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In the following decade, 1988 to be exact, I volunteered with the great organization, Frontline Foundation, to deliver lunch by van to homeless encampments throughout downtown Los Angeles, which included the streets and alleys of Skid Row and outlying areas along the train tracks where communities of people lived. It was the heyday of crack cocaine and its ravages were shocking. The poverty was overwhelming. AIDS was wreaking havoc and claiming lives, and the disenfranchised stricken people who accepted Frontline's food did so with gratitude and humility.
At the end of the next decade, the 90's, and into the new millennium, I was Program Director of a joint venture between the City of L.A. and the adult division of the Los Angeles Unified School District for which I placed educational programs in Community Based Organizations; some along Skid Row. Drugs, mental illness, alcoholism and hard luck were still the qualifiers that populated Skid Row - yet as had always been my experience, the residents were engaging and familial as they battled their many demons. I never feared them. I simply feared for them.
It was this thirty years of mingling with and experiencing the folks on Skid Row that so appalled me as I watched them portrayed in raging crowd scenes as lawless and incoherent by The Soloist's British director, Joe Wright - who in my opinion was an odd choice to helm this film. Rather than expose their humanity, Wright, whose previous works include period pieces "Pride and Prejudice" and "Atonement," focused on the harshest aspects of their personae, rendering them unsympathetic and cartoon-like.
Countering my claim that Wright was a poor choice, Steve Lopez told me he believed Wright was the right choice because he stayed fully invested when making the film. According to Lopez and others close to the project, Wright, at first, didn't want to do the film. But he came to Los Angeles and spent ten days with the people on Skid Row. He then went forward with the film.
Somehow I'm expected to believe that in the ten days Britisher Wright languished on Skid Row he miraculously "got" the community, absorbed its nuanced layers, and understood mental illness and poverty well enough to honestly portray the 500 residents he hired on as extras. If that were true, why then did Wright encourage the over-the-top behaviors that further exploited the residents? Was it simply to mirror his idol, Federico Fellini, by creating outlandish imitations of real people?
Director Wright committed a major injustice against the Skid Row community by creating a monolith of inhumanity which he melded them into. Throngs and throngs of drug crazed, illness crazed, violence crazed people who rarely displayed a single lucid moment. Rather than pay respect to their suffering, Wright placed them in a cinematic stupor and filmed them in a Fellini-esque haze.
But where Fellini created cartoons from actors he hired to play cartoons, Wright created cartoons from people he hired to play themselves. Lest anyone doubt Joe Wright's fidelity to Fellini, here's Wright in a London interview discussing the iconic director:
I also think a lot of literary people presume that literature and the written word have a monopoly over internal truth and I personally, as a dyslexic, don't agree with that. I think, to me, the films of Fellini or Bergman or the great classical masters of the medium spoke just as much truth as Tolstoy or Dickens.Wright's philosophy that cinema is the purveyor of truth, wholly equal to its literary model, was welcomed by Steve Lopez who authorized Wright to make any cinematic alterations to his book that Wright desired. Of course those who know Hollywood understand that writers must abdicate control of their work to studios and directors. Thus Lopez had little choice. Still, as Lopez told me:
I'm often surprised at how many people expect a book to be like a movie. I thought that in this movie they made all the right moves and pushed all the right buttons.Those moves Lopez refers to were clear deviations from his book. When I asked Lopez if the crowd scenes in the movie on San Julian Street outside the Lamp Community were as populated, lawless and frenetic as when he actually visited Nathaniel, Lopez admitted the film did take liberties with those scenes, as it also did by depicting Lopez as divorced, living alone, when in reality he lives with his wife and daughter. Lopez explained:
There's no reason for an artistic contribution to be exactly like a piece of art that already exists.Lopez asked if I accepted that philosophy and I told him I believed the quality test for a film based on a book is how closely the film resembles the book. I used the immensely popular Harry Potter series as the example where film goers would be gravely disappointed if the films deviated from the content of the books. Lopez stated this wasn't as critical for his book since his was read by just 100,000 people. Still those 100,000 readers who view the film might be disappointed if the test for mirroring the original isn't met. But Wright's artistic license sacrificed more than a couple of facts. It sacrificed an entire community of already disadvantaged people to provide Wright's preferred backdrop of rampant drugs, violence and derangement. In a town Steve Lopez contends is driven by the individual:
A lot of people believe this is a real community but it's more about the individualJoe Wright fully ignored the individual to create a monolith with no singularity or depth. Yet all around the Lamp Community (Nathaniel's service provider in fact and film), and up and down Skid Row, countless acts of kindness are carried out each day. Allow me to introduce you to CJ, who Jamie and I encountered just by walking along the street.
(Photo by Linda Milazzo)
CJ spends what little money she has to care for a community of cats living behind the gates of San Julian Park - a park the Safer City Initiative has shut CJ and her community out of.
Tell me, Joe Wright, where are the CJ's in your movie? I understand Nathaniel Ayers was the focus of your film. And your film, like all films, is constrained by time and budget. But surely, two minutes cut from an unruly crowd scene could have lit the way for CJ, or someone like CJ, who doesn't shy away from cameras. CJ regularly visits San Julian park just down the street from Lamp Community - a principal venue for your film.
I've heard from Steve Lopez, The Soloist's co-producer Gary Foster and its music advisor, Ben Hong, who appeared together on a panel at UCLA, that making this film was transformational and the experience changed them forever. Gary Foster says he still maintains relationships with some of the folks he met, including a woman named Detroit who calls his office nearly every day.
Lopez told me directly that Joe Wright, who I didn't get to interview for this piece, was also profoundly affected by the folks on Skid Row. But for all his supposed deeply felt connection, Wright was either unable to, or disinclined to translate the residents' individuality, humanity, and sense of community to his film.
Two days ago I had a discussion with Casey Huran, Executive Director of Lamp Community, about what life is like on Skid Row. Casey told me the following: There are tens of thousands of Nathaniels who have extraordinary contributions, gifts and talents who have been marginalized from our mainstream society at our great loss. There's a peacefulness, a joy, a camaraderie that's almost an enigma. When you're talking to people you feel their joy. It rubs off on you. People are so kind. I've traveled the world and have never seen the level of community I've found here.Tell me, Joe Wright, where is this Skid Row in your movie?? Collaborating on this article: Jamie Romano, Advocate for the Skid Row Community
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