r/Documentaries • u/morsomme • Jan 16 '23
20th Century Streetwise (1984) follows an unforgettable group of at-risk children driven from their broken homes, survive by hustling, panhandling, and dumpster diving. Criterion Collection. [01:31:54]
https://youtu.be/PdOzm0eBhFo68
u/apatrol Jan 16 '23
Is this the one where they would order weird topping pizzas, not pay/pickup, and then the pizza place would throwaway the pizza and they would go get it?
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Jan 16 '23
yes, it is.
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u/apatrol Jan 16 '23
I saw it in the theaters, My mom had me go with some friends. I grew up very upper middle class. I honestly had no concept of what being poor/homeless really was. This was very eye opening. This film literally was part of the reason I went into police work,
I quickly realized the police simply can’t fix bad parenting, mental illness, and poor education (and the ability to get into trade/college).
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u/Razakel Jan 16 '23
All the criminal justice system can do is warehouse Bad People. That's what it's built to do. But it falls to them to pick up the slack from underfunded social services.
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u/DefenderCone97 Jan 16 '23 edited Jan 16 '23
All the criminal justice system can do is warehouse Bad People. That's what it's built to do.
That and profiting off slave labor
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u/Feniksrises Jan 16 '23
Funny thing is that putting one person in jail costs society hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I live in a European country and we have a social safety net- not because we're socialist bleeding heart liberals but because it is actually cheaper to put the crazies and homeless in a cheap flat.
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Jan 16 '23
[deleted]
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u/trogloherb Jan 17 '23
Funny thing is time loves a hero; next thing you know, theyre naming highways and renaming airports after the guy. Itll always be “National” to me…
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u/Kamelasa Jan 17 '23
All the criminal justice system can do is warehouse Bad People
You mean in the US? It's different in Canada. Rehabilitation is a meaningful principle with meaningful programs of rehabilitation, particularly in federal penitentiaries. It's why the choice of over or under 2 years is so important in many sentencings - often people prefer to be over so they can participate in the programs. A lot of people really want to get off drugs or get away from intrusive urges they have and learn to manage them so acting on urges doesn't fuck up their lives further.
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u/_Dreadz Jan 17 '23
Yea we see how well you “rehab” the natives you have no room to puff your chest in this argument
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u/apatrol Jan 18 '23
If we keep bringing up past sins we will never get anywhere. Your comment did nothing to help the discussion and sidelined sharing and potentially educating a someone else.
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u/Kamelasa Jan 17 '23
police simply can’t fix bad parenting,
In fact, they can't even cope with it. These days, in Canada, such people get shot by the police. Donno if it used to happen a lot, but I believe we have greater gun activity because of influence from the completely insane level of gun ownership and misuse in the US.
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u/apatrol Jan 18 '23
No we have always had super high gun ownership in Texas. Murder rate may have been higher per capita in the 80-90. The bullying is so bad now it just magnifies everything. All emotions are 20% or something.
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u/Kamelasa Jan 18 '23
Not sure what you're saying, especially your last sentence.
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u/apatrol Jan 18 '23
Sorry, I am up due to insomnia. Lots of stuff makes sense in my head but doesn’t in writing or when speaking.
When I was a kid bullying stopped once I got home. Now bullying continues on multiple platforms and to a much wider audience 24/7. My belief is this plays a major factor on our level of just about every emotion. Others may take part in my shame by laughing with my bully or joining in. Potentially my parents see it so my safe space is tainted. If I was to lash out it would be at a much bigger list of people or even the school that didn’t protect me and etc. everything is magnified!
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u/Kamelasa Jan 18 '23
OKay, what you wrote before - I was talking about greater gun activity here in Canada, because we've gotten more influenced over time.
Yes, online bullying is a terrible thing. Considering how shit teachers were in dealing with f2f bullying, I'm not surprised bullying seems to flow unimpeded on social media. I'm kinda glad, now, I was the tallest kid, even taller than all the boys, and I defended a couple kids who were bullied.
However, I have to disagree with you about emotions. External things don't control our emotions, unless we let them; the problem is there is negative emotional intelligence, on average, and inadequate in most cases. It's not a thing that the mainstream seems aware of, that there are skills and power involved in emotions, but without that you just get a bunch of painful and violent shit. Then the police get to deal with it.
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u/PocoChanel Jan 16 '23
One of these children was later murdered by the Green River Killer. There aren't many fairy tale endings for the cast of this film.
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u/Sentenced2Burn Jan 16 '23
which one??
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u/PocoChanel Jan 16 '23
I haven't seen the film in a long time, but the person in question is Roberta Joseph Hayes.
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u/Gyftycf Jan 18 '23
Roberta Joseph Hayes... Wasn't a main "character", but she was in the documentary. https://m.imdb.com/name/nm2264603/. She was killed at 20 years old, in 1987; 3-4 years after this was made.
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u/Maximillion666ian Jan 16 '23 edited Jan 16 '23
Reminds me of the street kids I hung out with in the very early 90s back in Vancouver Canada. It was such a darker place back then. I knew kids who prostituted themselves often to old men. One kid I knew ended up murdered and buried in a park after prostituting himself at 13.
There was a child prostitution area downtown just off skid row back in the late 80s.
Another guy I knew was shot and killed by the cops because they thought his Walkman was a gun at night. We trained jackets for a bit and he ended up dying in my Raiders jacket . That isn't even counting all the kids who ended up turning into junkies.
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u/ctindel Jan 16 '23
Vancouver has a skid row?
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u/Ok_Profession_2512 Jan 16 '23
Never heard of Hastings? Believe it has the highest HIV rate per capita in the western world
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u/satisfactoryshitstic Jan 16 '23
I made a point to visit Hastings when I was there, as you get closer the NO PUBLIC RESTROOM signs get more frequent, then there are safe injection sites. I saw a guy shadow boxing on a corner and then he threw his shoe into traffic and ran after it. He was only wearing underwear and it was 1pm. There were some people fiending and talking very loudly about what sex acts they would do for drugs. Then I was at the park and there was a Christian group giving out free ice cream. Thankfully Vancouver has wonderful sidewalks that are all connected so you can walk very far away
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u/Painting_Agency Jan 16 '23
We Drove across Hastings St. at one point when visiting Vancouver. It was like looking at a post-apocalyptic film set: Ragged tents along the sidewalk, trash everywhere, empty stores, people staggering around like zombies.
At the semi-nearby Chinese gardens someone told us to not let our kids play around because people would shoot up in the bamboo grove and leave needles.
Shocking and heartbreaking.
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u/fieew Jan 16 '23
Unironically most major Canadian cities seem to have their own version of skid row. At least here on Ontario most major cities are struggling with homelessness and homeless camps are popping up more frequently and getting bigger and bigger in size. In Cambridge there was a massive fire in one of the camps that was pretty close to the highway and the highway had to be shut down for a bit. They may not be as big as skid row but most cities are getting there.
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Jan 16 '23
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u/lumpytuna Jan 16 '23
What do they do at this time of year? Head south? Or are there places they can go to find shelter in the subway?
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u/joleme Jan 16 '23
Depending on their mental faculties and how dirty they are some can just go to public places all day to stay warm. When night comes stay up as long as possible or if they're lucky enough to find enough blankets/sleepingbags to stay warm they just do that.
also, being homeless isn't the same as being broke. A lot of homeless people have hustles or part time jobs so they can at least afford some sort of heater if they can find a place to plug it in.
I haven't experienced the "full" homeless life since I had a car to sleep in, but I've seen enough of it over the course of my life so far.
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u/lumpytuna Jan 16 '23
Even in Montreal? No blankets or sleeping bags are going to save you in -20. Not even a car would unless you could afford to keep it running all night. And walking around at that temp isn't going to cut it for more than a couple of hours.
I just don't see how people survive that, and I'm really sad that they have to try tbh.
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u/joleme Jan 16 '23
I live in the upper midwest and we get down to -30f with windchill quite often. -20f is super common.
Frankly it's a testament to how resilient people can be that people do survive it for years at a time. What other choice do they have really? Unless you find a republican politician ready to bus a group down to warmer climates traveling is dangerous.
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u/billbixbyakahulk Jan 16 '23
Part of the reason the filmmakers of Streetwise chose Seattle was because back in the 1980s it was considered one of the nicest, family-friendly cities in the US. (Yes, I know that's very far its image today). They wanted to show that even "nice cities" have problems with homelessness so people couldn't dismiss the problem as one that just affects cities like L.A., Baltimore, Detroit, etc.
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u/Gojisoji Jan 16 '23
That's so sad. I knew a few kids like this growing up. Often wonder what happened to them and if they made it in life.
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u/Noheifers Jan 16 '23
That's the area where Robert Pickton found most of his victims, isn't it?
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u/beneaththeradar Jan 16 '23
Yes, downtown east side.
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u/Nickvestal Jan 17 '23
Is that Belltown?
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u/beneaththeradar Jan 17 '23
Belltown is Seattle. Downtown Eastside (or DTES for short) is Vancouver.
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Jan 16 '23
I believe they made a second documentary on Tiny called “Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell” in 2016.
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u/xoverthirtyx Jan 16 '23
Yep, that’s her in the thumbnail too.
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Jan 16 '23
I can’t imagine what those kids had to experience, she’s one hell of a survivor.
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u/NimChimspky Jan 16 '23
She didn't survive?
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Jan 17 '23
As of 2016 she’s still alive with 10 kids and a bunch of dogs. 2016 article about Erin Blackwell
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Jan 16 '23
[deleted]
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Jan 16 '23
Apparently he was 16, but incredibly underdeveloped and emaciated from years of hard living
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u/ihavefoodpoisoning Jan 16 '23
He said he was the smallest kid in the unit, it’s not hard to imagine what would have been happening to him in there.
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u/bassbeatsbanging Jan 17 '23
Thanks for the spoiler. Even though it wasn't fiction I still want to see the story unfold for myself. You could have discussed this in vague language or hidden the text.
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u/zulu_magu Jan 21 '23
Weird to read this far down in a thread about a movie you wanted to watch without spoilers.
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u/Red77777777 Jan 16 '23 edited Jan 16 '23
I always need to know what happened to these people. It's impossible for me to say "That was a good documentary", and then move on to other things.
There are a number of updates on the people in this documentary, children then, grown up now, and some have died, killed on the streets of big cities.
https://www.realchangenews.org/news/2021/06/30/revisiting-streetwise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetwise_(1984_film)
and if you want to know even more here is the google search command
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u/SirjoonE Jan 16 '23
another movie similar to this is ‘Children Underground’. it follows a band of homeless/runaway children in Bucharest who are seen fighting, self-harming, and becoming addicted to Aurolac (industrial adhesive). It’s terrifyingly upsetting.
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u/Noheifers Jan 16 '23
That is the most horrifying documentary. I worked with kids with mental health issues in juvenile justice when I first saw this and the kids in the documentary were like the kids I worked with but times a hundred. The way they were treated by the public was sick. Like it was their fault the were born and abandoned. Ceaușescu was a nightmare.
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u/Appropriate-Panda-52 Jan 16 '23
One of the best documentaries of all time!
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u/morsomme Jan 16 '23
Hard agree!
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u/_Dreadz Jan 16 '23
One of the girls from there is still around and is (at least 6 months or so ago) the one named Tracy and she has helped tons of heroin addicts and I wanna say is a drug and alcohol counselor after all that happened and she had updated how some of them were but sadly most aren’t around anymore
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u/skyfelldown Jan 16 '23
you’re thinking of Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street. different doc.
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Jan 16 '23
I just rewatched this yesterday!
There’s some follow up documentaries of Tiny and a short documentary of Rat on Mary’s website.
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u/theanakin Jan 16 '23
Excellent documentary. Terribly sad though, especially the things that happened to some of the kids after.
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u/poopshipdestroyer Jan 16 '23
Baby Gramps is the musician at the beginning! First saw him in the 90s, and last I knew still toured a bit
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u/OlasNah Jan 16 '23
Will have to watch this because I did much of the same things at that age. Lots of dumpster diving and other stuff
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u/Realistic-Squirrel87 Jan 16 '23
Holy fuck that was a difficult one to watch. Poignant yet tormenting in so many emotional moments. Top five documentary films of all time imo. Godspeed to all those people man, fuck.
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u/Nickvestal Jan 17 '23
I think Johnny Rotten's band PiL wrote a song about this documentary called Seattle. " Don't like the look of this old town..."
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u/ananthem Jan 16 '23
The opening monologue about flying is sampled in the How To Dress Well song "Say My Name, Say Whatever" it's a beautiful song and I've always wondered where that dialogue came from.
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u/billbixbyakahulk Jan 16 '23
If this subject interests you, I recommend two other excellent documentaries: Dark Days and Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street.
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u/Ok-Pea-6213 Jan 16 '23
It’s been a few years, but one of the characters had a son, and he was in my class as a 6th grader. He was a sweet kid and he really liked everclear the band. That’s what I remember about that kid. Socially awkward. But middle school sucks.
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Jan 16 '23
I saw this year's ago and it stuck with me bc its so disturbing. what's really disturbing also is how Hollywood tried to take the child prostitute like immediately after this came out. just a feel good movie for the ages....
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u/BlurryBigfoot74 Jan 16 '23
You can go down a rabbit hole on updates of what happened to most of the kids in this doc. Oddly enough, IMDb comment section has a lot of info. There's a few Facebook groups but they're all very quiet with random updates.