I grew up when the last steel mills in the Pittsburgh area were closing down. With a majority of my extended family living in Pittsburgh it became a topic that dominated the conversations of adults during my youth. In high school I went to Pittsburgh to visit my grandmother and my uncle took my father and I out for a drive to show me all of their childhood haunts and the places where my grandparents used to live and work. On this trip the conversation was about what “used to be”.
Part documentary, part fiction and all steel town, Lighting Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy (1988) is a document of a people in a specific time and place. While the film uses the relationship between filmmaker Tony Buba and actor/muse Sal Carollo as its dramatic glue the scope of the picture is far greater. By recording the reality of Braddock and its people and crosscutting those images with various pop culture pastiches (the Rambo and Iron Age Cafe sequences) re-oriented to be relevant to the labor issues in Braddock, Buba creates an anthropological tapestry portrait.
Buba’s agenda in Lighting Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy is one of political action. The film sets out to articulate the issues affecting small steel towns in the Pittsburgh area with the hope that the film will raise national awareness. From the perspective of thirty years later, Lighting Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy feels like more of a snapshot. The Sylvester Stallone jokes and other cultural references feel as dated as the anti-Reagan sentiments. However, the film is still vitally useful and relevant because of Buba’s succinct regional portraiture.
Watching Lighting Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy one can’t help but see similarities between the events that left Braddock impoverished and similar circumstances in cities and towns all across America today. There’s no real difference between the people of Braddock and the people anywhere else. Buba reminds us with this film that we are all united as victims of the “American dream”.
For Buba this “American dream” is to make a politically radical musical in Hollywood with a big budget and world class stars. But Buba refuses to indulge this ambition any further than idle fantasy in Lighting Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy. The success of a big time film director is equated with the morally corrupt presidents of industry. In Lighting Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy the “American dream” is the opiate of the masses that keeps us all complacent in an unjust, capitalist society.
Buba really is the “working class” auteur he appears to be. And unlike a lot of underground or regional filmmakers he has a real sense of humor about himself. Buba knows that if he took himself too seriously as a film artist he’d lose sight of his activism so this self-deprecating humor becomes essential to his modus operandi. What Buba achieved after four years of hard work would be treated as self-aggrandizing rather than austere in another filmmaker’s hands.
Personally, the most immediate gift that Lighting Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy gives is that of technical instruction. In Buba’s films students of the medium see the potential in cinema for both entertainment and social activism executed on a modest budget. All of Buba’s aesthetic concepts and techniques are easily decipherable yet retain their sense of wonder because of his own personal commitment to his work. That is the secret ingredient of Lighting Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy that the film imparts lovingly to any aspiring filmmaker willing to give it a watch.
