Here Comes Trouble (46 page)

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 dressed 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.”

A whole week? In Flint?

“Kevin, I’d be happy with whatever you could do. Do you think you can teach me this stuff in a week?”

“It doesn’t take long to know how the equipment works. The most important part about making a movie is what’s in your head, your ideas, and then the beats and rhythms it moves to. Knowing how to say more with less. Having a sharp eye. Listening for the stuff happening between the lines. Having some balls. I watched you when we came to Michigan. You’ll do fine.”

At some point it dawned on me that I would have to pay him for his time, plus his crew and equipment. I was on the public dole, so I was hoping for a little mercy.

“Of course, you know, I’ll pay you for this,” I said. “Maybe we can work out something?”

“Not necessary,” he replied. “You did us a big favor with our film and
we
didn’t pay
you.
So we’ll return the favor. You don’t have to pay us anything.”

The table did not break when my jaw hit it.

“Um, wow—I don’t know what to say. Thank you. Thank you so much. I’ve had nothing but one door after another shut in my face for the past two months. This is really beyond necessary. I can’t thank you enough.”

I wanted to break down right there, but I was in New York sitting at a table in the Village with a top filmmaker, and I wanted to act as cool as possible. So I smiled. A big smile.

Kevin took me over to his edit room which was in (and I will be polite here) some back-alley location you have to walk on 4 x 12s to get there. It was in a basement on MacDougal Street. The place looked like the kind of room where a cheap Chinese restaurant might store its garbage, or maybe a dead body. No, strike that—no one would do this to the deceased, not here, no matter how rotten they were or who they owed money to.

He saw the look on my face and said that the owner of the building did some deal with him that didn’t cost him that much to put his Steenbeck editing machine down in the basement. In addition to the Steenbeck, there was what he called a “rewind table,” a few “trim bins,” and stacks and stacks of developed film. He turned the machine on and showed me some of the scenes from the Nazi film he was working on. It was cool to see the things he had shot in Michigan, and even weirder to hear my voice and see my mug on this little screen. Other than my parents’ home movies, this was the first time I’d ever seen myself in a film. I hated it and I loved it.

“You made a lot of this possible,” Kevin said. “All your best stuff will be in here.”

I went back to Flint and started to think about what I would shoot. I had to get back to San Francisco where my wife was packing us up to move to Washington, D.C., where we both had found jobs. We arrived in D.C. in January 1987, and while I was happy to have the work and the income, my thoughts were on the movie I wanted to make.

I got word that the UAW in Flint was going to hold a rally on February 11 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike. I thought this might be a good place to start shooting. I called Kevin to see what he thought about that.

“Good plan,” he said. “I’ll get everybody together, we’ll bring all the equipment with us, and I’ll go buy the film and put it on my credit card. You can pay me back when we get there.”

I wanted to say,
You have a credit card?!
but I didn’t want to offend him. I was just glad that he had one.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s about $200 for a ten-minute roll of Kodak. I’ll bring about sixty rolls. That’ll be about $12,000. Can you handle that?”

“Um, yeah,” I said, lying.

“Good. You don’t have to develop the film right away, but it’s best if you do. That’ll cost you about $12,000 more to do the developing and sound transfers.”

Gulp.

I had some money saved from my four-month job in San Francisco, but that would not be enough. I would have to sell the building that was the office for the
Flint Voice.
It was a four-bedroom house with a yard in a nice part of town. The depressed economy in Flint would get me a whopping $27,000 for it. I was all set.

Kevin, Anne, and the others arrived from New York the day before the first shoot was to begin. A friend offered his home as a place for them to stay. We met that night in his house and invited a few Flint people over to discuss ideas for the movie. Everybody had a good idea about what this movie should be. I was getting a little overwhelmed and Kevin motioned me to step outside so he could have a smoke—and a talk.

“Movies are definitely a collaborative process,” he said to me outside in the cold. “But they are not a democracy. This is your movie. You don’t hold meetings and have discussions. We shoot your ideas. We just need to get out there tomorrow and start shooting.”

Kevin’s philosophy was to just film whatever happens, cinema verité style.

“I do have an outline of the things I’d like to get,” I said, pulling the list out of my pocket.

“I don’t use shot lists,” he said. “I just shoot. But this is your movie, so we’ll do it your way.” He did not like my idea of having a little bit of a plan, but he was willing to go along. “Let’s just call this meeting to an end and get some sleep and get to work in the morning,” he said as his cigarette concluded.

“Roger,” I said—which reminded me of the title that I had come up with for the film. I decided to wait for another time to tell him. I figured he wouldn’t think much of titling something before you knew what you had.

But I knew what I had. I’d been living it for thirty years, all the while taking notes in my head. I’d been writing about Flint and GM for over a decade. I was already operating at 24 frames per second, even though I had not yet encountered a woman who raised bunnies to sell for “pets or meat,” or a deputy sheriff who evicted people from their homes on Christmas Eve, or a future Miss America parading down Flint’s main street on top of a convertible and waving at the boarded-up stores, or the elite of Flint dressing up at a party like the Great Gatsby and missing the irony, or one tourism scheme after another to convince people to spend their vacations in Flint. And I was yet to meet a man named Roger Smith.