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 guys11 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 s
aid.
“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.”
They talked to me for an hour, asking me to tell them some stories about life in Flint and what would I do if I were them to keep the story “authentic.” I spoke a mile a minute, sharing everything I could think of and giving them my advice as to what I thought would make for a good movie. They took notes and seemed very pleased.
“We’d like to get a bunch of back copies of your paper and take them with us,” Shelton said as we were wrapping up. “And we’d also like to subscribe to it. Can I pay for a subscription?” (I made sure to frame this subscription slip and hang it on my wall.)
“We’ll be in touch if there’s anything else we need,” Donaldson said. “We’re going to do the drive from Flint to Texas, scouting along the way. Thanks for your time. We’ll be in touch.”
They left as they came in, and I got on the phone and called everyone I knew. “Hollywood was just here!” I shouted into the phone a dozen times that day. I just couldn’t believe the randomness of this encounter—and the fact that Flint was going to star in a movie, a real movie!
Around that same time, Nina Rosenblum, the documentary filmmaker from New York City, was making a number of trips to Flint. She, too, decided that Flint was a worthy subject for a film—and in her case, a documentary. I and others spent a lot of time with her, and she seemed ready to put our story down on film. This was exhilarating; we were glad that we were no longer going to be ignored. The movie people had shown up!
For whatever reason, neither film got made and, as fate would have it, I would soon leave Flint myself. Within a month of having made my move to California for the dream job of a lifetime, I was sitting in San Francisco both without a dream or a job and collecting unemployment. Dejected, I returned home to Flint to think about what course my life should take. Should I try to restart the Flint Voice? Should I run for office, like maybe mayor of Flint? Maybe I could get a job… well, there was nowhere to get a job.
When I wanted to be alone in those jobless days in late 1986, I would head to downtown Flint, which was like a ghost town within a ghost town. I would take a newspaper or a book or my legal pad into Windmill Place, a failed urban renewal project designed by the people who built the South Street Seaport in New York City. They promised to do for Flint what they had done for the Lower East Side of New York. But, alas, the Flint River was not the East River, and a few other things were missing, too. Nonetheless, a half-dozen restaurants struggled to stay open inside the food court that was empty for most of the day. My next-door neighbor from childhood worked behind the counter of the bakery in Windmill Place. I would go in there and she would warm up a chocolate croissant for me. The Chinese take-out place a few counters down made a mean moo goo gai pan, and that was what I was enjoying a few minutes before noon on Thursday, November 6, 1986, when, on the overhead TV screen in this desolate food court, the regularly scheduled program was interrupted by a live feed from the world headquarters of the General Motors Corporation in Detroit. Roger B. Smith, the CEO of General Motors, was standing before a podium, and he had an important announcement to make:
“Today, we are announcing the closing of eleven of our older plants. We will eliminate nearly thirty thousand jobs, with the largest cuts happening at our Flint facilities, where nearly ten thousand of these thirty thousand jobs will be eliminated.”
I looked at this man on the TV screen, and I thought, You motherfucking cocksucking son of a bitch. You’re a fucking terrorist. You’re going to kill another ten thousand jobs here after you’ve already killed twenty thousand others in Flint? Really? REALLY?
I had forgotten about my moo goo gai pan. I calmed down and thought: I need to do something. Now. What could I do? I had an unemployment check in my pocket. I had a high school degree. I had about a quarter tank of gas in the car.
And then the idea came to me.
I walked over to the one working pay phone and called my friend Ben Hamper. Ben was the autoworker/writer I had put on the cover of Mother Jones before they fired me.
“Did you just see Roger Smith on TV?” I asked.
“Yeah. More of the same,” Ben replied.
“I can’t take this anymore. I have to do something. I’m going to make a movie.”
“A movie?” Ben asked, a bit surprised. “You mean like a home video or something like we did for your going-away party?”
“No. A real movie. A documentary. About how they’ve fucking destroyed Flint.”
“Why not just write a story about it somewhere, like in a magazine or something? I dunno.”
“I’m done with magazines and newspapers. I need a break. They don’t want me anyway. A movie seems better.”
“But how you gonna make a movie when you don’t know how to make a movie?”
“I’ve seen a lot of movies.”
“Yes, you’ve seen a lot of movies.”
“I’ve seen everything.”
“No one will dispute that. I don’t know anyone who goes to as many movies as you. What’d you see last night?”
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash. No, wait—that was the night before. It was Soul Man.”
“Jesus, why do you waste your time on such crap?”
“You’re missing the point. I think I’ve seen enough movies to figure out how to make one. And I can make this movie. And I know someone who can help me.”
My next call was to Kevin Rafferty.
“I’d like to come to New York and talk to you about something.”
“Can’t you just tell me over the phone?”
“No, I want to do it in person. You around this week?”
“Sure.”
“OK. I can be in the city by tomorrow night.”
I borrowed my parents’ car and drove the twelve hours to New York. I met Kevin in a bar in Greenwich Village.
“I want to make a movie,” I said to him straight up. “I want to make a documentary on Flint and GM. But I don’t know the first thing about how to do that. And I was wondering if you could help me.”
Asking Kevin Rafferty for help was a crazy move; yes, he was an award-winning documentary filmmaker, but he was clearly broke. It was like me asking a homeless guy to dig a quarter out of his pocket cause I wanted a latte. I had no idea what Kevin’s situation was financially, but suffice it to say that I looked like I was dre
ssed by Saks Fifth Avenue compared to Kevin. With him it was always the same torn black T-shirt, the same plaid shirt over it, the same worn-out loafers. Making documentaries made no one any money, even if you made great ones like Kevin. His mop of red hair looked like he cut it himself. Understandable, considering his chosen low-paying profession. He was tall and lanky, the latter a condition I assumed to be the result of not having the money to eat three solids a day. I was glad to be taking him out for a meal, even if it was in a bar I couldn’t afford. His one luxury seemed to be the constant stream of cigarettes he was smoking, the brand of which was unfamiliar to me.
“Well, that sounds like a great idea,” he responded, making that the first time anyone had said they liked my outrageous plan. “What would you need me to do?”
Uh, everything?
“Well, for starters,” I said timidly, “you could show me how the 16mm camera works.”
“I could come to Flint and shoot some of it for you,” Kevin said out of nowhere. I wanted him to repeat that, but I was afraid if he did, it might turn out that he had actually said, I’ll have another Heineken, please, from the tap.
“Really?” I asked, fingers crossed.
“Sure. I could bring my equipment, and maybe some of my crew would come. I think even Anne Bohlen [his co-director on their American Nazi film, Blood in the Face] might come.”
This was way beyond what I was expecting, and, if truth be told, I was really thinking a “good luck” and “see you next time” would be all I’d get.
“Wow,” I said, my face feeling flush, “that would be so incredible. I mean, I wasn’t expecting that, but…”
“No, it would be fun. And I can show you what you need to know. I could give you a week of my time.”
Here Comes Trouble Page 33