Morristownian Thinking Green, Shopping Green (Video)

Christian Schuller almost never even opened the email. 

“I got it from someone in a totally roundabout way,” the 28 year-old East Brunswick native said. “I wasn’t going to open it. I thought it was probably spam.”

But instead of deleting the mystery inbox item, Schuller, who now lives in Morristown, opened it to find an invitation from a local non-profit organization called Grow it Green Morristown. They were seeking volunteers to help clean up a local vacant lot in order to convert it into a community garden.

Schuller responded to the email for two reasons: a keen personal interest in home gardening and local food production, but also because the mission of Grow it Green Morristown sparked an idea on the creative side of his mind. Schuller, an aspiring filmmaker, had been searching for a topic on which to base his first documentary film.

“I came to them and I said, ‘I want to make a doc about community gardens, and you guys are in my backyard’,” he said. “They were totally cool with it.”

The result of the project, Schuller’s 30-minute documentary “Growtown Motown,” will be screened at the East Brunswick Public Library on Thursday, April 7, at 7 p.m. A discussion with the filmmaker will follow. 

Schuller’s path from local kid to documentary filmmaker began shortly after he graduated East Brunswick High School in 2001. He attended Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he studied communications with a concentration in public relations and journalism.

“My last semester there I took a video production course and I though it was pretty awesome, creating something from nothing,” he said. “I enjoyed that whole process.”

After graduating he went to work with for Sescik Productions, a small production company based in Lake Hiawatha, N.J., where he gained much of the experience that allowed him to shoot and edit “Growtown Motown,” a project he describes as being exceptionally close to his heart.

“I’m really into home gardening,” Schuller says, “keeping food production local, supporting a system that we’ve really lost touch with. So this film is about the community garden that was started on 2.8 square miles in Downtown Morristown, how it came about and the gardeners themselves. Why they did it, why they care about it, and why they think it’s here to stay. There are so many levels of connection that they feel about it.”

Schuller began filming in June of 2010 and continued throughout the summer, sometimes with a skeleton crew of assistants but usually on his own.

“I think in the end I had about 24 hours of footage in the can,” he said. “I just approached it with a ‘Let’s shoot people and see what happens’ mentality.

“I had some idea of parts of the story in mind, what I thought were vital. Who the people are, what they’re growing, and why it matters to them to grow things close to him. So while I talked to people I tried to find the golden nuggets of information. There are gardeners who are characters, who want to share their information. I left a lot on the cutting room floor. It could probably really become something.”

Not only did the story of the garden grow on Schuller; Schuller clearly grew on the gardeners.

“This season they’ve hired me to run their community garden,” he says. “They’re a great organization.”

The East Brunswick Library screening will be the film’s first local presentation, one that Schuller suspects might kick start his ambition to try to distribute the piece more broadly.

“I’ve had it shown at a few film festivals, one of which I scored an audience award for best specialty documentary,” he says. “It’s one of the things I’ve been kicking myself about, getting it out there to other festivals. But I’m happy with it where it is right now.”