Tonight's guests are Tracy Droz Tragos on The Daily Show and Brian Chesky on The Colbert Report.
Tracy Droz Tragos is a filmmaker and director. Her latest is the documentary Rich Hill
Rich Hill intimately chronicles the turbulent lives of three boys living in an impoverished Midwestern town and the fragile family bonds that sustain them.
It looks like an amazing movie.
'Rich Hill' is a vivid portrait of a poor Missouri town
Rich Hill, Mo., is a town of 1,396 souls, halfway between Kansas City and Joplin. The evocative documentary named for the town focuses on three dirt-poor boys whose lives are effectively over before they are old enough to drive.
Frank is conscientious and friendly, a handsome athlete who might have grown into the prom king under different circumstances. Harley is a slow-witted fighter who collects commando knives with whatever money he can scrounge. And Appachey is a brooding skateboarder whose medications for attention disorders can’t keep him pacified.
Beside poverty, what the boys have in common is familial dysfunction. Frank’s handyman father, who dreams of being a Hank Williams tribute artist in Branson, has moved his son, daughter and brain-impaired wife a dozen times in the same number of years.
Appachey’s father disappeared when the boy was 6, leaving the articulate kid in the hands of a hoarder mom whose vocabulary is confined to variations of “Shut up!”
And Harley is being raised by a grandmother because his mother is in prison for the attempted murder of a husband who’d raped the boy.
Rich Hill and the American dream's shadow of poverty, drugs and shame
Despite that, Andrew, Appachey and Harley are still children at heart. They get excited over birthdays. They like to play with sparklers on the Fourth of July. They want to play football.
Unfortunately, life tends to get in the way. Food stamps can only buy you so much. Forget football. Andrew joined a high school team for a few weeks, but his family had to skip town when the bills piled up: “Often, short on rent”, the producers say, “Andrew’s family leaves in the middle of the night with only the clothes on their backs and a few belongings in garbage bags.”
“It all could’ve been fixed with $1,500, which makes it sad. And you can’t make that. You can’t make that in a week or two,” says his dad.
Andrew’s voice has developed a bitter edge. “He does not like to hold a steady job, a steady career,” Andrew says of his dad after they have to leave their new home once again and move in with his cousins.
That’s the thing that is partly tied to the American dream and the American myth – there is shame in these circumstances. The shame in having a need.
Tracy Droz Tragos
Brian Chesky is co-founder and CEO at Airbnb.
Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more than 34,000 cities and 190 countries. And with world-class customer service and a growing community of users, Airbnb is the easiest way for people to monetize their extra space and showcase it to an audience of millions.
Doing a quick check for my area showed some of the places I expected to see, since we have a few B&Bs in the area because of the casinos. There were also a few other places that only renting a room. I really don't know how I feel about renting a room from somebody who doesn't rent rooms for a living, it could be sketchy or it could be interesting. It looks like they take steps to eliminate the sketchiness, which is a good thing but still, I have doubts.
It looks like the shows will be taking an August vacation, returning Tu 8/26. Enjoy the rest of your Summer!