Writer speaks about Hurricane Katrina documentary

WILLIAMSTOWN – Writer Daniel Wolff  recently gave a talk about the making of the film I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad and the Beautiful, which, over a period of five years, he co-produced with Academy Award-winning film director Jonathan Demme.

The Nov. 12 program was sponsored by the Williams College Psychology Department and Experiential Education and took place at the Williams Alumni Log.

Mr. Wolff pointed out violent storms change the cities they hit in fundamental ways.  To find the story of Hurricane Katrina’s effects, he and co-producer Mr. Demme went to the 9th district in New Orleans over a period of five years every few months or so. They were looking for a story with feeling in it – not for documentary realism, of which there had been plenty.

A film was planned and at first they thought they had it financed. However, the lady who meant to give them the money to make it had one requirement:  it had to have a happy ending. Since that was out of the question, Mr. Demme, who, though he’s won an Academy Award as a director, had never filmed anything before, got himself a small camera and gradually learned to use it.

People in the New Orleans 9th district were glad to see them, as they were worried about “Katrina fatigue” – people might forget about them. Progress in rebuilding had been so slow. One person in the ward would point out the worst sections – each person sending them on to even worse parts of the ninth ward. One man said he didn’t find himself too fearful of Katrina until a shark swam up his driveway.

Something else was taking place in the reconstruction process as well. The suburbs had been discovered. The very people who had given New Orleans its character moved there and integrated.

African-Americans tended not to return to their houses as the suburbs grew. All the officials in New Orleans were now white and it was rumored developers had plans for large parks, high rise condominiums and a huge medical center. Eighty percent of the city had been damaged and officials did not seem to be in a hurry to rebuild. There were very few public schools, no teachers’ union and charter schools were growing.

As Mr. Wolff autographed his recently published books for sale, The Fight for Home: How Parts of New Orleans Came Back and How Lincoln Learned to Read: 12 Great Americans and the Education that Made Them, the small crowd was served a delicious Thai dinner. Following the signing and the dinner, people headed to the Images Cinema for a screening of I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad and the Beautiful.

The two producer-directors met Carolyn as they walked along the street in the 9th district, and she invited them into her house, the inside of which had been completely destroyed – not only by Katrina, but also by vandals. Everything in it had been taken – but she was determined to rebuild and live in it.

Meanwhile, she lived in a trailer – for two full years.  The two director-producers knew they had a winner.  She was an extraordinary woman, and she became the subject of their movie.

She was brave; she faced a bunch of white officials, giving them “what’s for” because they delayed (at that time) the reconstruction of the 9th Ward, where she lived near two years.

She was incredibly hard-working as she reconstructed her house. She was a talented cook, working for 30 years with recipes she never wrote down but simply kept in her head – “that way no one can write them down and make money off them.”

She was a fighter; she walked into an official meeting and excoriated them in no uncertain terms for the delay in reconstructing the 9th ward.

She was patient, too. The community’s church had been closed, but she mobilized the community and though it took two years, got it fixed and reopened for them. It took two years as well, until her beloved home was fit to move into from the wretched trailer she inhabited for those two years.

Sharp and funny, couageous and ingenious in her methods, Carolyn represented the best of New Orleans and the movie’s producers have used her to represent the human strain of resiliance. They did their job so well, there were very few questions for the author at its end.

Posted by Rae Eastman on November 20, 2012. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Community News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry