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My experience on the project helped me recognize that I would rather be a participant.
By the end it was challenging to document rather than participate. Eventually we became their therapists-listening patiently, empathizing, asking questions, and being there for them to the best of our abilities. They had no outlets, but like everyone else had a need to express themselves and sort out their personal histories. They weren’t writers, filmmakers, musicians, or painters. We had to go through a large volume of sex workers to find our cast. Unsurprisingly, most of them turned us down. We resolved ahead of time that we wouldn’t pay them because we thought that would make the film disingenuous. How did you describe the project to them?ĪP: We pitched the film as a feature documentary about truck stop sex workers. MJ: You focus on three women-Betty, Monica, and Jennifer. A lot of the truck stops were clean as a whistle. We put together a map indicating hotspots around the country.
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We did a lot of research online and spoke with truck drivers to find out where the sex workers were most prevalent. We set out from New York, drove south on I-95, then west on I-10 until we hit L.A. Dan Livingston, the field producer, looked for ride shares on Craigslist and eventually found one with Juliana Star Asis, his friend who was headed to Tucson, Arizona. MJ: How did you choose specific truck stops?ĪP: The majority of filming was done over eight weeks. I identified with her, as I identify with anyone who doesn’t really fit the mold.
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On a much smaller scale I knew what that was like-I hit a rough patch in my teens and almost dropped out of high school. Also, it was clear that she was living outside the bounds of traditional society. MJ: What was it about the encounter that intrigued you?ĪP: There was something about the set of her jaw-she had the strength of someone who had come to grips with a hard life. She offered to show him her breasts for $10, he took her up on it, and they walked off into the sunset.
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We were in the middle of talking about her grandchildren when a truck driver who looked like Santa Claus walked by. A woman sat down and struck up a conversation. My camping bag lay on the table next to me and a cardboard sign with the word “WEST” scrawled on it. It was midday at a truck stop in Ohio, and I was sitting on a bench outside the travel center. Mother Jones: So this film was inspired by a truck stop prostitute you met while hitchhiking from New York to San Francisco?Īlexander Perlman: Yes. I recently spoke with Alexander Perlman about life on the lots, dodging the police, and what he left on the cutting room floor. (Guess which pays more?) It’s a particularly wrenching moment in a film loaded with them. With time and money running out, she weighs the economics of earning minimum wage at a McJob versus hustling on the lot again. Jennifer, an ex-addict and single mother who recently quit prostitution, struggles to maintain her sobriety. “I can feel money,” Betty says, a kind of human divining rod, and yet she spends most of the film desperately searching for just that.
Betty and Monica are addicted to crack, Monica is homeless when she’s not crashing with friends or sympathetic drivers, and both are entangled in dysfunctional relationships. Being in this truck can actually make you crazy.” As Perlman discovered, however, the women-and, occasionally, men-who cater to this loneliness don’t fare much better. To quote one trucker in Lot Lizard: “These walls close in on you. Lurk on truckers’ online message boards long enough and you’ll likely come across what amounts to a guide to interstate sex, replete with lurid tall tales (see here, here, and here).Ī police intervention program in Texas that works? America’s Independent Truckers’ Association estimates there are nearly 5,000 truck stops across the country, and although many offer nondescript places to sleep, eat, or shower, many others host a bustling shadow economy of sex and drugs. The film’s three protagonists-Betty, Monica, and Jennifer-work on the fringes of the trucking industry. Indeed, what Perlman captures in Lot Lizard is visceral and harrowing. While his claim might sound hyperbolic-or like a canny bit of marketing-it rings true: He logged thousands of miles and hundreds of hours to make the film, braving roach motels, crack highs, and homicidal pimps. I suspect I may have developed some mild PTSD.” This is how filmmaker Alexander Perlman describes shooting Lot Lizard, his hypnotic new documentary about truck stop prostitution.
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“The truth is, making the movie was a really traumatic experience.
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