lot across the street surround the Club 101. Young Doug is not due yet but the rest of the crew is ready to shoot until they discover a light meter missing. “We’ll break for breakfast,” says Van Sant. The 101 has a reputation for violence and unpredictability among its usually staggering clientele. The waitress is a pearl in a bad spot, a bright, efficient grandmotherly type who acts like this is the Ritz and Van Sant’s seedy crew of imitation vagrants are tycoons in for brunch. Gus begins needling Grasshopper about missing work the day before and his need for a shave. The needle is wry and low key but evidently sharp. Grasshopper is apologetic and embarrassed. Gus looks around the crew. “We’ve been looking for a title for Grasshopper’s function on the shoot. Shall we call him the scapegoat?” “No, the Scape-Dude!” says Pat, and the laugh rolls around the table, taking the sting off Grasshopper. Scape-Dude means Grasshopper from then on. Back out into the cold on the corner after breakfast. Doug comes kicking up the street hunched incredibly thin in his Levi jacket and pants, talking tough, every third word man,” about whose ass he’s gonna kick or rip or trash. He’s excruciatingly young and the whole crew seems to like him, to mother him. Ray starts telling Doug about the Big Fight between Gus and Tim yesterday. Pat demonstrates Gus throwing rocks at Tim’s car and yelling Fuck You!’ with appropriately lean hand signals. Doug says, “What a fuckin' trip!” and they all go around Tim's battered Dodge to show Doug the little nick in the car door made by a rock. They stand staring at the small dent—among many less distinguished dents—amazed that Gus would lose his temper. “Tim shouldn’t have acted that way to the coach,” says Ray seriously. “Gus was right to blow.” Doug and Grasshopper, not needed for the moment, clamber into the cab of the van to keep warm. “Boy, Gus is ready to flip,” says Grasshopper reverently, “he’s right on the edge. I’d say there is a possibility of a serious mental breakdown. One little tip could put him over.” Doug, tough guy, pounds the steering wheel, “Great! Let’s do it!” Grasshopper shakes his head gravely. “No way! Not me!” Doug grins, bouncing and twisting the steering wheel in delight. “I’ll do it! I’ll wring his skinny little ass!” Grasshopper is not joking. “If you do you’ll have to go through me first...” Doug whips a look sideways meeting Grasshopper’s serious eyes. “Aaah?” Grasshopper shakes his head. “That’s part of my job is to keep people from getting riled up on the set." Doug is silent, staring out through the windshield. Up the block a wide-shouldered young black guy is walking away. His hair is covered by a black plastic bag tied neatly in place. Doug bursts out angrily, “Why do these guys wear Hefty bags on their heads? How can you walk around the street and be tough when you’re wearing a Hefty bag?" An old man shuffles across the street in front of the van. “See that guy in the hat?” Doug points, “I saw him and a bunch of other dudes holed up in a doorway eating Velveeta slices!” He doesn’t know whether to be disgusted or amused. He doesn’t dare show sympathy. Grasshopper, the wise old man of 21, nods gently. “That’s the way it is down here. That's the street.” Doug looks at him amazed. “Velveeta is the street?” Grasshopper nods seriously. They both double over their own laps, laughing. .Lede. Gartner NW 6th- and Glandle^— Having rented the storefront behind Katina’s Deli, the crew creates a wino grocery overnight...with the help of expert Walt Curtis. “I went over to Baloney Joe’s,” says Walt, “and loaded my car with empty wine bottles to wash to use as props for the store. These bottles, Christ! They were covered with puke and mucous and filth. I washed and sterilized them and filled them with Kool Aid and put the caps back on. My God they were filthy! All these years of selling these bottles and this was the first time I’d ever really thought about what happened to them afterwards. The crew begins shooting the central scenes which will bind the story together. The local residents are recruited selectively to act as customers. On the sidewalk just outside, Walt Curtis stands nipping at a beer bottle and watching through the store window as his film incarnation, Tim Streeter, sells the bottles of unsweetened Kool Aid back to the winos. Doug/Johnny and Ray/Pepper are kicking their heels in a corner waiting their turn for the camera. Doug is cartooning madly with a felt-tip pen on paper napkins. A bearded monster is John Campbell, a Gumby figure labeled Gus' gets tacked up on the shelf behind the cash register. It blends with the price signs below the Tops tobacco and above the Midnight Express wine. Gus, scanning the scene for the next shot, says mildly, “Take that down.” “Don’t be so sensitive, Gus!” “Take it down.” “Oh, oh, he’s getting authoritarian.” Van Sant says, coolly, “I don’t care what you call me but this is my movie and I don’t want that in the shot.” The napkin cartoon disappears instantly. * Jlancd time:GiiwLaA dbeU— At the big rear table of the deli, the crew collapses, eating hungrily. Catching Van Sant between potato salad and sandwich comes the question. “So, what’s the redeeming social value of this flick?” Van Sant looks, uncharacteristically, surprised. “I don’t think of it in terms of its social value.’ I just think of it as my art. I’m just doing my art. It's up to the audience to decide what its value to them is.” If art is, as some wiseacre ancient once said, “The world viewed through Temperament,” it’s reasonable to assume that Van Sant’s Mala Noche will be different from Walt Curtis’s. “I respect the actors and what they’re doing,” Walt insists, “but they are not the same as the characters in the book. I would have kept them more true to the originals if I were doing this film. I would have made it almost a documentary, with a camera just following me around the streets and taking in the winos passed out in the doorways.... There’s a lot of social and political message that I would have focused on more.... But this film has taken on a life of its own. Gus says, though, that he’s going to dub in a soundtrack with real Spanish-speaking voices and my narrative stuff. He’ll have subtitles. Maybe I’ll do the narrative. I think that’s a place where I could impose my will on this film.” Reminded that political and social preachiness is one of the grounds that the book has been, justifiably, attacked on, Walt points out that the film won’t be like that. “Gus isn’t making it that way.... Gus is a very low-key guy but there’s a lot of steel in him.... But in that narrative voice-over I might be able to gain back some ground....” Katherine Dunn is a well-published novelist and writes for a number of local and national publications. Her beat is boxing. Xhe 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 human 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. 10 Clinton St. Quarterly
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