A Leg Up, Not a Handout : Independent Hollywood Company Hires the Homeless for ‘Jeremiah Pollock’

A white Lincoln Continental with two well-dressed couples inside slows down to a near-crawl, four faces all but pressed against the windows, as it cruises eastward on 9th Street in the early morning hours. Though they aren’t about to stop and ask questions, this being one of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in downtown Los Angeles, the couples can’t help but stare at the klieg light-illuminated commotion on the sidewalk.

A group of about 35 shabbily dressed men, most of them black, seems to be clamoring for someone’s attention in front of a motion picture camera mounted on a crane. The Continental driver and passengers no doubt are wondering if the camera subjects are homeless people causing some sort of scene or merely actors.

The answer: both.

Skid Row denizens have been recruited not only as extras but as supporting actors and even crew members on the set of “Jeremiah Pollock: The Life of an American Saint,” an independently produced drama shooting on location downtown and in Glendale.

Hiring street people is, in the selfish sense, an attempt at gleaning utmost authenticity by using the real homeless McCoys, and, on a more altruistic level, an attempt to put something back into the community while taking dramatic license from it.

The steps taken have been unusual for a Hollywood production: Three homeless people have been hired as paid interns, each of whom will, at the end of production, be provided with first and last months’ rent and security deposit money in order to hold down an apartment while looking for the next job. A small percentage of the film’s pre-profit receipts as well as net gross have been earmarked for homeless charities. And then there are those--some down on their luck, some mentally ill--who’ve been picked to be in the movie.

As written and directed by Eames Demetrios, an award-winning documentarian making his first dramatic film, “Jeremiah Pollock” is a heavily stylized, tragicomic fable about a wealthy computer wizard who takes drastic measures to help the homeless and, in the process, tries in vain to absolve his own guilt. In the scene being shot, the Pollock character has just given the penniless locals an access code that will allow them to withdraw unauthorized cash from bank automatic teller machines, and chaos is about to ensue.

No chaos on the set, though. The film crew and the Skid Row folk have been getting along on this six-week shoot with minimal problems, though each group feels out of its element at certain points in the production. This morning, working in a “bad” area on a 7-p.m.-to-7-a.m. shooting schedule, it’s the crew’s turn to get a little nervous.

“I was quaking in my boots earlier, but it’s OK,” said a female production assistant. “This is supposed to be the worst night of the month down here, because welfare checks just came out.” And more money means more crack, at least on this end of the Row, where missions are few and pipes are plentiful.

The smokers are huddling safely away in the dark around the corner, though. And the more sober locals gathered to be immortalized in the mob scene seem pleased to have been made a part of the film’s making and not left as onlookers. That inclusion is never a given, even when other movie crews come to the neighborhood to use East Skid Row’s mean streets as a colorful set.

Mike Neely, the director of the Homeless Outreach Project located on this same block, has a beef with Hollywood invading his constituents’ turf.

There was a big Hollywood production company that “shot a movie about the homeless down here this summer, and guess what they did?” asks Neely. “They brought in homeless people from central casting! Like we need more homeless people down here. They brought cardboard boxes down. Hey, we’ve got tons of cardboard boxes already. People here said, ‘They got people made up to act homeless, and I’m already homeless!’ Out of a $20-million budget, this community got (nothing). That burns me up. If that’s not exploiting the community, what is?

“That’s insensitivity, but this is sensitivity,” adds Neely, who has been a bridge between the community and the “Jeremiah Pollock” filmmakers. Vegetarian meals for the crew and Skid Row extras alike are being served up in the Outreach Project’s headquarters this morning. “It demonstrates how a production company can work with a disadvantaged community and both of them can derive some benefit.

“We haven’t imported anybody--they’re all from right down here, all races, all creeds represented. I’ve been really pleased at the way it worked out, that our community had an opportunity to demonstrate we can do something. As you can see, this is not an unruly group of people. Just regular people. Nobody came up and threatened to hit you on the head.”

Still, it’s not a setting that lacks the potential for problems, and everyone is keeping their eyes open as the late-night hours fly by.

“I went down to the doughnut shop to get cigarettes and there were 17 guys standing outside smoking crack,” says Mary Ann Dolcemascolo, the unit still photographer. “And that was before sundown. Imagine what it’s gonna be like at 3 in the morning. I used to hang around down here and shoot four or five years ago, but things have gotten worse. Too much drugs. There used to be more families.” (The dark storefront of Para Los Ninos, a support center for homeless parents and children, is a few doors down.)

The last time Dolcemascolo worked in this neighborhood was when the gang-themed movie “Colors” shot some scenes nearby. Representatives of that production had walked through the area well in advance and solicited the cooperation of the locals, “but there’s always people who aren’t around and don’t hear and then want to create a problem . . . They were stoning the van.”

“So many people that come down here to shoot, they take away,” says Southern Comfort, a member of the Homeless Writers Coalition who uses the liquor moniker as his stage name. “They have actors that walk out of wardrobe all smudged up. In my way of thinking, they could at least hire two or three (homeless) guys to walk in back, and that would be a way of putting something back.

“This is a low-budget movie, and they’re not making lots of money, but they’re doing something,” he says. “And it’s taking guys away from doing something that could be detrimental to them or land them in jail. There’s a lot of creativity down here. If you don’t have somewhere to exert that, it can turn into a negative thing. It’s good to be around other artists and not around other non-productive things.”

The clash of cultures wasn’t always a smooth blending on the set. One of the three homeless production interns, Rick (he preferred not to give his last name), told of one early misunderstanding.

“They have stereotypes about us, and we have ‘em about them. Just by the nature of many of us being black while many of them are white, and that many of us either live or have lived on Skid Row, when certain funny, strange things happen, automatically you tend to think it’s some kind of prejudice or discrimination.

“There were incidents. They brought some people out that were living right on the sidewalk and used them as movie extras. And there’s a standard procedure in Hollywood, I guess, that the crew members eat first, and the extras really are almost like second-class citizens. When we were treated this way, we automatically thought it was because we were from Skid Row and they were better than us.

“I was getting mad about some of these things. It wasn’t intended, but we didn’t know that that’s how Hollywood works, that that’s their procedure, that these people eat first and we don’t. We thought it was some kind of slight to us, and it was just a misunderstanding.

“But I think, on their part, they should have possibly more looked into this ahead of time. Like, say, if you were making a movie about gang members, and you had gang members as extras, and you made them do different things that the other people didn’t do--they may get mad and blow up the set, see.”

“That’s Walt Disney’s nephew!” whispers one of the extras to another, pointing across 9th Street toward Tim Disney, the film’s executive producer. The excited extra was off by only a little: Disney is the son of Roy Disney Jr., who was the son of Walt’s brother Roy.

There’s no mistaking “Jeremiah Pollock” for a Touchstone release, however, in either theme or budget. Disney did work for Walt Disney Pictures a few years back, in the animation department--he co-wrote the hit “Oliver and Company”--but has moved on to smaller and better things.

The projected budget for “Jeremiah Pollock” is about $350,000, which, Disney admits, is about as inexpensively as you can make a full-length feature using 35-millimeter film stock. (The picture is being shot in black and white.) He hopes to give it a good send-off at one of the prestigious film festivals next year, to be followed by a run in selected theaters along the lines of, he says, previous indie hits like “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Drugstore Cowboy.”

Writer-director Eames Demetrios also hails from interesting stock, as the son of San Francisco sculptor Aristides Demetrios and grandson of designer Charles Eames. After several critically hailed documentaries, including ones focusing on the legacies of his father and grandfather, he approached Tim Disney--an old Harvard classmate--with the idea for a film that would center around homelessness from a different perspective.

“I think it’s going to surprise people,” says Disney, “because it’s a more abstract treatment of the issue than they’re expecting. It’s not a feel-good movie where homeless guy makes good. And it’s not a documentary, which is I guess the only thing that’s been made about the subject except for some TV films.”

Straightforward it’s not. In addition to providing the street people with access to unlimited, unauthorized cash from bank machines, the title character also decides to go on a secret hunger strike until homelessness is ended--that is, until his death. The film’s stylization comes in with this semi-hallucinating character’s awareness of Los Angeles as a literal urban wilderness. It’ll be on the surreal side, especially for any viewers led by the title to expect a Mitch Snyder-style saint instead of the movie’s somewhat cracked hero.

“I think it’s going to be a stretch for some audiences,” says Disney, “but that’s what’s gonna save it from being overly didactic. It’s a hard subject to talk about without being heavy-handed. I think the abstract elements embellish or illustrate things without having to put it into words all the time.”

And though the hero manages to provide the homeless with cash, most of them then use it to buy drugs, with the exception of Jeremiah’s chief antagonist, Gregor, who buys a vacant lot and starts a farm. The message is that the homeless must eventually be “ready to help themselves,” equipped with the tools of self-reliance.

“The point is not to say that people are bad because they’re taking drugs,” Demetrios explains. “What we’re saying is that these problems are so complex and deep-seated that you can’t solve it just by handing somebody money, if you don’t offer any (psychological) reconstruction of their lives. The way we usually solve big problems in our society is either by throwing money at them or by symbolic action, neither of which is adequate. Something better is required.”

But isn’t hiring a few homeless people for this production also a token act, not quite as grand as the title character’s movie martyrdom, but ultimately just as symbolic?

“The way this industry works is, people say ‘I’m looking for a production assistant,’ and we’re trying to bring people into that network. That would be the real victory. We’ll see if that happens. That was our plan, not just to offer a quick fix but to get people into a situation where they could get a work history, because it’s very hard to get a work history if you don’t have an address. And then give people a leg to stand on after the film, the leg being the first and last months’ rent so they’ll have a base from which to look for employment.”

And what if, instead, the money is used in real life the same way as in the script?

“When we went and shot downtown, and paid the extras money, I’m sure a lot of them used that money to buy drugs,” says Disney. “But that’s not a responsibility that we can take on. We can’t decide for them how they spend their money. Some of those people probably also bought food for their babies.”

Florence Hawkins, an artist from the Skid Row area who was hired to paint some of the surreal set backdrops, believes she’ll go on to other film jobs through this introduction to the business.

“When they hired me, it was like a dream come true, because it gives me an opportunity not only to get a nice resume going but to go to other companies when this project is over,” she says. “They intend to give me a letter of recommendation. At least I hope so.”

Disney admits that, in the midst of encouragement, he’s tried not to raise the interns’ hopes too high about their prospects for continued employment in the film business.

“We tried to be optimistic but to stress that it’s a competitive business,” Disney says. “That’s a serious problem we tried to deal with carefully. But we’re a film company, so there’s only so much we can do. We’re not a career counseling organization. I wish our organization could exist long enough to follow up--because follow-up is something that’s lacking in most homeless programs.

“Still, I think if all small businesses took on a small program like ours, it would make a world of difference. But nobody seems willing to help. Certainly, the taxpayers don’t.”

Meanwhile, if central casting needs any more credible street people the next time Hollywood comes calling, there’ll be a “Jeremiah Pollock” alumni cast list available. A few may be harder than others to reach--some of the actors list street-corner pay phones or shelter or flophouse lobby phones as their home numbers on the call-up sheet--but the savings in superfluous makeup and wardrobe personnel for that special stubble look might be worth the extra trouble. Cardboard boxes available on request.