Hi I am Ty Towriss, co-Producer of “Living Life on the Edge”, the documentary that will commemorate, memorialize, and tell of the life and sacrifice of Captain Robbie Bishop of Dalton, GA. I got involved in this project because I had come off another documentary pursuit as well as an original reality show pursuit that were both big swings and misses, seeing two solid years of work and investment go down the drain. So I suddenly had some time in my schedule to look at the next thing to come along, and desperately needed to latch onto something. Well I found this project staring me in the face, as my good friend and colleague Justin Webb indicated his strong desire to make this wish of his into a reality.
Robbie Bishop was Justin’s best friend. The two of them trail blazed the whole dashboard camera, drug seizure, interdiction how-to, burgeoning teaching and instruction video market long before the show COPS was ever conceived. And when I realized that Justin had married Robbie’s widow and helped to raise his two children? I was struck and intrigued to know more.
So having time available I decided to make a road trip throughout the eastern US to interview some of these law enforcement compatriots of Robbie and Justin’s. It was on that trip, and from what I heard, and the emotion that gripped my interviewees, and myself having never even met Robbie Bishop, that I decided this story not only has merit but absolutely needs to be told.
Justin needed my help (or someone’s help). Not everyone has time to drop everything and devote to an undertaking like this. Well for me, and lucky for Justin, everything I was working on for two years, had already kind of been dropped, and not by choice. So I said to Justin, “Let’s make this documentary a reality and see where it goes.”
I now consider myself extremely lucky and privileged to be a part of this noble endeavor. And looking back to when I first met Justin, well he and I both had our own small boutique video production businesses and were subletting office space in downtown Atlanta in the same building. There were many late nights cranking out production work. Justin for his clients. Me for mine. It gave us an opportunity to get to know each other during the late night coffee breaks. I did not pay too much close attention back then but it would have been around the time of Robbie’s death. I remember Justin was always working late on these police training videos with ride alongs and the like. My office sat just down the steps, around the corner, and down the hall where I was creating and exporting my own work. It was a very small, stale, smelly old office building. But what hits me today, it was where I met Justin some 16 years ago. It was on a quiet, very obscure back street on the north edge of downtown Atlanta…
BISHOP ST… I kid you not.