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| First Person: Money & Meaning |
The Kids Stay in the Picture
Michael Almog
10/01/2005
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“Because if you put me in jail, I would do everything to
not go back.”
I asked him what he offered his students. When he told me that
the Friends of Island offered a diploma, I asked him what his students would do
with a diploma. He said, “Well, they can work for McDonald’s.” I replied,
“That’s why they’re failing, because to succeed you need motivation, and what
motivates is the imagination. The kids can see for themselves that the maximum
they’re going to get from this is standing in front of a fryer at
McDonald’s.”
I came up with the idea to pay the kids $300 a week to
work at my company and other places in the industry. Danny Fisher helped me put
it together. For two years now I have been working with five boys from the
program. We had a sixth one who moved to New Orleans to live with his father.
One of the boys is now working for a small video production company, helping at
whatever they ask him to do; they are pleased with him so far. Another is
working at a company where they barter trades for low-budget movies.
 Danny
keeps the others busy doing whatever we need them to do: lighting, helping the
editor, logging, arranging the library, showing up on time. They read scripts,
too, and give me their opinions. One of the boys recommended the script for a
horror movie called The Plague, which we are producing with Clive Barker. It’s
about comatose children who wake up when they get to adulthood, and start
terrorizing their parents.
I make horror movies to maintain my cash flow. I
dream of making a historical film about a story from 300 years ago of a Jewish
man who beheld a new messiah and converted to Islam. I’m trying to teach the
kids to have dreams about what they can do, too. You have to understand: We are
getting boys who are worse than babies. They have bad habits. They grow up in a
place where if you’ve never been in jail you’re a “faggot,” you’re nobody. I can
hardly understand what they’re saying. But they’re very sweet, even innocent in
the sense that they come from a ghetto that has different rules than the
outside. They start selling marijuana when they’re 10, and they don’t really
comprehend that it is going to get them in trouble; it’s just what everyone
around them does.
They make fun of me for not understanding ghetto language.
One of the boys, Marc, came to me and asked me to talk to the manager of a mall
in Queens where Marc wanted to rent a booth selling custom jewelry. I asked him,
“Why do you want me to talk to the manager?” Marc replied, “’Cause he don’t
understand me.” I answered, “Two years ago you were making fun of me because I
don’t speak like you.” So he asked me to send him to speech therapy.
Some of
these boys are intelligent. Some of them want to become a film editor in two
weeks. Some don’t want to do anything except save their lives—which is fine,
because when you save your life, you save other people’s lives. If you aren’t a
rotten apple, you won’t make the entire box rotten.
I’ve tried to talk to
city officials about funding a program like this.
I tell them, “If you don’t
you will have to pay $200 a day to keep each of these kids in prison.” So far
all of the money for the project has come from my own pocket, and I hate to
think what will happen to the boys when I run out of cash. I do this because I
believe that when you leave the earth you don’t take anything with you—you take
only what you gave. I can give these boys a chance to give something.
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