She streets of Seattle can be be bleak and deadly. But when the streets are all you have, they become your home. It’s no secret that Seattle, like every major city in the world, has a population of homeless young people who have nowhere left to go. If you pass through Seattle’s downtown streets you'll see them, and if you get close enough, they’ll reach out and touch your life. Most of us never get that close. Streetwise is a film that takes you in too close for comfort. Based on “Streets of the Lost,” an award-winning Life article on American street kids by writer Cheryl McCall and photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark, Streetwise is a heartrending documentary filmed in Seattle’s inner city. It tells the story of the lost and confused runaways who drift through Seattle en route to adulthood or death, and it tells it in their own words. If you’re a kid on the street in Seattle, you’re one of four or five hundred youngsters who have no place to sleep, no legitimate income, and very little faith in humanity. You’re as young as eight years old, but more likely 11 to 17. You probably come from a broken home, and you have probably been sexually abused. You need food, shelter, friendship and love. You need to survive. How do you do that? You can beg...the ranks of the panhandlers in downtown Seattle get younger every day. You can steal. You can sell things that you steal, you can sell drugs, you can sell yourself. Prostitutes of both sexes line the Seattle streets at all hours. The degradation of humanity and the ruination of young lives never stops. We go home, but the beat of the street continues. The only people that street kids trust are others like themselves. They fall in love with one another, form alliances, identify their enemies. That’s why the making of Streetwise is so remarkable. Getting the cooperation of the kids who have managed to survive is no mean task. Directed by British director Martin Bell, Streetwise was filmed largely on Seattle’s Pike Street between First and Second Avenues. The film focuses on several street vets, one of whom commits suicide in the course of the documentary. The film takes us to his funeral, then goes on to other matters no less bleak. You can sense the humag lives going down the drain and flowing into the river of no return. When I went to the film’s Seattle premiere at Holy Names Academy on Capitol Hill, I found that Streetwise had become a cause celebre. Six hundred well-dressed patrons had ponied up $25 to see the film, with the proceeds destined for the Catholic Church’s Orion Center, a downtown haven for runaway youth. The movie-goers applauded generously at the movie’s end, then endured seemingly endless posturing and backslapping from the filmmakers before moving en masse into the lobby to sip wine and nibble on hors d’oeuvres. Downstairs, the post-show press conference revolved around the presence of Country star Willie Nelson. Nelson, the film’s backer, projected the most composed, laid-back persona imaginable, fielding questions with a mellow nebbish charm that offered virtually no substance. Cheryl McCall and Connie Nelson, Willie’s wife, are friends; thus, the Nelson dough to back the film and the Nelson name to promote it. “I was a kid like that,” Willie Nelson told the media. “Mostly in big cities in Texas.” “There’s no simple answer,” McCall said to end the press conference. “But I do know that these kids need love...love and understanding. That’s the bottom line.” McCall had been slightly defensive when questioned about the making of Streetwise. This may be the result of being accused by Katy Joost of staging scenes for the film. Ms. Joost, a young production assistant, was fired from the project in 1983. After the press conference, I strolled through the building’s lobby while well- groomed Seattleites discussed the film’s merits. I walked through the rain a dozen blocks west to Broadway, where small groups of reckless kids were making life rough for unwary strollers. “Hey mister, want a date?” a young punkette asked me. I declined, and kept walking, heading down Pike Street toward the bottom of the hill where Skid Road lies. Skid Road was packed. Small groups of street kids were everywhere, interspersed with their older brethren. Date offers and pleas for spare change abounded. Youngsters huddled in urine- soaked, garbage-strewn doorways, dodging the cold drizzle. The problem hadn’t changed since the making of Streetwise, other than to intensify. The trickle-down theory of social relief was still at work. Streetwise will probably never become a hit film. It’s film festival fodder, and will inevitably double-bill with other verite peers such as Pixote, a stark look at Brazilian street life. But Streetwise deserves to be seen, especially if you live in the Northwest. If it does nothing else, the film may make a star out of Baby Gramps, the Pike Place Market street busker who croons “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” twice during the course of the film. I hope its effects will be more far-reaching. I’d like to think that the proceeds from the film’s premiere and the added focus and attention on the plight of kids on the run will eventually have a beneficial effect on the problems in the streets. But for the time being, there’s no help in sight. If you don’t believe me, just go downtown and take a look yourself. Dennis Eichorn’s last article for the CSQ was on Vietnam photojournalist Tim Page. FROM JAMAICA ANI F HEMAYTALS EUGENE WED. DEC. 12 EMU BALLROOM U of 0 PORTLAND THUR. 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