Small towns like El Dorado tend to dwindle.
The oil boom produced a cosmopolitan little city in the 1920s; for a time the per-capita income here was the highest in the state. But times change.
Blame it on unintended consequences, like the interstate highway system that diverted traffic from the secondary roads that fed into the courthouse squares. Suddenly it made sense to build shopping centers and malls on open land near these highways, drawing folks away from the mercantile hubs of those little downtowns. Used to be there was a Western Auto here, a men's store, a grocery, a movie theater--but the chain-store boxes out on the highway and economies of scale changed all that.
And the kids go off to college, and they don't come back. In part because the kind of jobs they want and expect aren't available in small towns anymore. Factories relocate. Tire plants shut down. Chicken plants shutter.
So the population gets grayer and deader, and it gets harder for the businesses that have persisted to get credit, because the banks aren't betting on things getting better for them, and soon you're looking at abandoned storefronts and disinvestment, quarter-full churches and streets empty but for people with nothing legitimate to get up to.
Because everyone with the wherewithal to get out has, and the left behind are just that. There are places in Arkansas where the banks have trouble finding people qualified to work as tellers. Where it's tough to convince folks that a bank account is a reasonable and useful thing to have.
About 30 years ago, I went to El Dorado to write about a place called the Thunder Zone, where people came from as far away as Dallas and Atlanta to buy crack cocaine. I saw cars with Texas and Georgia license plates rolling slowly down South Hawthorne and Bruster avenues. I heard that the area was considered so dangerous that the railroad had changed its work schedules so its workers wouldn't have to pass through it after dark.
El Dorado is still dwindling; from 1960 to 1980 there were slightly more than 25,000 people living there. Now some estimates have the population at just under 18,000. Census bureau data puts nearly 30 percent of the population at or below the poverty line. And 70 percent of that 30 percent is black, concentrated on the city's east side. There is still a drug problem, and locals still refer to the Thunder Zone.
But last week, the Beach Boys played a show in El Dorado's Griffin Music Hall.
On Thursday, the El Dorado Film Festival kicks off with the Southeast premiere of acclaimed director Richard Linklater's new film Last Flag Flying. It's quite a coup for the four-year-old festival--Linklater, who was nominated for a Best Director Academy Award for Boyhood (2014) and whose résumé includes the romantic trilogy Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), is a consistently interesting filmmaker, and Last Flag Flying has the potential to be a commercial hit (Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne are its stars) as well as an awards contender.
It's the perfect film for the festival, a smart arthouse project (the film is a quasi-sequel to Hal Ashby's classic 1973 movie The Last Detail; Darryl Ponicsan, the novelist who worked with Robert Towne to turn Ponicsan's book into The Last Detail screenplay similarly collaborated with Linklater on the Last Flag Flying script) that will also appeal to casual moviegoers. And only general audiences in New York and Los Angeles will see it before festival attendees; the movie opens wide Nov. 25.
The festival continues through next Sunday, with a selection of Arkansas-made films including Billy Chase Goforth's Door in the Woods and Johnnie Brannon's short The Devil Made Me Do It, filmmaker workshops and music, including a Saturday evening performance by Dennis Quaid and the Sharks. Bill Pullman will be there to screen his new Western, Jared Moshe-directed The Ballad of Lefty Brown, which has brought Pullman--who plays a longtime sidekick out to avenge the murder of the legend (Peter Fonda) he had attended for years--some of the best reviews of his career.
And somehow the festival got hold of one of the most original and intriguing short films of recent years, Brian Pesto's sci-fi comedy Lightningface, which stars Oscar Isaac and Kristen Wiig.
No one should think a film festival, or even the sort of cultural renaissance that El Dorado has actively courted and seems to be realizing, will solve all of the problems inherent in being a small town in Arkansas. Arts and culture is a more temperamental kind of economic engine than a car plant.
Those pricey lofts downtown will wind up as just more sunken capital if there aren't people who can afford to live in them. There's a lot of competition for tourism dollars. If the Murphy Arts District is to succeed, it's going to have to maintain a high level of excellence, hope that the word spreads, and that other economies do well enough to give people the discretionary income and confidence to travel to your town.
But I don't know what you ought to do other than try your best to make your part of the world the best it can be. Talent isn't scarce; it blooms everywhere, and we ought to nurture it whenever and wherever we can. There's no reason El Dorado can't have a world-class film festival. With six million people living within 200 miles, there's no reason El Dorado can't flourish as a cultural destination, attracting tourists, retirees, artists, gallery owners, restaurateurs and mobile professionals. (See such places as Woodbury, Tenn., Abingdon, Va., Berea, Ky., Kerrville, Texas.)
I've seen Little Rock's River Market succeed, and the great things that are going on in Bentonville.
I'm not pessimistic. People in El Dorado have the hardest part covered. They've got people who care about saving the city.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 11/07/2017