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PART 1 OF 3 |
Slam was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival as well as Audience Award winner at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.
We asked readers to submit their questions to the filmmaker. We chose the best as the basis for our interview with Marc. Those supplying winning questions will receive a Slam baseball cap and t-shirt.
See what Levin has to say about being a white director making an African-American themed movie, the prospects of him performing slam poetry, and his allegations against critic Roger Ebert.
You can also hear excerpts of the Marc Levin interview with the Real Player.
How were you introduced
to slamming?
Gill Kitts
Pinconning, Michigan
MARC LEVIN:
my love
is the wind's song:
if it is up to me, i'll never die.
if it is up to me, i'll die tomorrow.
one thousand times in an hour
and live seven minutes later.
if it is up to me,
the sun will never cease to shine
and the moon will never cease to glow
and i'll dance a million tomorrows
in the sun rays of the moon waves
and bathe in the yesterdays of days to come
ignoring all of my afterthoughts
and preconceived notions
if it is up to me, it is up to me.
and thus is my love:
untainted
eternal
--from SLAM
I've been hanging out at the Nuyorican Cafe in New York City since it re-opened in 1989. I know Bob Holman who became kind of the a P.T. Barnum of the slam scene here in New York and host the first few years over there so I've kind of followed it at since at least in New York City it first started happening and I saw Saul [Williams, star of Slam] I guess it was two years ago at what they call the New York Grand Slams. I happened to just be in the East Village and ran into Bonz Malone [co-star of the film] and he said you've got to come on in here and I went in and I had never seen Saul before and I saw him actually win the Grand Slam and was blown away.
INTERVIEWER:
Your background is in making
documentaries. Would you consider Slam a
dramatized documentary?
MARC LEVIN:
No, no. It's a feature film in the true sense of that it's a story that we created. It's not a real story although it's inspired by many real characters that I've met and in the documentary films that I've been doing and certainly also two of my partners Richard Stratton, who was an international marijuana smuggler and did eight years in the federal penitentiary where he became a writer and Bonz Malone who I've known for over a decade and met when he had just gotten out of Riker's Island on graffiti charges and he went on to become you know a columnist for Vibe magazine and many other things.So it's a work of fiction in that we took a lot of ideas and stories from real situations but we distilled it and synthesized it into a fictional story. It is a fable in many ways, people have said that and I don't have a problem with that. I think it's true. It's just that we set it in the real world, shot in the real D.C. jail and in southeast and in the projects of Washington's ghetto. And we did use -- besides the four key cast members -- we cast a lot of real prisoners and officers so in that sense it does and it was shot in a documentary style but the story... I did a documentary which will be on HBO in the Spring and it's called Thug Life In D.C. And that is the documentary about the jailing of all the young African American men in our nation's capitol. So that's the documentary, that's the real documentary and Slam is the feature..
How did you get clearance
to do some of the prison footage?
Michael Gencarelli
Bellmore, New York
MARC LEVIN:
Well it was because I was shooting Thug Life In D.C. I'd also done two other films that the officials and a lot of the inmates actually knew very well what was gang war, almost all the young kids in the D.C. jail had seen that film two, three, four times memorized scenes in it. Gang Banging in Little Rock.And then I did a film called Prisoners Of The War On Drugs which a lot of both the officers and the prison officials and the inmates had seen. And then I was doing this film Thug Life so I got to know a lot of people there. And I think the combination of that, plus last summer when we filmed the Republican Gingrich Congress, was in the process of passing a budget which part was taking home rule from Washington the District of Columbia and also basically closing the prison system, the jails stay open but the Lourden prison system where all the people who are convicted in Washington go. They're going to close that down and send all the prisoners to either private or federal institutions around the country. So you had officials who were very unhappy, I'm talking about people who ran the system. They were being screwed and had been ignored and nobody cared if they were going to lose their jobs and what was going to happen and so there was a lot of I think pent up frustration and anger.
I think that a combination of those things the last year of Mayor Marion Barry's term, all of those things afforded us what I called moment day, a scene in time which we just slipped through but we had tried to do it here in New York City which would have been easier in a certain way but [Rudolph] Giuliani administration was very uncooperative in terms of shooting anything at Riker's Island so it was a combination of all those things.
INTERVIEWER:
And you actually had Marion
Barry appear in the film.
MARC LEVIN:
Marc Levin on the set of Slam.
That came because Richard, my partner, one of the producers and co-writers had published for a while a magazine called Prison Life magazine -- the voice of the convict -- and Marion Barry, as an ex-drug offender also like Richard, loved that magazine and they met each other and became friends. And Richard told him hey we're going to try to do this film Slam in your town here and described the story and the mayor wanted to help and said anything I can do. And we kind of thought it over and actually in the scene, the mayor of course plays a judge and Richard actually plays the prosecutor, so he was very helpful to us.And of course it is a bit of irony there's no doubt about it but when people, some people are amused by it and others are a little offended. It's a hypocritical to have the mayor of Washington who was busted on crack by the FBI playing a role as a judge who is putting this kid away on a small drug charge and says to him, 'You know, drugs ruining our community.' And my response to that is the next time you hear [drug 'czar' Barry] McCaffrey or [Senator] Orrin Hatch or any of these drug warriors on Capitol Hill, why don't you think the same thing.
It's total hypocrisy, the whole war on drugs is hypocrisy. It's the lie of our time, it should be exposed for the failure and tragedy that it is and you know and then on top of that as the mayor made the point when we had the opening in Washington, you know he paid his time and he's been clean and sober for six or seven years and that's part of the story too.
So I mean the drug war you know this is just my own personal point of view but I think the drug war is the Vietnam of this generation and someday hopefully we as a society will wake up you know nobody wants people to do drugs. I've got two kids.
But the most destructive two drugs in our society are legal, alcohol and tobacco and the idea of putting non-violent drug offenders away for years which is where we're at now, is a tragic waste of both human resources and money and it's not the answer. This is not a criminal justice issue, it's a social and psychological and medical problem but it should not be, but you would think we'd have learned from prohibition, but obviously we haven't.