Help is … on the way?

Director - Jason A. White

"Help Is... on the Way?" is Jason A. White's sophomore directing effort. Previously, he wrote and directed "The Hit," a short film which garnered 11 awards including Best Director awards from Idyllwild International Festival of Cinema (2021), the Show Low Film Festival (2021), and Best Comedy Short Film Director from the Jane Austen International Film Festival (2021). Currently, he is working on "Breaking Bear" an animated series created by Julien Nitzberg for TUBI. Jason co-wrote the indie feature "Silver Case" (which featured Eric Roberts). He has written web-content for ABC Family, punch-up comedy and wraparounds for the Discovery Channel’s The Christopher Lowell Show, advertising/copywriting campaigns for various film studios and television networks (including Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, and ABC Television). Additionally, he was a features writer for the Austin American-Statesman, the New York City columnist for Rochester’s Scene Magazine, and a contributor to the now-defunct Zed and Flatiron News. Jason was also the film programmer for the Austin Film Festival (1997-98); he worked at HBO Documentary Programming under Sheila Nevins and LeFrak Productions in New York. He's a champion bowler, a pretty good swimmer, and rices his own cauliflower, because the unexamined life is not worth living.

Director Statement

HELP IS… ON THE WAY? was born out of anger, fear, and frustration… you know, the usual ingredients for comedy. Coming out of a pandemic, a crazy-making administration, and the disheartening franchise-dependent mentality of the movie industry, I had many different notions: some conflicting, some irrational, and some iconoclastic. My initial inspiration was a question: “Who helps the helpers?” I envisioned a conversation between a therapist and patient that, on the surface, seems ordinary, but evolves into something unexpected. The dialogue, in retrospect, would take on a whole new meaning by the end. I hope to provoke the audience into wanting to see it again.

With this, my second film as a director, I challenged myself. Where my first short was a nine-location, broad comedy, I limited myself to a two-person, single-setting, subtly comic piece (really on some level a drama) that could sustain suspense and interest and yet still be cinematic. Louis Malle’s “My Dinner with Andre” and Richard Linklater’s “Before” series were benchmark films for me and were very much in my mind during the writing. For production, I took a very Brechtian approach to the design of the film with books, photographs and other props providing a “hidden in plain sight” commentary. Though there might be a glibness in tone and, perhaps, a certain amount of detachment, this film couldn’t be more personal for me, from the props (some of which I created and some of which are family heirlooms) to the wardrobe (the lead character wears my clothes - not out of necessity, but by choice) to the poster for which I had very specific ideas – an homage to the art from “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (appropriately comedic and yet apocalyptic and also nostalgic), to the end credit theme song which I conceived and wrote lyrics. As different stylistically as it is from my first film, “HELP IS… ON THE WAY?” shares a sensibility. While it may have a gimmick, at its core, the film is about humanity and interconnection and how sometimes, there is too little of either.