A new direction

Bob Fink sits in the half-finished basement of his north Everett home with his eyes fixed on a wide-screen computer monitor.

Sitting in this seat, he has gone through 60 hours worth of digital camera footage. There are three external hard drives feeding the display as Fink cuts, moves and adds music to

Meet ‘Wally’ Bob Fink’s documentary, “Wally,” is about a sister’s struggle to find the right care for her 56-year-old brother, Wally Meyer. Meyer was born with cerebral palsy and has had everything done for him all his life. His parents cooked for him, cleaned for him, dressed him and even brushed his teeth for him. He’s also never known a home other than his house in Lake Stevens. When his parents died within a year of each other, Meyer’s younger sister, Cassie Meyer Bernethy, was left in a bind. Always trying to make people happy, Bernethy promised their father on his deathbed that she would move into the family home in Lake Stevens and care for Meyer forever. But she never really want to do that and she isn’t sure how to handle it. “Wally” takes us deep into Bernethy’s struggle, complete with pressure from friends, family and neighbors, while Meyer, an extremely charismatic, funny and cunning guy, awaits his fate. Fink hopes to land his film in the Everett Women’s Film Festival and other film festivals around the country.Check Fink’s Web site, www.sweatyboy.com, for updates on where you might be able to see the film and find out how the story ends.

parts of his 85-minute documentary film.

Three years ago, this man didn’t know how to turn on a computer and get on the Internet.

Fink, 56, is a psychiatrist who has practiced in Everett for more than 25 years. He has had few, if any, complaints and his career has been great.

But it all came at the expense of a dream he left behind in college three decades ago while trying to please his father, Dan Fink, also a doctor.

“I wanted to be a filmmaker,” Fink said. “And when I told my father that, he developed left-sided chest pain until I graduated from medical school.”

To walk into Fink’s north Everett home is to enter a virtual shrine to cinema.

At the entrance of his basement workspace is a life-sized cardboard standup of Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy not far from the poster advertising “Casablanca” in its original run at the Paramount theater in Seattle. Fink’s framed poster of the movie, “Mulholland Drive,” autographed by director David Lynch, leans against a wall in the living room waiting for a permanent home.

When Fink discovered the power of computers and a program on his work-issued Apple Powerbook laptop called iMovie, the wheels began turning.

“I knew I wanted to make a movie, but I wasn’t even thinking about a documentary,” Fink said.

That’s when Cassie Meyer Bernethy walked in.

Bernethy had been a patient of Fink’s for 10 years, but he knew nothing about her.

Psychiatrists have become prescription writers in recent years and do less and less therapy than they did in the past, Fink said. Bernethy would come in once every six months for anxiety medication and be on her way.

One day in April 2003, she opened up.

“She came into my office this time, after 10 years of everything being fine and said things weren’t fine,” Fink recalled.

Bernethy told Fink that her mother and father had died within a year, leaving her to care for her older brother, Wally Meyer Jr., who has cerebral palsy and is thought to be mildly to moderately retarded.

Meyer, 56 at the time, grew up and lived in the same house in Lake Stevens all his life. His parents did everything for him, including dressing him and brushing his teeth.

There was no plan for what would happen to him after his parents died, and Bernethy was expected and asked by her father on his deathbed to move into the family home and take care of her brother for the rest of his life.

Bernethy faced a choice that threatened to split her own family, because she and her husband didn’t want to move into the house and take care of Meyer indefinitely.

“She said she didn’t know what to do. She was just stuck,” Fink said. “She had been trying to tell Wally that he really was going to have to move because she couldn’t leave her husband. But it was hard for her to do that too. It’s hard for her to make anyone unhappy.”

Bernethy told Fink that her parents’ neighbors in “the loop” were also involved. The loop, Fink describes it, “is a small 42-house neighborhood, and no one really leaves. Parents move away to retirement homes or die, and the family moves in. Nothing’s changed. Everyone knows Wally Meyer.

“And everyone has an opinion, and they tell Wally about it, and she doesn’t know what to do, and she’s totally stressed out.”

That’s when Fink made the admittedly controversial decision to take off his psychiatrist hat and put on his filmmaker hat.

“The light went on in my head, ‘This would make a good movie,’” Fink said. “It’s sort of a horrible thing, I mean I feel badly; a psychiatrist thinking about myself because I should be thinking only about my patients. But, in reality, I had this other agenda.”

Bernethy agreed and she asked Meyer’s permission.

“He thought maybe this film would help other people not be in the situation he’s in,” Fink said. “That was the reason they did it, to help other families of handicapped people.”

More than two years later, Fink has a moving, insightful piece of work that he’s preparing to submit to film festivals around the world, from the Everett Women’s Film Festival to Sundance.

He also has a better understanding of himself.

“This is a good lesson. You can do what you want to do,” Fink said. “Just because we pick something when we’re 20 years old or 25 years old, it doesn’t mean we have to do it for the rest of our lives.

Fink only recently realized he chose to document Wally Meyer’s story because it was really a story of Bernethy’s struggle, and he’d been just like her, “always doing what everyone else wants.

“And, for me, it’s like making a decision in my life to do what I want to do,” Fink said, “and to not do what everyone else wants me to do.”

Reporter Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@ heraldnet.com.