(Use the video player below to view a five-minute clip from "Twelve.")

By Dennis Miller

The film opens with a fresh, contemporary soundtrack and edgy, retro graphics. We cut to a family snapshot of a smiling young girl, and then quickly to a live close-up of a young woman. She’s presumably the same girl some years later. It’s an unrehearsed outtake moment — she’s speaking to someone off-camera about whether it’s time for her to begin. A film clapper snaps shut, and as an on-screen graphic identifies her as “Kat, discovered sobriety at 16,” she begins to tell her story.

So begins Twelve, a novel new film that explores the issue of alcoholism and addiction among America’s youth, in their own words. Twelve is the brainchild of Jack Sinclair, an Oklahoma City-based, self-described recovering alcoholic who had no professional filmmaking experience nor formal training in addiction treatment before undertaking the project. But you’d never know it. Slickly produced with an up-to-date, MTV-style sensibility, Twelve uses rapid-fire editing to present viewers with 20 young people telling their interwoven stories of addiction and recovery. As the stories progress and new people are added into the mix, the intercuts increase, and the pace quickens. Ultimately, at some point, it dawns on you: They’re all telling the same  story. Only the details are different. At its heart, addiction is a cruel and inexorable process that ultimately puts all of its victims through the same stages of pain and misery.

“So many of us in recovery see people come in and the similarities are so prevalent,” says Sinclair, who’s been working with young people in church groups and 12-step recovery programs for years. “The stories they go through are virtually the same. People start experimenting. They have fun. They have little problems. They have big problems. They crash and burn. And then a lot of young people die.”

In Their Own Words

Sinclair’s goal with Twelve was to reach young people around the age they’re most likely to begin to experiment with and use drugs and alcohol. But he knew that to reach them effectively, he had to do something different than the usual high school, health-class fare. “It’s not the standard pastor, teacher, principal or instructor up there saying, ‘Don’t do this,’ ‘Don’t do that,’ or, ‘Here’s your brain on drugs,’” he explains. “We wanted to have them relate to attractive young people that got in trouble with drugs and found a way out. What we tried to do with Twelve was to make this where young people could relate to it.”

For this reason, Twelve has no narrator, no on-camera interviewer, no scary statistics, and none of the usual dark litanies of all the horrible things that can happen to teens who use drugs and alcohol. There is no identifiable “authority figure” at all — in fact, the only people who appear in the film are the young people telling their stories. In this respect, the film follows to a large extent the principles laid down years ago by Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, who understood the raw, healing power of one addict sharing his or her "experience, strengths and hopes" with another.

Associate Producer Lynda Toney Bahr says it’s all about the identification process. “In AA in particular, one of the things that makes it work is that identification process. It’s when I tell a story and your head nods. And instead of me talking about you, I am talking about me… [Young people] can take that, and apply it to themselves. It’s non-threatening that way.”

A Synchronicity of Twelves

Bahr also provides some background on the film’s unusual name and what it means. “The title came as an evolution. When we started filming, we noticed that as we interviewed more and more people, they all started experimenting with drugs and alcohol at the age of 12,” she explains. “And there’s so much more significance to that. There are the 12 steps, the 12 hours on the clock, 12 months, 12 apostles, 12 disciples, 12 inches in a foot — we could go on and on. Mostly, though, it represents the age that we saw experimentation with drugs and alcohol beginning.”





Executive Producer Jack Sinclair

The filmmakers ultimately hope to see the film used in schools, church groups and youth education efforts nationwide. “We’ve had great feedback from the local communities, especially from church groups and junior high and high schools,” says Sinclair. “And they’re thinking about how to use it in their wellness programs. That’s really our goal — to try to get this into the schools.”

But the film may also serve as a useful education resource at addiction and alcoholism treatment centers, or as a conversation-starter for group sessions. “It can be used in the education series that treatment centers have, not only for new patients but also for family,” says Sinclair. “That new patient is finally going to hear the message from his peers, and I think if they just let young people talk to young people — well, that was really what we were trying to achieve here.”

The Medium Is the Message

Twelve’s high production values should also prove a draw for its target audience, who’ve grown up in a video-saturated culture and have come to expect a pretty high level of sophistication in their visual content. Here as well, it’s lightyears above the standard high school health-class fare many of us may be familiar with, an important attribute in attracting and keeping the attention of its intended audience. Needless to say, that slick look and sophisticated editing didn’t come cheaply. “We have spent probably over $200,000 to date,” says Sinclair. “By and large, we raised that money from individuals. There were a couple of foundations that contributed to this and we also went through a non-profit entity, The Communities Foundation of Oklahoma. It was a long, slow process. But, really it was people interested in recovery and wanting to see us get the message out.”

The DVD was just released in the fourth quarter of 2008, and is already generating a buzz in both the education and treatment communities. Sinclair has high ambitions for its ultimate reach, joking with BHC Journal that “possibly, by doing interviews like this, you can help get us on Oprah or Dr. Phil!” But they are hopes born of a lifelong commitment to the hard and often heartbreaking work of helping young people recover, along with a deep conviction that Twelve is a film that's very much needed. It fills a void that too often in our society is filled with dark, dreary and sometimes sensationalized stories about teen addiction. Twelve doesn’t pull any punches — it tells the truth plainly and starkly — but since it comes from those who’ve been through the long, dark night of addiction and have emerged on the other side into the light of recovery, the message is, ultimately, one of hope.

Twelve’s tagline asks the question, “Is There Life After Rehab and Recovery?” The answer, after watching the film, comes through loud and clear. Yes, there is — in abundance.

For more information:

• Read and/or listen to BHC Journal’s complete interview with Jack Sinclair and Lynda Toney Bahr.
• Visit the website for Twelve at www.12recovery.com.
• To purchase the DVD, visit the Hazelden Bookstore.

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