WRITER’S NOTE: As the opening paragraph indicates, this article was originally written ten years ago.
On June 27, 2012, singer and songwriter Paul Williams along with filmmaker Stephen Kessler appeared at the Nuart Theatre in support of their documentary “Paul Williams Still Alive.” After its conclusion, both men were greeted by a packed audience that had been deeply moved by what they just witnessed. The documentary follows up with Williams years after his enormous success back in the 1970s, and it finds him experiencing happiness and fulfillment in life he didn’t have back then.
Kessler has described making this documentary as “a labor of love,” but Williams quickly pointed out that it didn’t start that way. Their relationship when filming began was an uncomfortable one, but Williams eventually warmed up to Kessler, and their strong friendship proved to be very authentic as they talked with the audience at the Nuart. Kessler even went out of his way to say the following:
“I’ve never said this in front of people before, but you (Williams) were brave to do this movie.”
No one in the audience disagreed with this assessment. Williams described this as a “warts and all documentary” that shows him at his best and worst. One particular sequence, when he was co-hosting Merv Griffin’s talk show while on drugs, was one he originally wanted to be cut out as he was terribly afraid of what his kids would think about him. His son Cole, however, was in the audience, and when asked about what he thought of the documentary, he said, “It’s great dad!”
Kessler made it clear he had no intention of putting himself in this documentary, and he even said he “can’t stand movies that do that;” directors becoming the subject of their own films. His increased participation in “Paul Williams Still Alive,” however, helped to illuminate the songwriter much more than it would have without him. While Kessler keeps going back to the past, Williams looks to the future instead.
When Williams was asked when he reached his bottom as an alcoholic, he responded it happened when he started looking out the window for what he called the “tree police.” He even joked and said, “You know you’re an alcoholic when you’ve misplaced an entire decade.” What made him say this was the embarrassing truth that he forgot for a time that Ronald Reagan was once President of the United States.
Since becoming sober, Williams says he now knows what it feels like to be around people he feels safe with. He has also entered into what he calls his “Paulie Lama” period of life as he goes out of his way to pull people off of bar stools, and that he would be thrilled to work at the Betty Ford Center if asked.
1992’s “A Muppet Christmas Carol” marked the first project Williams ever did sober, and he remembered going into it feeling very scared. But after he finished working on it, he found he was able to approach his work in a more productive way:
“Success for me has to be about authenticity and honesty. Today I have to trust that I am enough. Never again will I ever let tension and my ego keep me from writing songs.” The emcee of the Nuart told us not to ask either of the two how much “Paul Williams Still Alive” cost to make or when it will come out on DVD. This is because he wants to see it again with as a big an audience in the midst of all these summer blockbusters being thrust at us. It is certainly one of the sweetest documentaries you will ever see, and to see Williams today is to see a man very comfortable with who he is and who does not need another cup of fame to feel better about himself.
“Gimme Shelter” gives audiences one of the most intimate looks at life inside a shelter for those in need they could ever hope to see. It stars Vanessa Hudgens who turns in an astonishing performance as Apple Bailey, the child of an abusive and drug addicted mother. At the film’s beginning, Apple runs away from home and seeks out her biological father, a Wall Street banker named Tom Fitzpatrick (played by Brendan Fraser) who does what he can to help her out, but she ends up running away upon discovering she’s pregnant, and because Tom isn’t excited about her wanting to keep the baby. After a couple of nights on the streets and a nasty car accident, Apple finds her way to a shelter for young pregnant women run which is run by a spiritual woman, and it is there that she begins to feel a sense of hope for the first time in her life.
“Gimme Shelter” was written and directed by Ronald Krauss who actually spent some time in an actual women’s shelter run by Kathy DiFiore, a once homeless woman who eventually turned her life around and founded Several Sources Shelters which is dedicated to helping women in need. Krauss’ original plan was to make a documentary out of all the interviews he did with residents of the shelter, but in an attempt to show the world of the importance of the work DiFiore has done and to keep her legacy going, he decided to make a feature length movie instead.
I got to meet with Krauss and DiFiore during a roundtable interview at the “Gimme Shelter’s” press day held at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. It was especially nice to see DiFiore there as she does not do a lot of publicity. DiFiore talked about why she decided to let Krauss make this movie which was inspired by her work. Krauss went into detail about his experiences at the shelter, and he also explained how he came to cast Hudgens in the lead role.
Question: How are you?
Kathy DiFiore: Good but a little tired. I’ve never been to so many interviews (everyone laughs).
Question: Welcome to our world. So, what did you think when this guy (Ronald Krauss) shows up on your doorstep? I guess you’re used to having people show up on your doorstep, but this guy…
Kathy DiFiore: Usually they’re pregnant women (laughs).
Question: Yeah right. This guy shows up and I doubt it went like, “Uh, can I stay here because I’m doing research for a movie.” But how did you feel when he proposes the idea of doing a movie based on your thing?
Kathy DiFiore: Well, it didn’t happen that way. It happened more like he was visiting his brother who happens to live a mile and a half from the shelter, and he had heard about my work through a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, and he volunteered. It was Christmas time and I let people come in to volunteer all the time, especially someone that has the talents he has. He eventually said, “Maybe I could film some of what you’re doing” which I wasn’t fond of because of the $10,000 fine. I didn’t want any publicity. I thought, let me just go quietly. No public relations. Over the course of time, and it took several months as he was doing the work speaking with the young mothers and they got to know him, they would come to me and tell me how much they respected him and how much he respected them. He felt they were giving him private information, but he was treating them with such dignity. You don’t hear those types of words coming out of the women that come to me. They’ve been abused and abandoned and are really confused by so many, particularly men, in their lives. And then I heard a little voice inside my head, I’m a very prayerful woman and I was asking God for guidance, and I heard, “Trust him.” And when I heard “trust him,” it kept going on. Trust him, trust him, trust him. I thought, okay holy spirit, okay, and then he and I talked about some of the things he looked at.
Ronald Krauss: I didn’t really have any sort of agenda when I met Kathy. I wasn’t really setting out to make a film. It just so happened that her shelter was a mile from my brother’s house and it was at Christmas time. Usually during the holidays I’m, like a lot of people, at food banks or something or shelters just reaching out to people who are less fortunate. I remember the first time I was there visiting Kathy and walked into that shelter for the first time and saw mothers and children walking around and it was really fascinating. It’s exactly what you see in the film because we shot the film at the real place. I had learned that Kathy had not done any publicity in her work. For the last 30 years she remained anonymous other than when she started with the $10,000 fine, and that was news of a woman who was homeless and was trying to give back to society by turning her own home into a shelter. The state came down on her, and that’s a whole other story. She reached out to Mother Teresa, and Mother Teresa came by her side and together they changed the laws in the state of New Jersey, and she was honored in the White House with Ronald Reagan. I learned all of this which was fascinating and I was sort of intrigued by her, but I was more intrigued by… the young women that struggled and were finding their way in life and the woman that was sort of selflessly helping them with her work in this shelter and five shelters she has now; some just for homeless women and some for teenagers and different things. My first thing was to sort of really help her organize so that her legacy and her work would continue. I didn’t realize that I was planting the seeds for a film that I was really trying to say that people need to learn about your work. I was thinking at first that I was going to document her work just for her own purpose so people could find out later. With any device that I found there, and I actually borrowed her camera, I started to interview the girls and record the girls and go through her boxes and look at all her old videotapes. It was a lot of stuff. I started filming one girl after the next, one after the next, interview and asking where they were from, how they ended up here, where’s their parents, where’s all these things and the tapes started piling up. I would put them in Kathy’s office in the back, and before I know it there was a whole stack of tapes of these girls and their stories and they were all very similar. They were all stories of abuse and neglect and abandonment. It was both something like a bad mother, bad father, nobody cared and the thing they had in common is that they didn’t pick this life. They didn’t pick these parents. They didn’t pick up parent who was a drug addict or an alcoholic, it just happened. And what do people do when these things happen? They just get abused and they struggle in life, and they think there’s no hope. A lot of times the will of the parents and the people who are bad, it gets thrown onto the kids and they become angry and bitter and they fight and rebel and they run away and become homeless, and so it’s a vicious cycle. I think the turning point of the whole thing for me was I kept going back and back and weeks were passing and peoples’ lives were passing through my life, and they were touching me but I was sort of a little bit removed in a sense. Then one day I showed up at the shelter at about 7 o’clock at night and there was a young girl standing there in front of the shelter; an African American girl about 18 years old. It was about 15 degrees out, she had no jacket on and she was just standing there and I said, “Can I help you? Why don’t you come inside? What are you doing out here?” I thought she lived in the shelter but she didn’t and she thought I worked there and I didn’t obviously work there, so we were kind of misleading each other. Then Kathy shows up and I’m standing in the living room with this girl and Kathy says, “Who’s this girl?” And I said, “I don’t know. She was in front of the shelter.” And she comes over and says, “Never let anybody in the shelter. These are the rules here.” She kind of dug into me a little bit, you know? And I was like, “Okay but this girl, she didn’t have a place to go. She’s by herself, she doesn’t have a jacket, she has nothing.” And she says, “Let me talk to her.” Kathy’s very seasoned obviously and knows what to look for in these people because they could be deceiving, and she interviewed her and she came back to me and said, “It just so happens that we have one bed left in the shelter. Why don’t you tell this girl that she could stay here.” And so I went up to her, her name was Darlecia, and I said, “Hey Darlecia, they have an extra bed here for you to stay. You can stay here” and this girl… I’m sorry (Ronald started to get teary eyed) … Anyway, this girl, she hugged me so hard that she almost knocked me over.
Question: Is she the one that you based Vanessa Hudgens’ character on?
Ronald Krauss: Yeah. It was a jolt into my heart about that there were many young girls like this out there and that could use help. That’s what inspired me and made me think if I was to make a film it could create awareness for other people. I asked Kathy about it and she said absolutely not, of course. And then time went on and she came to me and said, “You know the girls really respect you and trust you in terms of the care of what you’ve been doing, and perhaps you’re right. Maybe some sort of film could really help to spread the word that shelters like this exist and that other people can be kind, and maybe someone will open a shelter if they see a film like this.” But no one ever anticipated it would be a film like this.
Question: What made you choose Vanessa Hudgens for the role of Apple Bailey and what was it like to work with her?
Ronald Krauss: I never thought that a Hollywood actress could really play the role like this after living there for like a year. I lived there for a year writing this script. And there are a lot of famous actors that wanted to do it and had auditioned and some of them were really well known, and then someone mentioned Vanessa Hudgens and I didn’t really know who she was. I met with her and she was very passionate to play this role. She believed in herself that she could really do it. There was something inside of her. She turned in a great audition, she was persistent, and the turning point was that I had taken all the auditions, there was about seven or eight that I liked, and I sent them to the shelter. I didn’t tell them who I was thinking about. And when they saw the link of the girls, they unanimously picked Vanessa. They said this is the girl who should play this part, and that was the confirmation. She dove into this thing, she lived in the shelter, cut her hair off, she gained 15 pounds and besides the physical transformation, she transformed inside and she bonded with Kathy and the girls and they trusted her and they opened up to her.
Question: Kathy, what did you think of the final film?
Kathy DiFiore: (It’s) perfect. It still makes me cry when I watch it. There are women who have left Several Sources that want to come and see it and I can’t wait for that. It’s a legacy for us.
“Gimme Shelter” is now available to own and rent on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital.
“We are here to tell the truth! People say if you don’t love America, then get the hell out! Well I love America!”
-Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic in “Born on The Fourth of July”
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”
-Thomas Jefferson
I was a little worried about Michael Moore’s film, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” It covers the catastrophic economic fallout from 2007 to 2009 and presents a very harsh indictment of the current economic order in the United States. Throughout the movie, Moore shows us families being evicted from homes which they have owned for years, and how many get swindled out of them without them realizing the trap they are ensnared in until much too late. He also looks at how Wall Street treats the country’s economy like a reckless night of gambling in Las Vegas, and at how Goldman Sachs gained a frightening amount of leverage over congress at an economically vulnerable time. In short, it is Moore’s attack on all things capitalism, and of how it is an evil which is ruining the fabric of our once great country.
While it may seem ironic how Moore would take on capitalism, especially when he has benefited so much from it over the years, he creates a very compelling case here. Whether you think he is telling the truth or simply manipulating facts to his own advantage, he remains the most entertaining documentary filmmaker in American films. “Capitalism: A Love Story” is honestly one of his best films to date, and it combines some truly devastating moments along with some very funny ones. The movie does need those humorous moments, otherwise this could have been one of the most emotionally draining cinematic experiences ever.
“Capitalism: A Love Story” starts off in a way both hilarious and frightening. Moore starts off with one of those cheesy, snicker-inducing 1950’s instructional movies about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. It resembles all those films we were constantly subjected to throughout our school years. While the movie plays out along with the stiff narration, Moore inserts clips from the Reagan era White House, and continues all the way through the Clinton era, not to mention both of the Bushes, showing us how the fate which befell the Romans is very much alike to what is happening to America right now. Clearly, he sees us following in the footsteps of a society destroyed through endless greed and avarice, and he is amazed people want to hang on to this damaged system regardless of how bad it is.
From there, Moore takes us to a family in Peoria, Illinois getting evicted from their home. It’s one of the saddest moments in the film, and to add insult to injury, the family ends up getting thrown out of their home much earlier than they had expected. They were given a couple of weeks originally, but it turns out the bank which repossessed their home had just sold it to another family who were ever so eager to get settled in it.
I’ve been looking at these foreclosures from a distance, and I felt a good portion of them were due to owners not living up to their responsibilities. But while this may be the case to a certain extent, Moore creates a very interesting case of how the banks ended up swindling many families out of their homes because the banks continued to charge them more and more for their mortgage. For those looking to become homeowners, the movie is a reminder of how important it is to read the fine print of every contract you sign.
For Moore, capitalism seemed like such a great gift to our country when he was growing up in Flint, Michigan. The way he saw it, it provided his dad with a good job, helped give his family free health care, helped to pay for him to go to college without falling into tremendous debt over student loans, etc. But then Reagan came along and ruined it all from Moore’s perspective. “Capitalism: A Love Story” doesn’t necessarily portray Reagan as an evil man, but it views him more as a puppet for the banking industry among others. Before the star of “Bedtime for Bonzo” came along, the rich were apparently given a 90% tax on what they made, so naturally, they weren’t very happy about this. With Reagan taking over as President, the banks were able to gain control of all things money related, and they created massive tax breaks for the rich. From there, the cost of living rose faster than the cost of living, and prices on things like health care skyrocketed to an exorbitant rate. Even prisons and juvenile detention halls became for-profit businesses where the sentences turned out to be longer than you were told. In short, things were changing, and the price of those things started to get higher and higher.
Much of the American public seemed to be sold on the idea we could be rich too, and therein lays the big lie of Reganomics. In actuality, his policies throughout the 1980’s resulted in creating a bigger gap between the haves and have-nots, and the middle class at times threatened to be rendered extinct. Moore presents this as the point in our country where things started to change to where the rich benefited more than anyone else. Greed became a powerful influence on everyone, and much of America turned into a “me, me, me” society as opposed to one which sought to help the less fortunate. He also shows how it went from there to the Clinton era and, more horrifyingly so, to the George W. Bush era in which the tax cuts for the rich almost became permanent.
“Capitalism: A Love Story” is kind of a semi-sequel to Moore’s “Roger & Me” which came out 20 years ago. In that film, he pursued General Motors chairman Roger Smith for an interview over the closing of the car factory in his hometown. The closing resulted in a tremendous loss of jobs, all despite the fact GM was posting record profits. All these years later, Moore still cannot get a meeting with the CEO of GM. What occurred in Flint, Michigan all those years ago gave him a chance to tell the automotive industry, “I TOLD YOU SO!!!”Unsurprisingly, after all these years, Moore can still not get inside the doors of the GM corporate headquarters to talk to the CEO. His attempts to enter other buildings are just as unsuccessful, and when he tries to get any of the bankers to explain what a “credit derivative” is, one of them says, “Stop making movies!”
Unsurprisingly, after all these years, Moore can still not get inside the doors of the GM corporate headquarters to talk to the CEO. His attempts to enter other buildings are just as unsuccessful, and when he tries to get any of the bankers to explain what a “credit derivative” is, one of them says, “Stop making movies!”
One moment in “Capitalism: A Love Story” which really stayed with me was when President Reagan addressed the bankers on Wall Street, and one of the most powerful bankers standing right next to him told, not asked, him to “speed it up.” Wait a second, Reagan was one of the most powerful people on the planet at that time, and someone next to him was telling him to speed it up? It makes you wonder who was really in charge of America back then.
A truly heart breaking scene comes when a former Wal-Mart employee talks about how, when his wife died at a young age, the company ended up making thousands of dollars off her death. It turns out Wal-Mart took out life insurance policies on all their workers, and ended up profiting from their passing. To make matters even worse, the younger the worker, the more money they get. Now fact checkers everywhere are going to point out how Wal-Mart has since ended these policies, but Moore does mention this during the closing credits.
Another section of the film which hit close to home was when Moore points out how airline pilots are paid less than the manager of a Taco Bell; about $19,000 a year for starting pay. My brother is an airline pilot, and while he makes better wages now, those first few years were a struggle to say the least. It seems almost criminal how these huge airline companies which make millions of dollars end up paying their pilots so pitifully. Thus, we get an example here of the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Now let’s take a moment here because we all know many will be accusing Moore (many of whom will not even bother watching this film) with thoughtlessly manipulating his on-camera subjects and distorting what they say to his own advantage. Granted, there are moments where his camera focuses on crying family members a little longer than what feels comfortable. While the feeling of manipulation is hard to ignore, getting angry at Moore for showing this will be missing the point. He wants you to be mad. With “Capitalism: A Love Story,” he means to stir up your anger because he does not want you to react passively to what you are witnessing. He wants you to take action against what is happening because he is really sick and tired of doing this all by himself. Can you blame him? Many of us are viewing this economic breakdown and corruption from a distance, and we can’t spend the rest of our lives letting all this go unchecked.
But if scenes of everyday working class people getting heartlessly fleeced doesn’t frighten or enrage you, then the latter half of the movie where nerve-wracked members of congress get swayed by Goldman Sachs among other banks to bail them out so the banking industry could survive should do the trick. Nobody I know of was happy to hear about this, and we got even more pissed off when they got million dollar bonuses which were undeserved. There was a great article in Rolling Stone of how Goldman Sachs circumvented the economic crises of past and present to benefit themselves. Seeing this play out on the screen brought back my own deep feelings of unrestrained infuriation at what these bankers were doing with taxpayer dollars. Why exactly do we have to pay for the mess they created anyway? What happened to accountability?
Many still believe Moore is nothing more than an anti-American zealot who has nothing better to do than say bad things about our country. The conservative comedy “An American Carol” had a character like him trying to convince fellow citizens to abolish the Fourth of July as a holiday. But what made me really love the last half of this film is how he shows how the power of the people really did win out. If you still think he is a hater of this country after watching this, you may need to remove yourself from the cave you have been hiding in.
Moore shows how it was the will of the people which prevented the first economic stimulus, largely engineered by members of Goldman Sachs, from passing. At seeing what was about to occur, Americans everywhere contacted their representatives, urging them not to pass this bill. There were enough house representatives who saw how the banks were in the position of almost completely controlling the legal process, and they rallied against them for the sake of the country. This was all the result of American citizens speaking up loudly.
The spirit of the American people is shown even more strongly when we witness the laid off workers of Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago do an in-house protest at their place of employment. This came about because none of them were paid the severance promised from Bank of America. We also get a look at community groups like LIFFT in Miami which helped unfortunate families and “liberated” the houses they were evicted from. The police came out in force of course, but they ended up not arresting anybody probably because it wasn’t worth the trouble. Then we see Captain Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III, the pilot who saved the lives of all 155 passengers aboard US Airways Flight 1549 when he landed it in the Hudson River, go before Congress to protest the way pilots were treated in general and how underpaid they are.
I should add when the section regarding Captain Sullenberger came up, I was afraid Moore would bash him in some way. But he actually applauds Sullenberger for taking his newfound fame and using it to help others who love their job of being a pilot. This leads to one of the movie’s funniest moments as Moore shows how the media seemed to like him more as a hero instead of someone who stands up against the companies for not paying pilots enough. Moore ends up putting some patriotic band music over the soundtrack to shut out Sullenberger, because no one really likes a Debbie Downer.
After all the films Moore has made criticizing people and polices of the United States, it seems amazing anyone would talk to him on camera. But he does get people like University of Missouri professor Bill Black, and Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur to talk about what they see as the ills of capitalism. Furthermore, he even talks to the Catholic priest who married him and his wife who says capitalism is a sin and not very Christian-like.
Kaptur is one of the movie’s most compelling voices, and she said the first economic stimulus bill would have been a disaster for democracy had it been passed. It would have allowed the banks to have more control over taxpayer money and the legislative process, hence rewriting the law books we have come to study all these years. The banks may want to concentrate the nation’s wealth among the 1% of the population who has it, but they cannot be allowed to silence the voices of the 99%.
Black himself comes off as one of the most intelligent people seen here, and it is heartbreaking to see how some of the smartest minds in America saw this economic disaster coming from miles away. He compares the fallout to a water damn which breaks apart, but of how we could see those little cracks forming. The fact many people like him were silenced or had their character smeared beyond all repair is shameful. For them, they saw it as only a matter of time before the banking industry came crashing down, so there was no way they could have been surprised by any of this.
I was also really pleased to see Moore stick it to the Democrats as well as the Republicans. While the Republicans may share the largest blame, the Democrats cannot be excluded because many of them are every bit as guilty in what transpired. It doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum they were on, politicians of all kinds were bought out with what seemed like very little effort. Truth is, I am seriously frustrated with both major parties, and Moore taps into this because many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, feel the same way.
By the way, if you really think that Moore is this left-leaning zealot, keep in mind he has spent many years criticizing both parties, and his ire at Democrats seems much larger because he expects more from them. I’m sure if Moore had it his way, Ralph Nader would have been President by now.
As for President Barrack Obama, Moore steers clear of saying anything bad about him, probably because many still see him as a symbol of hope. If Obama does foul things up in Afghanistan, I’m sure Moore might consider doing something on it. But that coupled with the power of people made the last half of this movie seem like the feel-good movie of the year, and this is regardless of how exaggerated it all may seem to those who cannot stand this baseball cap wearing filmmaker.
In the end, Moore is not out to make you repeat everything he says or believes in like it’s the gospels. His attack against capitalism is not entirely waterproof, and much more blame could be thrown at how corporate America has become so corrupted. But it doesn’t matter because what he wants is for you to be angry, and to fight against those who would try to wrestle away the powers given to us in the Constitution.
“Capitalism: A Love Story” is really one of his best films in how he attacks many policies this country has adopted, and then counters it with proof that the power still does belong to the people. It does to the banking industry and deregulation what “Sicko” did to the health care industry, and it is informative, funny, moving, and endlessly entertaining.
For those who wonder why Michael Moore hasn’t left America yet, see this movie to find out. Like him, you may hate what this country is doing to its people, but you are not about to leave it.
The Ultimate Rabbit 