The Dollar General – trydersmith.org

Above, from top: inside Stan Martin Ford; T. Ryder Smith and Michael Rudko; Karl Bury and Michael Rudko; the Dollar General; Michael Rudko and T. Ryder Smith; David Chandler; Michael Rudko and Thomas Jay Ryan; Michael Rudko and Karl Bury, T. Ryder Smith and Michael Rudko.

Reviews

“The Dollar General, a funny, quiet, cinematographically deadpan meditation on economics, crisis, loss and change, shot in an abandoned Ford dealership.
That is, it’s a movie about America right now. It’s a beautiful movie, profoundly affecting in its visual rusticity, and its haunting final scene – the final shot, especially – numbers among the most memorable committed to film in this country in recent years.”
– Ryan Hatch

NOTE: you can watch the entire film on the Vimeo page, linked above right

Offscreen

Above, from top: Daniel Fish, Joshua Thorson, Michael Rudko, T. Ryder Smith; same, with Milo Cramer on sound; Joshua Thorson and Daniel Fish; T. Ryder Smith.

Synopsis

“The film came out of a production of Clifford Odets’ ‘Paradise Lost’ that I had worked on at A.R.T., and that play is about a family who loses their home, who loses everything, in the depression. I was making the production in 2008 and was obviously thinking a lot about these issues – about foreclosures, and how people were losing their homes now. At A.R.T., I had been interested in really doing the play in a foreclosed home. I thought, could we take apart a foreclosed home, could we do it in a foreclosed home? But that was not possible, so when I finished working on it, I felt like I wanted to work on the play more and so I said I’ll just make it into a movie – but the estate didn’t want me to do that. So I said, well, what would happen if I take… I mean, the part of that production that was Odets were the words. The visuals were mine, the actors were mine, so I thought, what if I just take the script away and start making something else? And so I started from that premise. And then I was visiting upstate and I found this car dealership. And so in the back of my head there had always been this idea about a sort of foreclosed home, or, in this case, a business that had gone under, and I found this space, this beautiful abandoned car dealership and said, this is where this piece should be made! And the film really – the space became the source for everything that followed.”
– Daniel Fish, interviewed by Ryan Hatch