "Momentum in Science."
Larger and larger swaths of memory disappear over time, often leaving odd bits and pieces, like song lyrics or fondness for a long-dead pet. Eventually, an Alzheimer's patient exists in the world much like a toddler, who must be hand-fed, diapered, dressed and vigilantly monitored.
"I think of it as the long goodbye," said one Alzheimer's caregiver in the "Caregivers" segment.
Finding the right individuals for these films was a months-long process. Filmmakers considered hun- dreds of cases and spent weeks interviewing families by phone be- fore showing up with their cameras. "The Memory Loss Tapes" directors Shari Cookson and Nick Doob found two of their subjects, Potocny and Josephine Mickow, through blogs (Potocny's http://living-with-alzhiemers .blogspot.com and Mickow's daughter Annie Mickow's http://maplecorners .blogspot.com).
Once filmmakers were in position, the disease itself posed special challenges to shooting. Though they were often lost in their own reveries, the late-stage Alzheimer's patients weren't oblivious to the camera. It sometimes took hours of waiting, said Cookson, before a patient was comfortable enough to ignore them.
"It was hard because we couldn't explain who we are to them," Cookson said. "We could just be as open and kind as we could be. . . . What was amazing to me was to see what remained of people. When you see those bits of who that person was, shining through it all, it's kind of breathtaking in a way."
