Bay Area documentary-makers Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman present a succinct and persuasive thesis in their new film Company Town as to why the raging "tech boom" has been such a mixed blessing for many of the area's traditional communities. They argue that:
1. San Francisco is the new global capital of high tech, home of "sharing economy" companies like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft.
2. The tech boom has displaced ethnic communities and driven the middle class out of the once-free-spirited city.
3. A grassroots backlash against the tech invasion could swing an upcoming election, sending a powerful message. Company Town (opening Friday at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley, with a special Nov. 6 screening at the Smith Rafael Film Center) should be considered must-viewing before Bay Area voters cast their ballots.
Snitow, a former TV/radio news director-producer, and Kaufman, co-founder of San Francisco's influential Jewish Film Festival, have for the past two decades turned out a series of cutting-edge docs: Blacks and Jews, Thirst, Secrets of Silicon Valley. Now, with Company Town, they have essentially covered an array of topics that might be seen as a new agenda for progressive forces in California. One of the doc's framing stories is the recent election in which former SF Supervisor Aaron Peskin returned to the board in a hard-fought race. He defeated a supporter of Mayor Ed Lee, now-former Supervisor Julie Christensen, who early in the film declares that "technology and technology companies are not an issue in my campaign." Peskin, on the other hand, asserts that "a handful of tech billionaires have decided to invest in the business of politics, and they are interested in controlling mayors and supervisors."
Much of Company Town consists of juicy chunks of the campaign for District Three, which cuts through the heart of the city's once-iconic North Beach area, the launching pad for the 1950s Beat Movement, and still home to the fabled City Lights Bookstore. Throughout the 77-minute film, community spokespeople note a virtual tsunami of evictions that have thinned out the ranks of the city's once-substantial coalition of renters and shop-owners, producing in the process a skyline that resembles Manhattan or the new core downtown of Los Angeles. One of film's many community hosts is Joe "Fitz" Rodriguez, an SF Examiner columnist and transit reporter, "so-named because my mom's Irish and my dad's Puerto Rican."
Rodriquez chuckles as he leads the camera through his "hood" in the Mission, which he admits is "a little gritty, a little rustic, it's definitely not the cleanest of spots, but many people make it their home, working-class people. Just two blocks away is Valencia, a completely different world, and only in the past five years since this influx of money and tech workers has come into San Francisco, Valencia is completely transformed." As he walks by a "smoothie bar," Rodriquez laughs as he notes, "$9 for a smoothie!" He zeros in on one of Valencia's burgeoning blocks of high-end condos, where prices range from $1.7-2.4 million. As a rep proudly boasts, "It's ground zero for tech workers!"
While it's not hard to discern where their hearts lie, Snitow and Kaufman employ the prism of the District Three campaign between Peskin and Christensen to give a taste of personal style, which at one point turns into "She said, he said." Referring to charges that Peskin has a rough-and-tumble, masculine approach to his brand of politics, Christensen quips, "My opponent is a table-pounding, epithet-spewing politician in the grandest sense. His way of getting things done is that traditional �" and I hope it's not sexist to say this, but a masculine approach of very forcefully letting people know where you stand, then using all methods at your disposal, including confrontation, to get what you want."
To which Peskin responds, "I'd certainly rather come to the arena with honey rather than vinegar, but if you come with vinegar, I suggest you get the big bottle out."
Company Town wears its politics and everything else on its sleeve. It's a concise call to action while there is still a part of San Francisco left that the late gay pioneer politician Harvey Milk would recognize. Recently I sat down with the directors to discuss what they learned while making the film.
David Lamble: Why the title Company Town?
Alan Snitow: It's a term that goes way back to the Industrial Age, but we wanted to focus on the new implications for this city and the tech industry. It's no longer about the extraction of coal. It's now about the extraction of data.
Deborah Kaufman: There was an election here last year that focused attention on this new definition.
Snitow: Joe Rodriquez talks about how there are now 35,000 Uber drivers in San Francisco, compared to 2,000 taxi drivers.
Kaufman: Everybody now needs a second or third job. We've had other booms, but this is on a different scale. Tech workers themselves are affected. It's not an attack on tech workers, but a focus on a whole different economic model.
What was your biggest challenge in making the film?
Snitow: It was, How do you make a film about people staring at small screens? Ultimately what we discovered is that it's a film not so much about tech workers, but about political power. It's about tech being freed to seek political power, fueled by a libertarian ideology.