Lightning over Braddock

Duration: 88

Year Published: 1988

Creator: Zeitgeist

Format: 16mm

Color: Color

Sound: sound

Description: Buba's first feature blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy to analyze Braddock, Pennsylvania's economic descent and the director's odyssey for personal fulfillment. As one of the region's prominent independent filmmakers, Buba often appears as a guest on local news programs but is ambivalent about his good fortune because it is based, in part, on documenting the suffering of fellow townspeople. Buba guides a tv reporter on a nostalgic tour of Braddock's blighted main street and to the set of his movie, Lightning over Braddock. On and off the set, Tony is harassed by his unbalanced leading man, a smalltime hustler named Sal, who is enraged because he feels he has not been accorded sufficient credit for Buba's success. Intent on avoiding his nemesis, Tony meets up with other Braddock regulars: childhood friend Ernie, Stephen, a hard rock accordionist, and Jimmy Roy, a self-improvement guru and proprietor of fifteen failed businesses. Embarking on a kind of cinematic pilgrim's progress, Buba endeavors to remain socially committed even though the carrot of a Hollywood contract tests his resolve. Meanwhile, area mills keep closing and painful dislocations continue. (Circulates).