Chavez Ravine
Jordan’s award-winning 2003 short documentary tells the bittersweet story of how a Mexican-American neighborhood in Los Angeles was destroyed to build Dodger Stadium — a community betrayed by greed, political hypocrisy, and good intentions gone astray.
About Chavez Ravine
For me, it started when Don Normark, my college roommate’s dad, came to dinner. My wife Jennifer and I had just moved to L.A., and Don told us a fascinating, bittersweet story about our new neighborhood.
A Los Angeles Story
As a young photographer in 1949, Don had become enchanted by a trio of close-knit Mexican American villages on a hill overlooking downtown L.A. Don spent a year taking beautiful, intimate pictures of neighborhood life. He didn’t know he was capturing the last images of a place that was about to be wiped off the map.
A few years later, it was all gone – 300 families, church and school, evicted to make way for a low-income public housing project that was never built. Instead, the city sold the land to Brooklyn Dodgers baseball owner Walter O’Malley, who built Dodger Stadium on the site — leaving a residue of bitterness that still echoes in Latino L.A.
Fifty Years Later
It had taken Don fifty years to get his pictures published as a book. Now the book was getting a lot of interest, and Don was looking for the right filmmaker to translate the story of Chavez Ravine to film. For some reason, my one film credit — Waiting for Dark, a student film I’d shot in Cuba — gave him the idea I was that person.
I explained that my background was in video games, that I’d come to L.A. hoping to make Hollywood action-adventure movies, and I didn’t know how to make documentaries. This did not deter Don. More importantly, it didn’t deter Jennifer.
So we got started. The first interview we shot was with Frank Wilkinson, the 86-year-old former assistant director of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. Hearing his riveting testimony, I knew this was a film I had to make.
Making the Film
Over the next three years, with a shoestring budget and a volunteer crew including director of photography Andy Andersen and producers Mark Moran and Tomi Pierce (all alumni of The Last Express), we shot interviews with former residents of Chavez Ravine. I edited footage on weekends while commuting between L.A. and Montreal to work on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
We applied for funding, but never got any. But we got something better: Ry Cooder, on seeing the rough cut, offered to contribute a musical score (which he went on to develop into a stand-alone album) and Cheech Marin volunteered to do the narration. Their talent and credibility helped keep the project alive.
Once the film was finished, we had a stroke of luck: Chavez Ravine won the 2003 IDA award for Best Short Documentary. PBS subsequently picked up the rights. The film premiered on PBS Independent Lens in 2005 and was short-listed for an Academy Award nomination.
(A highlight of the IDA awards ceremony was the moving speech given to honor David Attenborough by Sir Ben Kingsley… who subsequently starred in the Prince of Persia movie. Life is strange.)
Memories
Making Chavez Ravine was an experience like nothing else I’ve done. Former residents have told me how much the film has meant to them, even that it brought their families closer together. As a filmmaker, that’s the best accolade I could wish for. I’m grateful to everyone who put their hearts and talents into bringing this film to completion and, especially, to Don Normark for entrusting me with his story.
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Wow, have to track down this movie. Sounds intriguing.
Ya, I’d say it’s really xpensive at bullfrog – bullfrog wants 195 for the dvd, and 45 to rent.. wowza… I really want to see this film but i’m a starving artist.. like really starving, i’m a painter… can you get a copy to vidiots.. ? I have heard GREAT things about this film really want to see it
Thanks.
Nadia
The Bullfrog Films prices are for colleges, high schools, libraries that are buying the film to show to students or groups continually over time. That’s their main market. The high price includes a public performance rights license that allows the institutions to do this and comply with copyright law.
I did a quick google search, and it’s available on Amazon.com for home use for less than $20.
The Chavez Ravine story is mentioned in Michael Connelly’s novel Echo Park, which I’m re-reading at the moment. Fiction and reality connect!
And the Ry Cooder album is worth a listen too.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chavez-Ravine-Ry-Cooder/dp/B0009353IW
It takes a film like this to bring the human cost surrounding ‘eminent domain’ close to people; my thanks go to Jordan and all involved in making it.
But to derive lessons from such histories we must go beyond the particular and seek truths that are invariant. Is there a valid “larger interest” that justifies the destruction of people’s homes and neighborhoods?
I’ll quote Anthony Gregory, who has a gift for words surpassing mine, to address the the claim of “just compensation’”:
“Oftentimes, the state claims it is offering a “fair market value” for the property it seeks to seize, but this is a sham. The market price for something is, by definition, the price that both parties consent to. In a fair market exchange, each party gives up something he values less for something he values more, or else he wouldn’t agree to it.
It is only through such a voluntary transaction that we can determine what something’s market value is in the first place. Market value is not universal, but particular to the assets exchanged in a specific transaction. For any given piece of property, there can be no market value without market exchange.”
Source: http://mises.org/daily/2379
For those curious about issues related to those raised here, I reccommend Murray N. Rothbard’s “Man, Economy and State”
http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap15d.asp