When Richard Anderson asked me whether I would be interested in helping make Homeless in Modesto II, I wondered whether he had forgotten my manifold deficiencies at film, most of which he had suffered with his usual kind tolerance during the making of Homeless in Modesto I.
It’s impossible to refuse someone so magnanimous and good, but I did try to remind Richard that I’m not only inept and uninformed about film, I have an endless list of complaints about most every film I’ve ever seen about homelessness. Richard assured me he and Ben Hoover would handle the technical aspects and Frank Ploof would serve as chief consultant. My role for the most part would be to supply still photographs, of which I have a few thousand.
After a few weeks of back-and-forth about thematic elements, Richard and I found points of agreement regarding the misleading effects of slick videos about all the great things everyone is doing to manage homelessness. It helped that Richard had done extensive filming of people on the ground and thus knew first hand that, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars, we haven’t made much progress in getting people off the streets.
I had no idea, even a few months ago, how Richard, Ben and Frank could possibly communicate through film the deeply complex realities of homelessness in Modesto. On the one hand, homelessness is a simple matter of people in dire distress. On the other, it’s a tangled skein of misconceptions, misleading narratives, squandered resources, well-intentioned blunders, buck-passing politics, religious pandering and daily heroism by hired staff and volunteers with too few resources and too little leadership from local and state authorities…