The Lonergans were adventurous world travelers who had spent their last few years working for the Peace Corps in the South Pacific. They didn't fit the theme that Kentis said he wanted to stress: the idea that humans are arrogant and tend to take their lives for granted.
Doomed couple's story resurfaces
Family's emotions about movie mixed
Friday, August 20, 2004
By Keith O'Brien
Staff writer
Six years after Tom and Eileen Lonergan disappeared off the coast of Australia, abandoned by a dive boat and presumably killed by circling tiger sharks, Tom's mother, Betsy Lonergan, received a telephone call that stopped her cold.
There had been plenty of calls in the past. In the beginning, the phone in her New Orleans home had rung constantly with calls from friends offering sympathy or asking for news about the young couple. Then, after hope was abandoned that her son and his wife would ever be found alive, came the rumors. People wanted to know if Tom and Eileen had entered into a murder-suicide pact after being abandoned 40 miles out at sea, or, for no apparent reason, had faked their deaths to give themselves a clean start in life.
Once, Betsy Lonergan recalled, a reporter stopped by her house and asked her to look at a picture, taken months after the incident, to determine if it was Tom and Eileen, alive and well. It was not. The truth was more disturbing.
The dive boat had simply forgotten the young couple after others in their group climbed aboard that day in late January, 1998, doffed their scuba gear and headed for shore. Two days passed before the Lonergans were reported missing. They were never found. They were presumed dead. And in time, a bereaved mother tried to pay the rumors and the callers no mind. She was moving on.
But the call Betsy Lonergan received a few months ago was different. It wasn't from a stranger, it was from a friend. And it wasn't a rumor, it was a fact. A movie was coming out that seemed to tell the story of Tom and Eileen Lonergan, and the phone began ringing all over again.
People wanted to know if Betsy Lonergan had authorized the movie. She hadn't. They wondered if relatives sold the rights to the story. They didn't. And they asked how she felt about "Open Water," inspired by the Lonergan story, and opening today across the New Orleans area and in 2,600 movie theaters nationwide. Lonergan had a ready reply.
"How would you feel?" she said.
It upsets her, she explained, that people are profiting off the tragedy -- an opinion that isn't shared by all of Tom and Eileen's loved ones. Those backing the movie, meanwhile, can't seem to decide if the film is about the Lonergans.
On the one hand, Chris Kentis, who wrote and directed the film with his wife Laura Lau on a tight $120,000 budget, developed characters who do not resemble the Lonergans. Kentis did not use their names -- or want to, he said -- and Lions Gate, which bought the film for $2.5 million, has gone out of its way to say the movie is based on "true events" and not one single event.
On the other hand, Kentis said this week, the film was inspired by the Lonergan story. Kentis, also a diver, said he was "appalled, disgusted, and horrified" when he heard about their deaths in 1998. The harrowing tale stuck with him, he said, and the Lonergan name keeps coming up. As a film representative happily pointed out after a recent press screening in New Orleans, the movie is based on the local couple.
It's like the filmmakers want to capitalize on the public's knowledge of the Lonergan story, explained Eileen's brother John Hains Jr., without giving any creative control or financial support to the people hurt most by the story.
But Hains, who is the only close relative to have seen the movie so far, said he liked one thing about it. At least now, he said, he can imagine an ending to his sister's story, even if he will never truly know what happened out there.
Stranded in 'Fish City'
In the beginning, there were plenty of chances to find the couple. But a series of mistakes and missed opportunities doomed Tom, 33, and Eileen, 28, and it began with a botched head count.
The Outer Edge Dive boat crew miscounted the number of people on board when they left the rim of the Great Barrier Reef after a day of diving. The Lonergans, who were experienced divers, were still beneath the surface.
Later, back at Port Douglas, people stumbled across evidence of the forgotten divers: their shoes and their dive bag were still there. A shuttle bus driver waiting to ferry them back to their hostel became concerned. The crew was not -- not until two days later when the boat captain found the dive bag still sitting there with Tom Lonergan's wallet inside.
By then, it was too late. The Lonergans had been left in a place called "Fish City," a great spot for diving and also a feeding ground for tiger sharks. Experts testified months later that the sharks probably moved in that evening, circling the couple, and the Lonergans probably didn't live long.
But in the weeks after they disappeared, family members couldn't keep from picturing other, even more torturous ends: dehydration, exhaustion, drowning. Hains, 33, said he pictured how maddening it would have been to float in the water for days. But he and other family members never gave any credit to the rumors that ran wild. And neither did Kentis.
The movie version
If a couple wanted to kill themselves or disappear, the movie director pointed out, their plan probably wouldn't hinge on the small chance that the dive boat would forget them and leave them in shark-infested waters.
"We didn't want to get into all that stuff," he said, a decision that relieved Hains when he called Lions Gate months ago and asked about the movie. Kentis and Lau also didn't want to get bogged down in the specific details of the Lonergan story.
The Lonergans were adventurous world travelers who had spent their last few years working for the Peace Corps in the South Pacific. They didn't fit the theme that Kentis said he wanted to stress: the idea that humans are arrogant and tend to take their lives for granted.
So he created a fictional couple with a sport utility vehicle in the driveway and cell phones in their ears. He said he wanted people to watch the movie and wonder how they would react if they were left behind in the ocean.
He and his wife shot the film on weekends and holidays, using unknown actors and real reef sharks. These sharks, monitored by an expert during the filming, give the movie an eerie edge of reality. They were also the only option the couple could afford in a low-budget film without the backing of a major studio, and Kentis wasn't expecting a great success.
At best, he said, he figured the movie would get into a couple of film festivals and maybe play in some art house theaters. He didn't count on the kind of attention the film is generating, he said, much less the attention of the Lonergans' loved ones.
"We never wanted to open any kind of wounds whatsoever. We never anticipated that would happen," he said. "This is a movie. It's incredibly insignificant -- it's nonsense -- compared to anything that people have experienced in real life."
Coping with heavy hearts
That explanation does little to comfort Betsy Lonergan. The past few years have been hard on her. Her husband, Maurice, 73, died in 2001. He had been sick for a long time. But family members believe his son's death, and all the stress that came with it, hastened his decline.
"He was a typical Irishman," Betsy said of her late husband. "Up to any challenge." It upset him, she said, when he couldn't go to Australia to search for his son or to attend the manslaughter trial that followed in 1999.
The trial ended with the acquittal of the boat captain, and the family had to move on, said Nancy Weir, one of Tom Lonergan's siblings.
"My mom is a good Catholic woman," said Weir, who lives in Covington. "She's old enough to realize that terrible things happen. She realized she couldn't be a miserable person for the rest of her life."
But realizing that she also wanted something by which to remember them, Betsy Lonergan planned a memorial for her son and his wife. She had their names engraved just below her husband's on his tomb at St. Louis Cemetery No. 3. She likes to go there on their birthdays, she said, to leave flowers, even though their bodies are not there and most likely never will be.
It's an idea she and others have grown accustomed to, and Lonergan said she'll get over the new movie as well. It's not what she wanted. But even if she had known it was coming, she couldn't have stopped it. The filmmakers are on strong legal ground. They can tell this story however they want. Betsy Lonergan just wishes they had called her before the movie came out and, more than that, she wishes for just one thing.
"It's probably not going to be a real popular movie," she said. "But you know what? Maybe if it makes people think twice about scuba diving in Australia -- maybe that's a good thing."
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Keith O'Brien can be reached at kobrien@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3452.
