About this project

I wrote the earliest draft of Millie in first months of this very eventful year. It seemed like the whole world was about the change. A black man was President. Everyone was going broke (well, not really; the people who always had money just had slightly less). No one wanted to pay me to write movie reviews anymore. My life and everyone’s around me seemed to be entering some brave new era.

I had moved from Bedford-Stuyvesant after being slowly priced out of a “loft” just fifteen blocks south, in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, in the early months of the recession. Although I’m always weary these days of Brooklyn lore, some say that Clinton Hill is just a realtors term, a convenient fabrication, a term meant to separate it from the historical neighborhood which encompasses it, which has of late fallen upon disrepair.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, especially its northern reaches, gripped me quickly. A community in transition. As always. In Brooklyn, everybody is somebodies gentrifier. Colson Whitehead once said that. Filled as it is with failed industry, unrenovated Brownstones and misbegotten row houses, it decay has s certain dreadful charm. The elevated tracks of the J train its single artery to the glamourous city beyond the shores of the East River. With little patches of Haitians and Dominicans, hipsters and those who can’t quite afford to be, it’s a diversity one could find only in this place at this time in history.

When I went to my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio for the holidays last winter, just as the idea of loosely adapting a hip-hop song I had been listening to recently into a feature film, it all began clicked into place. No one has the slightest clue back home what my life is like up here, regardless of what I say about it. Part of the pleasure of writing the movie, was to be able to paint a portrait of the community in which I live. When I returned to New York, I was finally ready to represent this special place in a story about abuse and human frailty, urban alienation and spiritual malaise. Like so many of the filmmakers I admire, from Adam Egoyan to John Sayles to Robert Altman, I want to make an ensemble piece with a series of protagonists that allow a picture of an entire community in a time of great turmoil to slowly unfold.

There are people who abuse their children yet are capable of acts of kindness, of forging lasting relationships and being integral parts of their communities. There are those that standby while such things go on, incapable of helping the defenseless because of their own weaknesses. Many "urban" communities are more dangerous, less educated, dirtier and have families with a smaller median income when adjusted for inflation than comparable communities fifty years ago. Many in my community have been besieged by the type of nihilism that only festers in places where people truly lack any hope for a better tomorrow. These are inconvenient truths, but truths nonetheless. They are also the fodder for great drama, although often the complexity of these issues clouds the ability for storytellers to properly dramatize them.

I want to make the movie that gets it right.