This is Charlie. He was just born. These are his parents Jenny and Greg. In 20 years, Greg will be dead. But Charlie doesn’t know that yet. Charlie doesn’t know anything yet. He’s just a baby. This is where Charlie grew up, his brother Geoff, sister Meg, their dog Louie, and the TV room where his dad hid these, some of the tackiest video pornography of the 1980s had to offer. Greg will be dead in 10 years. But Charlie still doesn’t know that yet. This is Charlie’s first project from film school. Evidently, he loaded the camera wrong, so the footage came out like this. So he never showed his dad. Greg will be dead in one year, but Charlie still doesn’t know. Charlie has a ticket to see his favorite band. It’s the same day that his dad tells him he’s gotten a diagnosis. But he insists that Charlie go to the concert and not to worry. So Charlie isn’t worried. He doesn’t even know what malignant means. Then just before Greg’s 52nd birthday — [ring] Charlie’s mom calls to tell him that his dad has been hospitalized and is basically comatose. She explains, as delicately as she can … “This is to the end.” At his hospital bed, Charlie thinks his dad gives him a smile. Greg can’t speak anymore. So they sit in silence. In truth, this is not so different from when Greg was healthy. They didn’t agree on much and so they never really spent time together. But Charlie was waiting for the moment when they could see each other as adults. He knew that was when the strange distance he felt between them would finally close. But then — [beep] This is Charlie’s dad today. He’s been dead for nine years. In the aftermath, a life’s worth of weird stuff is left behind, stuff that Charlie hoped might explain why his dad was the way he was. Like maybe if Charlie looked hard enough, he could bring him back from the dead, at least long enough to understand who he really was. So it’s a pretty stupid plan, but this is him trying anyway. [music] Gregory Allen Tyrell was born November 14th, 1956, in Hamilton, Ontario. Parents, Dale and Stan. Along with Greg, they’d all die within a year of each other. Dale was the last holdout. Greg was a police officer. He’d work long shifts an hour from home. But it was a job he kept pretty tight-lipped about. OK. Being a cop just paid the bills. So what did Greg choose to do? Well he flew airplanes in his spare time. He’d often drag Charlie to airstrips on weekends, but always ended up chatting with the other pilots for hours while Charlie, bored out of his mind, would leave to wait in the car. He fixed planes too. He loved fixing things. He left behind a junkyard of tools. And their house was in a constant state of renovation, right up until his death. But what did any of this mean? Greg: “So this is our — [chuckles] not done yet kitchen, 12 years in the making, this. This is our front hallway. What a vast improvement. It’s actually quite nice.” “Well, I do nice trim work, don’t I?” He was pathologically protective of his stuff. Anything misused, misplaced, or presumably used in a movie would make him erupt. So far this is going very badly. It looks like everything in this pile is just as elusive as Greg was. It’s just trivia. Greg was hard to live with. Greg had a volatile temper. So what? Unexamined for all these years, this stuff could have hidden anything — revelations, answers, catharsis. Examined, it’s looking more and more like a big pile of nothing. And he’s gone all the way from birth certificate to cancer diagnosis. The doctors told Greg that the most common causes of this kind of cancer were smoking, drinking, and stress. Greg didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink. They nicknamed the tumor Dale. So maybe Charlie’s been looking in the wrong place. Dale threw cocktail parties. Stan was a pilot. On the surface, they looked like a pretty typical well-adjusted family. This was their house, a monument to a respectable brand of normalcy. Dale’s cocktail parties were showcases. Her kids were props. On Christmas mornings, she would march them downstairs in matching uniforms and make them write long thank-you cards immediately after every gift was unwrapped to Santa, every single time. Greg had a speech impediment back then. Dale would reluctantly drive him to corrective lessons, bullying him the whole time about what a burden he was on her. Decades later, nothing had changed. Charlie remembers how reticent his dad got every time they went to her house for the mandatory holiday visits. And then Charlie found this. No, it’s something we have to be aware of. Every time you try to — For a split second, it’s like Charlie has his answer. But all he’s really done is move the question back a generation. If she made him this way, what made her? A pattern starts to emerge. But rather than see how far back it goes, Charlie focuses back on himself. When Charlie was a kid, he wasn’t living in an abusive household. He was just trying to avoid another visit to the airstrip with his dad, his dad who was only trying in his own naive and awkward way to just spend time with his son. This wasn’t Greg failing. This was Greg trying. He just kind of sucked at it. A cycle of abuse, echoing from Dale’s father to her, to him, left Greg hard and bitter. But at some point, he made a decision. He was going to stop it from going any further. I’m dressing up for my daughter’s birthday. Get the wide angle going to get this shape. [chuckling] Funny… You wanna watch me brush my teeth? “Sure.” And after all those years Charlie spent avoiding him, Greg still supported Charlie’s filmmaking ambitions. And Charlie wasted all that time at the airfield hiding out in the car, like he wasted so much time combing through his dad’s crap, clinging onto VHS porno tapes like they were part of this puzzle. But Greg was never defined by what he carried with him. He was defined by what, after multiple generations, he was finally able to let go. His loving and devoted wife who would have happily spent the rest of her life with him — His son Geoff, now a father to his own perfect impossible kids. His daughter Meg, who shares his stubbornness, if nothing else. And his youngest son Charlie, the one who thought his dad could be a dick sometimes, who felt like there always was, and now always will be, a distance between them. But he still ends every single movie he makes the same way, even though his dad will never see it, a single credit all by itself that reads —