`Lotto Land' Reflects The New American Dream

Like Wayne Wang's art-house hit, "Smoke," writer-director John Rubino's "Lotto Land" is an amiable amble through a Brooklyn neighborhood where we gradually get to know and care about the locals.

"One advantage with a low-budget movie is I can introduce the neighborhood and see the characters come out of the weave," said Rubino during a Seattle visit. "You don't have to make a gang-banger movie."

Rubino, who has lived in Brooklyn since he purchased and renovated an apartment building there in 1983, sees more than drug deals and shoot-outs there, and he wrote the script to reflect his experiences.

"Life in the backyards of Brooklyn is a whole different deal. People hang out on their fire escapes and get to know each other, which may be why there are more mixed couples there than in any neighborhood I know. There's far more acceptance of people as people."

Gradually the movie centers on two love stories, one between a black musician (played by off-screen blues musician Wendell Holmes) and his white neighbor (Suzanne Sostallos), both of them middle-aged and cautious. The other involves her adopted Latina daughter (Barbara Gonzalez) and his son (Larry Gilliard Jr.), both of them enthusiastic teenagers.

A story without a genre

Although the movie played well in festivals, the younger couple proved a hard sell when Rubino shopped around for a distributor.

"The executives in Los Angeles didn't believe in the innocence of these kids," he said. "They may have a jaded, self-protecting coloration, but that doesn't mean they're not still kids. It's a romantic story but it's also very real.

"And there's a contrast between this head-over-heels young love and the much more tentative and scared middle-aged couple. She's overweight and neurotic and he's a guy who's given up on his dreams, and a little bitter about that.

"That's something you don't see in movies now, and that's one reason it doesn't fit into a genre. I heard one executive coming out of a screening who said `I don't know how to sell this film.' This is a market not served by Hollywood. I know that this is a general-audience film, but Hollywood would never have made it."

He's proud that he shot it in 35mm, used Screen Actors' Guild actors, hired experienced technicians to work behind the camera, and produced the music himself.

"There's an album coming that will be both a soundtrack and a Holmes Brothers album since they did all the music," he said. "I'm trying to have it out in coordination with the New York/Los Angeles openings."

The next step

Rubino has another script, "The Contender," that's been on and off the schedule at Disney's Hollywood Pictures, and he's been offered several major-studio movies with radically different budget levels. He's holding out for a writer-director position.

"I don't want to be just a hired gun as a director. Making a film is such a huge gamble, if it's a bomb, I'd rather have the bomb be mine. I used my life savings for this one and I'm profoundly in debt, but that kind of personal investment is what I want to do. It has to be more than just a job."

The company that eventually picked up "Lotto Land," CFP Distribution, chose to hold the American premiere over the weekend at the Metro Cinemas in Seattle, where Rubino felt it connected with film-festival audiences last spring.

"We're showing it first where we had previous exposure at festivals (Austin is next) and in Miami, because of a tie-in with a Holmes Brothers' concert."

The son of a CIA man, Rubino was born in Berlin and moved back and forth between Europe and Washington as a child. He used a writing fellowship to buy his Brooklyn apartment building, renovated its seven apartments and vacant stores, and sold it for a substantial profit in 1986.

"The profit from the building sale gave me seed money to do a film," he said.

He wrote "Lotto Land" partly to deal with what he sees as "the pervasive hope that your life will be changed by winning the lottery." One of his characters appears to be a $27 million winner. He sees this as the new American dream, replacing the ideal of working hard to attain wealth.

"I tried to get into the whole mindset," he said. "The high levels of consumerism beaten into everyone's skulls have made it out of reach for the working class to even dream of getting ahead. That's just gone.

"How is it that the gambling industry is now bigger than the entertainment industry? I think it's really true (as one of his characters says) that `Americans who can't understand the language may be the only ones who have dreams left.' "