By SAM LOGAN KHALEGHI, The Oakland Press (MI), Sunday, May 6, 2012
An interview with the filmmaker behind Murder By Proxy, the documentary.
Emil Chiaberi has gone “postal.”
Chiaberi was merely curious when one day he decided to research the phrase “going postal.” But what started as a mere curiosity, turned into an extensive sociological study — and finally a documentary film.
His movie, “Murder By Proxy: How America Went Postal,” examines the reasons behind workplace violence, particularly the 1991 shootings at the Royal Oak Post Office.
The film’s main character, Charlie Withers, is a postal worker from Royal Oak. He’s featured throughout the film.
“Murder by Proxy” is available to watch in metro-Detroit Comcast Cable, listed under “New Movies” in On-Demand.
“All of a sudden I saw how all these incidents were connected to the larger cultural trends and that by studying them we could gain better understanding of where we are and where we are heading as a society,” Chiaberi said.
He became so obsessed with the subject that it started to affect his business.
“It came to a point that all I could talk about was mass murders and how they were symptoms of a deep societal crisis,” he said. After a while, I finally realized that unless I do something, like write a book or make a film, and thus get it out of my system, I will never shut up about it.”
Learning by doing
Chiaberi, who grew up in the Soviet Union and now lives in California with his family, also owns a biomedical company. “Murder By Proxy” is his directorial debut.
Chiaberi’s lack of experience and formal education never deterred him from pursuing his goals.
“I studied economics in the Soviet Union, but dropped out in my second year in order to come to the U.S.,” he said. “I never had an opportunity to resume my studies, because I had to work to support myself. But I quickly found out that I was too opinionated and outspoken to be a good employee. Some may call it annoying, so in order to stay employed I had to become self-employed.”
Chiaberi couldn’t hold a steady job, but instead wound up building several multimillion-dollar enterprises. Eventually as the film bug bit him, he decided to make a documentary.
“A lot of people thought that I was either crazy or that I had hit a premature middle-aged crisis. But I assure you it was neither. I was simply doing what I always had done — pursuing my interests.”
As a practical person and a businessman, Chiaberi knew he was facing steep challenges at every stage — from raising funds, production and post production, to the most difficult part, getting distribution. But being a businessman also means being irrational at times.
“You have to believe that you will succeed, despite all the evidence to the contrary,” Chiaberi said. Otherwise, you will fail. It sounds cliché, but that’s how it really works. And I also knew why I was making this film. It wasn’t because I wanted to become a filmmaker. It was because I had an important story to tell. And as long as I succeeded in doing so I couldn’t possibly fail.”
Filmmaking as social study
Chiaberi’s documentary explores the connections between hostile work environments and trends in violence in the workplace causing disaster. While the film shows the public reaction to the shock of such an event, it also explores how workplace management bent on profit and employee bullying plays a role in these tragedies.
The film’s subtitle is about how the term “going postal” came to be — how an otherwise normal person is driven to mass murder. Chiaberi utilized on-camera interviews to reveal perspectives around the Royal Oak post office shooting Nov, 14 1991, when a dismissed postal worker turned guns on fellow colleagues before turning the gun on himself.
The film’s main character, Charlie Withers, is a postal worker from Royal Oak. He’s featured throughout the film.
“It took about two years to gather all of the footage for this film,” says Chiaberi. ”I think that the purpose of a documentary is to offer food for thought, not necessarily provide a solution. I tried to do my best to offer people food for thought.”
Bullied worker becomes the bully
”Murder by Proxy” became a feature-length documentary that examples the phenomenon of spree killings in the workplace but also tries to use case history to show the importance of a psychologically healthy workplace.
“To understand what happened in the Postal Service in the past 40 years is to understand how mass murder phenomenon had evolved in our society,” Chiaberi said.
”They took what used to be a government agency performing a valuable public service and turned it into a for-profit corporation,” he said. “They had to dramatically increase productivity.”
“USPS historically relied on a huge work force. Because USPS had massive work force, the only way they could do that is by squeezing more out of their workers. It resulted in dramatically increased stress and endemic workplace bullying throughout the entire organization.”
Chiaberi’s film is most definitely not a scientific study of what causes workplace bullying and how it affects human psyche, but shines a light on what he considers to be a dark room. He and his crew took a large sample of people spread over a huge geographical area and subjected them to the same conditions. As a result they had a workplace bullying epidemic that gave us the so called “going postal” phenomenon.
Chiaberi’s film company is growing and he’s now in a position to pursue more projects. As words of advice for future documentary filmmakers, Chiaberi keeps it simple.
“Don’t do it unless you feel passionate about the story,” he says. “Try to figure out all business aspects, such as who is your audience, who you’re going to sell it to, how, etc., prior to going into production. Once you start filming, don’t think about anything else but staying passionate and honest. You will never fail.”
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I’m proud to have collaborated on this film along with criminologist James Fox of Northeastern University and psychiatrist Michael Welner. Charlie Withers is an American hero, now retired from the USPS after 40 years of service. I found Emil to believe more deeply in the ideals of America than most Americans. The reason he was so bothered by USPS management’s ability to torment its workers was specifically because this happens in the U.S. For some non-cynical reason, he believed it should not ever be allowed to happen in the ostensibly greatest democracy in the world. The film was a lesson about the real America and what capitalism does when it replaces government service.
By visiting the Murder By Proxy website, you can download or purchase a copy. Do so today.
