Glenn Kulka Documentary Journal

I am on a bridge into mist, not rushing towards an end I cannot see and do not want, not stopping, bound by a rule of law; “a time to be born and a time to die”.

In February, as I was preparing to go to Ottawa for eight weeks to complete my first shoot of “Kulka: The Final Round”, my wife Dawn and I were dealing with the possibility that I may have cancer. We didn’t tell too many people; I let my production team know… for insurance purposes… and I might have mentioned it in casual conversation to a couple of buddies over beers. “Hey, have any of you guys ever had a camera shoved up your penis?” Like that. I knew whatever it was, Dawn and I would deal with it, we would overcome it.

Just before Christmas we found out that my best friend Jay’s Mom had been diagnosed with lung cancer, stage four, a much different animal. They gave Jody thirty days and told her to say her goodbyes.

At Christmas time we saw her. Physically aside from a slight cough, we could not tell. And, aside from the fear, neither could Jody. As far as she was concerned she went to the doctor for a persistent cough and came out with an advanced case of mortality.

In January when her thirty days were up, Jody was still here. The doctors weren’t predicting miracles, but they were impressed enough with the fight in Jody that they gave her a course of radiation for pain management. They blasted her until her skin cracked, and for a while, that seemed to slow the beast.

At the end of February Jody was still scrapping. I rolled through Edmonton on my way to Ottawa, and stopped in for a visit. She was sleeping a lot now, the treatments and drugs knocking it out of her, but she was well enough to sit in the living room and look out the big window onto the street, the same window that I would wave to them through as I walked up the drive, the same window that the Christmas tree would be lit for, the same window that for most of my memories always had an ottoman pushed up to it for the family dog to safely lord over the neighborhood from. And she had set herself a new goal, March 25, granddaughter Kate’s birthday. Jody set her resolve for that day. But she can do more, I thought, and I did not say goodbye.

As I left Edmonton and drove the country under, I thought about whether to tell Jay about my own scare. As a kid, I would embellish to get attention. You know the drill… if you have a belly ache, you damn well made sure somebody, preferably your mother, saw you puke if you really wanted that day off school and a little TLC. This could not be that. This was not in the least about me. He didn’t need to know.

Much of what was important to me about the film and Glenn’s story took shape over the course of those eight weeks on the road, and upon the lattice-work of fear and resolve that only things like cancer can bring forth. A film about a fighter became the story of a man, a fist pump for winning became a celebration of survival… the weeks Glenn and I spent together were set apart by the realization for both of us, in our own way, that the only way to overcome the fear of what lies in the mist is to walk through it. It takes guts to do that, and perseverance. I was about to find out just how much.

Jody and her family celebrated granddaughter Kate’s birthday with silent prayers that Kate’s three year old mind could somehow hold a memory of this day. It was Alison, Jay’s wife and Kate’s mom, who first told me of Jody’s cancer back in December. With profound clarity, Alison’s tears were not for us who have had the warm blessing of Jody in our lives, but for Kate, who’s childhood would soon be without this beautiful woman in it.

I came back through Edmonton in mid April, roughly four months after Jody’s diagnosis, three months after her predicted expiry date. Still fighting, but bedridden, Jody was awake and still sharp. She was gaunt, but not to the extent that I had seen in others who had fought the fight.

It wasn’t until she had told me she had done what she needed to do that I realized this was good-bye… and I lost all sense of reason.

Knowing that the best I could do was to be there and listen, I tried to do just that. I sat on the bed beside her and held her hand, my touch so light out of fear of causing her pain that I’m sure all she felt was my trembling. I listened but all I could hear was the chain reaction of mourning that was to come. Brian sat at the foot of the bed, husband, sentinel, wounded child and I could not look into his eyes. The one time I did, at the door as I was leaving, we both broke into tears and I ran out of there knowing I should stay but unable to.

The next day I was supposed to start driving back to Vancouver. I lay awake most of the night knowing I was going back to Jody and Brian’s instead. I realized what drove me out of the house that day was Brian. I was picturing me as him, me as if I was losing Dawn. My heart was breaking for Brian because I know what loving a person who makes you a better man is about, what that feels like in your heart, and I couldn’t imaging the devastation of losing that.

But I thought maybe I knew a way that I could honor them.

If Brian and Jody were surprised to see me the next day, they didn’t show it. We had a good visit, talked about Brian’s inability to master Jody’s bookkeeping system, laughed quietly knowing we weren’t talking about bookkeeping at all.

When I pulled out the camera and asked for a picture of the two of them, it caught us all off guard for a moment, a very brief, quiet moment. Then Jody said all right.

I shot six frames. In one, I saw the truth. I saw two lives. I saw the giving, I saw the force, I saw exaltation, I saw a mirror, I saw the paper thin line, I saw the leaning, the embrace, rings of gold, weary laugh lines, a child, and another, I saw the voice, I saw the dance… I saw love.

Then I came home.

Dawn and I had agreed back in February that, because almost of the tests had been done and all the results had come back clean, I should go on the trip. If something happened, we would deal with it. Thankfully nothing happened on the road and on May 1^st I received the results from the final set of tests; no cancer. We didn’t talk a heck of a lot about it, but the fear was there, and it made Brian and Jody’s situation that much more poignant.

A month later I received a phone call from Jay.

She had been induced into a coma, the grip of it finally too much to bear. After a day of shared memories, her family each whispered into her ear, you can stop fighting now, you’ve done enough. And a few minutes later, at day’s end, May 29^th, 2009, Jody slipped quietly into the night.

Five and half months, Christmas, her 80^th birthday, Kate’s third birthday, Easter, she hung on and fought and gave her family the gift of knowing, seeing and loving… and the gift of goodbye.

The lady went the distance.

Time beats all.

First, I must apologize because I have been neglecting the blog.  But with good reason I promise… check out the trailer for the documentary on YouTube under “Glenn Kulka Documentary Trailer”.  That’s what we’ve been doing.

I’ve been going through a lot of firsts on this project and one of those firsts is having to figure out how to store and view my footage when all I own is an outdated laptop.  I found some rugged compact hard drives and managed to borrow a computer with Final Cut on it, not that I knew how to use Final Cut but at least I could view my footage… saved my bacon.

I had a deadline to cut the trailer… 10 days.  In that time I had to review 55 hours of footage, write the assembly script and deliver it to my editor Kyle Summers in time for him to put it together for our producer Mike Grudman to take to the Cannes Film Market.  Needless to say we were a bit rushed.

At first, the footage I was reviewing didn’t seem familiar to me, I wondered who shot it and how it ended up on my hard drives.  Then, key interviews started to come up, moments with Glenn that trancended what I thought was possible on this shoot… and the memories came flooding back.

I remembered every image I wanted to show, every word I wanted to hear.  I transcribed the words, images and timecode cues on Final Draft and ended up with a rough script of just over 60 pages.  Over the next few days I distilled those 60 pages down to a dozen clips and 30 cutaways that I thought Kyle and I could use for building rhythm.  It worked out to 5 pages of script that would boil down to just under 3 minutes cut together.  I gave it to Kyle.

Through that whole process, I kept flashing back to conversations I had with a guy named Nuno Fonseca in Toronto.  Nuno is a personal trainer from Xtreme Couture.  I met him the first day I came to film there.

We got to talking.

We got to talking about quality people.

Time and competition both have a way of bringing out the true nature of people, revealing their quality.  Time is a sculptor, carving out a person like waters cuts a valley.  Competition, particularly at the intense level that combat sports delivers, hews more like a wrecking ball.

When Nuno told me a little bit about his life, I realized that, though his story is unique, it mirrors the experience of a vast majority of the men and women who seek out combat sports.  It was a story of survival, a story of pain, a story dominated by the wrecking ball, and seldom soothed by water.

Both Nuno and Glenn have come through their experiences as quality human beings, who recognize quality in others, but such is not always the case.  Too many souls are crushed long before they even have a choice to climb into a ring or not.

There are a thousand tragedies I could have filmed, but they wouldn’t inspire… and these days, I think we could all use a little inspiration.

The day I went over to Kyle’s to see his assembly of the trailer, I knew I had made the right choice.

So what is it about good friends that they seem to have such a profound effect on the way our lives go?  I can’t tell you the number of people who have supported this film about Glenn, but I can tell you that without all of them… this film doesn’t get done.

Jay, Alison and their daughter Kate live in Toronto.  Staying with them allowed me to get several interviews in the city without having to shell out the exorbitant hotel prices.  It also allowed me special insight into their lives as (relatively) new parents and (so far) survivors of the recent financial industry fiasco.  They both work in the industry and owe much of what they’ve built to a mutual love of business and the firm stance of integrity with which they hold their dreams aloft.

But it’s not easy.

Like Glenn, they struggle with the idea of the daily requirements of what they do, the overall worth of it, and the constant pressure to morally compromise.

Glenn beats people up.

Jay offers training packages to investment firms.

Alison provides insurance to corporations.

These professions, within the public view, could be seen as ranging from; at best self indulgent, and at worst as akin to providing sharks the tools to sharpen their own teeth.

It’s fun, isn’t it, being the public?  We get to offer opinions, educated or not, without looking in the mirror first.  We are accountable to no one, and yet the press and the politicians pander to our every whim.

Let’s change that;  before we judge Glenn, Jay and Alison on what they do, let’s take a look at how and why they do it.  And then let’s take a close look in the mirror and see if we hold up under scrutiny.

I work in the entertainment business.  That should be enough to never allow me to pass judgement on anyone ever again.  As a matter of fact, I’ll take a business consultant, insurance analyst or an MMA fighter over a film producer any day of the week… most days anyway.  ( All apologies and exceptions to my producer friends who are most obviously exceptions to my gross overstatement!)

Here’s what counts, during the mist of our economic uncertainty, and the massive pressures that are on Jay and Alison right now, they took me in, fed me, gave me a great place to sleep and work, and shared the sunshine joy of their daughter with me.

It’s not what you do, it’s how and why you do it.  Jay and Alison do what they do and all they do with love… that’s integrity.

Last Sunday night my producer Charlene Blaine-Schulenburg (one of the good ones) called me from the Arrowhead Film Festival awards ceremony in California to tell me that the film I wrote, and Char produced, last year, REACH FOR ME, won Best Feature and Best of Festival.  Before I hung up, and had a little ‘overcome with joy’ moment, as Jay placed a glass of champagne in my hand and toasted me.  He had been there from the start; when I began writing, when I struggled with the business of it, when REACH FOR ME had it’s LA premiere… Jay was there.  It’s only fitting that I should be staying at his house when I hear this news.

I wish Dawn was there at that moment, but we spoke on the phone… and she knows.  Without her, none of this happens, she is my partner in all things, she is my perfect partner.

And later when I talked to Glenn on the phone and filled him in on the news to celebrate with him, his joy was sincere.  As was his voice when he told me that Laura and Jaxson, his kids, missed me.

It’s how and why we do it.

I’m not sure if the world needs another filmmaker, business consultant, insurer or a fighter, but the world does need people who do whatever they do with love and integrity.

Thank you Jay, Alison and Glenn.

Yesterday was the end of my time with Glenn, Mariko and the kids.  I leave with my energy on empty, but my heart well full.  What a gift this time they have given me, I depart enriched.

I am excited to start cutting this footage.  While most of the events weren’t exactly what I thought I’d be shooting, the footage is better than I could have hoped for, and will serve the truth of Glenn’s story in ways I could never have imagined.

With all that has happened, I wonder if Glenn feels as good about our time as I do.  I can’t imagine how, considering I’ve rammed a camera up his life for the past month, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was moved in some way.

But I guess the reality is, for him, those kinds of thoughts just aren’t important right now.  What is important is that yesterday was Parent/Teacher day, where the kids got to show all the work they had done this semester to Mom & Dad.

Yesterday, it seems, was a day of joyful tears and much laughter… yesterday was perfect.

And all this from a family whose father lost a big fight last weekend… would have devastated some… would have devastated the Kulka’s of old.

You want to really know how Glenn took the loss?

On Monday morning after the fight he opened his radio show by instructing his listeners to open their morning papers to page 41 in the sports section.  There they would find on the top left hand corner of the page a color photo of Glenn at the fight… flat on his back unconscious.

“That’s about how my weekend went… how was yours?” Glenn asked.

And then he laughed.

The waiting is over.

For three and a half long hours you had to sit and watch as eight undercard fighters camped out in the dressing room with you have had their hands taped, hit pads with their trainers, and marched into the ring.

Finally, it’s your turn.  Yours  is the first fight of the main event.  Casper tapes your hands.  He does a thorough professional job.  Without the tape, your knuckles will crush under the force of your punches… you hit that hard.

The arena is close and hot.

The smoke, the lights, the twenty foot high TV screens, the cage, and the crowd close in on you, suck the air out of your lungs, give you tunnel vision.

Only the men accustomed to this hold their focus.  You and some of the others with few fights under your belts struggle to block it all out.

Strip off your T-shirt.  Strip off your sweats.  Show your mouthguard, tap your cup.

Officials grease your brows and cheeks with Vaseline to help avoid cuts, and check your body for extra grease that shouldn’t be there, grease that might stop your opponent from getting a proper hold of you.

Your opponent is waiting for you.  Run up the stairs.

Hide your fear with aggression, quell the rising puke in your belly with bravado.

Let the horn release you.

Take the center.

Find your distance, find his trigger.  Throw.

Throw and connect.  Feel it but don’t feel it.  He’s fast, good instincts.

He takes your shot… and starts throwing back.

Feeling out, countering your jab, your right hand lead.

You chase… and take a knee for your impatience.  You take the knee, it takes your breath.

He sees you step back, he presses.  Out of nowhere the right hand snaps your jaw left to right and down, the force of it torques your neck, splits the skin inside your mouth.  You feel it but don’t feel it.

The left hook comes, opens up your brow,  you can’t see that either, and then the right, the left again and another right to square  you up for the killing blow.

The knee comes like a wrecking ball into the the tip of your sternum, forces the ribcage into the lungs, forces the air out.  The internal muscles lock, protecting the heart, immobilizing the torso.

You cannot breathe.

A left hook snaps you around as you fall.

There are blank spaces.  People will tell you that your body was convulsing.  Later you will know that your organs were trying to reboot.

Your lungs were sending messages to your CNS; let go, we need to breathe.

It is over.  It is over.

You cannot believe this, even as they raise his arm.

It is impossible that after all you went through just to get into this ring… that the outcome could be this.

But you know it’s true and you immediately think of a dozen things you could have done differently.

You are mad at yourself.

You feel guilty because you are relieved it’s over.

You feel like a shmuck for disappointing your family and friends, when all they care about is that you are okay.

But you cannot hear this.

You cannot hear this.

You cannot forgive yourself.

Not yet.

This is penance.

This is your doing.

You are responsible.

You live through it.

You live with it.

Tomorrow is another chance to stand tall.

But…

Tomorrow hits harder than today.

Last night Glenn fought his third professional mixed martial arts bout.  Mariko took the kids and stayed over at her Mom & Dad’s place in East Ottawa to give Glenn a chance to sleep in this morning if he needed to.  All things considered, we were sure he would.

When dawn arrived, I woke briefly, not sure if it was due to the pattern of sleep that I had grown accustomed to from staying with Glenn and Mariko, or to a stirring in the house.  I toyed with the idea of climbing out of bed and up from the basement to check out the noise.  We’ve had skunks around, not that I was going to try and do anything about that, and there was the other reason, the reason I stayed up later than I should have after a very long day and night of the fight; because Glenn might need a ride to the hospital and I was the only other one home.  But instead, I turned over and fell back to sleep.

When I woke again, the house was still, and without the activity of the Kulka family waking, too quiet.  You know that feeling you get, like something has happened, something that you are too late to do anything about, something that quickens your heart and puts ice in your belly; that’s the feeling I had.  It came with guilt, a conviction that I had not been diligent enough, that while I slept Glenn had needed my help.

Then it came with fear, that I had not seen the warning signs, that the sound that woke me at dawn was muffled and sharp, and hung in the silence with the bitter tang of rust and cordite.  Knowing Glenn’s past struggles, my mind went there with dread, and the growing possibility that my presence, the presence of my camera, had tipped the scales, the last stone on a mountain of building pressure Glenn has had to shoulder surrounding this fight.

The day after I arrived in Ottawa was March 10th, a Tuesday.  I went with Glenn to watch him train at Nabil Khatib’s Bushido Ju-Jitsu Academy.  I took only my still camera so I could get a sense of the lighting and the space.  Glenn told me he would do the bulk of his training there so I wanted to be prepared.  While doing escape drills with Nabil, Glenn separated his right shoulder and strained the tendons in the muscles connecting his neck to his shoulder girdle… all of them.

At this point, Glenn was two and a half weeks away from the fight, plenty of time, he thought, to get the injury treated, plenty of time to recover and get back into training.  Unfortunately, this was not to be the case.  Glenn was not able to train again, aside from riding the bike for cardio, and a light, no-contact sparring session with me a couple of days ago.  As a result, he came to last night’s fight with no training for 17 days, unprepared and in pain.

This was a part of the story I was unable to tell until now, after the fight, because if his opponent had gotten wind of this information, the result of the fight could have been much, much worse.

Add his injury to the pressures from sponsors, the promotion itself, taking on ticket sales as a way to supplement his meager fight fee, a documentary filmmaker scavenging for compelling footage, mounting pressure from family and friends to keep fighting as a badge of honor for his age, mounting pressure from his family and friends to stop fighting as a humble resignation to his age, personal pressure from himself to make good on his fight pledge… and what you get is a man who would have dragged himself stabbed and legless into the ring to make this fight if he had to.

I tried many times to go upstairs and deal with whatever heartbreak I might find, and eventually after steeling myself for several minutes, I climbed the stairs to the second floor.  I could hear the rain on the roof.  The upstairs hallway light was on.  I could see a laundry basket of folded clothes resting on top of Glenn and Mariko’s unmade bed…

But Glenn was gone.

I ran down to check the driveway; the car was gone.  I ran to my bedroom to grab my phone, debating the first call; 911, Mariko, or Glenn himself.

Then I heard the door open upstairs.  I heard heavy feet strain the tired linoleum and floor joists above me…

On his right brow, a comma of dark blood marks the origin of what will soon be a whopping shiner, a light swelling across the bridge of his nose and right cheek tighten the skin giving it that artificial youth of a bad face lift, a fat lip and deep cut inside his mouth turn his grin Brandoesque.

“How are ya?”  he says.  Shit, how am I?

“I was starving.  Had to go out and get some eggs.” he tells me.

His jeans are clean.  He’s in his good golf shirt, the one I associate with dress up occasions like hockey games or church.  And he’s smiling.

I realize that something special has just occurred; for a few moments I lost faith in Glenn.  For a brief time, I expected him to cave and revert to old ways… to escape down the dark path.  Because maybe if I was in his position, that’s what I would have done.  So easy to walk that path, in spite of the heavy toll you pay.  But Glenn didn’t do that.  In spite of every excuse not to, he stood tall.

So many times in my life I have seen examples of extraordinary courage in the face of the unimaginable.  Both my brothers will always remain heroes to me for the lives they have lived by necessity.  They’re not saints, just everyday heroes, the finest kind, the kind that I believe is in all of us, the kind that today Glenn has chosen to be.

Glenn lost his fight last night by TKO in the first round, and if there is beauty in adversity, he has shone the light on it.

On Saturday night, Glenn’s professional mixed martial arts record slipped to 2 – 1, but this Sunday morning, I have never been prouder of my friend Glenn.

Sunday morning comes the dawn… and it is good.

We hate in others what we hate in ourselves.  Some say hate is a strong word… so is love… so is fight… so is empower.

Who we fight is no great mystery; hold up a mirror and you will see your enemy.  Eventually, all conflict in rational human beings boils down to this.  I said rational… the psychopaths are on their own.

In the ring, Glenn will be fighting Hosier Bruno, the man in the background of the first picture.  Hosier is a soft spoken French Canadian Muay Thai specialist, he wears sandals in winter, he looks you in the eye when he shakes your hand, he carries prayer beads.

Hosier could be anybody, it wouldn’t matter.  Glenn’s opponent is always the same.

Today is the official weigh-in.  We travel to Robert Guertin Arena in Hull, Quebec, ten minutes from downtown Ottawa.  The weigh-ins are better organized than most, but still take longer than they should.  Fighters lounge at cafeteria tables.  Those trying to cut weight suck ice cubes or shadow box, quiet, inside themselves.  There is little or no bravado, a bit of territorial pissing between the headliners but that’s about all.

Glenn and Hosier shake hands.  They are respectful of each other.  When they separate, one watches as the other walks away.  Glenn has seen what he needs to see, Hosier has questions still.

After the official weigh-ins we got to Glenn’s daughter’s school in Kanata for a choir recital.  Mariko joins us.  Later she asks me if I saw the tears in Glenn’s eyes.  For her, the fact that Glenn can show this kind of joy one day before the fight is a small miracle.  She’ll take it.

Back to Ottawa for a media dog and pony show at the Hard Rock Café.  The fighters strip down as their weights are announced and flashbulbs fire rockets at their flesh.  The crowd is typical fight; young men with very little hair and fight t-shirts.  I am slightly surprised that I also fall into this description… except that I am not young anymore.

Then we’re at the hotel and the Warrior One (W1) production office.  W1 is the company promoting the fights and all in the fight game have high hopes for what seems to be a stand up crew, but the gate isn’t in yet and the checks haven’t been signed… plenty of time for the greed to take hold.

Driving and still and hour from home, Glenn talks to his kids on the phone to wish them good night.  He doesn’t like this, it upsets him that he is not there.  After a day like today I wonder what motivates him to go through this.  The reality is that he has probably spent more on doctors, chiropractors, trainers, and spending time promoting the event than he will ever get back in pay.

Selfishly, he has a reason, a test of himself the results of which are only known to him.

But aside from that, there is only what will be.

And what will be wakes him up every morning with kisses and I love you daddy’s.

What is and what will ever be…

My wife mentioned that Glenn looked too scary in some of the earlier posts.  So for all of you who agree, here is a shot of Glenn doing some viscious teddy bear grappling!

Glenn is getting into his prefight zone.  He is constantly visualizing, piecing together the fight in his mind, blow by blow and throw by throw.

I know he’s ready for the fight this Saturday because he’s got that far away look in his eyes when he’s going through the fight in his head… and he’s smiling.

I had to take some promo shots of Glenn for DVD covers, one sheets, etc.  This is a test photo I shot with my little Lumix LX3.  Great camera.

The lighting is a little extreme but it’s pretty close to what I’m after.  I think a camera with a little more dynamic range will pick up the tattooed lettering on Glenn’s arm a bit better, then we will enhance the words with photoshop to bring them out.

The tattoo reads, “Only God Can Judge Me”, and I can’t think of a more appropriate creed for Glenn, given his story.

So spiritually, you know, we’re covered.

And from a marketing standpoint… beef in Levi’s… slam dunk!

I’m the little guy getting hit.

Glenn needed a sparring partner to help visualize his new opponent.  The last opponent chickened out.  The one before that had his sternum broken and had to drop out.

I’m supposed to try and look like the new opponent who stands six foot two and weighs two thirty-five.  I’m five nine on a good day, and a paunchy one seventy-eight.

Because I’m editing the blog, I get to choose the pictures.  I left out most of the ones of me getting punched in the head, me getting body slammed and me tapping out when Glenn sat on me.

I seemed to be most successful running away.

What would you do if you had two hundred and sixty-five pounds of mad guy coming at you?

Have you even seen a really bad car wreck, or maybe a train derail?

You know that moment when you see someone stand up and climb out of all that carnage, and you just want to go over and raise the guy’s arm and say, “Hey Buddy, you’re alive!”

Yeah.