The Dallas Morning News |
Metro: Plano |
Bringing suburbia into focus |
Young filmmaker turns camera's eye on troubled teens |
3/28/2000 |
by Diana Griffith/The Dallas Morning News |
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That's the message of the edgy documentary Plano, Texas: A Cultural |
Study of Suburbia, which made its area debut at the Dallas Video Festival |
on Friday night. |
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because it illustrates what he sees as the failure of carefully planned |
suburbs to deal with unexpected problems such as teen suicide and heroin |
use. |
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up in suburbs in Texas and Oklahoma. "I don't know if there is a |
more important place." |
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to shed some light on all suburbs. |
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Plano families - of farms, old Mechanic Street after the fires, the Interurban |
Railway. Then a young man from Plano, his head shaved and arms crossed |
with tattoos, describes in graphic detail what he'd like to do to your |
daughter. Cut to Vicki Northcutt, author of Plano, an Illustrated |
Chronicle, conservatively dressed and coiffed in her Plano home. |
"It's a great place to raise kids," she says. |
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that including the profanity was my indulgence with sensationalism." |
It's a device used throughout the film, as Mr. Marriott follows adults |
boasting of Plano's clean-cut image with footage of former jocks and drug |
users describing the more desperate, dangerous side of Plano that they |
knew. |
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A clip of a real estate promo promising that "The advantages begin in |
Plano;" a Keep Plano Beautiful trash can; a joke about how Plano was named. |
Then there's Jim Lindenblatt, telling his memories of the early-80's suicides, |
when he was sophomore. "In Plano we had nothing to do. Basically |
a bunch of white trash rich people." He describes the drag race that |
he said started it all: "Bobby hit Becky, then Bobby killed himself." |
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Early Years, he said, as well as the hundreds of newspaper and magazine |
articles written in the last three years about Plano. He spoke to |
founding families, city planners and sociology professors, taking a file |
several inches thick to each interview. |
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that he tracked down Mr. Marriott after seeing the film at a smaller festival. |
Mr. Weiss included the film in Frames of MInd, a collection of short films |
on KERA-TV (Channel 13) as well as the in festival because of the film's |
message, he said. |
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this is the culture they're living in." |
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Plano's history of troubled teenagers, he'd never heard the voices of the |
teenagers. |
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he said. "It's really clear that the parents don't want to hear it." |
Mr. Marriott said he worked hard to present a balanced view of the city |
and its parents. "I didn't want to make anyone look ridiculous," |
he said. |
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be seen. Mr. Marriott, who just returned from several months in Finland, |
said he has not had a chance to send copies of the video to the people |
he interviewed. He said he's unsure how they'll respond to the final |
result. |
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was fair enough. |
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It's e out a real different perception, a delusion the parents are under." |
But that delusion is not limited to Plano, she said: "It's endemic in |
this society." |
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teenagers dead of heroin overdoses; court indictments and plea bargains. |
Aerial shots of subdivisions, their gracefully curving streets lined with |
matching homes with matching pools and matching security fences. |
The city is named fourth kid-friendliest city in 1997, the same year national |
media did feature stories on the city's heroin deaths. |
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an exposé on drug use among its teenagers. |
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I had, it sort of took its own shape," he said. |
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weekends to film his subjects: sociology professors, undercover cops, p,6.on |
parolees. |
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They talk about their disbelief, their shock, and now, their regret. |
Mr. Hill's voice rises as he says to the camera, "I don't care if you trust |
me. I'd rather you be alive because I didn't trust you tan go to |
visit your grave and say I trusted you." His wife's suggestion that |
parents give children drug tests is met with laughter by the mostly young, |
urban video festival audience. |
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said they appreciated the glimpse into what many them grew up only hearing |
about - Plano's troubled teens. |
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kids viewed it and the cops viewed it," said Daniel Dunham, 21, of Dallas. |
But Jason Gray, 20, said he was tired of the whole thing. |
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growing up in Dallas he knew plenty of people who overdosed and didn't |
get any media attention. |
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it. But for the price of a tape and postage, he said he'd be glad |
to send out copies if anyone's interested. He can be reached at his |
e-mail address, southernlove26@hotmail.com. |
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- unkempt black hair, T-shirt worn thin, thick glasses in clunky black |
frames. An outsider in the affluent suburbs his parents' work took |
him to - "I was an oil brat" - Mr. Marriott said he was frustrated with |
the expectations adults had becarne of his appearance. |
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his culture's assumption. "I didn't want to be associated with any |
group." |
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heroin. |
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where he said people are more invested in their outer image than in their |
inner lives. |
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testing and longer jail terms miss an important part of the problem: |
That kid's drug problems don't begin when they overdose, they began years |
earlier and just weren't addressed. |
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putting more ambulances at the bottom," he said. |
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