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| In Mission Beach, Calif., a couple tells their story on the purple couch as waves crash in the background. Courtesy of Natassia Francis/Moving Pictures, Inc. |
'The Purple Couch' emphasizes similarities, overcomes differences
A couple fights division with TV cameras, cushions, and a chance to talk
from the August 17, 2007 edition
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"Our experience has been that people are dying to be heard," says Michael.
Kelly Burk, an effervescent waitress at the Curbside Café, starts talking about her new boyfriend before the camera is even rolling. "He is the love of my life," she says. Ms. Burk, a single mother of two, tells of a particularly lonely night, when she wrote on the back of a cellphone bill the qualities she wanted in a boyfriend. After she began dating her new beau, she found that list and realized he embodied all of them. She smiles rapturously into the camera. "I think we both kissed a lot of toads before we found each other," she says. Watching Burk talk, I find that despite – or perhaps because of – the voyeuristic feel of the whole thing, this is pretty compelling entertainment.
That's because what works in drama is the personal aspect, says Richard Walter, a professor and chair of the screenwriting program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. "Look at movies," he says. "Nothing is more false than a movie, and yet we want movies to seem real. Because what's real about film is the emotion you feel.... We are looking for a connection between our own lives and the characters' lives."
Leo Braudy, a cultural historian and University Professor of English at the University of Southern California, says people tend to feel a tug of war between exposing their innermost thoughts and hiding them. "Whether you're sleeping with your mother-in-law or talking about something that happened in the third grade, there is a need to tell stories," he says, and the couch itself is conducive to that sort of exposure. "We learn protocols of behavior from popular culture. A couch is the late-night TV talk-show setting. People think you're on the couch, you start talking. It signifies a kind of privacy and intimacy."
Soon Fred Albury sits down. He is bald, clean-shaven, and wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. Asked how he thinks we can improve our country, Mr. Albury is thoughtful and articulate.
"National healthcare, affordable housing, ending the war in Iraq," he says. "We're spending millions upon millions on the war in Iraq, but we don't address our own citizenry. I don't know who said it – I think Voltaire – that a society can only be judged by how well it treats its old people and its children. We fail on both counts." After health problems caused him to lose two jobs a few years ago, he says, he now works for a temporary service. "And," he adds, matter-of-factly, "I'm homeless."
There is general astonishment. This guy – homeless? Moments ago, he was quoting Voltaire. Albury senses our disbelief. "I know ... when you think of homeless people, you think of people who are drug-addicted and drink," he says to the camera. "I don't fit into any of those categories, but day to day, I have to think about what I'm going to eat, where I'm going to sleep, and how I'm going to survive."
If Cheryl and Michael wanted to prove their point about how little we know one another, they couldn't have scripted it better. But the power of this moment is that it isn't scripted. In this makeshift living room, with concrete in place of carpet and the sun as a blazing roof, a single admission cuts through our assumptions about one another's worlds.
"There's a whole life in this person you've judged in 30 seconds," Michael says of his inspiration for the project. By taking the time to sit, talk and listen, it's remarkable how much of strangers' lives a purple couch on a San Diego sidewalk can absorb, support, and reveal.
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