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Writer/Director Buddy Giovinazzo’s drama Life Is Hot In Cracktown starring Kerry Washington, Evan Ross, Brandon Routh, and RZA, recently opened theatrically in Los Angeles. Check out Buddy’s blog below to read his thoughts on turning his best-selling novel about the harsh realities of a neighborhood into a motion picture. Life Is Hot In Cracktown is now available on DVD (edited and unedited versions). -- Lisanne
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Life Is Hot In Cracktown began as a book of short stories written while I was living on the lower east side of NYC in 1992. I’d been haunted by things I’d seen on the street, mostly the people devastated by drugs, notably crack cocaine and the violence that always seemed to accompany the drug, and so I began to write fictional accounts of what these people might do at home; the hidden lives that we never get to see, I was fascinated by what that might look like.
One year later Life Is Hot In Cracktown was completed and secured a publishing contract with Neil Ortenberg at Thunder’s Mouth Press. Normally that would be the end of it. When I write a book it’s basically out of my system and I move on to another subject. But LIHIC never left my system, these characters continued to haunt me and I realized, I’d never seen anything like this depicted in film, and so I adapted the book into a screenplay and tried to set it up for production; I remember thinking at the time it should be somewhat easy--I was still fairly naïve even in my late thirties.
Several years later Larry Rattner read the script, liked it, and decided to take it on as producer, and so the film was made, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounds here. The first thing was to convince other people—people with money to finance a film like this--that this story was something worth watching, investing your time in, something that would touch an audience’s heart as well as shock and disturb them. Sure, it’s at times brutal, it’s a cruel world, and yet, the challenge was to find the heart and soul in these characters, the humanity that makes them worth rooting for. It’s a story of survival. Everyday is a new hardship, a new threat, and yet, these characters don’t cry for themselves or beg for our sympathies; if they can only survive through the day, then tomorrow will be better.
We decided to shoot the film in downtown Los Angeles as a stand-in for Anytown USA, which fit the story perfectly as crack cocaine had long since become a national epidemic. I wanted to keep it real and gritty, so I decided to shoot in a visual style that was raw, spontaneous; explosive; the feeling is that you’re watching somebody’s life unravel in front of you.
Shooting in Downtown Los Angeles was no picnic, I can tell you. It was actually more dangerous to shoot nights downtown in LA then it would have been to shoot in New York City. Because of the LA gangs and the fact that everybody has guns down there, we needed police presence for most of the shoots, augmented with an understanding from the gangs that we were doing an authentic film about street life and not some weekly crime drama. They pretty much left us alone; well, except for one night where a stabbing took place twenty minutes before we arrived to shoot the scene where Romeo kills Pepperton, the drug king, in cold blood; the police were hosing down the sidewalk as we unloaded the trucks to shoot. They said it was nothing special, just a typical Friday night disagreement among friends.
An interesting difference of shooting in LA is that the streets, even in very bad neighborhoods, are relatively free of garbage and junk. In New York bad neighborhoods look like bad neighborhoods, but in LA it was just the opposite, so we brought with us at all times a truck filled with trash bags, junk, old baby carriages, tires, rugs, everything. When we’d get to a location we’d unload the truck and dump everything onto the sidewalk; this was more in keeping with my vision of poverty and deprivation; it was at least true to what I’d seen and experienced in my life. One night we were shooting a scene between Kerry Washington and Desmond Harrington on the street, and we took a break for a few minutes, when we returned, all the garbage--a filthy rug, a broken chair and a tire—had been taken. I remember standing there on the street, in wonder, followed by amusement, but then I realized it was actually pretty sad, and that brought me right back to the reason I was making this film.
Attracting a talented cast was probably the greatest challenge in a film like LIHIC because if the characters don’t elicit sympathy or at least our understanding, how could we connect with them; why should we follow them, or care what happens to them? As a director you live or die by your cast, so in that regard Lina Todd, our casting director, began to contact the best and brightest actors she could find, most notably Kerry Washington, who was the first to come on board. Kerry is one of the bravest actors out there, and she saw immediately the heart and soul of these people and threw her support behind me and the project, and because of Kerry’s initial enthusiasm and support, we were able to attract the other name talent: Evan Ross, Victor Rasuk, Brandon Routh, Illeana Douglas, Lara Flynn Boyle, RZA, Shannyn Sossamon, Vondie Curtis Hall, Desmond Harrington, Edoardo Ballerini, Mark Webber, Thomas Ian Nicholas, etc.
All the actors came to this project with abandon; they were prepared for anything, and shooting on real locations most of the time gave them a primal edge, and probably a bit of fear as well. But it was a commitment and a desire to show another color of their talent, to show what they could really do, that I think was most rewarding and attractive to them—How else do you get Superman to smoke crack in your movie? During the shoot I challenged them to go for the extreme, not only on the cutting edge but way over it; to show a truth and a grittiness that they normally would never get a chance to show in their work; and yet, they portrayed these lives with sensitivity and authenticity; humanity.
All right, I know, I’m the director, of course I’m going to say that. But it’s true, just watch the film. Life Is Hot In Cracktown is a journey into a dark and very real world that exists on the periphery of our own “normal” world; it’s both disturbing and enlightening, always exciting. Sit back and enjoy the ride. - Buddy Giovinazzo
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