My Big Fat Homeless Berkeley Movie Book: How Making A Movie Led Me Home

My Big Fat Homeless Berkeley Movie Book: How Making A Movie Led Me Home

In 2005 I was broke and homeless in Berkeley, CA. I had spent decades on the road after being a feral runaway from a broken childhood and by then I was too shattered to see any way out. I picked up a camcorder and started filming everything around me in order to make a documentary of my life and have something to sell on DVD. It made me famous and became an underground hit that led to bigger, fatter sequels and homeless people selling DVDs on the streets for their own profit. Eventually it led me home after 30 years and redeemed my life. This is the photo and art book from those times from 2005-2009. May it inspire you to believe in yourself. 8.5x11", 200 pages. From my East Bay Express cover story from March 21, 2007 - "Even though Shaw has been homeless since he was a teen, has no intention of ever being otherwise, and is congenitally broke and unemployable, he has produced a powerful feature-length documentary that’s available worldwide. Against the odds, he managed to scrounge up a digital camcorder and three separate laptops, shoot more than 31 hours of raw footage in 2005 and 2006, and edit it into the 52-minute doc, which he finished late last year. The resourceful video nut went on to press two hundred DVDs, of which he’s sold about three- quarters on the street and through local retailers such as Amoeba and Rasputin. He recently secured distribution through IndieFlix.com, which will sell his movie for $10 to anyone in the world. Entry deadlines loom for many film festivals, if only Shaw can scrape together the fees. The world has plenty of wannabe filmmakers aiming for social justice with depressing footage of homeless people telling their stories. Pras, a member of hip-hop group the Fugees, even tried to film himself living on a dollar a day in Los Angeles last year. But Shaw differs from the pack. For one, he’s the first person to get this far while actually living the life. What’s more, My Big Fat Homeless Berkeley Movie is a bizarre sort of triumph — at times very funny, and brutally sad, but never didactic or preachy. Shaw never appears or speaks in the film, which wanders plotlessly through eighteen vérité vignettes depicting individual lives on the street. Embracing the gonzo ethic of “shoot first and call what you hit the target,” Shaw’s documentary is cultural anthropology in the raw, capturing the exotic people, customs, and ideas of a subculture that hides in plain sight. Where most might overlook, ignore, or judge, the veteran hobo director hits record and waits for something interesting to happen. And it often does. Yet Shaw’s success, as admittedly modest as it has been, puts him on a collision course with the straight world he has avoided for so long. After decades of avoiding the system of “plague-makers,” he now has need of a bank account, which would require an address. He also wants a new camera and a more powerful laptop for a planned sequel, not to mention cash to cover film festival dues and production expenses (true to form, Shaw hand- packages his DVDs). At any given moment, however, he has just a few tattered dollar bills to his name. Shaw may be sane, but his chosen lifestyle conflicts with his long-term ambitions. Logic says you can’t be a famous filmmaker and still live in a carport. Shaw respectfully disagrees."