Martin Bell shot his cult documentary Streetwise following an article written by activist journalist Cheryl McCall for LIFE magazine. Bell’s wife, Mary Ellen Mark, shot the pictures.
In 1983, the two women headed to the Pacific North-West, to the city that would become home to both Starbucks and 1999’s Battle In Seattle. They chose Seattle as the spot to write about street kids because in the ’80s it was apparently America’s ‘ideal’ city, so, they reasoned, if they found homeless kids there, well, then America must be teeming with them.
They found them alright. There’s Erin, aka Tiny, the 14-year-old prostitute who stays with her crush, Rat, a teen runaway who sleeps in an abandoned hotel; or with her drunk mum in a trailer.
There’s Patti, her boyfriend-cum-pimp, Munchkin, and also Shadow, a depressive 18-year-old who hopes dying his hair will numb the pain. “Why do you want to dye your hair? To change?” asks one young runaway. “Not to change. To get away from everything,” he says.
Their unofficial ‘leader’ is Lulu, a frustrated gay girl whose vast compassion turns to violence dangerously quickly. Her approval was the key that let the filmmakers into the kids’ world, but she was murdered shortly after filming.
When Martin Bell screened Streetwise to the kids, one said to him: “Are our lives really like this? I want to hit someone but I don’t know who to hit.”
Like Stephen J Szklarski’s 2004 doc Union Square, Streetwise offers a cinematic and candid peek at the void outside your door. While the (significantly older) heroin addicts of Union Square come from all walks of life, the kids in Streetwise are all the products of some serious neglect.
One Shirley Temple lookalike is filmed talking about her current step-dad who raped her when she was younger. Her mum replies: “Well he doesn’t do it anymore, so why do you care?”
Streetwise captured a different time. Crack was just taking off, Kurt hadn’t met Courtney, hell, Nirvana wouldn’t record Bleach for five more years.
Here’s how Mary Ellen Marks described the area in the 1987 preface to her accompanying book of photographs: “During the past three years much of the area around the Pike Street Market has been renovated. It is rapidly becoming gentrified. The grafitti wall has not been torn down yet and it is still a gathering place for street kids. Many of the kids that we knew still meet there from time to time and of course there are many new street children.
“The oldtimers talk about how things have changed and how it will never be the same without DeWayne and Lulu there. Sometimes they will take a new kid across the street to the Pike Street Market and show them two plaques on the ground. Plaque 21393 says ‘Lulu Couch 1985′…”
The film screened as this month’s Midnight Movie at the Curzon Soho in London. December’s will be Arnold Bennett’s Piccadilly (1929) as part of The Smoking Cabinet weekend. Although pop culture lore maintains that midnight movies should be cheap and kitsch à la Pink Flamingos, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974 version), this doc ticked the cult box perfectly.
So tell us: what would be your ideal selection for a Friday night midnight movie?
