Screen Player

Deborah Scranton's home in Goshen, New Hampshire, is a most unlikely place to make an award-winning war documentary. It's a big jumble of a farmhouse, with a red barn out back and two dogs racing around the lawn. It oozes history, largely because Scranton's family has been in Goshen (population 732) for nine generations, four of them in this house. But it's this history that in many ways led Scranton to make The War Tapes, a documentary about the war in Iraq. What's unlike any other war film is that soldiers shot the footage. In May, at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film Festival, it won Best International Documentary Feature as well as a standing ovation from the crowd. "There were a number of films shot in Iraq," says a spokewoman for the festival. "But this was the huge breakout."

Scranton is 44, a tall redhead with brown eyes. On this spring afternoon she's sitting on a lawn chair out back, wearing jeans and a purple blazer. People are sometimes curious about how she ended up making a war movie, she says, and often ask if she's from a military family. Her answer: "I always say, `Well, um, sort of.'" She says this referring to ancestors like her Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Stephen Scranton, who fought in theAmerican Revolution. His musket hangs in her kitchen. And to her Great-Great-Uncle Theron Scranton, whose discharge papers from the Civil War hang by the stairs.

Scranton grew up in the house, went to Brown University, joined the US Ski team, and spent 15 years in the television industry, mostly in New York, working as a freelance writer, producer, and director for companies including ESPN, CBS, ABC, and MTV. In 2001 she returned to New Hampshire and, in 2003, recently divorced and with her then 3-year-old son, Benjamin, she moved back into her childhood home. "I had grown up in a multigeneration household," she says. "It's an experience I wanted for my son."

Soon after her return home, Scranton attended a meeting of the local historical society. When the subject turned to the town's shrinking population of World War II veterans, Scranton volunteered to record some of their memories. She went to the war monument in front of the library and wrote down the 46 names she found there. She managed to trace information on all but two, and the resulting interviews made up her first war documentary, Stories from Silence, Witness to War, which she finished in 2003.

Five months after its first screening in Goshen, Scranton's phone rang at the farmhouse. It was Major Greg Heilshorn, the public affairs officer for the New Hampshire National Guard. He had seen Stories from Silence, and he asked Scranton if she wanted Screen Player to join the next deployment of troops to Iraq as an embedded documentary reporter. Scranton said she'd think about it. "I woke up late that night," she says, "and I asked myself, `What if I gave the soldiers the cameras?' " In a way, it was an outgrowth of her TV work, mixing and managing multiple viewpoints to form a whole picture. Two weeks later, she was at Fort Dix, New Jersey, standing in front of 180 men from New Hampshire's 172d Infantry Regiment. She asked for volunteers to film for a year.

Ten soldiers signed up, packing off with hand-held video cameras. Sometimes they would go out on patrol with a camera duct-taped to a turret, other times they would film in the dark of a tent after a battle. Scranton was in constant contact.As she puts it, "I talked to them every time they were inside the wire," meaning inside the safety of a military compound, in this case the Logistical Support Area Anaconda in Balad. The computer would ping in the middle of the night, and she'd find herself deep in an instant-messaging conversation with "her" soldiers, offering advice and an ear, asking if they'd had a chance to do their self-interviews, in order to try, in Scranton's words, to "hold on to what the experience was" - whether it was seeing dead bodies or noting the weird humor of Army life. One night she got a message saying, "Two rockets just landed." Then she heard nothing for 24 hours. Her soldiers, she eventually learned, were safe.

During an 11-month deployment in the Sunni Triangle, five of the soldiers stopped filming. "All of them," she explains, "were soldiers first and journalists second." Eleven more contributed footage as the project went on. She ended up with 800 hours of tape in Iraq, as well as 200 hours of interviews she conducted with soldiers' families back home. She chose to focus on three men: Kingston native Sergeant Stephen Pink, Sergeant Zack Bazzi of Watertown, and Specialist Mike Moriarty, a Beverly native. "We had so much material," she says. "We just couldn't fit them all in." The three are as different as can be. Pink is a cynic and wisecracker, Lebanese-born Bazzi has a subscription to the left-wing magazine The Nation, and Moriarty is a self-described "ultimate patriot."

Distilling the tapes took a year and the help of editor Steve James, who made Hoop Dreams, and producer Robert May, of The Fog of War. She found such high-powered support the old-fashioned way, by cornering May when she met him at a conference. "I don't want to do another documentary right now," Scranton says May told her. "That's great," she replied. "But let me tell you about my documentary."

The dogs take a spin around the house and end up underfoot. Their names are Artemis and Persephone, reflecting Scranton's lifelong fascination with Greek mythology and the classics. Her two favorite books are The Iliad and The Odyssey, and she studied the classics at Brown, though her major was semiotics, the study of communication and meaning. In some ways, she sees her film as an attempt to understand the meaning of the war. "The War Tapes is my version of The Iliad and The Odyssey," she says. "We're all flawed heroes on life's journey. And, in the end, it's really a story about trying to come home."

Bryant Urstadt is a freelance writer in Connecticut. E-mail him at burstadt@sbcglobal.net.