May 30, 2010 FILM


Long Shadows of a Borough’s Boogeyman By JOHN ANDERSON


COUPLES do all sorts of things on first dates. Coffee. Dinner. Dancing. Or strolling around the grounds of the abandoned Willowbrook mental institution on Staten Island. Josh Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio chose to take the walk. The outcome was a movie.


“Cropsey,” named for the mythic boogeyman of Hudson Valley campfire stories, is the cinematic version of peeking under the bed and not breathing a sigh of relief. Two parts true crime and one part folklore, the documentary examines a string of child disappearances on Staten Island during the ’70s and ’80s, including two for which the onetime Willowbrook worker Andre Rand is serving time.


Mr. Zeman and Ms. Brancaccio, who dated for a time after that initial stroll through the haunted landscape of their Staten Island youth — where one child’s body was literally buried — spent nearly a decade of nights and weekends investigating the cases against Mr. Rand; the other, seemingly unrelated disappearances; and the history and character of the borough. But they also wound up examining the controlling nature of narrative.


“ ‘Cropsey’ is really a movie about storytelling,” Ms. Brancaccio said. “It’s about a small-town location, a series of unfortunate events that affects the entire community and what they told themselves about it. By the time we get to court and see the outcome, I think it’s not even relevant. The people had determined what the story of the missing children was, and it had become a part of their own mythology.”


It’s a mythology sparked by the collision of urban legend and urban nightmare: missing children; a perpetrator who could have come from Central Casting (and is suspected in the other disappearances); and the location itself, Willowbrook, on the fringe of the island’s Greenbelt, had warehoused the city’s mentally ill under disgraceful conditions. For children growing up around the shuttered institution it was synonymous with horror.


As a result, that “Cropsey” is being shown at the College of Staten Island on June 5, as part of the Staten Island Film Festival has taken on a perhaps inflated significance: the college is on the grounds of the old Willowbrook State School. (The film will also be shown on video on demand July 2; opens theatrically June 4 at the IFC Center in Manhattan; and will be broadcast on Investigation Discovery Aug. 13.) Add all the unresolved aspects of the case, and what might have been a straight crime story is now something more volatile.


“The facts don’t reveal the truth, is the problem,” said Mr. Zeman, who during the years of making “Cropsey” was co-producing indie films like “The Station Agent,” “Mysterious Skin” and “Choking Man,” as well as


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