SYNOPSIS: OAKLAND RAIDER PARKING LOT (2004)
As Gertrude Stein once wrote of Oakland, ?There?s no there there.? That was before the Raiders came to town. In a city with high unemployment, rampant gang violence, and a drastic divide between rich and poor, the Raiders football team may provide the only true sense of community in Oakland. Yet the city is often portrayed in the media as a lawless and violent place, and the Raider Nation is fingered as a major part of the problem. But as this documentary reveals, beyond the eye of mainstream media, the Raider fans prove to be a familial, loving, and even sentimental bunch. With rich and poor; young and old; white, black and hispanic fans creatively sharing the tailgate experience, the Oakland Coliseum parking lot may be the only integrated and peaceful place in the dangerous and depressed city of Oakland.
BACKGROUND
Oakland Raider Parking Lot is a 20 minute documentary shot during the 2001-2002
football season. But the "parking lot movie" concept dates back
much further. In 1986, John Heyn and Jeff Krulik made the first, Heavy
Metal Parking Lot (link to http://www.heavymetalparkinglot.net/), in Landover,
Maryland. Since then, they have made a number of parking lot films, and
even produced a parking lot TV series for the cable channel Trio.
Director Jason Blalock saw Heavy Metal Parking Lot in the late 1990s, and it changed his idea of what makes a documentary great. After making a number of short docs in Portland, OR, including High Rocks and Spangled, he moved to the Bay Area and was blown away by what he saw in the Raider's parking lot. He grabbed his filmmaker friend Ryan Junell and shot during three games of their worst season in decades.
Krulik and Heyn have seen it, and gave it their stamp of approval. Well, they don't really have a stamp, it's a figure of speech. They said it didn't suck.
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