SAN FRANCISCO - As kids growing up in West Marin, identical twins Noah and Logan Miller first saw actor Ed Harris co-starring in "Places In The Heart." When they left the theater, they both agreed that, remarkably, Harris looked just like their father, Dan.

They never imagined the day would arrive that Harris would become him in a movie of their own.

On Saturday, the 29-year-old self-taught film-making brothers pulled suits and ties from their 1994 black Honda Accord parked outside the Kabuki Sundance Cinemas then went inside and sat with Harris and his actress wife, "Field of Dreams" star Amy Madigan, to watch the world premier of "Touching Home" at the San Francisco Film Festival. The Millers' movie, which they wrote, produced, directed and co-starred in, is a mostly autobiographical account of their struggles to make it as big-league players and make amends with their alcoholic and homeless dad, who ultimately died alone of an aortic rupture in Marin County jail on Jan. 5, 2006.

"We had so much pain and we had so much guilt about the way we weren't able to save him," Logan said.

At the time of their dad's death, the 1992 Drake High graduates, who played baseball at College of Marin, had the ball rolling on their film project but it was going as far and as slow as a bunt. All they knew for sure was that they were broke and wanted Harris to portray their father on the big screen.

"Let's not even try to find some twins (actors). Let's just play ourselves,"

Noah said. "We wanted Ed to play our dad. There was no back-up plan."

So the twins had to hatch a scheme to convince Harris, which they did on a day that the actor was honored at the San Francisco Film Festival two years ago at the Castro Theater. They were two rookie movie-makers who talk fast and over each other like AM radio on scan.

"I've never met anybody like those two guys," Harris said at Saturday's premier.

They went way over the top to get Harris in their movie. They basically tried to kidnap him for 10 minutes. It was the movie version of "Being Ed Harris."

"They accosted me," Harris joked.

What the Millers did was lay out a plan to jump Harris somehow, someway, somewhere and practically beg him to play their father in their movie. That's what they told friends.

"They told us were nuts. We were absolutely out of our mind. Don't do it," Noah said.

"We were two nobodies. We had nothing with no resume," Logan said.

The "Ambush of Ed Harris" originally was supposed to occur the night before the San Francisco Film Festival when the actor as attending a $500-a-plate fundraiser. But the only $500 the Miller twins could lay their hands on was gold "Monopoly" money and the fundraiser wasn't offering a buy-one-get-one-twin-in free coupon. They had pretty much maxed out the 16 credit cards they used to film scenes in Arizona.

Fortunately for them, a friend, Chau Fong, gave them tickets to the festival the next day as a gift. The twins arrived two hours early with the idea that they would apply a full-press on Harris outside, before he entered the theater. They literally staked out the joint, checking side exits and cozying up with security to see if they would divulge Harris' entry strategy.

"We did our reconnaissance," Noah said.

Apparently so did Harris. He somehow slipped past their trap. They didn't see him until he came from behind the curtain inside.

"We were just deflated. We thought there was no way we were going to get to him," Logan said.

So they waited in their seats with a lap top computer, a script and a pipe dream until a question-and-answer session where, in front of 1,600 people, they were going to raise their hands, be handed a microphone and put Harris on the spot. They never got their hands on a microphone, probably because they acted more like war protesters than movie-goers anxious to speak.

"I think they thought we were probably desperate," Noah said.

Er, they were. When Harris was given a standing ovation and disappeared behind the curtain, the Millers thought it was curtains for them, too.

"I remember sinking in my chair thinking we had failed and we're never going to have this opportunity," Noah said.

"We were humiliated," Logan said.

Not yet. Noah grabbed the lap top, stood up and led a charge to the front.

"Bleep this," he said. "We're going back stage."

Noah, with Logan in tow, walked past security and up the steps before he bumped into a woman who stopped them. He said they were "independent film makers" and were supposed to meet with Harris. She knew better. They knew better.

"We were imposters," Logan said.

Yet they were persuasive. They convinced the woman to go back stage and grab Harris for them, but they thought it was more likely she'd come back with the cops. To their amazement, the actor appeared.

"Ed Harris, whatcha you guys got?" he said, shaking their hands.

The lighting wasn't good enough on stage to show him the two-minute trailer they had in their lap top. They hurried backstage but it was too crowded there. Noah saw an open door to an alley and suggested they move out there.

So, with their dream on the line, Noah placed the lap top on top of a greasy dumpster and the twins made their pitch. They thought the actor, who was a standout catcher on his high school baseball team and a star fullback who went on to play football at Columbia University, was taken by the scenes they shot from spring training with the Colorado Rockies.

"I never knew if it could work or not. That wasn't the point," Harris said, smiling. "The point was I needed to do something else that day and the only way I could get out of it was to say I'll do it."

Harris took their script off the dumpster and asked for their contact numbers.

The twins' response: Now what?

"It was like (bleep)," Noah said. "The odds are getting him a script were tens of thousands. He gets offered millions of dollars for scripts he (eventually) turns down. We were offering him nothing totally unsolicited. It's an agent's worst nightmare."

Nine days later, Harris called the twins on their cell phone, though he loved the script and wanted to do the project, Harris sounded apprehensive because he didn't know if there was enough time in his busy schedule to shoot it.

"I had a heart attack," Noah said. "Right there I sort of felt it slipping away. I said, 'OK, can we meet in person?' We had no money, but he didn't know that. He didn't know where we were (progressing with the movie.)"

Still, Harris agreed to meet them at a Starbucks three days later. The twins knew this was their last stand. They got to the coffee joint early. They didn't want to sit down with him inside because it might be too distracting - you know, two nobodies talking a mile a minute with a big movie star - so they went outside and moved all the tables - except one - around the corner so they could sit with him all by themselves.

They had him cornered again. They sealed the deal with a handshake.

"Their passion and their insistence that I was the only guy that they had to do their dad, it wasn't just some character. They wanted me to play their father, who they actually had a great amount of love for growing up loving and fighting and trying to help and being disappointed by him over and over again," Harris said. "It was so important to them."

Important enough that Harris said he would work for union scale.

"Look he was doing it for free. That's like gas money for his big truck from L.A.," Logan said.

Harris asked for video of their father so he could study him and his mannerisms, but they had none. They did give him letters their dad wrote from jail.

With a two-week window to shoot his scenes in December, Harris drove up from L.A. two days early. The twins drove him to their house in Nicasio and haunts around West Marin then took him to lunch at M&G Burgers and Beverages in Fairfax. It was then that the Miller twins finally came to realize that Harris was going to make their dream come true.

Their dad had died penniless and in jail - "How can you get any lower in life?" Noah said - and a little more than two years later his sons were standing on stage dressed to the nines for the world premiere of a movie about their life with him, played by a four-time Academy Award nominated actor, Ed Harris.

"He allowed us to say good-bye," Noah said. "He resurrected our father."

+ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/24/DDSU109TST.DTL

Marin twins play to win - in film

Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, April 25, 2008

Twins Logan (left) and Noah Miller of West Marin applied ... Actor Ed Harris used letters Dan Miller wrote to his sons... Noah Miller (left), Ed Harris and Logan Miller shot "Touc...

(04-24) 19:22 PDT San Francisco -- People in the movie business told Logan and Noah Miller they were nuts: No way two novice filmmakers with no money could get a big star like Ed Harris to play their homeless father in their autobiographical film. But the working-class twins from West Marin wouldn't take no.

Hearing that Harris was being feted at the Castro Theatre by the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2006, the Miller boys charmed their way backstage, pitched the actor and got him to step outside into the alley, where they plopped their laptop on a Dumpster and showed him a trailer to "Touching Home," the story of their struggle to make it in big-league baseball and come to terms with their beloved and maddening alcoholic father.

"I couldn't help but pay attention to them, because they were so energetic and so passionate about what they were tryin' to do," recalls Harris, who agreed to read their script. A week later, he called the Millers to tell them it was well written - "it read very real to me," he says on the phone from Los Angeles - but he was booked solid and couldn't make the film. They kept at him until Harris agreed to meet them for coffee at a Starbucks in Santa Monica. An hour later, he signed on and sealed the deal with a handshake.

"Basically, these guys were undeniable," says Harris, who praises "Touching Home," a potent pastoral that the festival premiers Saturday at the Kabuki Sundance Cinemas, with Harris and the identical twins in attendance. "They wouldn't let me say no, so I said yes instead," Harris adds with a laugh. Although the self-taught Millers - who wrote, produced, directed and act in the film - had never made a movie, "they really knew what they wanted and what the story was about. And I thought they were very efficient in the telling of it. They had really good ideas in terms of directing and character."

For the Millers, whose hardworking but hapless father died at age 59 in the Marin County Jail months before they shot the film in the bucolic locales where they'd lived those scenes, Harris was the only the man to play their dad, a roofer and carpenter who slept in his truck.

"Ed was No. 1," says Noah, 29, who, like his brother, is blue-eyed, blond, 6-foot-2, engaging, funny and unfailingly polite. "He had the look, the feel, everything." Logan, who often finishes his brother's sentences, and vice versa, chimes in: "He has that everyman quality. You could love him, even when you hate him."

The twins are driving west out Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in their slightly banged-up '94 black Honda, making the rounds of the spots where they shot "Touching Home," a feature film rooted in the reality of rural, working-class American life. They were born in Lagunitas, went to Drake High School, played ball and did manual labor in the lush valleys and woods of Nicasio and other West Marin towns far removed from the chichi world of Tiburon and Mill Valley. The landscape plays an essential part in the film.

Noah's at the wheel, talking a streak, with lower-key Logan in the backseat, echoing and expanding on his brother's riffs. They drive past the Little Store in Forest Knolls, where as baseball-crazy kids they drank chocolate milk and traded baseball cards, and the Papermill Creek Saloon, where their dad drank and gambled. They point out the pasture where he'd once built and lived in a corrugated-metal box with no windows, electricity or running water (the boys stayed with him sometimes but lived in Fairfax with their mother, who waited tables). They wind beneath a canopy of towering redwoods to Samuel P. Taylor State Park, where their father often spent the night. The rangers cut him slack because he'd built a lot of fences and outbuildings there. He'd invite his boys to dine with him at the Redwood Restaurant, as he called the picnic table by the creek where they ate cold ravioli from the can, and he'd joke about leaving a tip for the waitress.

"We wanted to show in the movie that our father would still try to make the best out of a bad situation," says Logan, a catcher who played in the minors with the Toronto Blue Jays, had two elbow surgeries and was let go. "You could never just disown him, because he was such a beautiful person."

Noah, who attended Southern Arkansas University on a baseball scholarship for a spell, says: "When he was sober, it was fun. You make the best of it. You're outside, you're eating with your dad and you love him. It was quality time. You're just hopin' that he doesn't drink."

"That's it," Logan agrees. "You're just hoping he doesn't drink."

Shooting those scenes with Harris was a wondrous and unsettling experience for the Millers, who watched Harris transform himself into their father. They'd sent the actor poignant letters Dan Miller had written his boys from jail late in life - "stuff he had to get out," Logan says - some dealing with dreams and a deadly scene he'd experienced as a soldier in the Korean DMZ. Harris, who quizzed the twins about their dad's body language and speech, says those letters helped him shape the characterization.

"Ed became our dad," Logan says. Noah echoes that. "I don't know what he did - some inscrutable tool of acting," Logan says. Some of their buddies were at Love Field outside Olema when Harris first shambled onto the set with his stubbly beard and sad blue eyes. The resemblance to Dan Miller was so striking "they gasped," says Noah, who had the feeling directing the dinner scene between Harris and Logan "that I was watching my brother and my dad."

Says Logan: "It was eerie and comforting. I felt like I was looking across the table into my dad's eyes. ... We harbored a lot of guilt when he passed away. We were always trying to make some money so we could get him a little place to stay. We ran out of time. Being able to sit again with him, with Ed playing him, was our chance to say goodbye to our father and really memorialize him."

Adds Noah: "It was cathartic. It allowed us to move on."

When their baseball dreams faded, the brothers pursued their second love, movies, with the same zeal. They spent about five years reading and writing. Taking tips from Lew Hunter's "Screenwriting 434," they wrote "Touching Home" and a handful of other scripts while roofing, digging ditches and cleaning Laundromats to pay the bills.

"When we played baseball," Logan says, "each day we'd wake up and say, 'How do we get to the big leagues?' We needed to do the same when we decided to make movies. We needed to read and write as much as we could. We knew from sports that you're not going to be good at anything unless you're disciplined."

They got some nibbles on scripts, but when their dad died, "something just hit us," Noah says, "and we said, 'OK, we're going to make our movie. We're making it right now. And we're not going to rely on anybody. It's just going to be us. We figured out how to write a screenplay, we can figure out how to produce and direct.' "

They pitched a Kodak official whose name they'd found in "The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook." Impressed, she sent them to a guy at Panavision who was so taken with the twins he gave them one of the company's new filmmaker grants, lending them the use of cameras that would've cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent and arranging loans of dollies and other equipment. A friend signed by the Colorado Rockies was in Tucson for minor league spring training. The Millers drove there with the hope of shooting spring training so they'd have something to show. They gave their script to manager PJ Carey (now with the Dodgers), who, it turned out, was a recovering alcoholic and was taken by the story. He let the twins suit up for a few days and film the workouts.

That was the footage they showed Harris. A family friend hooked them up with Sacramento real estate developer Brian Vail, who agreed to finance most of the low-budget picture, which cost several million dollars. A top-flight crew of Bay Area filmmakers, including editor Robert Dalva, retired LucasFilm president Gordon Radley and Oscar-winning sound mixer Mark Berger joined the crew.

In addition to Harris and the twins, the cast of "Touching Home" - which famed film editor Walter Murch called "a thoughtful and intensely emotional exploration of the forgotten corners of the American dream" - includes Lee Meriwether as their grandma, Brad Dourif (Doc Cochran in "Deadwood") as the boys' eccentric uncle and Robert Forster (Max Cherry in "Jackie Brown") as the sympathetic sheriff and coach. His character is based on Steve Gough, a retired San Francisco cop who was the Millers' weight-training coach and like an uncle to them.

"They always had a tremendous inner fire," says Gough, on the phone from his Montana home. "They really complement each other. I don't think two human beings could get closer." Gough, who's seen the film, was friends with their dad, who "had the clearest blue eyes you'd ever want to see, like they could see forever. He loved them and they loved their dad, as simple as that. Ed Harris got it right. "

As for their own acting, the brothers say they just tried to relax and be themselves.

"I was playing myself, trying to tell the truth," Noah says. Adds Logan: "It was about stripping everything down, not analyzing it, just being it, and being emotionally rooted."

The Millers, who've written a book about their moviemaking adventure titled "Either You're in or You're in the Way," still can't quite believe their good fortune and the generosity of the veteran filmmakers who helped them.

"Our father died penniless in jail, and a movie star has resurrected him," Noah says.

Touching Home: The film screens at 5 p.m. Saturday and 12:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets for Saturday's screening are available only at the door. $12.50, $10 for San Francisco Film Society members.