Done Dirty: Sucker Free City [television]

Sucker Free City (2004)
Crime/Drama; USA
113 minutes

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One of the lesser known Spike Lee joints, "Sucker Free City" was conceived as an original series for Showtime, but for whatever reason they sat on it for awhile and never bothered to greenlight the series. Eventually, it became clear that the show had no hope and so the 2-hour pilot was released as a standalone film.

Set in my home turf of San Francisco, California, "Sucker Free City" is the story of 3 men from different backgrounds, living in completely different worlds that coexist just miles apart from each other in relative seclusion. A black kid growing up in the crime-ridden ghetto of Hunter's Point, a Chinese kid raised in the gang-ruled Chinatown neighborhood and the son of 2 former white hippies being forced out of their home in the newly gentrified Mission district are our windows into the vastly disparate micro-climates of modern San Francisco. Each character has his own troubles and faces his own obstacles, but in the end they are all simply trying to make something of themselves in a world that cares little about them and even less about those aforementioned obstacles. The real focus of the story, however, is not how different these characters are, but how closely their actions resemble one another and how easily someone without the feeling of hope or purpose can wind up treading a path that only acts to continue the cycles of economic and social oppression.

For those used to seeing the shiny-happy, Rice-A-Roni depictions of "the city by the bay", Spike Lee's portrayal is a much needed reality check. The truth of the matter is San Francisco is one of the most culturally, racially and economically complex cities in the world and "SFC" is probably the first piece of popular media I've encountered that attempts to accurately show that diversity, warts and all. It's an incredibly rich tapestry of possibilities that ultimately will never have the chance to be explored because Showtime not only did this show dirty, they also did themselves dirty by passing on what could have possibly been their only answer to HBOs complete and utter domination of pay-cable programming.

Judging "SFC" as a standalone movie is nearly impossible because watching makes it abundantly clear that we're only seeing a tiny fraction of something much, much bigger and in the end most of what is presented is never resolved. But if you watch it keeping in mind that it was meant to be so much more, you can at least appreciate the attempt to capture something on film that had never really been tackled before and is much too complex to cover in a mere 2 hours. Sorry "Sucker Free City"...if you hadn't been done so dirty, you could have been a real classic.

*Pours some out for the homie that never even had the chance to be here.


Give this some time if you're into: The Wire, Spike Lee's other joints, San Francisco, cultural ghettos of all shapes and sizes, racial politics...you know, standard Spike Lee shit.