Average Community

Fred Zara is both my friend and mentor.

So much of what I learned from making the King Lear doc I learned through Fred, so when it came time to make his own feature documentary he brought me in as a producer. It was the easiest producing gig I will ever have because Fred knew what he wanted from the start.

If I was of any service to him, it was through our many conversations about the theme of Average Community. One of our chats actually made it into the final film (I play the stuttering, hat wearing, coffee drinking producer sitting on a park bench).

Fred fashioned a circular tale of youth, adulthood, career, passion, and friendship, but what struck me most THEMATIC about the film was its use of the Delaware River Bridge. The bridge, a Trenton landmark, and more commonly known as the "Trenton Makes Bridge" because it states (in giant neon letters) TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES - a slogan the city adopted in 1910.

Bingo!

If I had any influence on Fred, it was addressing the question about what does Trenton make (it made Fred), and how did the World take him, his brothers, and his friends?

Go see AVERAGE COMMUNITY and find out!

c.





www.averagecommunity.com/index.html



Welcome to Trenton, New Jersey, a post-industrial wasteland of abandoned factories, neglected row houses and urban decay. Trenton is a relic of America’s once-thriving manufacturing economy, the kind of city most of us have long since forgotten. But for Fred Zara, a 30-something family man living an average suburban life near downtown Orlando, it’s not so easy a place to forget.

Growing up in Trenton in the mid-1980s, Fred went by the name of Fred Fatal, played drums in a punk-rock band called Prisoners of War, and was filled with so much teen angst that he managed to get himself kicked out of high school before reaching the 10th grade.

“Average Community” follows Fred on a 900-mile journey back to his hometown to confront his troubled past, and the troubled people in it, in the hopes of understanding how the person he was made him into the person he is. Fred is joined by his two older brothers, one a disheartened New York journalist, the other a free-spirited Seattle musician, as he reunites with old friends, revisits painful memories and tries to make sense of what it meant to grow up in a dying city.

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