By Charles Little II
Over the past few years, our members have been reminded — sometimes painfully — of how fragile our working lives can be. For Local 700 member Alain Fleury, that reality came into especially sharp focus with a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer that requires ongoing treatment and careful management.
What makes Alain’s story remarkable is not only the medical journey itself, but the fact that he has kept working while undergoing treatment, balancing long hours, physical demands, and uncertainty with determination and perspective. With the support of colleagues, healthcare professionals, and Local 700, he has remained active in his craft at a time when many would be forced to step away.
“I love bringing people together …. I saw during my cancer journey people coming together, supporting me, and I felt the love and support, from my family members to my friends.”
The Editors Guild discovered Alain had some work hours “on hold” from a previous employer due to a reporting error, which was preventing him from qualifying for a healthcare extension. The Guild retrieved pay stub documentation that enabled Alain to obtain six more months of rightfully earned health coverage.
‘When I learned the diagnosis, I didn’t know what to do.’
“One of the most rewarding aspects of our roles at the Guild is our ability to access various resources for our members,” said Western Executive Director Jessica Pratt.
Charles Little II: Hey Alain, how are you feeling today, brother?
Alain Fleury: I’m good. My face is still a little swollen. And I’m also actually hooked up [to chemotherapy] — I’m doing a treatment right now. The cancer is in remission, so that’s the main thing. But I’m still going through a lot of different symptoms and reactions from [treatment], so we’re managing that.
Little: Tell me your specific union classification and your specific area of expertise within our craft.
Fleury: I’ve worked as an assistant editor and an editor. People compliment my editing for strong pacing and storytelling beats. When I’m editing, I constantly ask myself: What does the character want? How do we get to that want and need, externally and internally? I studied psychology in college, and it’s helped me identify the psychological and emotional cores that actors are likely going for in a particular take.
As an assistant editor, I worked on bigger projects like “Wakanda Forever,” “Dr. Strange,” and “Transformers.”
Little: And you’ve got a track record as a producer, too. I remember “Vigilante,” for instance.
Fleury: Yes, I produce a lot. And I love bringing people together. As I’ve endured this cancer journey, I was trying to find a purpose for it. And at a certain point, it started to click: it’s because of the support that I was seeing around me. People gravitated towards me and rallied behind me during this. I began to think maybe this is my purpose: to bring people together. That happens when I’m producing, as well. It’s bringing a whole team together, rallying everyone around a project. When it’s completed, it plays in a theater where a bunch of strangers gather to go on this emotional journey with you. So I feel like that is my purpose. That’s why I’m here.
This past year, I produced several projects: a couple of shorts for National Lampoon and a couple of things for Keke Palmer. When I first felt the pain that made me go to the ER, I was working on the National Lampoon short. I got the cancer diagnosis and was admitted to the hospital, but we still had to turn in the cut for the film’s premiere. I was in the hospital, still working!
Little: Tell me about that. What was the diagnosis?
Fleury: Multiple myeloma. It’s a bone marrow cancer in which plasma cells mutate in your bone, get into the blood, and overwhelm your immune system.
Little: How did you deal with that?
Fleury: I had no idea what this cancer was, so I started researching it immediately, there in the hospital. Knowledge is power, right? If you know what you’re dealing with, you’re better able to confront it. So, when I met with my oncologist, we talked about the different treatments. This was on December 7, 2024. I figured, OK, if I don’t do anything about it now, I’ll probably have only two or three years left to live. I’ve got to take action, NOW! We decided therapy would start on December 30.
The first game plan was immunotherapy, and the first treatment was a four-drug chemotherapy called DRVD. I got weekly injections directly into my belly for about six months. We needed to reduce the myeloma, which at that point was in about 70% of my body.
Little: Wow!
Fleury: That treatment would reduce the myeloma, or “bring the cancer down,” from 70% to around 5% after those six months. Then they would do a bone marrow transplant that was going to wipe out the cancer — and my entire immune system with it. Sometimes people need bone marrow donors, but I planned to use my own bone marrow from other parts of my body. When you use a donor, there’s a risk the transplant won’t take hold, and the cancer will come back.
Unfortunately, when we got to week five of treatment, we hit a roadblock. Some of the medicines damaged my liver, and I started going into liver failure. So I had to go back into the hospital. That was probably one of the most miserable times ever. I had jaundice; the whites of my eyes were yellow, and I was super-itchy. It felt like everything that could go wrong with me, was.
Normal liver enzyme numbers are, say, 100. If you’re drinking too much alcohol and maybe have some liver damage, your numbers might be elevated to, say, 200 or 300. My liver enzymes were at 1400. They had to stop chemotherapy until my liver could recover. This was in February. My liver started to return to normal by April, but because we’d had to stop chemo, the cancer came back even stronger. So we had to switch the drugs.
It was a tough time. It was a trial-and-error process searching for the right combo of drugs to get the results I needed. Cancer presents differently in different people. You can have the same type of cancer as someone else, but everyone’s body responds differently to the drugs.
It took another month to find the right combination of drugs and restart treatment. But because of my liver damage, the bone marrow transplant was no longer one of my options — and that was supposed to wipe out the rest of the cancer and keep me going for the rest of my life! What was I supposed to do? Would the cancer always be there? And even if we apparently destroyed it, would it always come back?
That’s when my oncologist suggested this clinical trial called CAR T cell Therapy. This is brand new technology. UCLA only started doing it in 2023, and only a few hospitals do it. I did more research and found that everybody who’s had this kind of treatment has gone into remission, and they don’t even have to do maintenance treatments anymore. You’re in the clear; you can go on and live your life again. I was very ecstatic about that.
T cells are usually the ones that fight off diseases, but when my plasma cells mutated and started overcrowding my T cells, my immune system couldn’t handle it. The T cells couldn’t latch onto the cancer cells. But with CAR T cell treatment, T cells are extracted and re-engineered in a lab. With the addition of protein receptors on the cell exteriors, the T cells are injected back into the body. When they recognize the cancer, the T cells can latch onto the cancer cells, multiply, and destroy it. And if the cancer ever tries to come back, those T cells will recognize it and fight it off. I call it The Super Soldier Serum, and it was the miracle that I needed.
Little: Speaking of miracles. I saw a video you made about this experience. I call it “Gon’ Be Alright.” I almost jumped out of my chair when I watched that video, man. I was happy for you!
Fleury: As I mentioned earlier, I’ve always been a storyteller. So I decided from the beginning to start documenting everything I was going through. If I had a doctor’s appointment, I would record it. Or if I was undergoing a procedure, I recorded it. I didn’t have any editing equipment with me, so what could I use? I started learning Cap Cut on my phone. I needed whatever I could use to tell the story that I wanted to tell. And that’s exactly what I did. I tapped into that creative outlet of editing.
Little: When you and I talked during this period, you had mentioned that some of the Local 700 membership was there for you. Talk to me about that. Our members might love hearing how their presence may have helped you navigate this problem.
Fleury: From the beginning, when I was in the hospital and learned the diagnosis, I didn’t know what to do. The first thing that popped into my head was, “Well, I have to go through this cancer treatment. Do I even have enough hours to cover it? Because now I really need it!” I did more research and discovered I was already running out of hours!” I reached out to some of our Local 700 board members, like [Vice President] Shiran Miller, who helped me find resources. She led me to Jessica Pratt, who called MPI Health Plan to check whether anything was missing that could affect my health coverage. Pay stubs verified missing information from previously reported hours and added six months to my eligibility. Then they found underreported hours from a feature with Wanda Sykes that I had worked on. An audit of those missing hours led to additional reporting, and that gave me hours for the entire year of 2025.
‘My new treatment was the miracle I needed.’
Little: That’s what it’s about!
Fleury: They provided all the resources I needed. Different funds could help me financially from month to month, like the Will Rogers Fund and the Entertainment Community Fund. I applied for assistance and grants every month, and that helped me pay my bills. I also signed up for disability at the state level. I was also very fortunate to have a financial advisor who showed me that, three years earlier, I had applied for longterm disability on my policy. I opened that up, and it helped me financially throughout the year as I was battling cancer. So that’s what kept me going — the community. Folks at the MPEG and MPI Health Plan really pushed me through this.
Little: I’m so happy that this is the conversation we are having. I know you’re not entirely out of the woods yet, but as you said earlier, you are in remission! So, where is your head at now? How are you going forward into 2026?
Fleury: I feel like I’ve found my purpose, and I want to give back to the film community as much as possible. That’s how I want to move forward: I want to live life, I want to keep working on the films and stories that we tell. But now I realize I should also make time for myself. So today, moving forward includes taking care of my health, mentally and physically. Taking breaks between gigs. Taking trips, going to the spa — the kind of things we often forget as editors. We tend to focus on work and little else, but sometimes we lose focus on ourselves. I remember you and I were at an ACE wine-tasting event; I had cancer in me and didn’t know it. When I asked the doctors later, they said, “Looking at the markers, it’s been growing in your body for probably about two years.” It was already there when we were sitting, enjoying ourselves.
Little: You’ve gone through quite a storm. Now you can focus on getting back to normal.
Fleury: Yeah, I’m starting to. I just started working with Marvel again, and they’ve been very accommodating. I’m working on the new “Spider-Man” film!
Be the first to comment