A wonderful life
Looking at Derek Sitter's triumph over trauma
I really struggled for an angle with this article. Derek Sitter makes such a big splash everywhere he goes and his projects are so numerous and varied that one feels the impact of his presence in a multitude of ways. I tell myself to go with the flow, but how does one, even one who ‘felt’ that presence through the filter of a Zoom call, decide what stream to follow? Do we go with the story of the actor or the story of the mental health patient? Of course, we have to merge them somehow. The two streams are so interrelated, so interconnected many times over. The question then becomes: Where did one begin or pick up from the other? He must have been bipolar first, and yet how different would that bipolar experience have been in some other professional or creative outlet? How might it have gotten worse or been more or less noticable if he had chosen, say, commercial advertising as a career?
Driving along in his automobile, a teenager, he heard an advertisement for Puttin’ On The Hits on the radio. Now, at this time (1986ish) he was just a kid in small-city Oklahoma. When I think of Oklahoma, I think of Tulsa, and The Outsiders. I was obsessed with all of S.E. Hinton’s books (and the movies that came out of them) as a kid. Derek Sitter, though, was no greaser, and McAlester is not Tulsa. Derek was on the brink of enlisting the in the Air Force when he and some buddies got the wild idea to audition for Puttin’ On The Hits.1 They went all the way to the grand finals in Hollywood (clad in diapers and singing/banging around to “Infant Rock,” their version of “I Wanna Rock” by Twisted Sister) and actually tied for the prize. The money enabled Derek to get out of his Air Force enlistment and go to college.2
I don’t want to use the words he says are most commonly ascribed to him—words like “intense” (or worse) “crazy.” From the way he talked about his grad school years at LSU, they were fun but also incredibly challenging. The young student of John Dennis and Barry Kyle was practically bouncing off the walls in a time of highest energy and exhilaration. At the same time, he was pushed to limits previously unimagined. “Intense” or “crazy” might not be far off the mark to describe those years for Derek—and yet, these words don’t feel quite nuanced enough. They feel hollow, empty, almost cliched. Years after that time, Derek came to realize that the “craziness” wasn’t just the recklessness or the restlessness often attributed to youth. His LSU years were rockin’, that’s for sure—literally, as he was a singer in a Blues Funk band called Bonedog! So on top of doing plays and teaching acting to undergrads, he traveled around southeast Louisiana performing with three other guys at college venues. There’s a photo of him in LSU’s Daily Reveille that perfectly encapsulates the abundance of energy bursting from him in those days. It shows him climbing the flagpole in front of the Music and Dramatic Arts Building. He says he used to do it before every show. It is tradition in the LSU theatre department for one of the students to hoist the departmental flag before a show, only students were advised to use a ladder. Derek bucked this advisement and simply shimmied his way up the pole! In the photo, taken by W. Scott Kiker, Derek is seen looking down from the top of the pole. The caption reads: “POLLING—Derek Sitter, a graduate assistant in acting, shimmys [sic] up a flagpole in front of the Music and Dramatic Arts building to hang a flag, only to find out that he does not have the key to the lock that holds the flag to the pole. Sitter helped prepare for Thursday night’s production of ‘All the King’s Men.’”
He was able to unleash a lot of energy in scene study classes. Professor J.D. (John Dennis) admonished him to stop banging his head during a Chekhov scene. The implication was for him to be a little less Okie and a little more turn-of-the-century Russian. That’s easier said than done for a Gen X kid in the throes of yet-undiagnosed bipolar mania.
People liked him, though. A lot. He even met the woman who became his wife and mother of his child in the MFA program. Sure, people called him Crazy D. “Crazy in a good way,” they said. “Whatever the hell that means,” he scoffs.
Professor J.D. helped him and his girlfriend (now-wife, Jeanne Sanders) get set up in Los Angeles. J.D. put him in contact with a former MFA student called John Mese, who was already settled out there, and already well-established in the Screen Actors Guild. Mese helped Derek and Jeanne find an apartment and get going in showcases. (Mese actually tells that story in my interview with him.)
Derek (who already had SAG membership from his two years living and working as an actor in Portland after graduation)3 cut his teeth in roles like “Rooker” in Reggie’s Prayer (1996); Recruit #1 in one episode of Nowhere Man; “Cop #2” in Chicago Hope; and a chopper pilot on ER. Nothing prepares you for the gruesome, fast-paced, sometimes flattering but rarely fulfilling realities of generic TV appearances. J.D.’s and Barry Kyle’s acting students were classically trained in character studies from the best playwrights of the 20th century. Dressing up as “Cop #2” and having a bunch of egomaniacs direct one as to how and when precisely to pick up a coffee cup are not calculated to inspire a hungry soul like Derek Sitter. He kept at it, however. It was not in his nature to just throw in the towel. And it wasn’t all bad. There was some great stuff in the mix—some diamonds in the ruff, we might say. In 2001, he was cast in a play at the Laurelgrove Theatre—a fantastic experience, he recalls. His role in The Dead Boy by Joseph Pintauro—the U.S. stage premiere, no less—earned him a nomination for Best Featured Actor at the Ovation Awards.4 He was even friends with a fellow nominee in the same category, one incredibly famous Leslie Jordan, who lives in my personal memory for his plethora of hilarious guest TV appearances on shows like Will & Grace and Boston Legal. Leslie ended up winning the Ovation Award—for Southern Baptist Sissies,5 but he and Derek remained friends. People often scoff at the idea that “it’s just an honor to be nominated” but when you’re in company like that, it has to be true. They picked five stage actors from all over Southern California, and Derek, not even 35 years old, was one of those selected. Nevertheless, the stressors were building up: marriage, becoming a dad, and juggling these new experiences with the rollercoaster of bipolar disorder and mental health treatment. While he got some good credits on hit TV shows (Presidio Med, Zoey 101) he and his wife were increasingly worn out by the bullshit of L.A. life. (His wife had her own difficulties, being a schoolteacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. One time, she phoned him to say her school in lockdown after a gang shooting in a parking lot.)6 In 2007, they decided to move to quieter Bend, Oregon.
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Bend has gained some recognition of late for being the last place on earth where there’s a functioning Blockbuster video store. In fact, the director of the documentary The Last Blockbuster, Taylor Morden, is a great friend of Derek’s. Morden and Sitter worked together on Bugtussle, the 22-minute short film that Derek and I discussed at length in the first and second segments of the interview. Bugtussle was released into the film festival circuit last year and continues to rack up awards. In fact, shortly after our interview wrapped up, it acquired two more accolades—a Best Duo diamond award (for Derek and John Mese)7 and a “Best Actor in a Dark Comedy” platinum award for Derek.8
And yet Bugtussle is skipping way ahead in the story because the man who directed and acted in Bugtussle is very different from the man who first embarked on a filmmaking path early in the 2010s. The man today no longer has panic attacks. He finds solace in mindfulness techniques like meditation. He talks about having awakened to living in the present moment. He had to go through quite a bit of therapy and psychiatric treatment to get there. There was a great deal of overlap between his early forays into filmmaking and his experiences as a psychiatric patient. His current work-in-progress, a script called Brain Slut, is a direct descendent of his first screenplay, written about a decade ago and titled, Second Sleep. Second Sleep never got made (not fully) although it got a fair amount of publicity in Bend.9 It seems there is a curious story behind it. They put a good deal of work into it. Derek's friend Fred Lehne had the starring role, a part reflective of Derek's personal experiences as a psyc patient. Weirdly, the director of the film took the footage and disappeared. All Derek has now from Second Sleep are a couple of trailers, which you can watch on his YouTube and Vimeo channels. With Brain Slut, however, he’s taking the original ideas that went into Second Sleep and turning them into what has the potential to become his first feature film. Before I even read the script the night before my interview with him, I googled the term “brain slut” and didn’t find very much. There was an urban dictionary definition and there was also an article from the Bend Bulletin about Second Sleep. Apparently, a “brain slut” is a “person who submits to psychoactive drug testing for pay.”10 While Derek never did that, he certainly has enough firsthand experience with those kind of drugs to know what they do to the brain. The script gives the impression of overlapping, hyperactive thoughts and images. There is a frequently recurring image of an "Antler Man" that haunts the protagonist.
Is it real? Is it hallucination? Is it a daydream? As we discussed in the interview, Brain Slut promises to produce a questionable sense of reality in the audience. It’s also a first for Derek in filming technique. Bugtussle (Short 2022) and Tutu Grande (Short 2018) were very theatrical, character-driven, actor-focused. This will be an entirely fresh experiment in visual presentation. There will still be dialogue, but mostly it will be a visual experience. You’ll see not only what the character is seeing, but also what’s going on in his mind. At the end of it, as Derek says in the interview without spoiling the ending, the viewer will be left wondering if any of it happened as perceived in the moment. One image at the end will threaten to overturn the whole.
But here is the rub. If we saw it, if the character saw it, how could it be anything other than real? A thought in the brain is real. A flash of emotion is real. How Philip (the protagonist) experiences his trauma all comes down to brain chemistry—the drugs working in his brain or the withdrawal from those drugs. I know for myself, when I’m least conscious, when I’m most consumed in whatever thoughts are swirling in my brain, or intoxicated, I’m disconnected from the present reality. In that disconnection, I’m lost in past trauma, or anxiety of the future, and it’s only when I “wake up”—Derek talks a lot about waking up—that I become aware of what’s happening right here, right now. Drugs take you out of the present moment by numbing the pain. Anyone of us has potential to become a pharmacological guinea pig, and that opens up a pandora’s box of issues about addiction and dependency. So many of us are completely broken by these things, or nearly broken. Through this brokenness, though, which Derek’s films shine a light on, there is a path to an expansion of consciousness—a sense of being connected, really connected to aliveness. I mean aliveness, not just life, not just a beating heart, but in fact, the essence of that life as it beats, and beats again.
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“1986 Puttin’ on The Hits Finals ‘Infant Rock’ Twisted Sister” & “Puttin’ On The Hits 1986 Semi-Finals Winner ‘Infant Rock’ Quiet Riot ‘Bang Your Head.” YouTube channel: coyoteweed.
Burns, Suzanne. The Bend Source Weekly. “Awakenings: Actor Derek Sitter draws on his own struggles for new film project.” 8 February 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20230407193550/https://www.bendsource.com/culture/awakenings-actor-derek-sitter-draws-on-his-own-struggles-for-new-film-project-2141950.
Bates, David. “Derek Sitter: Exploring the ties between privilege and trauma.” 1 February 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20230306195525/https://www.orartswatch.org/derek-sitter-exploring-the-ties-between-privilege-and-trauma/.
Ehren, Christine. “Lion King, Contact Vie for L.A. Ovation Awards.” Playbill. 10 October 2001. Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20210727125043/https://playbill.com/article/lion-king-contact-vie-for-la-ovation-awards-com-99059.
Shirley, Don. “‘Lion King’ Rules Ovation Awards; Solo Shows Also Honored.” The LA Times. 14 November 2001. Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20230508213828/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-nov-14-et-shirley14-story.html.
Burns, Suzanne. The Bend Source Weekly. “Awakenings: Actor Derek Sitter draws on his own struggles for new film project.” 8 February 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20230407193550/https://www.bendsource.com/culture/awakenings-actor-derek-sitter-draws-on-his-own-struggles-for-new-film-project-2141950.
Tweet from @mesejohn, 5 May 2023: https://twitter.com/mesejohn/status/1654547506012000257.
Best Actor & Director Awards—New York. March-April 2023. https://bestactoranddirectorawards.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2023/05/MARCH-APRIL-2023-BADANY.pdf. Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20230505204211/https://bestactoranddirectorawards.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2023/05/MARCH-APRIL-2023-BADANY.pdf.
Burns, Suzanne. The Bend Source Weekly. “Awakenings: Actor Derek Sitter draws on his own struggles for new film project.” 8 February 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20230407193550/https://www.bendsource.com/culture/awakenings-actor-derek-sitter-draws-on-his-own-struggles-for-new-film-project-2141950.
Jasper, David. “Writer-actor explores mental illness.” The Bend Bulletin. 28 January 2012. http://archive.today/BAoSi.