‘STREETWISE’ MAKERS--’IT STILL MAKES ME CRY’

Twelve hundred miles from home, wandering among a glittering Hollywood crowd at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on a glorious Southern California evening, Tiny was enjoying the good life.

Dressed in a rented tuxedo, Tiny, the 14-year-old focus of the documentary “Streetwise,” was attending the glamorous Academy Awards ceremonies. Tiny was not a little impressed. She dreamed of becoming a movie star herself, of “being really rich, with three yachts or more.”

Her fantasy did not last out the evening.

“Streetwise,” nominated for best documentary feature this year, lost to “The Times of Harvey Milk.” When that decision was announced, Tiny ran out to the pavilion lobby, threw down her corsage, crushed it with her heel and cried.

Worse news awaited Tiny. She was given a card from a producer at the awards ceremony. But the producer, it turned out, apparently wanted nothing more than to be treated like Tiny’s customers on the Seattle streets.

Tiny is a prostitute.

Fortunately for Tiny, the daughter of an alcoholic mother, “Streetwise” director Martin Bell called this “producer” first, found that “he was a complete sleaze” and, at Tiny’s insistence, tore up his card.

Art, in this instance, would not imitate life.

“Streetwise” (Fox International) is the story of a group of runaway and throwaway children--Tiny included--scratching out a desperate existence on the streets of Seattle, a city not known for its seamy side. For Bell and his wife, award-winning photographer Mary Ellen Mark, making the film was almost as draining on them as it is for audiences to watch.

“It’s a very emotional experience,” Bell said in a recent interview, “because what you’re looking at is something so horrific. And yet what you’re getting as a film maker is incredible film.

“For instance, Tiny gets into the car with a john right in front of my nose. I can’t believe it. I’m so excited. Here I have piece of film that’s very good for the movie. And then I realize what she’s doing to herself. I’m thinking, ‘Great film!’--and then I’m destroyed.”

Bell and Mark invested more than emotion in the project. Halfway through filming, the hastily formed production company ran out of funding.

“We suddenly found out we didn’t have any money, but we knew we had something great, something very special,” Mark said. “We knew that we couldn’t stop, it was just impossible. I took all the savings I had and wrote a check. Cheryl (McCall, the writer of a 1983 Life magazine article from which the film grew, and the film’s producer) took her Time Inc. stock and sold it all.”

As the new money dwindled, the crew worked faster, spending two months working six, sometimes seven days a week, 14 hours a day.

But Bell and Mark insist--their dedication to the project notwithstanding--that the film is not a crusade of any sort. “I hate that!” said Mark. “I hate being called a crusader.”

They will even tell you that they have no expectations that the film will have much of an impact. “I’ve been working for 20 years as a documentary still photographer,” said Mark, whose work includes the photographic study of Bombay prostitutes entitled “Falkland Road.” “I’ve always done as many social documentary stories as I could do. And I’ve done them because I’ve felt it was important for people to know that situations like this exist, and it was important to open people’s eyes and make them aware.

“But I’ve never, ever , once believed that I could actually effect change. To presume that you can actually turn them around and change their lives is to presume too much.”

Not that the two don’t care deeply about the film or its subjects. “The film still gets me,” Mark said. “It still makes me cry. I think the film goes far beyond anything that I’ve ever been able to achieve as a still photographer.”

The film is enjoying lavish reviews across the country, and Tiny will be interviewed on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday.

“I showed the film to a person at Paramount Pictures,” Bell said, “and he said, ‘Where are these kids now?’

“And I said, ‘They’re on the street.’

“And he said, ‘They’re on the street? How can they be on the street?’

“I’m sure he didn’t realize it’s a documentary,” Bell explained. “He somehow expected that magically all these kids’ lives would be transformed.”

Indeed, the children of “Streetwise” continue hustling the sidewalks of Seattle, except for the one who hanged himself in prison, his hope finally drained completely.

Months after the end of shooting, with a rough cut of the film in hand, Bell learned of the boy’s suicide. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

The production company returned immediately to Seattle, filmed the funeral--which was only attended by a few adults--and inserted it as the crashing conclusion. The funeral, Bell said, “really nails down the film. You know right there that this can happen, and this does happen.”

(Some of the “Streetwise” children, all of whom consented to be in the film, were reportedly upset that it did not include a separate memorial service that they had held a week later.)

“I think the kids are proud of the film, and I think that’s important,” Mark said. She described the first screening of the film to the children as “most frightening. I thought if they didn’t like it, we had really failed. But at the end, they were crying, hugging each other.”

After that screening, one of the “Streetwise” children approached Bell.

“Is this how our lives are?” he asked.

“Yes, I think it is,” Bell said.

“Well, I’m really angry and I want to hit someone,” the child responded. “The trouble is, I don’t know who to hit.”