It was a rainy the night after Christmas and I had been following railroad lines. Two parallel tracks run north from Berkeley and I was straddling them, driving through neighborhoods, seeking the arcane routes and secret shortcuts, trying to keep them both in sight. I wanted a train yard or just a small siding with an open box car under lights. I had a scene I could shoot in two hours… guerrilla under the wire or with permission. Was that too much to ask? One line went east at Highway 4 and the other stayed curving along the shores of the bay and right under the Carquinez Straits Bridge.That night I went to see CLOSER. But it was FURTHER. And this from, Mike Nichols, a man who had made CARNAL KNOWLEDGE a real film about sexual obsession and male lust. CLOSER is erotic for those turned on by silliness. Two “straight” guys converse in an erotic chat room, one pretending to be a woman. This had to be the most inane erotic conversation that ever never happened. Both of the guys Jude Law and Clive Owen gave the gigglers in the house a field day. A guffaw fest for embarrassed beeves. Can’t we pass a law against such livestock reaching their majority? No I guess not. Mainline critics would have no one to cattlechize.

But I came away vowing a mighty vow! I would watch no more films with screenplays, three act or otherwise. No more knowing clipped and clever dialogue just like sexy people love to come up with in the pick-up bar at the height of their heat. No more screenwriters who think they know how these people talk but won’t give them a chance to. No more “come-on” film directors deep into their plurality who are trying to remember how clever they once might have thought they could be if they hadn’t been. Oh, I know how hard it is. But why make it so much harder? Why force smart people like Julia Roberts to be banal, and one note and small as a wee wuss? “Why?” whined I. But I didn’t know.

Except I really did. It’s the way it’s done. That’s the way dollar people can keep track of their dollars. They know how much they have to pay for the words, how much for the people who say them, and the salary of he who waves the baton and the fee for the DP. It’s a form of control. A formula. A star, a plot, and a passel of hacks for the hype.

If you let people go out with ideas and let them function like those of us wearing the cheap suits, sure of what we want but unsure of what to say, intent on the goal if completely unlikely to achieve it, full of juice and reasonable hope and unreasonable incompetence, you might not know how much a movie (made like a jazz tune is made) would cost or how to recoup or who to blame, or where to place the yellow tape… or anything. And then too, the beeves in the theatre might not know when the movie actually begins. “Oh, they were just acting like me and Louise do. I didn’t know it was the movie until it was too late.” B.O. zippo! And I don’t mean body odor.

Ok. But how about a movie that doesn’t stoop to banter. How about VERA DRAKE? Or … how about LITTLE ANGEL OF COLUMBIA? This is my choice for the film everyone must see this year. It’s a TV documentary from Channel TF1 in France, produced by Toni Comiti. I saw it on late night KQED, Dec. 19, at 11:00 pm.

“Program Notes:

“If an angel were to appear on Earth, what form would it take? In South America, it might be that of a small boy living in the shantytown of Ciudad del Norte in Bucara-manga, Colombia. In 1988, at the age of 9, Alveiro Vargas organized squads of children to spend their free time helping shut-ins who had been abandoned by their families. The children brought them food, bathed them, cleaned their hovels, solicited donations from local businesses and arranged for rent to be forgiven. And the care and love didn’t end even with death. The “angels” buried the old people with dignity and honor.

“Alveiro is a sweet, mature-beyond-his-years, self-assured and respectful boy who dreams of one day building a modern facility for old people. Fast forward 10 years. It is 1998, and Alveiro is a 20-year-old young man. He is now director of a clean, modern care facility for 140 poor elderly people who would otherwise be homeless. The facility is a monument to the potential we all possess when we follow our hearts.” Watching these little boys and girls visit with old people washed up on the shore of various disasters, carrying them outside tin and cardboard hovels and washing them, dancing with them, laughing with them and politely refusing any divigations into self pity… well it’s an education in feeling and bedrock community.

What I liked most of all was Alveiro’s pride in these old people, how he joked with them, bantered and cajoled, caressing and kissing their decrepit flesh without disgust and fear. How many of us would be able to do that? His happy smiles while he showed his old friends to the camera crew are models of how to fight the political posturing of the hypocrite, the do-gooder, the wide, toothy smiler. Only those who recognize, along with Alveiro, the cosmic joke played on us all should do this. Let the politicians who see charity as a photo-op, take off their suits, burn their ID cards, and roll up their sleeves.

The victim seeker celebrates the idea that social inequality creates poverty and crime. This is a convenient abstraction that often leaves solutions to politicians who will never respond without political payback. In this model desperate people are “driven” to crime, caught, and then entitled to rehabilitation. I’m sympathetic to that view but only when they attack unresponsive systems: corporations, governments, cold and indifferent institutions. But when a liquor store clerk dies because of an ersatz Robin Hood’s decision to liberate the till, I say that’s unforgivable. Instead, let’s celebrate the justice and fellow feeling found in positive grass roots communities. There the Alveiros, still unsullied by political hypocrisy and entitlement, may stand a better chance to thrive.

To those who overemphasize the progress possible by political means I offer two thoughts. #1. America works because of its abundance of natural resources and because hard working pragmatism combined with a clever system of checks and balances tends to mitigate the perfidy of the worst crooks. This is not politics. This is Anglo Saxon common sense and Enlightenment realism. Never mind how we got there. The blood of conquest stains all of us, winners and losers, in every age and time.

#2. One of my tragic heroes was Leon Trotsky. Coming from Middle Class landowners, he felt the suffering of marginalized workers and farmers. Brilliant and well read, he began as an idealist but got caught up in the narrow opportunism of the Bolsheviks and ended up pursued around the world by Stalin. Diego Rivera protected him and David Siqueiros tried to machine gun him. A Stalin goon finally assassinated him with an ice pick in Mexico City. I doubt you’d find another story so illustrative of the treadmill we walk when we elevate politics above its station.

Politics rewrites Sisyphus a little. He rolls the fatal rock up the hill not knowing (or does he?) that it will roll back down again and crush him. But, knowing or not, he doesn’t learn. And the cycle begins again. Only human kindness performed for its own sake can avoid that tragic waste of effort.

I like to make films about unrepentant dead enders. I don’t like fake contrition or to pretend bastards are really nice inside. In fact, they’re not. It may be a shame, it might even be tragic, but they’re bruised fruit. A minority owns up and stops whining. Some even try to change, though few are able. But we do have people like Albeiro Vargas in the world. They’re everywhere and they’re not looking for thanks. They’re looking to help. Many of them are poor. I’d guess most of them are. I don’t think that’s an accident.

So I challenge the Michael Moores of the world who are so sure about what’s wrong and who’s to blame for it, to make a film about what’s right and who to praise for it. That way we’d spend less time lionizing ambitious charismatics and pay more attention to those angels on earth who do good out of warm impulse, natural empathy, and respect for human suffering.

Oh yes, railroad tracks. That night I ended the search up in Martinez along the Sacramento River. Huge refineries up there, spewing light and smoke and steam into a swirling galaxy of industrial mayhem. It reminded me of how much the Oily God controls our destinies. Poking around a little, I found a back road which petered out into a rocky path along the tracks. There, shining out of the rain, was a small railroad yard under the high cliffs which extend from Crockett past Port Costa and out towards Sacramento. Yellow lights loomed through mist and gathering rain. Inside a wooden building I could see a vending machine offering the usual carcinogens, and a man sitting alone at a long, institutional table. I had yet to head south to see CLOSER but I realized I had just spent an entire Sunday afternoon trying to… go FURTHER. But there was still further to go. Or was it farther?

PS- Don’t forget to buy WINTER ORANGES on http://robnilsson.com/store.html. Next month we’ll be offering one of the first 9 @ Night films. We’ve been stockpiling these pictures, awaiting the day. Almost no one has seen them. As you know, we don’t believe in the distribution system out there. Half-dumb and just too greedy. Help us break the system. Be the 15,000!