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Grand Buba of Braddock Acclaimed filmmaker has kept his sights on the quirky characters and quiet dignity of his hometown Friday, July 10, 1998 By Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Ron Howard, wearing a baseball cap and a milk mustache, peers down at drivers cruising into the bruised and battered heart of Braddock. But there is only one film director who really means anything in this town, and that's Tony Buba, creator of "The Braddock Chronicles."
The 54-year-old Pittsburgh native has no billboard, no milk mustache, no Hollywood handlers. He does have a body of personal, highly regarded work documenting his beloved immigrant grandmother, a hustler named Sal and the people whose lives collapsed along with Big Steel.
Buba credits his father, Edward A. Buba who died in January 1997 at age 81, with helping to make him the man he is today (even if the elder Buba always worried that his son the filmmaker had no pension plan).
"I sort of gave this eulogy at my father's funeral, talking about one of the best things he ever gave my brother and me was not moving out of Braddock in the '50s when white flight took place, because it gave us a true multi-cultural education that doesn't come from books, of living in an ethnically diverse community."
It was a community of people who were Polish and Italian and Slovak and Greek and African-American. It embraced the doctors and lawyers on the hill and the steelworkers below and even Spike and Alice, a couple living together without benefit of marriage.
It was a perfect cauldron for boys who would end up in the film business. Buba jokes, "Shoemakers in Italy, filmmakers in America. A trade is a trade is a trade." But a fine shoe, like a fine film, can be a work of art.
Younger brother Pasquale (Pat) Buba is an editor whose credits include "Looking for Richard," "Heat" and "Striking Distance." Tony is the Anti-David Lynch, the director whose 1986 movie "Blue Velvet" opened with serene scenes of picket fences and flowers ... and then the collapse of a man watering the lawn and a view of the insects churning beneath the grass.
"Now, when you go through Braddock, there are a lot of boarded up buildings. I sort of use this analogy, it's the opposite of a David Lynch film. When you go to the clean suburbs, you dig down into the ground and you find worms and dirt where, here, the worms and dirt are above the ground and as you dig deeper, you find all the warmth and goodness that people have to offer."
The goodness, in every sense of the word, of Buba's work is being honored by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. It has named him its 1998 Artist of the Year.
While experts coo about his "disregard for transgenre boundaries" (that means he sometimes mixes documentary, fiction and experimental techniques), Pittsburghers know he's the guy who did "Voices from a Steeltown," "Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy" and "Struggles in Steel," which aired on WQED this year.
An opening reception at the center tonight will feature a performance by Steve Pellegrino and, in pure, palatable Pittsburgh style, cookies (pizzelles, biscotti, thumbprints and delicacies with ricotta cheese, raspberry preserves, pignolias and chocolate) by the Artist's mother, Angeline Buba, and aunt, Filomena Cuccaro.
Buba has been celebrated near and far, but this is heady hometown stuff that comes with an exhibition and $2,500 honorarium. "I was sort of amazed," he says, of being informed he had been chosen for the award established in 1949 to recognize outstanding artistic achievement and contributions to the cultural life of the region.
The exhibition of Buba's work, with screenings of movies Sundays at 2 p.m., will run through Aug. 30.
Curator Vicky A. Clark says when the selection committee "came in and looked at Tony as an artist, he was the unanimous choice." The challenge for Buba was to bring his films, typically shown in darkened auditoriums or theaters or halls, to an art gallery and present them in a different way.
The center has turned over the entire second floor to Buba, the most space any artist has received. He even has his own CD-ROM, a high-tech version of an exhibition catalog giving the user a walking tour of the duplex where the Buba family has lived for six decades (today it's Tony and wife Janice McMannis on the left, his widowed mother on the right) along with authentic ambient sounds such as train whistles and bawling babies.
Click on various items and up pops a Buba film or someone talking about him or even old home movies. It is a nifty bit of technology, designed and programmed by Jason Simmons from a Pittsburgh-based outfit called Grouper.
If you can't get Pittsburgh to go to Braddock - not like in the old days, when it was a boomtown with 300 shops and 82 beer gardens - you can bring Braddock to Pittsburgh.
Buba has transported its flavor to the center's second floor in Shadyside. When you reach the top of the grand staircase you find an "interpretation" of his grandmother's kitchen, complete with faux tile wallpaper and appliances. The room next door is devoted to industrial footage while down the hall is the Braddock room, with still photos of what Buba calls "the avenue" lining the walls.
And tucked everywhere are monitors flickering with images: his grandmother as she slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's, a view inside the Carrie Furnace, the fabled shopping district then and now.
When Pittsburgh Filmmakers has shown Buba's films, there's been a universal response, says Gary Kaboly: "People have loved them, simple as that."
Kaboly, director of exhibitions for the Oakland-based organization which counts Buba as an instructor, says the filmmaker's compassion for his subjects always shines through. "His earlier stuff is all short documentaries based on people he knows. Usually they're eccentric in some way, oddballs. Tony never used their persona as a comedic device....He's not making fun of these people at all."
With a personal style of filmmaking that shows this affection for his subjects, Buba took us into his grandmother's kitchen where he did housework and she told stories in thickly accented English. He escorted us into Betty's Corner Café, a little bar that catered to afternoon regulars with its pool table, jukebox and picture of Jesus on the cash register.
He introduced us to J. Roy, mastermind of a drive-in used car and new and used furniture store, and a hustler named Sal, who once got Buba to turn his rundown Cadillac into a film fireball and accused Buba of hogging all the credit for the success of his documentaries. (The two had a falling out, but made up after a chance encounter in a Braddock emergency room. Buba, doubled over with gallstone pain, looked across the way and saw Sal emerging from a diabetic coma.)
What Buba does, Kaboly says, is simple yet sophisticated: "He's just trying to show what it's like to be at a certain place at a certain time. That's the basis of documentary filmmaking."
Sitting in the lobby of Production Masters Inc., where cousin Joseph Stamerra is downstairs recording a 1936 piece of music called "The Strange Funeral in Braddock" for the show, the filmmaker recalls his earliest movie memories.
"What I remember is not the movies I saw, I just remember my brother and me sitting on the porch on Sundays with my grandfather" as he read the newspaper and picked out a western or Randolph Scott picture. "I have no idea what we saw, but he would fall asleep."
Buba graduated to Saturday matinees of cartoons and Three Stooges shorts. "When I was in junior high school, there was this one young woman I had a crush on. There were no seats, so she sat on my lap. There's a memory I won't forget," Buba says, with a healthy laugh as the scene rewinds and plays in his mind.
Like a real-life version of the movie "Sliding Doors," where a woman's life will take two entirely different turns depending on whether she catches a subway car, Buba's career path was forged by job offers and the lack thereof.
After a stint in the steel mills, he became a college freshman at age 24. He earned a psychology degree from Edinboro University in 1971 and an MFA in film from Ohio University in 1976.
He had been a natural behind the camera, earning kudos and awards from the start. For an early assignment in "matching action," he plunked a friend, wearing her trademark work boots, into a rocking chair in front of a window. He shot her and her reflection in the glass behind, as she brushed her hair. An artist who saw the clip praised the way Buba contrasted the femininity of the hair with the boots. That never entered his mind, he says, at least not consciously.
"Half the stuff I do is because I couldn't get hired anywhere. When I finished grad school with an MFA, if I had gotten a teaching position immediately, I would have moved somewhere and taught. Except when I went to OU at the time, the energy crisis hit, enrollment dropped there from like 18,000 to 12,000, there were no assistantships....
"I came back to Pittsburgh and worked with [George] Romero and ended up making some money here, so there was no reason to move. I didn't start out with this whole idea of chronicling Braddock, it just became something that happened."
In a way, though, it was an ideal subject: Something Buba knew like no other filmmaker, and a community in the midst of economic and social upheaval. He realized you don't have to leave Pittsburgh to do good work.
As Buba says in his "Artist's Statement" for the exhibit: "I focus on my hometown because I am continually challenged to create new ways of seeing it. I want to do in filmmaking what has been done in literature by writers such as William Faulkner. I want to convey the humor and the quirkiness of people in one community, my community, using cinematic forms that fit the tone, rhythm and texture of their stories."
His work has earned him more than 40 awards from far-flung film festivals, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships and, earlier this year, a spot on PBS schedules for the documentary "Struggles in Steel" made with Ray Henderson. However, the 200 copies of "Struggles" sold after its national airing, yielded the pair the grand sum of $192. To be split two ways.
Still, it and "No Pets," a 1994 release based on a Jim Daniels' short story about a factory worker who feels trapped on all fronts, represented a departure for Buba. "How do you grow as a filmmaker and an artist? You can't keep repeating the same type of films. You need to keep challenging yourself."
With a couple of shorts debuting at the center ("Fade Out" and "Unidentified Man," the latter about a cousin who fell or jumped from the Fort Duquesne Bridge), Buba is looking ahead to other projects. He is working with collaborators on stories about a newsstand, a town too poor to fix its traffic lights and a funeral home where three Italians - a grandmother, a 50-something heart attack victim, a teen who OD'd - represent the hopes and realities of their generations.
"None of them will generate any income. 'Well, let me go rush out and see the film about three dead people,' " he quips, with typical good nature. He's also toying with a project called "Far From Braddock," and foresees the day when he may chronicle his move from the family duplex.
"We probably will end up moving because of the [Mon-Fayette] highway going through. It's going to come right through the house. Even if it doesn't come through the house, it's going to be close enough that who wants to be there with construction, all that noise and dirt?
"Either way, this show is sort of appropriate in that sense," an unintended tribute or requiem for a town that might be forever changed again - this time by a ribbon of roadway.
"It will be fairly traumatic for me to move," Buba acknowledges, but he won't head for some upscale cul-de-sac. He probably will move to Braddock Hills, where his grandfather once farmed and his family still owns a couple of acres. He may build a house from scratch. "That's the fantasy."
No David Lynch land for him. Just another chapter in "The Braddock Chronicles."
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