In 1974, a filmmaker set out to make a portrait of Jay Frank Butler, an elderly resident of Ellicutt City, Maryland. Butler was a town character, frequently drunk and fond of speaking of dead people and crazy people, his two favorite subjects. After abandoning the film for 30 years, the filmmaker, Roger Deutsch, now uses his haunting, grainy black and white footage and Butler’s mesmerizing stories to meditate on the power of the documentarian to record the truth and create lies.  JH