Ojai resident and creator of the must-see Netflix documentary ‘137 Shots’ holds up a powerful mirror to American society, if we are willing to look.
By Peter Deneen
9-minute read
This story was published in the summer 2022 issue of Ojai Quarterly magazine.
On the evening of November 29, 2012, as the blue 1979 Chevy Malibu accelerated past police headquarters in downtown Cleveland, its rattletrap engine backfired, sending a sonic clap that echoed off of the buildings, frightening police officers standing outside. The officers ducked, covered, and called it in.
“Old Chevy just capped a round off as he blew by the Justice Center,” the initiating officer radioed, setting off a chaotic 23-minute, 23-mile chase that involved 62 police cars, more than 100 Cleveland police officers, and culminated in one of the most egregious incidents of deadly police violence in American history.
Thirteen officers fired an astounding 137 bullets at the victims, 49 of them coming from a single officer who unloaded his final 15 shots through the windshield from a standing position atop the vehicle’s hood. By the end of it, all that was left was the shot-out carcass of the Malibu, and the bullet-riddled Black bodies of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, who were unarmed.
Five Thanksgivings later, Michael Milano was editing footage from the 137 shots incident in the Upper Ojai home he’d just moved his young family into when a dry breeze began to blow. Just as one of the strongest Santa Ana wind events on record was gathering strength, utility equipment upwind of Milano’s home malfunctioned, igniting the dry grass. The cheatgrass caught everything else aflame and the Thomas Fire burned on to briefly become the largest fire in California history; forcing the evacuation of more than 100,000 people, destroying more than 1,000 structures, and killing 23 people, including victims of the fire-precipitated debris flow that raged out of the posh Montecito slopes before the ground had even cooled.
The Milano’s house survived the initial firestorm, but the subsequent days remained perilous. The wind would reawaken embers, igniting anything left unburned. In rural Upper Ojai, most of the 100 structures lost—many of them homes of new neighbors Milano had yet to meet—were lost in the hellish hours after the main fire front had already passed, when most emergency resources had already departed to keep pace with the flames galloping toward urban areas.
But little fires were still burning everywhere.
With the documentarian’s instinct for preservation and the awareness that he was witnessing an epochal event, Milano began recording the Thomas Fire disaster. His film, Burning Ojai: Our Fire Story, premiered on HBO in the fall of 2020 and remains the defining account of the Thomas Fire.
If you knew Mike Milano was in film, you would assume he was an actor—possessing a rugged Hemingway handsomeness and Midwestern congeniality— a presence made for on-camera rather than behind. But of all Milano’s convivial traits, his voice stands out. He speaks with the full-throated, captivating confidence of a storyteller, and listens with the attentive ear of someone who assumes he has everything to learn. Milano isn’t an actor, he is an observer, whose motivation for storytelling could broadly be described as hellbent on doing the deep work to tell stories that bend the world evermore toward justice.
Milano was raised in the Cleveland suburb of Rocky River, Ohio, the third of four high-achieving siblings, whose upbringing was practically within the walls of the criminal justice system. Their father is the Cleveland attorney who led the courageous exposure of corruption within the Catholic Church that set off the ongoing global reckoning of abuse.
“My earliest memories are going downtown to the courthouse,” Milano recalled during an interview at his Upper Ojai studio this spring. “We’d go get lunch, say hi to the cops, the prosecutors, the bailiffs, and the judges. I was raised within that world, speaking that language, and immersed in that lore.”
In 2005, Milano received a scholarship to wrestle at the University of Michigan, where he majored in political science. After two years of wrestling, the five-foot six Milano decided to try out as a running back for the Wolverines’ football team, a roster that boasted at least 20 future professional players at the time. Not only did Milano make the team, but he also received a full athletic scholarship in a second sport—a feat for which if statistics were kept would be exceedingly rare.
After graduating in 2009, Milano taught abroad and at an inner-city elementary school in post-Katrina New Orleans with Teach for America. On and off the field experiences at Michigan led Milano to write his first book, which was published shortly before his acceptance to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism—where Milano intended to hone his skills into a career of long-form narrative writing.
The 137 shots story changed that plan.
The incident, which occurred just before Milano entered journalism school, was talked about a lot back in Cleveland. When it came time for his thesis at Berkeley, Milano naturally gravitated toward the grave injustice in his hometown.
“137 Shots was initially going to be a book,” Milano told me, but as he developed the story he realized the audio and visual components of the story could be expressed more impactfully as a film. That and the multi-dimensional nature of directing and producing appealed to Milano’s hard-working, strategic mind.
“It’s a million little battles,” he says about making films, which appeals to his “grind-loving” wrestler’s psyche—something he wrote about in his book nearly fifteen years ago. “That doesn’t go away,” he laughed.
While at Berkeley, Milano met his wife, Noémie, a French-Senegalese-Vietnamese business student, who would become Milano’s partner in all things at Make It Plain—Milano’s production banner—where together they specialize in premium, feature documentaries, and strategic nonfiction storytelling. Noémie produces, edits, and shoots on all of their projects.
“Mike doesn’t want to be famous,” Noémie told me. “He wants the stories to be famous. He’s passionate about his work and wants to do his bit of good in the world.”
Milano eschews projects about the rich and famous, bemoaning their prominent positioning in the Hollywood commercial zeitgeist. “I do stories about real people,” Milano said. “As inequality soars, it’s the artist’s job to paint pictures that speak for the rest of us.”
When Milano screened a cut of his 137 Shots film for me in the summer of 2020, I spent all 105 minutes vacillating between chills-with-goosebumps and outright fury. At that moment, America’s streets were a cauldron of inchoate rage over the spate of police killings and 400 years of cumulative oppression. Milano’s documentary masterfully threaded them all together and laid bare the injustice of the system that permits it to continue.
The film employs a seamless stitchwork of intimate, first-person accounts, police depositions, surveillance and dashcam footage to break down a series of outrageous policing errors, a culture of misconduct, communications breakdowns, systemic flaws, and the imperfect people in positions of power that led to the 137 shots tragedy—carefully balancing it all with the real and omnipresent danger of doing police work in a country whose citizens possess 400 million frequently-used firearms.
Milano had been working with Netflix on the original film—shot, edited, produced, and directed primarily, by Mike himself—for nearly five years, before it was finally released on December 15, 2021. It has since exceeded expectations, making extended stays in the Netflix Top 10, top documentaries, ‘trending now’, and outperforming other films in its category.
In a glowing review published in February, The New York Times wrote: “Michael Milano’s riveting documentary investigates not only the night in question (via powerfully intercut testimony, dashcam videos and expert witnesses) but the department’s attempt to cover up their mistakes as part of the city’s powder-keg history of racial inequality and the pattern of “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force” by its police.
The Times’ review continued:
“Milano keeps peeling back layers of bias and corruption before folding in the near-concurrent murder of Tamir Rice, ultimately amounting to much more than the story he sets out to tell; it becomes less a true-crime documentary than an in-depth exploration of the psychic divide that has split this country in two.”
On social media, 137 Shots resonated, too.
One Tweet read, “137 Shots on Netflix is the most gut-wrenching documentary I’ve seen thus far in this life. Brilliant, unbiased, and legitimately factual storytelling of Cleveland’s catalytic nightmare that sparked the fire for change. You’ll be sick and sad, then mad…but all should see it.” Another Tweeted, “137 Shots is why we need to DEmilitarize the police, NOT defund,”—a position Milano’s film makes clear that he agrees with.
They are all too right.
Milano doesn’t narrate 137 Shots, his sources do. The film frequently turns to the late Cleveland journalist, Mansfield Frazier, who was the fiery host of a popular radio show on WTAM 1100 Cleveland. Frazier is a powerful narrator and provides insightful commentary on the case. Milano says his decision to make Mansfield the narratorial backbone of 137 Shots was foundational.
“Mansfield is the conscience of our film, the Greek Chorus, providing our moral clap-back,” Milano explained. “He says things I could never say.”
Milano’s intimate access and arrangement of the subjects, who tell their stories in the first person, makes it feel more like a cinematic novel than a stodgy documentary. There are many instances where the naked vulnerability of Milano’s sources caused me to wonder how he could possibly have been allowed to record.
The answer lies in the years of effort Milano put into building relationships with the people involved— they trust him, and in return, he is fair to them. At one point, the officer who stood the best chance of being held accountable—the one who fired 49 shots—is playing the video game Call of Duty in his living room, virtually gunning people down while seemingly unaware, or unconcerned, with the optics of the moment as Milano sits beside him, camera rolling.
Milano, who lost a best friend in Iraq at the age of 20, lends us empathy for everyone involved, including the police. That the story takes place in Milano’s hometown—within the justice system he was raised in—adds an extra air of care and attention to detail to his film. He knows the people, personally. 137 Shots is a searingly honest and unfiltered account of what happened that tragic night and how accountability was denied by imperfect people running a system unjust by design.
Despite the damning footage of backroom depositions of police officers, a Cuyahoga County judge acquitted every police officer involved—including the former Marine who fired more than a third of the shots that night.
As Milano was making the film, the riotous summers of Ferguson and Minneapolis fueled the movement to reign in policing in America. But the pendulum has since swung away from the energy of those movements and police reform legislation has stalled.
“The institution of policing is so strong, so resilient because it represents the essential class divide in America,” Milano asserted. “The film takes a shot at that. It’s a reality check. 137 Shots, and all that we now know that incident encompasses, is representative of so much more. It’s a metaphor for how far off the rails these aspects of American culture have gone.”
The independent research collaborative Mapping Police Violence reported that 30,000 people were killed by police in the US between 1980 and 2018. Over the past decade, 98 percent of police killings have resulted in no criminal charges.
“How do we, as Americans, define strength?” Milano asked me. “What are our basic moral virtues as a society? What is our relationship with violence? That is what this film is ultimately about.”
Just six months before the 137 shots case was to go to trial—in another uncoordinated response by the Cleveland police to a report of a child playing with a toy gun—officers killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice. The officers in that case employed the same practiced spiel in court and the grand jury would decline to hold any officers responsible. Evidence unearthed by Milano’s film has prompted Rice’s family attorneys to lobby the Department of Justice to reopen Tamir’s case.
Milano said that even though action on police reform has mostly stalled, the film brought closure and some semblance of justice for the Russell and Williams families, who have praised Milano’s 137 shots account.
Milano’s motivation to pursue the 137 shots story is rooted in the final lines of his film, “to seek our own advancement, in search of the advancement for all.” Robert F Kennedy opens and closes the movie with a famous speech he gave in Cleveland the day after MLK was killed. Speeches from Martin Luther King Jr, Cornel West, and RFK serve as moral lighthouses throughout. Milano often quotes artists, writers, and philosophers—he says he’s on a Krishnamurti kick at the moment.
Milano doesn’t like interviews. He says that it gives the author too much power over your own story. Full disclosure: Mike and I are friends and neighbors. We met when I rushed to his home as part of a civilian Upper Ojai fire brigade to put out flames threatening his house in the days immediately following the Thomas Fire.
He’s an interesting paradox of the millennial generation. His work has been seen by tens of millions of people around the world, but he craves privacy—a generational throwback to when, he says, “mystery was cooler.”
Milano says everything he wants to say is in the work.
In the film, Cornel West—with his usual power and poignance—referencing W.E.B. Du Bois, says, “every generation has to attempt to meet the standards of integrity, honesty, decency and courage.” In our final interview, I asked Mike if he feels a sense of generational leadership—if he sees himself as one of the defining millennial storytellers.
“That’s not up to me, and I don’t have a choice—and I don’t particularly care about that external approval,” he replied quickly. Then he took a breath. “I think an artist is someone who’s highly attuned to the world around them—and sensitive—and all that stimulus churns up inside you, and you need a release for all that emotion or you’ll go crazy. Essentially, I have to paint. I’d paint if I didn’t get paid and no one ever saw it.”
By showing us at our most unjust, his deep longing for us to be better to each other than we are shines unstoppably through. The 137 shots story is infuriating, and also maddeningly, tragically, preventable.
During one interlude with Mansfield Frazier, the WTAM Cleveland radio host, Frazier says, “The 137 shots case goes back to who runs the country. In a totalitarian state, men with guns run countries. This is about power. Policing is still a reflection of society, and we have a society that doesn’t want a mirror held up to it.” With 137 Shots, Michael Milano holds that mirror up for us, if we are willing to look. And if we are going to do the work to be better, we must.
‘137 Shots’ is currently streaming on Netflix. The author of this article, Ojai native and environmental writer, Peter Deneen, is a former officer in the US Coast Guard, who served 12 years on active duty. Follow his work: www.petedeneen.world