When the filmmakers behind The Parking Lot Movie handed me an advance copy of their documentary, I asked myself the same question I asked after first hearing about the movie three years ago: Who cares about some college town parking lot? The funny thing is, that’s the question that’s driving national interest in the documentary Meghan Eckman started on a whim, which premieres this week at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, and was featured in a story on NPR’s “All Things Considered” Friday. The film premieres locally on March 27 at the Paramount Theater.
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The Parking Lot Movie was a labor of love for director Meghan Eckman, pictured here in front of the Corner Parking Lot booth where disgruntled, flannel-clad philosophers have collected meager fees since 1989. |
“Everyone, no matter what the different personalities are, had this same story of this parking lot,” Eckman says. “It’s a big story,” she says, which begins in 1989 when Chris Farina started running the Corner Parking Lot. (A filmmaker in his own right, his World Peace…and other Fourth Grade Achievements is also screening at SXSW.) He makes for a compelling central figure, even if he doesn’t get a lot of screen time, as he compares the dilapidated booth where his attendants collect money to an orange juice stand he once saw in Morocco.
Imagine your boss laughing as he explains why his employees don’t take their jobs seriously. The attendants are invariably highly educated, scruffy men in their 20s with chips on their shoulders and cigarettes in their mouths. Like in HBO’s “Big Love,” where a family of Utah Mormons tries to capitalize on a vice it could never eradicate by buying a casino, the attendants are actively anti-car but are engaged in a self-righteous quest to squeeze the lot’s modest fees from those who park there. Yo La Tengo bassist James McNew—the lot’s most famous alum—gets a lot of screen time to talk about one unsettling incident where a sorority girl refused to pay the 40 cents she owed. The attendants activate emergency brakes, refuse to park Hummers and, indeed, throw wrenches at the sideview mirrors of cars that refuse to pay.
That’s the aspect of the movie that Eckman calls “parking lot justice,” and it’s a product of the attendants’ rich internal dialogues. After all, working at the Corner Parking Lot may very well be the most boring job in the world, except when drunk college students pour through the lot after last call at Three and Trinity. Some of the film’s funniest shots feature well-dressed “frat boys” as they funnel beer and fall out of the back of pickup trucks—Eckman even caught one, er, motorboating.
But Eckman and Assistant Director Christpher Hlad didn’t make The Parking Lot Movie to embarrass future presidents and executives. Hlad, who worked briefly at the lot and has lived in town for 20 years, says he wanted to tell the lot’s story because “the Corner Parking Lot is a very serious cultural touchstone for this community, whether people are clued into that or not. It’s one of the few actually culturally important things that’s actually going on in Charlottesville, to be quite frank, really on any level. It’s as simple as, if it weren’t there, there would be a vacuum.”
For Eckman: “I had nothing else going on, I had just moved back to town, and my life was very open…I was just sitting around with some friends, one of which was a parking lot attendant and we were talking about movies. He was like, ‘Someone should make a movie about my parking lot.’
“So I came to the parking lot and pressed record.”
Regardless of what Eckman and Hlad had in mind when they started making The Parking Lot Movie, it gives today’s audiences a lot they can relate to: being overeducated, underemployed and hopelessly bored.
Love ’em and leave ’em
SMG’s manager for the John Paul Jones Arena, Larry Wilson, who was instrumental in putting local venues on the map for major touring artists like U2 and the Rolling Stones, announced in a mass e-mail Thursday that he’s leaving Charlottesville for a new post in Jacksonville, Florida.
After it lost two executive directors in less than two years, The Paramount Theater inked a three-year management deal with SMG in October 2008. Since then, Wilson used his leverage to court more nationally recognized touring acts to the Downtown theater. Paramount General Manager Mary Beth Aungier says Wilson is one of two people, along with Coran Capshaw, most responsible for putting Charlottesville on the map. But she’s careful to note that when Wilson leaves, he won’t take our spot on the map with him. Let’s hope not.
Never one to tend the fire after stoking the flame, Wilson was involved in the opening of six buildings since he started working for the event promoter 1994, and managed the opening of the $130 million JPJ in 2006. “Our job,” Wilson told C-VILLE at the time, “is to put butts in the seats.” Liz Flynn, marketing director at JPJ, said in an e-mail that staff there is waiting to comment until the news is officially released this week.
