ALL DIN

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Perhaps no bellower of his time and powers is so neglected as Alden Long, the subject of a new biographical film directed and narrated by his grandson, the actor Alan Bricker, and due to be released early next year, on the centenary of Long’s birth. Born to a Brahmin family stocked with politicians and lawyers, Long grew up among the well-heeled, and did not discover how loud he could yell until he was nearly fourteen, vacationing in Scotland. “It was there that he was born, in a sense,” Bricker says in the film, titled All Din after his grandfather’s most common nickname. “Away from the wood-paneled boardrooms of Boston and their stifling decorum, he first tasted freedom, calling to his sister Gillian with a volume that vaulted over Black Cuillin.” Long returned home and notified his family that he would not be practicing law, and proceeded to search for careers that suited him. He was briefly a hog caller, and then even more briefly an “echo artist,” a job invented for him which consisted of standing on one side of Buckskin Gulch in Utah and speaking so loudly that the echo would collide powerfully with his original call, forcing dust and other particles into shapes suddenly visible in the air. One of the most moving parts of the new film is a silent montage of these shapes, which range from deep vortices to flat floating planes. “He was never hoarse, not for one day,” Bricker says in his narration. Much more sparkling detail is contained in this portrait, which is recommended to anyone interested in volume, nature, filial pride, canyons, hogs, independent thinking, Scotland, law, sisters, wood-paneling, or the human voice.