My journalist friend Tim Malloy and I wrote and self-produced a documentary called Murder of a Small Town. Our hope was to draw some positive attention to Belle Glade and Pahokee, Florida, in the western part of Palm Beach County, as well as to my hometown, Newburgh, New York. The film turned out to be an emotional indictment of racial injustice. We finished it in 2014.
When people think about Palm Beach County, they imagine it’s all like the town of Palm Beach—incredible wealth, gated estates, sandy beaches, Tiffany and Hermès boutiques, and, of course, Mar-a-Lago.
That isn’t even close to the truth. Palm Beach County is actually the largest agricultural county in Florida—and the far western part is very poor and can be violent.
When Tim and I made the film, Newburgh was ranked the sixth-most-violent small town in America. Belle Glade was ranked first. But both towns were filled with good people, a lot of whom couldn’t get jobs. If we could, we wanted to do the right thing by Belle Glade and Newburgh.
I tend to be obsessive about efficiency and tight budget controls. It’s a hang-up that probably goes all the way back to the days I was growing up without much money in Newburgh. It’s definitely the way it was when I was running J. Walter Thompson North America. This film was a good example of how efficiency can work and help get more projects done.
We bid the film out to two top documentary companies, one in New York, one in LA. Both came in with bids over $700,000. Tim and I thought the bids were outrageously high. Absurd. Dumb. As a TV news journalist, Tim had shot a lot of film. I had produced movies, TV shows, and thousands of TV commercials. We knew we could do Murder of a Small Town for a lot less.
That’s what we did. We finished the film, all in, for $51,000. We shot it with a local cameraman. Then Tim and I edited it in a strip mall in West Palm.
The documentary went on to win two 2016 Emmys and appeared on PBS and Netflix. So much for $700,000 productions.
Most important, the documentary helped people understand what can happen to a small town, what is happening to small towns all over the country. Obviously, people are suffering; some have given up hope, way too many are turning to life-threatening—sometimes life-ending—drugs.
Again and again, strangers came up to Tim and me. They said that Murder of a Small Town helped them to understand and frequently made them cry. It helped them see that towns like Belle Glade and Pahokee, Florida, and Newburgh, New York, are filled with good people, people who sometimes also need a little help to get moving in the right direction. Just a little push. That’s all it takes sometimes.