"Down and Out in Plainview," 1987.

In the winter of early 1987, esteemed newswoman Pat Harper went undercover on the streets of New York City in a journalistic effort to experience homelessness. She dirtied herself up and spent almost a week outside in frigid temperatures, even coming down with the flu in the process. She won an Emmy for the WNBC report, which aired in January, but the experiment was criticized as superficial, and she herself admitted that it could not come close to depicting the real problem, considering she had a housekey in her pocket the entire time.

A month later, my pal Mike and I decided to replicate the intrepid investigation for ourselves...
Nah, not really. We were 17, and regularly filming stupid little movies on VHS cassette to amuse ourselves and our friends, and we saw this as yet another opportunity to be irreverent goofballs. We adopted the personae of "The Witner Twins," namely Frank (played by Mike) and Dale (me). We claimed to be from Minnesota (despite our obvious Long Island accents), visiting cousins in the well-off hamlet of Plainview on the Island, which is in fact where I was born. Mike lived in neighboring Old Bethpage, often hyphenatedly attached to Plainview. We called our report "Down and Out in Plainview," after a popular HBO special about the issue. We filmed ourselves bundling up (in 70's clothing relegated to a rarely-used downstairs closet), then headed to a nearby strip mall in Mike's Toyota Corolla. We filmed our shenanigans beside a Dumpster behind the Morton Village Shopping Center drugstore (before it became the CVS, which as of this writing is still there), because that was where the meager lighting was best.

The original grainy, hard-to-hear video clocks in at an intolerable 28 minutes, which I've edited down to a merely excruciating sixteen. Much of our mumbled wisecrackery got the axe, as did a lot of a "staged" segment where Dale heads to Dunkin' Donuts, and I then pretended to be a deranged derelict. In an artless POV shot, the miscreant assails Frank until the mild Minnesotan is forced to brandish a metal cord. "I'm going, I'm going... I ain't gonna mess with you, Frank Witner," I slur.

The opening scene, where we prep for our adventure, was shot in my family's basement, and the epilogue is in the blue wood-paneled TV den. (It's been someone else's home for just over thirty years now, and I'm sure they've foolishly taken that awesome paneling down.) The on-location shooting--which did in fact take place late at night in well-below-freezing temps--includes several moments where we felt compelled to hide from passing vehicles (including a police cruiser), and ends when a car goes by and can be heard skidding to a halt. We watch for a moment before I worriedly say "I think... he's backing up!" and we scramble to the Corolla in a panic. Also, in case you can't hear it, the thing Frank picks up off the ground when we first approach the Dumpster is an unopened package of slumber caps. The brand name is something like "I-Let," leading to his joke "I let you slumber." Again proving that, in improv, they can't all be winners.

I'm still toying with the idea of adding subtitles, but that's a whole other project. In the meantime, I present this unlisted YouTube video of the Maxrat Video Production "Down and Out in Plainview." It may not accurately represent the societal pain of homelessness, but I promise at least some discomfort, particularly eyestrain.