Making of

I went down there and spent two hours walking all over the Landfill and I was blown away by all the artwork I saw and the different styles of dwellings. There were so many paths; it was like a maze. And at the end of these crazy paths would be dwellings that would be completely hidden by bushes and shrubs.

That's when I saw Rabbit. I asked him if he was a resident, and he said, "Yeah. You want to come see my camp?" I said sure. We talked about the time he spent in France, the time I spent in Guatemala in
the Peace Corps.This led to our discussing a documentary film I did in Guatemala during that time. Rabbit said, "Well, you should do a documentary on this place." I said I'd do it if he would work on it with me -- if he would take an active role in it.

Rabbit wanted to make a film called "How to Be a Bum: An Instructional Video." He wanted to include segments on dumpster diving, house building, and survival out on the Landfill. I wasn't sure I wanted to do this as a how-to movie, but I got Andrei Rozen and a camera and three days later we were shooting.

The first day, Andrei and I arrived at about 10 AM and proceeded to film Rabbit and Derek as they polished off a bottle of vodka for breakfast. At day's end, it didn't seem like we'd gotten anything worthwhile. That's when we decided we weren't going to do a how-to-be-a-bum movie.
Click here for Rabbit's photos of Tomas and Andrei on that first day of shooting.

As the eviction process dragged on, we spent many long days and nights there. We were fascinated by their resolve to live outside the system and their artistic abilities. After several months, I got a job, but continued to go out there before and after work every day.That's when I decided to buy Rabbit a video camera.

After Rabbit's first three days with the camera, I noticed that he was edgy and acting very strange.
I asked him what was wrong and he said that he hadn't had any drugs or alcohol for three days,
he was so worried about the camera. When I looked at the footage he had shot, it consisted of
a half-hour of a duck.

I told him to relax, not worry about the camera and live his life as he normally would. I told him not to
even worry about losing the camera . . . as long as I got the footage. When the thirty-day return policy
on the camera came up, I took the camera back to the store and returned it in perfect condition.

I asked Rabbit if he had written anything about the Landfill and he read a couple of things -- a letter he had written to his folks but never sent about being homeless and living in the Landfill and a story he had written for Street Spirit about his desire to live outdoors. They were brilliant and added immensely to the understanding of the film.

Rabbit's writing and the fact that we gave him a camera greatly influenced the final structure of the film. Once I was in the editing suite, I realized that Rabbit's voice needed to tell this story. Who could tell it with more insight than Rabbit?

For the next year and a half, I worked with Rabbit as he wrote the narration and I edited the film. This was incredibly difficult, because sometimes it would take me up to eight hours to find Rabbit. Since he had been evicted from the Landfill, his camps were transitory and I didn't know where he would be living one day to the next. After a while, I bought him a pager, but he still had to find a phone and call me, which could take up to three or four hours.

This collaboration, however frustrating it was at times, was worth it. It led to a piece that spoke for the homeless people themselves. Usually, the filmmaker asks the questions and shoots what is important for him or her. Here, we let the residents of the Landfill ask their own questions and tell us what they think is important.

I described the project to my friend Marc Black and he expressed interest in writing some music for the film. I took him to the Landfill so he could see it first-hand. He saw the area called the "Amphitheater" (made from a twenty-foot wall of debris in a semi-circle), and said he wanted to record the music for the film there, primarily using found objects as instruments.

We assembled six musicians (including Andrei and myself) and did improvised rhythms by hitting rebar with rocks, shaking weeks, and hitting bricks together. We also banged drums and whistled. Marc jumped up and down on a piece of plywood, and this specific section provided the background music for the scene in which Jimbow the Hobow reads a poem about the Landfill as the police serve eviction notices. Marc took this raw material into the studio to create rhythm tracks. He added instrumentation and this became the soundtrack that reverberates throughout the film.

Ultimately, the combination of Rabbit, Andrei, Marc, and myself was perfect. Andrei wasn't at all intimidated by what went on in the Landfill; everyone wanted to talk to him. Rabbit, of course, knew everyone. He was also able to give and inside view of life on the Landfill. Marc was able to capture something about the soul of the Landfill in the music that was created from its natural surroundings.
I'm the one that threw away any shred of normalcy in my life and went broke to make sure that this collaboration is reflected in every scene in the film, because it is part of what makes Bums' Paradise so intimate and powerful.

Tomas McCabe - Email: Tomas@BumsParadise.com

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