Awards:Columbia Dupont Silver Batton, CINDY Gold, CHRIS Award, NEMN Silver Apple
In blue-collar Lowell, Massachusetts, where disappearing businesses and jobs have produced high unemployment, some residents have turned to crack for relief - only to see their dreams of a better life go up in smoke. A Harrowing documentary chronicling 18 months in the lives of three addicts.
Uncompromising and revealing, HIGH ON CRACK STREET: LOST LIVES IN LOWELL takes an up-close look at the lives of three crackhouse friends whose addiction has let them to crime and despair.
For HIGH ON CRACK STREET, documentarians Jon Alpert and Mary Ann DeLeo teamed up with Lowell resident and former drug addict Rich Farrell, who was able to obtain remarkable access to the town’s drug subculture.
Brenda, Dicki and Boo-Boo have grown up in and around Lowell, Massachusetts. Brenda was an aspiring actress, Now she resorts to prostituion to pay for her crack addiction. "I love it more than anything. More than life itself. Yet I hate it worse than anything", says Brenda. Dicki was the 'Pride of Lowell' a boxer who once fought Sugar Ray Leonard. He commits robberies to support his habit. Boo-Boo has spent the last twenty years smoking crack, shoplifting, and doing whatever he has to do to stay alive.
In the eighteenth months it took to film this documentary, the camera follows these three in and out of crack houses, rehab centers and jails. Their sad struggle mirrors the despair of their home town. There are many 'Lowells' in America - where citizens are abandoned to drugs and the empty factories echo their despair.
CREDITS
Producers/Reporters: Jon Alpert / Mary Ann DeLeo / Rich Farrell
Camera: Jon Alpert / Mary Ann DeLeo / Rich Farrell
Editor: Jon Alpert / John Custodio / Mary Ann DeLeo
60 min.
1996
