A black father in the poverty-stricken ghetto in 1967 Venice, California, presents the desperate story of jobless black youth.

THE SAVAGES is a documentary shot in 1967 in Venice, California, in the African-American ghetto there appropriately named "Ghost Town". The approach is part lyrical, part cinema verite. The film essays an analysis of why so many ghetto youth fail in this society, but in the voices of the young people themselves and their friends. The entire voice track is taken from interviews and presented without comment by the filmmaker. For jobless young black men in the sixties, guns and cheap wine brought prison and death, and soon crack cocaine would be coming on the horizon to decimate even further the next generation.
THE SAVAGES was awarded first prize for best documentary at the 1968 Mercer College International Film Competition. It was also honored at the 1969 Columbus Film Festival and the 1970 American Film Festival.

Is it the people or their surroundings which seem savage?

THE SAVAGES was my first film out of U.C.L.A. film school done as a solo independent filmmaker. It grew out of my community work in Venice where I live and was Chairman of the Board of Directors for Project Action, a local group seeking to help the many unemployed young street people hanging out and getting into alcohol, guns, violence, and petty crime, sometimes robbery and homicide. During the sixties assistance from the War on Poverty generated a brief glimmer of hope, but then the government money was diverted into the war machine, the light of hope dimmed, and Crips and Bloods and crack took over.