Sunset Junction

A flaming ex-hairdresser-to-the-stars decides to quash the mounting tensions between Latino gangs in a rundown L.A. neighborhood by getting everyone involved in a summer street fair. Thousands of folks show up from all over the city, dozens of at-risk kids learn valuable life lessons of tolerance and self-respect, and the zip code quickly becomes the trendiest Bohemian block in town. No, it's not some corny after-school special, but the true story of one man and his vision of a happy little corner in the violently disjointed City of Angels. The proof of this stranger-than-Hollywood story is right here in A&E "Biography" director Peter Jones's masterful debut feature documentary, Sunset Junction. Sunset Junction connotes several entities to the greater Los Angeles community. It's the coffeehouse on the 4100 block of Sunset Boulevard, in the Silverlake district, that serves up Latina lesbian poetry slams and transgendered A.A. meetings along with half-caf soy lattes. It's a weekend-long annual street fair that caters to the gay community, now more popular than even after over twenty consecutive festivals. And in a greater sense, Sunset Junction is the place in time where young people let the sun set on their violent, unhappy pasts and "make a new day" for themselves as they mature into responsible, ethical adults. The last of the three, we quickly find, is actually founder Michael McKinley's greatest passion, although he never says so in so many words. He's not the fatherly (or grandfatherly) type by any means, especially, as he is quick to point out, as his lack of Latino machismo would ordinarily make him the least likely candidate to mentor the youth of his neighborhood. So perhaps the young people on the fence between choosing the pseudo-family of a gang and a future in mainstream society are drawn to McKinley because he himself has successfully navigated the life of both an "outsider" and the life of a respected businessman and community leader. McKinley welcomes both young men and young women to work in his coffeehouse and on the August festival; his "intervention" is of a gradual, experiential, often accidental nature. He doesn't subscribe to mainstream religion and he doesn't preach; not once does he use the word "love" to describe his rationale for his projects. He's a character too fascinating to have been made up. This film follows McKinley and several of his young employees over the course of three months leading up to the 2001 Sunset Junction festival, both in direct preparation and in their personal lives. Editing choices are oftentime surprising, as Jones treats his subjects honestly, as the multifaceted people that they are. We see "good" sides (McKinley's right-hand-planning man, Esser, coaching a youth soccer league), "bad" sides (flippant Gisselle showing off a straight-F high school transcript), to simply silly sides (McKinley himself prissily mocking up the layout of the throw rugs for a festival band's tent, three months in advance of the concert). Content of conversations run the gamut from tragedy (classmate funerals) to inadvertant comedy (giggly girls draining a broken refrigerator), and are unedited for expletives. Gisselle tattoos a skull on a boy's arm, and her friend, Luz, unenthusiastically kneads a (white) woman's back in an junior college massage class. There is nothing romantic about Latino life in L.A., yet Jones eloquently monumentalizes even the most banal events in this film. For a filmmaker used to working with archival black & white photographs and film clips, Jones has pieced together an incredibly vibrant, energetic, and utterly engrossing narrative from hundreds of hours of PAL footage that he shot for the project. The film opens with gratuitous but gorgeous shots of L.A.-- lotuses in Echo Park, graffiti murals, cream entering the black abyss of a coffee cup. Whenever d.p. Shana Hagan got the chance to make a shot look "artsy," she took it. In one memorable take, she allows the camera to linger on a splendidly-plumed rooster strutted through an overgrown yard before cutting to Giselle, dressed like the bird in oranges and browns. Several shots of soccer practice in the Griffith Park fields show Esser stoically standing by as the late afternoon glow illuminates the bugs and dust lazily circling around him. Jones struggles mightily to maintain a nonjudgmental perspective on the proceedings, but he tends toward the anti-authoritarian stance that McKinley and his young cohorts clearly take, as in a particularly damning shot of a wall of cops pushing a toddler on a scooter out of the way as the fair closes down for the night.

Jones had originally planned to make a film capturing vignettes of life on the blocks of Sunset Boulevard. On the first day of shooting, he found all that he needed and more in Sunset Junction, and lucky are we the filmgoers that he started from the easternmost end of the city's most famous avenue. On its cinematographic merits alone, Sunset Junction is an instant classic L.A. movie, with all the inherent location charm of a "Swingers" or a "Chinatown", but with its roving, indiscriminate documentary eye, it becomes an invaluable sociological study as well. ****1/2