The Shape of Film To Come | The Public | Steamboat Bill, Jr. | Highlights
I am writing this during the atmospheric river monsoons, looking up at the curtains of rain and thinking, God help those without a roof over their heads. Riding BART to work, I see the miles of tent cities along the tracks.
Is it too early to call them Trumpvilles?
Inside the train, I watch as the unsheltered curl up in knots, trying get a little sleep on the hard, plastic seats. One couldn’t ask for a film more relevant than Emilio Estevez’s The Public, about a impromptu revolution at the Cincinnati Public Library on a sub-freezing night.
Bookish, smaller-than-life librarian Stuart Goodson (Estevez) is being asked to quit by his boss (Jeffrey Wright); there’s been a lawsuit filed by a patron Goodson evicted for stinking up the library. One night, the patrons whom Stuart knows well, have no place to stay and are unwilling to be turned out into the freezing cold. The occupation turns into an all night drama, demonstrating the institution’s new role as, among its other functions, a refuge for the poorest of the poor.
Estevez will be on hand at Cinequest for a screening of this Ken Loach-like film. San Jose librarian Jill Bourne, 2017’s Library Journal pick for librarian of the year, will be interviewing Estevez. Bourne’s fund-raising through Measure B helped reopen branch libraries throughout the Valley, closed because of budget crises in the early years of this decade.
There is a lot of fun in The Public, such as the satisfactory sight of a snotty prosecutor (Christian Slater) getting a taste of his own medicine. Alec Baldwin, kind of a national hero these days, is a police crisis negotiator whose son has been swept up in the undertow of drugs. The seemingly drastic yet simple solution to the standoff has its own kind of common sense. And the anecdotes of street life are something like the stories of Ohio’s own Harvey Pekar. “Get a library card, impress your friends!” Stuart says, as Pekar might have. Taylor Schilling brings zest as the outrageously flirtatious super of Stuart’s apartment. Jena Malone has her own charm as Stuart’s sunshine-leftist co-worker whose ringtone is “La Marseillaise.” Gabrielle Union is a predatory TV newscaster; I liked her cheerful wink at a passerby who had just dressed her down as a media pig.
Estevez needs little introduction. He was a hard-working A-list actor in the 1980s in The Breakfast Club, St Elmo’s Fire…most cherished of all, Repo Man. Alex Cox’s sort-of kind-of sequel to Kiss Me Deadly (1955) starred Estevez as Otto, an LA punk-rocker taken on a celestial journey.
Estevez was a Santa Monica kid who grew up to be a director of some 30 years standing. One was Bobby, a sort of Grand Hotel at the about-to-be demolished Ambassador Hotel in L.A., on the night Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Estevez is the son of Martin Sheen and the brother of the notorious Charlie Sheen. (I don’t want to make too much out of Stuart’s last name “Goodson,” but eh, Estevez was.)
Via phone, Estevez says The Public began 12 years ago, after he read an L.A. Times article by Salt Lake City assistant librarian Chip Ward titled “How the Public Library Became the Heartbreak Hotel.”
“I was moved by the piece. The libraries have become de facto homeless shelters,” Estevez says. “I did a lot of research at the downtown Los Angeles public library for Bobby. All the things Ward had experienced in Salt Lake were very similar to what was going on in L.A.
“I was writing this in 2007, long before the Trump election. In 2008, I had a fully realized script and funding. Then the economic crisis hit. So I went to Spain to make The Way”all about the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. “I was able to reboot The Public, but set it in Cincinnati. Ohio state offers a very generous tax rebate. With the help of the city and the Cincy film commission, we started in early 2017.”
Estevez sold his house in California and bought a place in Cincinnati’s historic Over-the-Rhine district. “I packed up my car with everything I wanted, in two suitcases. Since I finished the film, I’ve been back in California, staying a lot in hotels and friends’ couches. Generally I go six months here and six months there. These days, with the climate crisis, it’s not as easy to cherry-pick the best time of the year to be in Cincinnati.”
So there he was, a Hollywood type coming to urban Ohio to delve into the lower class. He faced some suspicion.
“I talked to the homeless on record and off. Their stories were tragic, but a lot of them are really eager to tell what happened to them. I explained to the library that the film was going to support the core tenets of what a library does, and that I wanted to abide by the rules and stay out of their way. We worked during closing hours and vacated in the morning after making the set safe. We were in a pretty good groove. The crew was respectful of the place. Sometimes, when a film crew goes into a private home or institution, they wreak havoc. So pretty specific ground rules were obeyed.”
Like any other American city, Cincinnati has a homeless problem. “There are people dealing with it. Shelter House is the best known. And there are organizations in town that’ll tell you it’s not as bad there as it is in other cities. But they just recently moved a tent city away from the base of I-75, right near the Great American Ballpark.
“Universal health care is one thing, but we have to get to universal housing. It can’t be conditional on sobriety. You really can’t get the treatment for your problems without getting a roof over your head. Housing first, then the treatment, and then the support groups.”
The Public has a moving section where his Stuart reads from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, contrasting the richness of America with the degradation of the poor.
Estevez notes, “It’s the 80th anniversary of this book this April, and it’s more relevant now than ever. If Steinbeck were alive, he’d recognize the Hoovervilles. While no one walks this planet without some trauma in their lives, this kind of deep insecurity the homeless face is a measure of terrible trauma.”
Estevez doesn’t necessarily look back in pleasure on the work he did as a young man. “My early directorial films were derivative and silly, and my mother gave me the advice that I should direct about what I knew. It helped shift my focus. I’m never going to make a superhero or outer space movie, because I don’t know anything about it. And even if some of those films are entertaining or technically surprising, they focus less on relationships and humanity than what I’m interested in. I’m finally doing movies about things that are personal to me.”
He had advice from his mother; had there been any advice on dealing with filmmaking or the industry itself from his father, Martin Sheen?
“That question actually brings things around full circle. He’s a believer in nonviolent civil disobedience, and he’s been arrested 68 times. Always on the local news, and sometimes on the national news, I’d see him carted off in handcuffs, reciting the Lord’s prayer.
“Sometimes, he looked like a lunatic. I’d worry that he was destroying his career, and becoming one of a long list of blacklisted actors known more for political activism than their work. Years later, I understand him spiritually; he was demonstrating ‘the sublime madness’ Reinhold Niebuhr describes in of engaging with fascism. Sartre said, ‘I do not fight fascists because I think I’ll win, I fight them because they are fascists.’ My father’s political activism informs The Public. I hope this movie pushes back against the cruelty of the times and this administration. Nothing would make me happier if people rally around this film. “
After its night at Cinequest The Public is getting an April 1 premiere at the 42nd Street Branch Library in Times Square, and then a 15-city theatrical release.
“And then,” Estevez adds, “we’ll take it as wide as the public will demand. It’s certainly counterprogramming. It seems like an original piece, and audiences are craving some originality in the content. It’s a difficult lift to ask audience to go watch a story of homelessness and the library. But as Alec Baldwin was saying at the Hamptons film fest, ‘This movie is about everything that’s going on in the country right now.'”
The Public
Mar 9, 6:45pm California Theatre
Mar 10, 11am Hammer Theatre Center
cinequest.org
