INTERVIEW: For director Marc Levin, ‘Stockton on My Mind’ offers a model for the future
Photo: Mayor Michael Tubbs is the focus of the new HBO documentary Stockton on My Mind. Photo courtesy of HBO / Provided by Sunshine Sachs with permission.
The new HBO documentary Stockton on My Mind details the political rise of Mayor Michael Tubbs, who took office at the age of 26, becoming the youngest mayor of a major American city. Tubbs’ story, including his upbringing in Stockton, California, and his burgeoning political career, are the subject of Marc Levin’s new film, which begins streaming on HBO today, July 28.
Levin is an accomplished director who has had a longstanding relationship with HBO. His previous documentaries include Slam, Brick City, Gang War: Bangin’ in Little Rock, Rikers and Chicagoland.
“I had been doing a series of films for HBO on how these massive economic forces were changing everyday people’s lives,” Levin said in a recent phone interview. “I had done a film called Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, Hard Times: Lost on Long Island, Class Divide, and I first went to Stockton because it was ground zero for the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2007-2008 that produced the Great Recession. And so I started getting interested in Stockton.”
In his travels, he met Tubbs, who at that time was a 22-year-old councilman. The director remembers walking with the future mayor outside of city hall and hearing a story about the few political candidates that Oprah Winfrey has supported over the years: Tubbs is one of them, along with Sen. Cory Booker and President Barack Obama.
“So I was like, that’s some pretty good company,” Levin said. “I said I need to stay in touch with this young guy, and I did. And in 2016, the day that Donald Trump was elected president, Michael at age 26 was elected mayor and became the youngest mayor of a major U.S. city.”
Levin spoke with HBO about the project that was forming in his mind, and to the network’s credit, they green-lit the documentary and were supportive from the beginning. Levin headed out to Stockton and started to learn about the various issues that Tubbs was bringing to his hometown, including universal basic income.
“That was something that had come up in these other projects as kind of an idea that was starting to percolate out there as a new way of looking at a possible social safety net, especially in an age of automation and economic displacement,” the director said of the universal basic income model. “So that was kind of how it started, but it was still somewhat unclear exactly what the mix was going to be, what the focus was going to be. … Here was this beleaguered city that was ground zero for basically the collapse and went bankrupt and was now coming out of the ashes with this new generation of leadership who is kind of turning it into a social policy incubator, so those ideas were interesting. But you needed more than policy ideas because this isn’t … CSPAN network.”
Levin spoke with Tubbs, who was open to the documentary being about two different facets of his personal and professional life: one, that he was a relatively young newcomer to the field of politics, and secondly, that he was working in conjunction with a network of fellow change agents.
“And he was very generous in that way, so I think those two things kind of clinched the deal,” Levin said. “HBO was tremendously supportive, but they themselves were wondering how are we going to fit in a film about Stockton, California, because the whole spring is going to be the Democratic primaries, the presidential primaries. And it will be hard to get attention, and then the Olympics are coming in July and then the Democratic and Republican conventions. So it was a question of how to fit something like this in. Now the irony is that of course the whole world has been turned upside down with the coronavirus. All of a sudden people are asking, what’s next? What’s the paradigm shift? There is no back to the way it was. We’ve got to go forward. What is forward? What is change? Everybody is demanding change and wants to know how we can change, and here’s a film where you actually see the seeds of change being planted in terms of a new social contract, a new way of looking at how our citizenry and our politics can work together for the greater good.”
Levin also referenced the renewed Black Lives Matter movement and the demands for racial and economic justice, calling it karma that Stockton on My Mind was being released amidst this national conversation.
“This is a model,” the filmmaker said, referencing comments made in the film by musician-actor Common. “You’ve got a model here. Even in the midst of the madness you see emanating from Washington, D.C., here on a local level in a town that so many people had written off, you see how you can start making real change happen, and certainly I agree with Common.”
Perhaps most powerfully for Levin is that Tubbs came home. He went off to study at Stanford University, and he became an intern in the White House. But after a personal tragedy in his family, he came home to Stockton, California, and decided to dedicate himself to his hometown.
“As a New York City kid, I kind of never thought about it quite like that,” the director said, “but that is part of how change happens.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Stockton on My Mind, directed by Marc Levin, begins streaming on HBO today, July 28. Click here for more information.
