Here Comes Trouble (45 page)

I looooved the movies.

I always did. Like most kids of my era, my first films were
Bambi
and
Old Yeller,
Swiss Family Robinson
and
The Alamo.
But the first movie I remember having a strong reaction to was
PT 109,
the story of John F. Kennedy in World War II. It had everything an eight-year-old boy could want: action, suspense—but in this case, the story of a hero who initially screwed up and ran his boat into the path of a Japanese destroyer. Yet he didn’t let his mistake defeat him. He saved his crew and found a way to get them all back to safety. He was a rich boy, and probably could have gotten out of being on the front lines, but he wasn’t that kind of American. Even at eight, I got that.

I came of age as a teenager when the great films of the late sixties and early seventies blasted their way onto the screen.
Out
were the stiff, formulaic movies of the aging studio system, overblown fare such as
Hello, Dolly!
and
Doctor Dolittle.
In
were
Easy Rider
and
The Graduate,
Midnight Cowboy
and
The Last Picture Show,
Deliverance
and
Taxi Driver,
Nashville,
and
Harold and Maude.

At seventeen, I saw Stanley Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange,
and then I saw everything else by Kubrick, and after that there was no looking back. I was hooked on the potential and the power of cinema. I took two Introduction to Cinema classes as a freshman in college, and the professor, Dr. Gene Parola, had us watch all the greats, starting with
M
and
Metropolis
and landing on
Blow-Up
and
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
My friend, Jeff Gibbs, took both classes with me, and we would spend hours afterward dissecting every nuance of these movies. Two years later I opened my own “art house” in Flint where, for just two nights a week, I would show everything by Truffaut, Bergman, Fassbinder, Kurosawa, Herzog, Scorsese, Woody Allen, Buñuel, Fellini, Kubrick, and all the masters of cinema. Each film would get four showings, and I would spend my Friday and Saturday evenings watching all four shows. On the first viewing I would sit close and enjoy the experience. On the following three screenings, I would sit in the back and study them, sometimes taking notes. This became my one-room, one-student film school.

I did not like documentaries, and so I rarely went to see them. Documentaries felt like medicine, like castor oil—something I was
supposed
to watch because they were good for me. But most were boring and predictable, even when I agreed with the politics. If I wanted to listen to a political speech, why would I go to a movie? I’d attend a rally or a candidates’ debate. If I wanted to hear a sermon, I would go to church. When I went to the movies I wanted to be surprised, lifted, crushed; I wanted to laugh my ass off and I wanted a good cry; and when I left the theater afterward, I wanted to glide out onto the street as if I were walking on air. I wanted to feel exhilarated. I wanted all my assumptions challenged. I wanted to go somewhere I had never gone before, and I didn’t want the movie to end because I didn’t want to go back to where I was. I wanted sex without love and love without sex, and if I got the two together then I wanted to believe I would have that, too, and forever. I wanted to rock and be rocked and five days later I wanted that film ricocheting around in my head so madly that goddammit I had to go see it again, right now, tonight, clear the decks, nothing else matters.

And I felt
none
of that
when I went to see a documentary. Of course, it was rare, rare, rare that a documentary would play in a movie theater in Flint, let alone any other place in the state. But when it did, and when it was constructed as a
movie
first and as a documentary
second,
then it would fuck me up in ways that no work of fiction could. I sat in the Flint Cinema on Dort Highway and saw the devastating Vietnam documentary
Hearts and Minds
—and to this day I have seen no finer nonfiction film. Another time I drove to Ann Arbor and saw something I didn’t know was possible—a humorous film about a depressing subject,
The Atomic Café.
In Detroit, at the Art Institute, I saw the cinema verité classics by D. A. Pennebaker (
Don’t Look Back),
and Richard Leacock and Robert Drew (
Primary
), and the radical work of Emile d’Antonio (
Point of Order
). Later, I would see the films of Errol Morris (
The Thin Blue Line
) and Ross McElwee (
Sherman’s March
) and an outrageously experimental nonfiction film with Barbie dolls by a young Todd Haynes called
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.
And one day, without the use of any substances, long after I had dropped out of college, while collecting $98 a week on unemployment after being fired during Labor Day week by a rich liberal, and having just spent the scariest weekend of my life in Acapulco—my mind brought all these films and filmmakers together and gave me an idea unlike anything that I had seen before, a film that began to unspool in my head and simply started to project itself onto my imaginary screen in my frontal lobe. I was broke, depressed, shunned, and three thousand miles from home. I was on Mount Parnassus in San Francisco living under a giant microwave telecommunications tower, and I wanted to leave and go back home
and make a movie!
It was nuts, I knew it, but the bus had already pulled out of the station and there was no turning it around, no going back. I did not have a day of film school in me, let alone much of any college schooling at all. I didn’t care. I had my idea. And I had a new friend. His name was Kevin Rafferty.

Kevin was a documentary filmmaker. He made
The Atomic Café,
a smart, funny film, in the early 1980s. He and his brother Pierce, and friend Jayne Loader, put together ninety minutes of scenes and clips from the archives of the U.S. government, defense contractors, and the television networks of the Cold War era. With no narration, they strung the footage together in such a way that made the arms race and fear of the Red Menace look exactly like the madness that it was. Footage showing how you could survive an atomic attack in your basement or at school, by ducking and covering your head under your desk, said more about the stupidity of the two superpowers than any political speech or op-ed. The effect was both hilarious and debilitating—and when you came out of the theater you were certain of two things: (1) never, ever believe at face value anything a government or corporation tells you; and (2) these Rafferty brothers are not only great filmmakers, they proved to me that a documentary could be both funny
and
profound.

Ronald Reagan had been president for just a year when
The Atomic Café
came out. The American and Russian people were tired of spending billions on the Cold War, and this movie hit that raw nerve. It became a big hit on college campuses and among those who loved good movies. When the political history of an era is written, the honest recorders of that history will write about the impact that the
culture
had on the political changes that took place and how it shaped the times. (You can’t tell the story of the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras without mentioning the impact of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, or Harry Belafonte.) I would like to now say, for the record, that for every “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” there was also a “Born in the U.S.A.” and an
Atomic Café.
Art has a searing impact in a thousand simple, unnoticed ways. This work by Kevin and his brother and friends had that kind of impact on me.

Flint was the Forgotten City in the 1980s. Once a vibrant, thriving metropolitan area that was the birthplace of the world’s largest, richest company—General Motors—it was now an evil science experiment for the rich.
Question: Can we increase our profits by eliminating the jobs of the people who not only build our cars but also buy them?
The answer was yes—
if
you kept the rest of the country working so they could buy your cars. What the mad scientists didn’t count on was that those car workers would not only stop buying the cars once they were jobless, they would also stop buying televisions, dishwashers, clock radios, and shoes. This in turn would cause the businesses which made those items to either go under or make their products elsewhere. Eventually, those who had the remaining jobs would have to try to buy the cheapest stuff possible with their drastically reduced wages, and in order for manufacturers to keep that stuff cheap, it would have to be made by fifteen-year-olds in China.

Few foresaw how the taking of just one itsy-bitsy little thread and pulling it out of the middle-class fabric would soon unravel the entire tapestry, leaving everyone struggling in a dog-eat-dog existence, a weekly battle to keep one’s head simply above water. On one level, it was pure political genius, because the electorate, so consumed with its own
personal
survival, would
never
be able to find the time or energy to politically organize the workplace, the neighborhood, or the town to revolt against the mad scientists and politicians who had engineered their demise.

In the 1980s, though, it was just that first tiny thread that was being removed—but it was coming out of the place where I lived: Flint, Michigan. The
official
unemployment rate hit 29 percent. This should have been the canary in the American coal mine. Instead, few noticed. Sure, there were those who cared about our plight and sought to tell its story. There was a solid BBC story about Flint being the jobless capital of America, and then there was the… ah… the… um… Well, OK, that was about it. The BBC. From five thousand miles away. Not many others came to Flint to tell our story. They were too busy talking about the Reagan Revolution and how great it was that some people were prospering with the trickle-down economy. And they were right. Those who did well in the ’80s did
very well,
and, frankly, there weren’t that many places that looked like Flint, Michigan. Other than the steel towns of the Ohio Valley that had their comeuppance a few years earlier, and the textile mills in the northeast a few years before that, the country was still doing pretty well, a middle class still existed, and nobody paid much attention to the grimy, gritty towns that built their cars. The Brits from the BBC knew what a town on its knees looked like, and their DNA allowed them to not mince many words as to the cause of what was going on when they did their piece on Flint.
But who saw that?
Oh well, tallyho! Out of sight, out of mind. If you lived in Tampa, in Denver, in Houston, in Seattle, in Vegas, in Charlotte, in Orange County, in New York, Flint’s fate would never be yours! You were doing great and you would continue to do great. Yes, of course, poor Flint. Poor, poor Flint. Pity. Pity. Tsk-tsk.

One day in 1984, I was sitting at my desk at the
Flint Voice
and there was a knock on the door. Two men who did not look like they were from these parts were standing on the porch, peering through my screen door to see if anyone was home.

“Hi there,” I said. “Can I help you?”

“Sure,” said the taller one with the accent. “Is this the
Flint Voice?
”

“Sure is,” I said. “C’mon in.”

The two of them walked in.

“My name is Ron Shelton,” the American one said. “I’m a screenwriter. I wrote
Under Fire.
It came out last year.”

We shook hands. “Um, yes, I, I loved the movie,” I said, a bit startled and thinking,
Is this guy lost?

“And I’m Roger Donaldson,” the Aussie said.

I knew him, too. “Uh, you didn’t make
Smash Palace?
” I asked.

“That didn’t play here, did it?” he asked, perplexed that there would be someone in Flint who had seen his indie film from New Zealand.

“No, I drive to Ann Arbor a lot,” I replied.

I was trying to collect myself. What were these guys
¹¹
doing in my office? In Flint, Michigan? Not exactly Hollywood. I was in a bit of shock, but trying to stay cool.

“Well, you’re probably wondering what we are doing at the
Flint Voice,
” Donaldson said.

“Not really,” I responded with a straight face. “Writers and directors pass through here all the time. Last week Costa-Gavras stopped by with Klaus Kinski.” He laughed. I offered them each a chair and they took a seat.

“I’m writing a screenplay,” Shelton said, “a sort of a modern-day version of
The Grapes of Wrath.
We’ve heard about the hard times Flint has been having, about the many people who’ve lost their jobs and have had to pack up everything and leave the state. So, the story follows a family who loses everything here in Flint and throws together what’s left into the truck and heads to Texas in search of work.”

“And when they get to Texas,” Donaldson added, “they are treated the way the Joads were treated when they got to California.”

I sat and looked at them and, goddammit, if I just didn’t want to get up and hug them right there. Somebody—from Hollywood, no less—wanted to tell our story! I thought we’d been ignored, forgotten. Not so.

“So the reason we stopped by to see you is that we’re collecting information and stories and research, and someone mentioned you would be a good person to talk to. And that your paper was really the only paper in town covering this story from the side of the workers.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say,” I remarked, trying to find the right words and
be cool
at the same time. “First off, thank you. I can’t believe you are actually here and give a shit. That means a helluva lot.”

“We do give a shit,” Donaldson said. “We think there really is this shift taking place in America, where those with the money want to turn the clock back to a time when everybody else has to scrape and scrap and beg for the crumbs. And we think that this will make for a powerful movie.”