TV Documentary on Los Angeles’ Homeless Looking for a Home

Tom Seidman has almost completed his documentary about the city’s homeless, titled “Lost Angeles.” He spent months befriending and mingling with his subjects, then many more months editing his 40 hours of footage into 55 minutes of compelling video, lacking only a final cut that would include polishing and production credits.

And now, a year later, his documentary is homeless, too.

“With all the stations in this market, broadcasting 18 hours a day, you’d think there would be an hour somewhere,” Seidman lamented about his failure to obtain a TV commitment now for the documentary he made with his heart and $16,000 of his own money.

“Lost Angeles” is the first documentary for the 39-year-old Seidman, who works as an assistant director in the movie industry. His plight is typical of the frustrating, rejection-paved road traveled by most independent documentarians.

That “Lost Angeles” truly deserves airing, that its raw honesty and power far overshadow its inelegance and narrative gaps, may not matter much in the fiercely competitive scramble for air time. Although the small documentary seems to be resurging somewhat on some independent stations and public TV, space is still at a premium and it’s a buyer’s market.

“People go out and find a cause they believe in and then they pour their heart into it,” said Harrison Engle, vice president of the International Documentary Assn., which aims to expand opportunities for independent film makers such as Seidman.

“Partly it’s their naivete and unfamiliarity with the marketplace.”

In fairness, Seidman at one point had a chance to place his documentary on KHJ-TV Channel 9. But that opportunity evaporated. Moreover, he has not explored all potential avenues, specifically cable TV and most significantly the documentary-minded Discovery Channel--the low-paying stop of last resort that often accommodates the “nice little film” that gets vetoed elsewhere. The Discovery Channel has already aired three short documentaries on homelessness in Los Angeles in the past year.

But the Discovery Channel is unavailable to much of this metropolitan area, including Seidman’s own cableless Studio City neighborhood.

“My thrust was always to get ‘Lost Angeles’ on local broadcast television so that it can be seen by the people who are down there (on Skid Row),” he said.

With Seidman as occasional narrator, “Lost Angeles” offers an insider’s-eye view of the urban campground near downtown that was run by the Salvation Army and sanctioned by the city as a temporary alternative for the homeless from June 15 to Sept. 25, 1987. Some of the homeless there were Seidman’s subjects and--to hold down costs--his crew.

Why this topic for his first documentary?

“I was drawn to Skid Row and I don’t know why,” he said. “I started to go down there and wander around. Then after a party for my 38th birthday, I took the leftover food to a street encampment and began to know the people there.”

That was about the time the city began sweeping the homeless from the streets. About 600 of them ultimately ended up in the urban camp.

“The camp was a finite event in time, and it seemed to me that it was an opportunity for the city and the homeless to come together and mutually address problems that were facing both of them,” Seidman said.

“There was a lot of optimism among the homeless that this could be the start of something very positive, that there would be a building or something permanent (for the homeless) coming out of this camp.”

That optimism disappears in the course of “Lost Angeles.” What makes the documentary work on a very basic level, however, is its intimacy. The characters that Seidman follows include a singer-composer who loses custody of her child, a man named Mickey who seems on the right track when he gets a gardening job, and a likable couple named Nate and Judy who take a positive step by trading homeless life for a dingy apartment.

More than anything else, “Lost Angeles” vividly shows the deep psychological scars borne by these street people.

“It’s like a disease,” Seidman said, “and if you’re down there long enough, you catch it.”

Absent from Seidman’s documentary are downtown’s familiar babbling winos and panhandlers.

“I may have gyrated a little more toward the people who were more intelligent and charismatic, because as a film maker you want to shoot people who are interesting,” Seidman said.

“But this was a fairly typical slice that was very close to my experience of living down there. What impressed was how sensitive and articulate these people are. They are not a bunch of bozos walking into the wall.”

It’s been Seidman, in fact, who has been mostly hitting walls in trying to interest local stations in his documentary. Some don’t accept documentaries from outsiders. Some don’t like the program. Others find it dated, even though the homeless problem it addresses seems almost eternal.

“It’s very hard to place independent documentaries on stations,” Engle said. “Usually they just don’t fall into the commercial, Nielsen-oriented mix or they don’t have the kind of professional polish they are looking for.

“Television is pretty much a mainstream medium. So these films that may represent very valid but narrower points of view simply fall though the cracks.”

The local commercial station that did show an interest in “Lost Angeles” was KHJ-TV.

“I offered Seidman a time period, but he said he had something going at KCET,” Channel 9 program director Walt Baker said. “When that fell through he came back, but we were already committed to our fall schedule and I had lost the time period.”

“I wish I had it now,” Seidman said.

Baker said that Seidman even explored buying an hour of air time at 9 p.m. on a Sunday, but found he couldn’t afford it. Seidman rejected a chance to buy cheaper time at midnight on Channel 9, fearing the audience would be too minuscule, Baker said.

“It wasn’t the best show I’d seen on this thing, but it was a good one,” he said of Seidman’s documentary. “Anything that shows the problem of the homeless is a step in the right direction.”

There is still a chance that step will be taken via KCET Channel 28, whose news and current affairs director Tom Thompson said he has recommended to the station’s program department that Seidman’s documentary be seriously considered despite its flaws.

“It ought to be seen, and I think it would have a wonderful opportunity as part of our ‘Independent Eye’ series,” Thompson said.

However, KCET won’t consider “Lost Angeles” without that final editing cut, Thompson said. And he added: “What Tom doesn’t realize is that there are probably 500 other Tom Seidmans who have tapes stacked up here. So these things take time.”

But two commodities that Seidman said he is short of are the money to finance a final cut--at least without a commitment from a station--and time. The longer “Lost Angeles” sits, he fears, the harder it will be to place.

Meanwhile, an update: Mickey the gardener abandoned his job after one day and is still on the streets with his family. And that nice couple, Nate and Judy, lost their apartment and are again in and out of Skid Row hotels.

“Lost Angeles” may disappear, but its subject won’t.