Homeless & Poor Kids: Making Movies While Poverty Explodes
It’s such a small world.
Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra, recently in the news as an Elector for the Electoral College from California, is also a documentary filmmaker and author living in New York City. Her most recent film for HBO (August, 2016) was Meet the Donors, about “Why billionaires pour millions into elections.” She told an interviewer from The Observer that Joe Kennedy III told Richard Plepler (head of HBO) that she should make the film.
But before that, six years ago, she went to the motel rooms of Orange County in Southern California where I live, and interviewed a variety of families living there. The interviews comprise this documentary film which, near as I can tell, made absolutely no difference to anyone’s life whatsoever, except possibly: the filmmaker’s.
In 1988, I went to the city Council in Redlands, CA, one of my two hometowns, and told the assembled group, “There are families living in cars under the freeway overpasses in our town.” The Council didn’t believe me at first. Only after I gave them a tour and…
