You know the Corner Parking Lot. Bordered by train tracks and buffeted by the rear end of Littlejohn's, it has long served as a cut-through for students traversing the Corner or heading to class. Maybe you've parked there a couple times and paid the attendant sitting in the ramshackle white booth.
Now, though, the Corner Parking Lot and its attendants are the subject of a documentary by director Meghan Eckman, called The Parking Lot Movie, which premiered at the South by Southwest Festival and is showing this weekend at the Virginia Film Festival. The film takes a look at the individuals who man the facility and brave the harassment of students and others who feel parking is simply not something for which they should have to pay. In delving into this world most at the University simply pass by, Eckman, who graduated in 2000, has produced a striking, stimulating and engaging feature, one she was inspired to make after spending time with the lot's colorful cast of attendants.
The Inspiration\nEckman had just moved back to Charlottesville from New York when inspiration for the documentary struck. She was with a group of friends when one of them - a former attendant - threw out an idea that someone should make a movie about the lot. "The next day, I showed up there with a video camera and started recording," Eckman said in an interview. "What unfolded was absolutely hilarious - there was instant drama."
Perhaps too much drama, it turns out. With help from co-editor Christopher Hlad, Eckman waded through 150 hours of footage shot during a three-year span and cut it down to a one-hour film. "I lived by the rule that the moment I turned my camera off, something good would happen," Eckman said. "So I just hung out for six or seven hours at the lot at a time, filming everything. The things that you're recording might not seem important, but they become important."
Much of the film's fun can be attributed to the employees: a caustic yet hilarious rag-tag bunch of guys - philosophers from the perch of their ticket booth. During the mid-1980s, owner Chris Farina started posting fliers seeking new attendants in some of the University's academic departments, like comparative religion and anthropology. "The people who work there are what truly makes this movie special," Eckman said. "It's not so much the space as the people who inhabit the space. They're all such great characters - [National Public Radio] said even Terry Gilliam couldn't dream them up."
The Battlefield\nEckman said many of the lot's interesting qualities are because of its location behind the Corner, which draws students and Charlottesville residents in equal numbers.\n"The geographical location really sets itself up for great storytelling," Eckman said. "The parking lot is an interesting place because it's a representation of different demographics, all mixing together in one public space."
The lot certainly acts as a microcosm for Charlottesville - a city with extremely wealthy and many well-known citizens, and also one with three trailer parks.\nAlthough differences in class and wealth fuel much of the film, tensions arise most often when people simply refuse to pay. "Close parking is an unalienable right of every car-owning citizen," says former attendant Matt Datesman in the film, speculating on the mindset of his more difficult customers. "And to have them pay for it - it's as if we're scalpers, we're criminals."
Former attendant John Lindaman relates the frustration he felt when dealing with patrons who drove nice cars and still felt entitled to getting away without paying the full fee. Those times were difficult, he says, "especially if you are talking to someone who's in a $50,000 Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer and they're getting in your grill about 50 cents. To you, that 50 cents is worth $50,000 worth of Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer and you just want to take it out of them any way you can."
Some arguments remain purely verbal - such as one particularly volatile lot patron shown haggling for two bucks or an inebriated sorority sister feigning a lack of cash - while others escalate to a physical level. Constantly, drivers try to escape without paying up. "After that, the switch would flip. It was just total bloodlust. I would end up out on the street, holding onto someone's shirt," Lindaman says in the film. Stories of attendants smashing heads into the steering wheel, breaking car windows with wrenches and hanging onto car fenders as they pull onto University Avenue are all recounted. Corey Gross, a current lot attendant, said one time a guy got out of his car and chased him around the lot after Gross told him to pay up. "It was the scariest thing that's ever happened to me. And all I asked him for was five bucks," he says with a laugh.
Attendants see the resentment patrons show them as a mixture of snobbiness and laziness. "It's unfair for you to expect me to drive around and look for a spot on the street, but it's also unfair for you to expect me to pay this spot," Datesman explains in the film.
Gray Morris, a current lot attendant, says patrons often forget that parking attendants are simply doing their job.
"There's a definite sense of entitlement when it comes to people's interactions with attendants," he says. "People don't treat you like human beings."
The Big Shots\nThe film itself, Morris said in an interview, tends to dwell on the most exciting moments in the life of a parking attendant, when most often, time spent in the parking booth is quite dull.
"I think the film doesn't focus enough on the downtime," Morris says. "There's a lot of waiting around we do, and it plays up the more dramatic elements of the job a lot. It's really pretty low key."
Eckman, though, said she was aiming for a realistic look at life on the lot. "Editing was the biggest challenge," she said. "You are making a movie about a parking lot, and while sometimes it can be a dull place to work, I didn't want to make the movie dull."
At the end of the film, Lindaman sums up his time at the lot by saying that it "taught him how to be a human being."
One attendant, Scott Meiggs, makes even grander assertions about what life in the booth meant to him.
"In the parking lot, we were dynamos. Whirlwinds. We were rulers," he says in the film. "We had it all in a world that had nothing to offer us"
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