Filmmaker Steve Loring sets out to discover the workings of love

By Cindy Mindell

While the world’s fastest-growing age group is 65 and over, when we consider love and desire, our youth-obsessed media still embrace clichés about age. Rarely in our culture are older adults given voice as emotionally intricate individuals.

The Rochester speed-dating event for seniors, from the documentary “The Age of Love”.

A 2014 documentary, “The Age of Love,” follows the humorous and poignant adventures of 30 seniors in Rochester, N.Y. who sign up for a first-of-its-kind speed-dating event exclusively for 70- to 90-year-olds. From anxious anticipation through the dates that follow, it’s an unexpected tale of intrepid seniors who lay their hearts on the line and discover how dreams and desires change – or don’t change – from first love to the far reaches of life.

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Steven Loring will present “The Age of Love” at the Greater Bridgeport Jewish Housing Corporation’s Hollander House senior-citizen community on Thursday, August 18. He spoke with the Ledger about his lifelong quest to understand the origins and timeless nature of love.

Jewish Ledger (JL): How did you develop an interest in the workings of love?

Steven Loring (SL): I grew up in a very tight-knit Jewish family and community in Rochester, N.Y. All four grandparents lived within a mile of my home and we all saw each other all the time. My grandfather was one of the founders of Congregation Beth Sholom, an Orthodox synagogue, where we went for the holidays. I got more involved in the Reform Temple B’rith Kodesh youth group and that’s where I made my friends and had a lot of my camping and social experiences as a teenager. We were a really happy family. My father’s parents were married for 72 years before my grandfather passed away; my mother’s parents were married for 56 years. I had a lot of examples of close, loving relationships growing up and was very close to my grandparents as well. I don’t know if that influenced me in making this film. That was a long time ago; I’m in my 50s now.

I left Rochester to go off and become a scientist. My goal was to be a biochemist studying the physiology of love. I was interested in how chemistry was able to create emotions in the human mind and how they translated themselves into true human connections out in the world. When I got to Wesleyan University, I remember that the interviewer’s eyes lit up as I was telling him what I was hoping to do with my life. He said, “You can create any sort of major that you want, out of your own interests,” and I started a relationship with him that day that led to him teaching me a one-on-one independent study course during my freshman year. I graduated as a double major in organic chemistry and theater.

JL: How did you become a filmmaker?

SL: I moved to New York to become an actor – making the world my laboratory, so to speak, which was much more appealing. Then I became a public-relations executive, then segued into becoming a screenwriter. I worked in Hollywood for about a decade, writing “Movies of the Week” for TV networks until that genre died out with the advent of reality TV. So I went looking for some way to do my own stories, to pursue my own journeys, now that I was getting older and had a better idea of what was important to me.

I went to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and got an MFA in social documentary filmmaking and started looking for a topic for my thesis project. My dad had just passed away, and my mom was 70 and alone – it just led me down this path to reconnect with my childhood inspiration and look at love again in terms of whether it changes and, if so, how it changes as we age. At that same time, my 78-year-old uncle, who had always been alone, suddenly met a woman who was 80, and they were just like teenagers again, it was like they locked the bedroom door and were having a true love affair.

And all this inspired me to think that there’s a lot about the human heart as we get older that’s overlooked by our society and the media. Their idea is that somehow, at a certain point, you get “beyond that” or you’re not as interested anymore or you’re not capable of true romantic love or passion. I could see in my own family that that was not the case. Clearly, people were still ready to open themselves up and to connect and to share life in very intimate ways with others; there just wasn’t a lot of opportunity. That’s what led me to spend months looking for a way into that topic, talking to people at retirement communities trying to find characters and a story that could introduce it. Suddenly, I came upon a speed-dating event for seniors in Colorado Springs and when I told friends about it, everybody burst out laughing; they thought it was hysterical.

As a filmmaker, you’re always looking for a hook into a topic that will get people excited or interested and into the theater, and I knew that the humor of older people going speed-dating would be a great hook just because of the way people were reacting so strongly. Then I started searching for an event that I could cover and be embedded with and that would allow me access to make a film.

JL: How did “The Age of Love” come about?

SL: There is a large “healthy aging” community in Rochester and so I called some organizations and floated the idea for a speed-dating event past them. They just loved the idea and thought, “we should really do this here.” Once the speed-dating event was organized [in 2011], I needed permission to film the participants.

So, I got the list of everyone who signed up from the main organizer and got their phone numbers and started calling. I called the first woman and started my little spiel, saying, “I’m not looking to embarrass you, I’m not looking to expose you in any way, I’m really looking for guides into a world that I don’t understand, and I’ll treat you with total respect…” At some point, she just stopped me and said, “Steve, let me tell you something. My children love me. They do everything in the world that good children should do: we celebrate birthdays, we’re on the phone all the time, they’re great kids. But even my own children never ask me what’s in my heart at this point in my life. As far as the world is concerned, if it isn’t about Social Security or digestive aids, I’m invisible. So why wouldn’t I want to talk about it? Why wouldn’t I want to share what I’m feeling? Bring your camera and come over and let’s get started.”

In documentary film, you don’t know where the story is going, you just have an idea. You don’t know what you’ll be able to shoot, you can’t write it in advance, you can’t expect how it’s going to turn out. But I think there’s still a moment when you know you’re on to something and that you’ve found a topic that might yield some really interesting results and make a really interesting film. And that was the moment, when I started calling everybody on the list. And, in my first phone call, 29 of the 30 people said I could bring my camera and start filming them.

JL: How did the film go from thesis project to internationally-screened documentary?

SL: When the film was done and I had my degree, a lot of people told me that it could make a difference out in the world, so I pushed ahead for another year-and-a-half and created a feature-length film. And I’ve discovered that it does affect people emotionally. I had an opportunity to release the movie theatrically but that would have precluded my ability to bring it to communities and groups and universities and JCCs and libraries – directly to the people who would benefit from it most. So I decided to take a couple of years away from filmmaking and distribute the film directly to communities where they were excited by it and where I could come and talk with them about it and lead a discussion with the groups afterward.

That led to another element, where people would see the movie and say, “That’s great, but what can we do? There are no opportunities for us to do something like that.” So I created a speed-dating kit for seniors that has organizational and strategic guides and templates for scorecards and brochures and registration material – all the things you’ll need so you won’t have to reinvent it – and I give it for free to groups that book the film. Of the 300-plus screenings we’ve had so far, about 135 groups have planned speed-dating events for their communities.

JL: Why do you think your film is striking such a loud chord?

SL: I think the thing that’s driving interest in this film and a lot of other films about aging is that people are living so much longer. When I was a kid, grandparents retired at 60 or 65, and they expected maybe five or 10 “golden years” to play golf. Now, you go to the gym and people in their 80s and 90s and even 100 are working out. It’s kind of like society is still taking that old definition and trying to apply it, ineffectively, to older adults now, when what we really need is to define an entire new generation, like a fourth generation of people from age 70 to 100 and over, who are still growing and developing in life.

The film is now being translated into Polish for our premiere in Warsaw in October and we’re going to be in three cities in Russia that same month. The people who are screening this in Warsaw are planning to do a speed-dating event, which they say is going to be the first-ever senior speed-dating in all of Poland. When we screened in Sao Paolo, Brazil last year, they said that the audiences were stunned by this idea of old people actively going around looking for dates, that it just wasn’t part of their culture, and yet they were lonely – so why not try something like this? We’ve also screened in Israel, Denmark, and Australia. I don’t know how the film was received in Siberia, but it has been shown there. I’ve been interviewed by magazines in India and Japan. It seems like the film has taken on a life of its own in a way, due to the fact that people are living longer in every part of the world and many cultures are facing that change for the first time.

There seems to be a very ingrained ageism in terms of many cultures ignoring emotional growth and social connection for older adults. Just because, in some countries, extended families provided for the basic needs of the older generation, that doesn’t mean all of the seniors’ emotional needs were taken into account. Maybe the fact that now we see social structures changing and older people going speed-dating, it means we’ve been overlooking something essential about human nature and needs. Sure, we took care of Grandma and Grandpa, but now that they’re on their own, they’re out searching for love – that’s an eye-opening idea. No one ever encouraged them to go out and find another human being to touch and feel an intimacy with, so maybe there was a profound loneliness among older generations that we never even considered.

JL: Has the experience of making this film affected you personally?

SL: In my own journey in life, everything has tied together in interesting ways. If I had gone to film school when I was 21 or 22, I probably wouldn’t have made this film. But I found I was able to take something that’s been on my mind all my life and express it through character and story so that others can share in that journey. I think that’s the beauty of being a documentary filmmaker – we work to understand the world as we experience it, then tell a story so that others can come along on the ride. You think, how can a film change somebody’s life? Recently, at a screening, a couple came up to me and said, “Can we take a picture with you? Because we met when it screened here last time.”

I just feel that that’s the path that’s been given to me – to take this film out into the world and do something good with it.

“The Age of Love” with filmmaker Steven Loring: Thursday, Aug. 18, 1 p.m., Hollander House, 4190 Park Ave., Bridgeport. For reservation: (203) 374-7868.

For more information visit the ageoflovemovie.com.