A film in which I became very involved set out to film black and Hispanic youth gangs in Spanish Harlem. Our crews (never more than two people) were to hang out with gangs that we contacted through our centrepiece, Piri Thomas, a former drug dealer and mini-gangster. Years before, he had held up a Greenwich Village night club but was shot in the process by an off-duty cop who Piri then shot... he ended up being sentenced to 14 years in Sing-Sing. There he became a Black Muslim, but after a couple of years figured out that that wasn’t going to shorten his stay. I’m not clear how the change took place but Piri, who was known as Petey, started attending the services of a storefront Christian Church run by an Hispanic minister who would come up to the prison and work with the inmates. Petey became a model prisoner and converted others and, as a result, was paroled after seven years: seven long years... as he often told me. He started working for YDI, a Christian outfit dedicated to reforming the youth gangs and headed by another graduate of the prison network.



This film took longer to make than any other in this series. Most of these films had a built-in termination point: Eddie Sachs did not win the race, Susan Star did not win the prize, Jane Fonda’s Broadway debut was not a hit... On these, we knew where to stop filming, but on Petey & Johnny; well, people we had decided to follow got killed all of a sudden and forgotten, or they got sent to jail and faded from our view. Teams of us constantly had to keep going back and going back, waiting for things to develop, waiting for things to happen.



Then we realized that our intention of following gangs created a new problem. We were obviously a well-funded group and the gangs were hard pressed for ready cash and were enjoying the notoriety that we were laying on them, so why shouldn’t we pay for their ammunition? And take them to the beach and buy the Hamburgers... they and we were having a ball, but commit a crime while we were there? No way! So we changed tactics and followed Petey through labyrinthine stories and finally, after more than nine months of filming, it became Petey’s film. Loads of Narration, but it was Petey talking, not a “Narrator”: he had to tell you what was going on that you couldn’t see. And the film is made up of scenes that have no logical cohesion. How else to deal with his past? I thought that this film would not hold up well, but when I watched it on TV I realized that films that have a clear plot and design can become very mysterious to people who are zapping and coming in late. Whereas, if the sequences are short and gripping, you can do without the context. So, thirty years later Valerie Lalonde and I made “Les Oeufs a la Coque”, an 80 minute film about nothing in particular... and I love it! Beware of rules!

For me, there were extraordinary scenes which you felt privy to, situations that you would never expect to be part of, such as the meeting of the gang leaders where Petey is trying to cool a dangerous situation.