Housing Crisis Gets Star Billing in New “Fresno” Documentary
“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” teamed Fortune magazine writer James Agee and American photographer Walker Evans in a Depression era masterpiece about three poverty-stricken sharecropper families in America’s deep South in 1936.
“Fresno” is the work of documentary film maker Stephen Payne, who’s made a 70-minute piece that places the California city in one of the housing crisis’ ground zeros.
Reports the Fresno Bee.
[Steve Payne says] “My budget covers Fresno. By studying something small and understandable like Fresno, it makes it feel like you can get a handle on this.”
Fresno also fit the bill economically. A recent study by the Brookings Institution ranked Fresno seventh on a list of the largest 100 cities hardest hit by the recession.
Also, Fresno has the 14th-highest rate of home foreclosure in the country.
Payne says he made six trips to Fresno, starting three months ago and ended filming with about 35 hours of footage that he’s boiled down to about 70 minutes.
“I thought I could be done with this thing in two or three visits,” Payne says. “But as I got a little more into it, I realized I needed to spend a little more time on this, or else it wouldn’t do it justice.”
Asked how the finished product manages to weave the various stories together, he said: “It just does.”
“It’s one of those odd little things where if you tried too hard to make it work, it would look fake,” Payne says. “By just cutting between these things it just seems to flow. I liken it to a good cocktail. It’s like a Bloody Mary — on paper it doesn’t look very good. But actually on several Sunday mornings I would climb over my dead granny to get one.”
One of the stars of “Fresno” is Josh Peacock, who was at the center of all the news stories about the pool-raiding skateboarders.
He is currently being followed for another documentary produced by a Hollywood agency that’s behind numerous cable reality shows. Peacock also produced his own pool-skating video called “Cancer Dust,” that was mostly filmed in Fresno and is available at Herb Bauer’s Boardshop, SBI or his own Web site (www.fresnopools.blogspot.com).
The Skateropolis blog has posted this clip of the film’s trailer.
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