The Price of 'Freedomland'

In the new film "Freedomland," novelist/screenwriter Richard Price explores "why [Susan Smith] had blamed this phantom black guy. People bought into it across the country." (By Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)

Price went to the well-regarded Bronx High School of Science. "The alternative was to go to some big public school and get my ass kicked every day."

The housing project where his family lived didn't have the stigma of today's projects. He recalls World War II vets raising families. Maybe there were some knife fights, but he doesn't remember gunfire. "In the '50s and '60s, housing projects worked," Price says.

Raised modestly -- his was never a stone-broke Bronx family -- he's quick to give a buck. "I'll throw a track meet for the kids in the projects," says Hart, "and Richard will buy the food. He's been like that since I met him."

Price was accepted into Cornell and majored in labor relations. "For me," he says, "growing up and going into Manhattan was like being one of the Clampetts. So Ithaca was like Eden."

During his summers away from college he worked in construction. After Cornell, he got into the graduate writing program at Columbia. A short story of his got noticed, got sent to an agent, became "The Wanderers."

His daughter Anne is at Yale, and daughter Gen attends the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Price teaches at Yale, so "I can see my daughter once a week." Gen acts, and appears in "Freedomland."

Price also writes for "The Wire," an HBO drama set in Baltimore. He wrote a part for Gen last season. "Last year she played someone buying cocaine," Price says. "She said, 'Geez, Dad, thanks.' This year I got her playing a crackhead."

He loves movies. But he doesn't feel that the industry -- old, old song -- always loves him back because it has gotten harder to get projects to the screen.

"I don't know where Spike Lee gets his money to make movies," he says. "I bet it's harder now." He's sighing. He goes on: "They can't afford to make cheap movies. I don't know why. I don't read Variety. But movies are geared toward big budgets. And the big budget story has to be simpler. Paul Schrader [who wrote "Taxi Driver"] once said to me that someone at a studio told him, 'Tone down the nuances.' "

And yet Price admits he roots for the town, the industry. "You keep wanting for Hollywood to say, 'Let's make smaller movies about people.' "

Roth, the Revolution Studios head and "Freedomland" director, also laments some of the changes across Hollywood. "I remember when a movie like 'Dog Day Afternoon' was considered mainstream."

Many smaller movies do find outlets, Roth allows, within subdivisions of big movie studios. It is the marketing and advertising for those movies, many contend, that get short shrift.

Roth and his eclectic cast -- Moore, Jackson, Falco, Ron Eldard and Aunjanue Ellis -- filmed "Freedomland," for the most part, in an old housing project in Yonkers, N.Y. Much of the movie takes place at night, with a palette dark and hard and nearly brittle.

The $30 million film shoot was quick, done in a little more than 40 days. Price says he marveled at watching Jackson, Moore and Falco work. Falco -- unrecognizable to those who know her only as Carmela Soprano -- plays Karen Collucci, an activist leading a search party for the child. Falco is black-haired, intense, at times acting with nothing save silences. "You can say movies are superficial to books," Price says. "But no. It's a trade-off. What a movie can give you is faces."

He has no idea how "Freedomland" will do, but he likes it, is grateful the project was retrieved.

Like Theodore Dreiser, who wrote about the poor and the desperate, he seems to bleed for his work.

"I wake up every morning," Price says, "and ask myself, 'What have you done for me lately?' I'm in low-key panic most of the time."

He's at work on a new novel, one rooted in the streets of Manhattan. Some poor kids and well-off kids, coming to blows. It's about class and culture, about what one group might believe about the other, beliefs leading to murder. It's about the bruises that hang in the air.