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Photograph courtesey Cogswell College
'Raimey,' a young inmate at the O.H. Close detention center in Stockton, prepares to shoot video that will be incorporated into a Cogswell College documentary film shot inside the prison.
A snapshot of hard time
Cogswell College students share film lessons with juvenile offenders
By Sam Scott
The dice always tumble Big Cash's way. He is a hustler, an inmate who thrives at prison games: handball, dominoes, craps, whatever. Sick of Cash's Midas touch and his big mouth, the other prisoners cut him out of their games. Frustrated, Cash looks for alternatives. He finds a nerd who teaches him chess -- a new way to take a crowd.
"All he's done is find another way to hustle," explains Lee Miller, a professor from Cogswell College in Sunnyvale. "Big Cash" is the featured character in a short film by inmates at the OH Close detention center in Stockton. Miller and his college film students helped teach the students at OH Close to write and produce the short movie. At the same time, Miller and his students shot there own documentary film chronicling their experiences at Close.
In Big Cash 's final scene, the master of the take vanquishes another foe with a resounding "checkmate". As the movie ends, Cash leans to the camera, flashing a broad smile and a chunky wad of cash. Both beam "Victory."
The 10-minute movie is impressive. The script, directing and pace all feel well-crafted. Shots of a showdown between Big Cash and the prison champion on the handball court jump cleanly and quickly from angle to angle. The plot builds over a series of short, tight scenes pulled together nicely. It's clean and surprisingly absent of amateur excess.
"It looks good," says Mark Devic, a 17 year-old ward who portrays one of Big Cash's early victims in a high stakes dominos game for toilet supplies. "I was surprised."
Credit the success to the teaching ability of Miller, five Cogswell students and a few talented wards of the California Youth Authority. If Big Cash lacks anything, it's certainly not authenticity. These are prisoners playing prisoners. When Devcic loses a game of dominoes to Big Cash and has to give up a bevy of toilet supplies, the audience gets an insightful lesson in real barbed-wire economics.
Beginning last fall, Miller and Cogswell students Thuyen Vu, Mike Gaeta, Daniel Resz, Soneile Hymn and Nathan Zanon began making bi-weekly trips to the Stockton campus to meet with two groups of five inmates. Using their equipment and expertise, the Cogswell contingent ran the inmates through a rapid course in the elements of filmmaking: scriptwriting, storyboarding, and directing.
For the inmates, the culmination of the trips was making their own movies. One group shot Big Cash while the other shot The Spotlight, a short film about two basketball rivals competing for a spot in a movie.
Recently, the inmates got a chance to see the finished products.
"It came out better than I thought it would," says Rasul Gasery, 20, the lead actor and screenwriter of The Spotlight. He has always wanted to be a writer, he says, and meeting Miller gave him the inspiration to pursue it. Gasery recently saw an edited copy of his film for the first time. "I am very satisfied," he says.
Starting with their initial arrival at Close, Miller and his crew began shooting, gathering footage for their own documentary of their time in the prison. As the prisoners recorded their movies, Miller and the students taped the prisoners. Editors will later incorporate Big Cash and The Spotlight into the Cogswell production.
"At first it was difficult to invade them," Mike Gaeta, a junior, says of the inmates and their world. "We just filmed everything." The students have more than 50 hours of tape to choose from for their production, he says.
Miller says he got the idea for the project this summer while researching youth crime. A screen writer himself, Miller wanted to understand why criminals are becoming more hardened to society at younger ages. The spark to do the documentary came shortly thereafter.
"I got away from doing research," he says. "I thought I'd like my students to be involved in this. What can we do? We can go to prisons for minors who have done brutal felonies and teach them how to make movies."
Lee sees the documentary as a film about art affecting troubled kids. Down the road, he can perhaps see the film being used in sociology classes.
Thuyen Vu, a junior who taught the prisoners storyboarding, agrees that the project is less about prison life than about the power of creating. "It is not a film about prison," he says. "There are too many films about prison already. It's a film about the creation process."
On an immediate level, the instruction seems to have had a positive result. Chris Lawyer, a Close computer teacher whose classes were involved in the project, said the experience was a boost to his kids.
"It gave them confidence in themselves that they could do something they could never do before," he says. "They never really knew they could actually do it."
Optimism aside, the documentary won't be a didactic account on the benefits of filmmaking. Miller and his group also have explored the grim side of the prisoners' pasts, probing for information on their crimes and interviewing some of their parents -- a discomfiting process to say the least.
Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Lee Miller, right, professor of video and film technology at Cogswell College, leads students through the video editing process.
The California Youth Authority is not designed for petty criminals. Juvenile offenders are generally diverted to alternative means of punishment or rehabilitation. CYA is for violent and repeat offenders.
"This is the end of the line of the juvenile justice system," Sarah Ludeman, a spokesperson for the institution, says.
In the CYA system, O.H. Close is a place for the younger criminals. Many of the inmates come here barely into their teens. Some are younger. The film project participants are in the older section of the populace, though all arrived at much younger ages.
Miller says as the prisoners became more comfortable with the crew, a few talked about their crimes on camera. It's was a difficult experience for Miller, who first got to know the inmates without knowing their crimes.
"You get this emotional attachment to these guys," Miller says. "But some of them killed people, some of them raped, some of them have just done horrible things. You just don't know how to feel."
The experience stands in marked contrast to the usual interactions of artistic collaborators, Miller says. "I don't know them as vile people. I know them as creative film-making guys."
Feelings of repulsion the Cogswell students occasionally felt were often balanced with empathy, a sense that these kids have talent and potential. "A couple of times I thought 'wow, wait a minute, he's in prison?" Zanon said.
The experience of being in prison has been eye-opening for Miller and the Cogswell students. Overall, they say, O.H. Close, with its athletic fields and interested teachers, seems a much brighter place than they imagined a prison to be.
"It's probably nicer than some of the public schools in the area," Resz says. Yet, he says, there's also an inescapable tension of being behind barbed wire gates, always accounted for.
"Every day waking up to the same thing," says Hymn, the group's only woman. "I'd probably go crazy if I was them."
Miller says the group leaves the visits to the complex depleted of energy, driving home with minimal conversation. "Not only are you exhausted because of the physical output," Miller says, "but also because of the underlying unsaid feeling in a prison which is very, very uncomfortable."
One of the stars of Big Cash withdrew from the project before its completion. The young man had a breakdown, Miller says. He was one of the brightest kids the group had met, and his condition saddened the crew.
"He was just a really cool guy," Zanon says as he views footage from the movies. "We're there for 6 hours and it's really draining. A guy who's there for six years; I guess it can get to you even if you're together."
As the trips to Close become fewer and fewer, there's a sense of sadness among the group. Hymn says illness forced her to miss one of the last visits. She has found herself missing the prisoners, a feeling others say they shared.
"I don't want it to end," Gaeta says. He hopes to teach similar classes to kids in other institutions.
With filming almost completed, Miller's students have begun the more difficult process--editing. "We've done the easy part," Miller says. "Now comes the hard part."
Fifty hours of tape, stowed in a fire safe, await editing. Every minute must be catalogued in a notebook, each small thing noted. Moments that look inconsequential now may become poignant as the movie takes direction. It will be a time-consuming process, the filmmakers say.
"I can feel the burnout coming," Miller says. He expects to be done sometime this summer.
The entire editing process will be done on computers. Miller points to The Buena Vista Social Club, a recent film about Cuban musicians, as an example of another film recorded digitally.
Digital recording isn't the only thing Miller hopes the films will have in common. He'd also like a sliver of Buena Vista's success. Despite this being his and the students first documentary, Miller is thinking big.
"I'd be really happy if it opened at the Roxy," Miller says, referring to a theater in a popular area of San Francisco's Mission District. "I'd definitely like this to find a distributor for theatrical release."
He also wants to enter festivals. But these ambitions will first mean taking the movie from video to 35 mm film, a costly proposition.
"Film is really expensive," Hymn, who recently transferred to Cogswell, explains. It may cost $50,000 to $60,000 to put the end product on film, she says.
With her visits to the prison winding down, Hymn dedicates her time to researching ways to fund the conversion. She's taking a grant-writing class to refine her approaches. With a little "Big Cash" luck, she and the others hope to the funds the movie needs.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
