PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
On Sept. 27, 1994, documentary filmmaker Tod Lending started shooting a profile of Terrell Collins, a remarkable 14-year-old boy living in Chicago's notorious Henry Horner housing projects. Despite having a crack-addicted prostitute mother and no father in his life, Terrell triumphed. He was an outgoing, decent young man, a straight-A student who was regarded as a shining light for the other kids in his poverty-stricken neighborhood.
I know the date Lending started his film because it's on Terrell's tombstone, shown at the start of the movie. The morning filming started, another boy came up to Terrell in the street and shot him in the chest and head. Terrell died in the hospital shortly afterwards.
Out of this tragedy, Lending has created a remarkable documentary entitled Legacy. You're going to hear a lot about it early next year, when it will be considered for an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. Current plans also call for it to be aired in 2001 on HBO, which helped fund it. So far, the film's visibility has mostly come from its showing at the Sundance Film Festival. Film critic Roger Ebert saw it there and featured it at his own Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign, Ill., last April. That's where I first saw it.
OPEN-ENDED.
I'm telling you about this film now because I don't want it to be forgotten until next year. Everyone should see it. It's the sort of movie that companies should show their employees, and schools should show their students as a way of heightening racial understanding. Whatever your political beliefs, Legacy will confound your preconceptions about race and poverty in America and strongly color your views in a positive way.
Rather than abandon his project after Terrell was shot, Lending decided to follow the aftermath of the murder and chronicle its effects on the boy's family. With no idea where the story might lead, Lending ended up filming the young man's family for five years. The documentary starts with an interview with Terrell's grandmother, two hours before the shooting, then moves on to Terrell's funeral and beyond. It's narrated by Terrell's cousin Nickcole, who was about Terrell's age at the time of the murder.
This is the kind of inner-city black family that conservatives love to rail about -- a family with its third generation on welfare. No member has ever graduated from high school or owned a house. Terrell's mother, Wanda, and his aunt (Nickcole's mother) have 10 children between them by various men. But no fathers are anywhere to be seen. The matriarch, Terrell's grandmother, Dorothy, is raising Wanda's six chldren. Dorothy took over mothering Wanda's kids after Wanda briefly abandoned Terrell (her second child, born when she was 16) to hit the streets and turn tricks to feed her drug habit.
CONSTANT FEAR.
In short, with its promising son dead and welfare being phased out, this family seemed headed for disaster. The events after the murder unfold like a suspense story. You watch in constant fear that some second disaster is about to strike -- another child will be murdered, the family will lose its home and end up on the streets, or Nickcole will get pregnant and drop out of school.
I won't spoil the movie by giving away all the details, but most of what happens is good. Wanda goes into drug rehab and eventually takes over mothering her children. After years of procrastinating, Nickcole's mother finally gets a job teaching preschoolers, then earns high school equivalency and teaching certificates, and gets off welfare. Grandma Dorothy eventually buys a house. So eager is she to get out of the projects, that the family moves in while the front steps of their new home are still being built. Nickcole goes to college.
Remember, this is reality, not some Hollywood tearjerker. These things just aren't supposed to happen in real life. But in this case, they do.
HELPING HANDS.
You come away full of admiration for people who could make such changes against such terrible odds. You also come away realizing that they never could have made it on sheer gumption alone.
Dorothy could never have bought her house if a businessman hadn't heard of Terrell's murder and pledged $10,000. Nickcole's good grades wouldn't have gotten her into Northern Illinois University if there hadn't also been a special program to help disadvantaged students with low test scores. Nickcole's mother never would have gotten her job if it weren't for a kindly administrator in the neighborhood Catholic school who was willing to take a chance on her.
Time after time, you see how easily this redemption could have been derailed. At one point, Nickcole's mother gets dropped from a job program after missing an orientation meeting. The reason: The state provides child care and bus tokens to help poor women attend job-training sessions but not to attend orientation.
Nickcole gathers enough money to pay the tuition at her private high school only because her mentor, Kenny, the head of the neighborhood youth club and the only visible male role model, again and again helps her find scholarships.
"MY BACKBONE."
In the end, it's the children's courage that gives Legacy its hope. It's Nickcole who nags, cajoles, and encourages her mother to get a job and get off welfare. Jack, Terrell's older brother, who witnessed the murder, is devastated. At one point, he laments, speaking of Terrell, "The man was my backbone." And suddenly you have a glimpse of the astonishing responsibilities Terrell, this 14-year-old "man," had shouldered before he died.
At this point, the only way to see this film, Lending says, is to order it from a San Francisco outfit called California Newsreel (415 621-6196) for $35.00. Or you can wait until Legacy is officially released next year. Whatever, you do, make a point of seeing this film.
Peterson is a contributing editor at Business Week Online. His Moveable Feast column on art and culture appears every Tuesday, only for BW Online
EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
