THE FOURTH WALL
by Karen Pecota

Luke Meyer, USA 2023

The Tribeca Film Festival is an avid supporter of stories that require additional time to bring appropriate depth to their telling. The style of these narratives is brought to the audience in episodic form–a series of several parts of storytelling that come together in sections.

Film festivals today open up their scheduled programs to allow for episodic stories to be told but present between one to four episodes of the particular storyline so as to entice the audience to finish the episodic series at a later date on a designated streaming platform.

Filmmaker Luke Meyer was chosen by Tribeca Film Festival to screen his first episode of a character-driven documentary series THE FOURTH WALL, Part 1: The Revolution of the Self. It is a fascinating story that uncovers a "psychotherapy sex cult" known as The Sullivanians, located on New York City's Manhattan Island in its Upper West Side. The humble beginnings formed in the late ‘50s, under the leadership of Saul B. Newton. It flourished in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and then dramatically closed down in 1991.

Meyer says, "The rash of cults in the volatile ‘70s was no accident. Nor is our interest in them today. Cults and mass movements thrive during periods of social and political instability." Adding, "They reduce the complex systemic problems all around us, replacing them with some form of higher calling and questionable explanations of a world that can seem random and out of control."

Modern day cults tend to isolate themselves and retreat to remote locations away from societal norms led by leaders with attractive charisma, and a skew on life that is out of the ordinary. The Sullivanians were different because they operated in plain sight. They lived in close proximity to one another, in the midst of a highly respected neighborhood of New York City. They kept normal day jobs, looked and dressed like their peers and were not part of an unusual religious belief system; and, Meyer adds, "They were bound by ideas of psychotherapy, at a time when the field was exploding in popularity."

In 1957, Newton and his wife, Dr. Jane Pearce, founded the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis in New York. The two had adopted teachings of Harry Stack Sullivan, but over time they formulated their own philosophy that became more controlling. They had a strong political bent and often spread their idealism through plays at The Fourth Wall Repertory Company, based in New York's East Village, with a run from 1976 to 1991.

Keith Newton, a son of Sullivanians’ cult leader Saul Newton, uncovers the truth about the group in which he was raised and its longstanding secrets. His thorough investigative research enlightens and explains the depth of the Sullivanians’ history, how they survived and the horrific fallout of psychological violence in THE FOURTH WALL.

The documentary series is a rare glimpse inside a cult phenomenon from firsthand accounts that show just how easy it is to buy into a seemingly idealistic group simply to fulfill one’s deepest need for connection and belonging. To be harmed or controlled is unthinkable... in the beginning.