Tales of the Grim Sleeper

Nick Broomfield, I gather, is a well-known figure in documentary films, and he IS a little different from what you'd expect. He wanders in and out of the frame carrying the microphone and wearing earphones. He looks like a normal, middle-aged Englishman, moves deliberately, and sounds a little like Donald Crisp might have sounded as he approached adolescence. His voice is calm, dispassionate, and lacks drama. On the whole he sounds like a philosophy professor at some British boarding school, maybe Sidcot. "Next we met Bertrand Russell. Bert is a white-haired socialist. He once drove a garbage truck but is now homeless. Bert, how well did you know Alfred North Whitehead?"

In point of fact, we don't really get to know much about the suspected murderer, Lonnie Franklin. Broomfield has the invaluable help of a key informant, Pam, who takes him on a tour of South Central Los Angeles and calls pedestrians over for a few words about the Grim Sleeper. Without Pam Bromfield probably wouldn't have got as far as he did, since he's white. According to the anecdotes we get from the people on the street, Lonnie Franklin seems to have been one of those fellows who goes out of his way to help other people, although his friends do mention a few peculiarities -- a pile of stroke magazines in the bathroom, a proudly displayed .25 caliber pistol.

If we don't learn much about Franklin, we certainly get a good gander at the neighborhood and its residents. First of all, despite the bars on the windows and the gun shots in the background, it doesn't look nearly as squalid as the black ghetto near where I grew up, in Newark, New Jersey. Anybody moving from Chancellor Avenue to broad sunny Central Avenue in LA would take a deep breath and relax, the way retirees do when they finally step off the bus in Florida.

The police weren't involved in the film, so we get the African-American perspective on events. Generally, the attitudinal set is that the LAPD is incompetent and neglectful of black crime victims. There are exceptions but it's clear that there is a great big wall between the black neighborhood and the police force, as in so many other cities.

Broomfield doesn't show much in the way of political correctness. His informants speak for themselves. As an anthropologist, which is what I am, I would be very careful in taking some of their statements as literal fact.

One of the more admirable features of the film is that Broomfield, despite his narrative voice-over and his occasional intrusion into the images, is no Michael Moore. He's not one of the so-called Nouvelles Egotistes.

I regret to say that on the whole it was a little repetitious and dull. Too many anecdotes from a handful of acquaintances and relatives about what Franklin might or might not have done. It could have been pruned down to a fascinating one-hour show.

The more films I see the more I hanker for a few simple things. Do we enter an interesting world, not fully charted? Can we steal an entry into life as it comes to be? Ways?

This is what I get here. Not just a documentary that traces the particulars of horrible crime - a serial killer who freely killed for 20 years has just been arrested - but a first person noir that swerves off the beaten track to investigate simmering truth.

What you'll see here is an English guy with a camera and his soundman driving around Southcentral LA or snooping outside homes to talk with people as they're trying to see how far this malaise seeps. Was it just a crazy man in an otherwise perfectly fine world after all?

Our host who shows them around is a former prostitute and crack addict, a tough street-wise woman who freely stops the car and chats with women on the street. A breathtaking sequence shows them driving around at night in search of prostitutes who may have known the killer, we find them here and there in dark streets and roll down the window to talk to them. We stop at a girl's house at night and someone is glaring from a window. During an interview, gunshots are heard from nearby.

It has all this tension, invaluable because it comes from having quietly slipped into this world from a backdoor and just prowling in search.

One acquaintance leads to another and we find a man who was paid one day by the killer to take a car out and burn it, who found bloodstained clothes in the back but kept quiet. We meet with the man's friends who insist he couldn't be the one but begin to have second thoughts. We're taken to a backroom where one of them keeps stacks of photos of nude girls who posed in shabby bedrooms or in the back of someone's car, images these guys passed on between them.

The greater insight is that all of this has been quietly taking place for decades and accepted as sleepless life, that we're seeing how the lives of 20 year olds in Reagan's time faded away. It's all in being able to see how this man who is now sharing stacks of photo albums - a catalogue of despair, both his and the women's who sell themselves for their next crack fix - is sharing what is for him a casual pastime in a life that you have nothing better to do, sleeping with hookers and keeping these mementos.

Even better; none of this would have been possible without these people being so candidly open to the camera and freely sharing stories. Can you imagine how fastidiously silent a German neighborhood would have kept? (and that's the subject of The White Ribbon)

Now we begin to see the life that give rise to this world. How many people would have been spared if they had all come forward or the police cared enough to investigate? They won't because of past experience with police, the police won't because murders in the ghetto are a triviality.

This is more valuable to me than any book James Ellroy could write or anything seen in True Detective. I'm going to go ahead and add it to my list of essential views of LA, next to Angel City, Killer of Sheep and Southland.

I would like to know why some of the members of the community, who were so articulate and vocal about the LAPD and their lack of interest in this case, were not just as vocal towards some of the men we met in their own community, who clearly had associated and collaborated with Lonnie and treated vulnerable women like garbage. I feel the community where Lonnie lived should have taken some of the responsibility too. How can so many women go missing? What does that say about the community? What does this say about how these "friends" of Lonnie feel about the women in their community? It's not just police gross incompetence, it's members of a community that appeared to look the other way or ignore what was happening right under their own noses and not just about the murders either.

It's not bad - it shows that LAPD are incompetent, and that in South Central life is very cheap indeed. Usual Broomfield faux-incompetence. Can't quite prove the allegation that LAPD were complicit rather than incompetent in the non-arrest of a prodigious serial killer.

The impressive thing is the interviews, which Broomfield plays down. He can have people who were hurling insults at him tearfully recollecting, or admitting their own complicity as they realise they cleaned bloodstains or found victims.

I'm surprised some local tough guy didn't take him out, there seems to be a strange reliance on the police, who no-one remotely trusts for anything else, to solve the problem of a serial killer in the neighbourhood - looks like local people who weren't related to the victims didn't care any more than the LAPD.

You have to watch anything by Nick Broomfield with a grain of salt, never forget that this is the guy who made 'BIGGIE & TUPAC (2004)' which made almost everyone think that Suge Knight was the guy who had Tupac killed.

Which is something that today most people have changed their minds about, and people from said documentary have since come out with stories of manipulative tactics he uses to get to people to more or less say what he want them to.

Anyway he does what he usually does here, takes a camera team around the areas that were affected and start looking for people to interview on the spot.

Runs across some people that knew the 'grim sleeper' or just knew of him and asks them questions. With a lot of driving around and discussions that stray far away from the actual documentary subject at times.

One thing that struck me as weird was how many people that actually did know him (yes he actually eventually found some that did) would initially start off as saying how he seemed normal and was a good guy and then mention things about him that would suggest otherwise.

Like the ex girlfriend of Lonnie's son who initially said that 'Lonnie and his wife seemed like a normal couple, whatever I wanted I could depend on him to fix' to 3 minutes later be talking about how she could sense that he was listening to her and his son having sex and how he was a perv etc etc.

And his best buddies who'd swear that he was a good guy and that they couldn't believe the charges towards him to eventually started talking about how he'd torture prostitutes with vivid descriptions.

Like okay, do you have any sort of concept of what a 'good guy' and a 'normal' guy is or did you just change your story because Nick Broomfield wanted something juicy to put in his film and he was offering you extra money for it?

So yeah it's hard not to put on a suspicious eye here, I'm not saying that the man accused of being the 'grim sleeper' is innocent I don't think he is, but it's hard to know for sure when things get fishy like that. It is possible I suppose that even if they did get paid more for juicy stories (and Broomfield is known for paying the people he interviews) that those stories still are true.

Goes on a little too long as well.

But still decent enough to watch once.