Trailer Trash - a WV film beyond Paradise Park
Don Diego Ramirez has an amazing true-live story to tell in his new documentary - “Trailer Trash - A Film Journal.” I found a review of it in a Baltimore newspaper, and hopefully will be previewing it soon. There is a whole sub-genre of films about people who live in trailers including a quite good one by another WV filmmaker, Daniel Boyd, who made a film originally called “Paradise Park” starring Larry Groce.
One of the most famous trailer park films of all time is John Water’s classic “Pink Flamingos.”Jacob Young’s own masterpiece, “Dancing Outlaw” as well as his lesser known but equally exciting “The Amazing Delores” are both about people who live in trailers. Supposedly a famous newspaper owner in Charleston, WV called Charlotte Pritt, the first woman to run for the govenor of the state, ”trailer trash.”
More recently the film “8 Mile” shows a Detroit family living in a trailer. For years I tried to find Monte Hellman’s film, “Cockfighter,” finally succeeding. This film stars Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton in one of the great Southern movies of the Seventies. ( Hellman is best known for his classic “Two Lane Blacktop.” ) (I met Hellman at the Telluride Film Festival during Labor Day Weekend in 1978.)
Speaking of mobile homes - there is a great Belgium film about a young girl who lives in a trailer park,”Rosetta.” It won the top award at Cannes as best film and best actress. It was directed by two of the greatest working filmmakers in the world, the Dardenne Brothers, whose urban realism should be studied by every WV filmmaker.
My friend Sandy Berman told me last night that a recent BBC tv series, a mystery, is about an English trailer court…something I never saw during two tours of England in the early 1970s.
Ramirez e-mailed me that his fav filmmaker is Alejandro Jodorowsky whose “El Topo” could be called “the Citizen Kane of the Sixties.” He sometimes teaches at Shepherd University where he got his undergrad degree in art - twenty years ago.
Thank the Lord for those Google news alerts for “West Virginia film.” I ran across this major new film that is so relevant given the very sad tragedy that happened in a trailer house in Logan County recently. ( There was a great photo on the cover of the Charleston Daily Mail of a local girl that looks just like a scene from a John Waters film, showing the girl with her leopard skin jacket and lots of great amazing little things pasted on the outside of her own trailer house….)
