Art
Spotlight on Federal Hill
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, September 24, 2006
Jon Raben talks with Carol Scialo Gaeta, of Scialo Bros. Bakery, on Providence’s Federal Hill.
The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl
Jon Raben at the iconic entrance to Providence’s Federal Hill. Raben’s film Italian Americans and Federal Hill premieres Friday and Saturday at Providence’s Columbus Theater.
The Providence journal / Gretchen Ertl
PROVIDENCE There really was only one question that people had for Jonathan Raben when he told them he was planning to film a documentary about Italian immigrants and their influence on Federal Hill.
It was a question Raben often asked himself in 2001, when he began production on Italian Americans and Federal Hill, the feature-length film that will have its premiere Friday night at the Columbus Theatre, with many of those he interviewed over the past five years in the audience.
Everyone wanted to know whether a non-Italian could capture the essence of what was once Providence’s most Italian neighborhood.
Not only was Raben not Italian, but he had never lived on The Hill. He had grown up in Newton, Mass., didn’t move to Rhode Island until the late 1970s, and now lives in Cranston.
And except for some “little academic projects,” he had never made a film before, let alone a 90-minute feature that set out to tackle the neighborhood’s high and low points honestly.
He had been “originally a geologist,” he says almost sheepishly during a recent interview. “More recently I was a gemologist who did appraisals, sales, more diamond-related.” He taught gemstone mineralogy at the University of Rhode Island. He also dabbled in real estate, buying and selling buildings in Boston and Rhode Island.
Because Raben was adopted, he doesn’t really know what his ethnic origins are. He wasn’t raised a Roman Catholic, the predominant religion among the immigrants who left impoverished southern Italy in search of a better life for themselves and their children in the New World and settled on Federal Hill. His adoptive father was Jewish; his mother, the daughter of a Protestant minister.
“It was a very difficult line to walk,” admits Raben of not having the ethnic credentials of the subject he was exploring. “The biggest nightmare was dealing with my own sensitivities of not being Italian and telling them who they are.”
Despite all that baggage, Raben has put the question of his ability to rest with the wonderfully rich and complete Italian Americans and Federal Hill. Brimming with colorful anecdotes from the children of the immigrants who arrived from Naples and Reggio di Calabria and Catanzaro on ships that sailed from Genoa and Marseilles and docked at the Port of Providence, Raben’s film looks back to the way things were and how all that evolved into The Hill we know today.
“The biggest compliments I received were from two very conservative Italian-Americans who said that because I wasn’t Italian and was from the ‘outside,’ I probably did a better job than would someone who grew up there. I could make fresh and unemotional decisions.
“If someone had done this film from the community, there probably are things they wouldn’t talk about.”
He’s alluding to the longstanding impression among outsiders that many of the residents of Federal Hill were involved with organized crime, a reputation enhanced by the presence of reputed New England crime boss Raymond L.S. Patriarca in the 1970s and ’80s.
“Everybody assumed that was what the movie was going to be about. When I said I was making a movie about Federal Hill, they assumed it would be about wiseguys. But I don’t think I met a wiseguy in the five years I was up there. I think Federal Hill gets a bad rap in that respect.
“I lost a lot of sleep about some very sensitive issues. Some people had told me, ‘You don’t want to mention this and that. You want to be positive.’ ”
“Others said, ‘No, things were a lot worse than what you showed.’ They wanted it to be more negative.”
He said he was never nervous about asking people about organized crime while the camera was rolling. “In every interview I basically had one question about organized crime: Because it was a presence from the 1950s to the 1980s, how did that affect you and your family? Some took off with it. Some didn’t want to answer it. But I knew that I didn’t want to make a gangster movie. I tried to avoid stereotypes.”
To that end, he said he even has “pretty much sanitized the movie of all slang, because that was part of the stereotype.”
Organized crime is one of the many topics covered in Italian Americans and Federal Hill, and it’s covered with an unemotional directness. But it’s far from the overriding focus of the film.
Raben has screened his film already for more than half of the people who appear on screen.
“That was a very important part of the process,” said the affable Raben, a hulking man with an easygoing sensibility. “They gave me a lot of insight.”
Former Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Thomas R. DiLuglio, one of the many on-screen interviewees who grew up on Federal Hill, previewed Raben’s film and “thought it was an excellent, accurate portrayal of Italian-Americans and their contributions to the progress and evolution of Federal Hill.”
“I don’t know how he did it,” he said of Raben, “but he did it.”
Reached at home by phone, DiLuglio quickly began reminiscing about the days when his family lived on The Hill. “It’s a subject I never tire of talking about. I was brought up there. When you’re a kid, you don’t know you’re poor. You don’t know there are better places. When you’re a kid, every place is fun.
“In those days there were three- and four-story homes that housed as many as six or eight families. We lived on the front of the second floor and another family lived in the other half. If someone sneezed next door, you’d say ‘gesundheit.’ ”
Raben said one of the reasons he chose to focus on Federal Hill was that “it was a very specific geographic area” and that it was urban. “Early on I discovered that if people grew up in an urban area, their sensitivities would be very different from Italian-Americans who grew up in, say, Westerly. And unless I wanted to make a huge, unending film, I had to be specific.
“It was an easy study group. It was a specific population I was looking at that spoke English. And Rhode Island is so rich in that culture.
“After a few interviews, I knew what had to be in the film. I had to have the church, immigration. Those were the building blocks.”
Raben did 50 interviews over almost five years, but said, “I did a lot of interviews that didn’t make it in.” Those that did were edited down considerably. “The first cut of the film was four hours long.”
For instance, he spoke to former Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. for “around 25 minutes on the fly.” That was cut down to about two minutes on screen.
“What hit me like a brick early on was that to make it entertaining, I had to develop personalities in the movie. If 50 people said one thing pretty much the same way, that would be boring. But if I had 25 people say three or four different things, then it would develop characters and personalities. That was a major decision in keeping it entertaining. It was an evolving thing.”
Raben said that at first he found it very difficult to get women to appear on screen. “Maybe it’s a cultural thing,” he said.
But he did eventually entice several, including Carol Scialo Gaeta and Lois Scialo Ellis, the two sisters who run Scialo Bros. Bakery, which their father founded with his brother back in 1916 and which has been a Federal Hill mainstay ever since. Raben caught up with them on a hot summer day last year.
Last week, Ellis said that Raben began his interview very simply and casually, but it led to reminiscences that kept the sisters chatting in front of the camera for more than an hour and a half.
Sitting on a wooden chair in the back of the bakery more than a year later, Ellis spun a series of anecdotes about the old days when she and her sister lived in the huge apartment upstairs from the bakery.
“We’d know it was summer,” she recalled, when the people who ran the restaurant across the street would haul out a big wooden bucket filled with frozen lemonade. “And that was in the days before Del’s.”
Ellis reminisced about the 5- and 10-cent store that used to be where Venda Ravioli is now, on DePasquale Plaza, only then it was called Balbo Avenue after an Italian general, and before that it had been Arthur Avenue. “Oh, the treat it was to go in there and see the little shelves filled with wonderful things. They used to have pushcarts along the side wall.”
Those were the days when trolley cars ran along Atwells Avenue. Not the gas-driven ones that rumble down Atwells today, but honest-to-goodness streetcars that ran on tracks and were powered by overhead electric wires. Ellis remembers the thrill of looking out her second-floor front windows, which were just about the same height as the trolley’s electrical wires, “at the people passing and see the sparks from the electric trolley as it went by.”
These are things that could have made it into Raben’s movie, if he’d let it run for four hours. “I have enough footage left over to make one more good film and two bad ones,” he said with a laugh.
Some of his excess material, and more, will appear in a 192-page companion book, Italian Americans and Federal Hill, which Raben has worked on for the past five months and which will be given away free at the Columbus to ticket holders at this weekend’s three screenings.
The book also will be included with the first 3,000 DVDs sold of his film, which he has been working on full time for nearly a year and a half, with editor John Gulino. “I give him a lot of credit for the end result and the artistic decisions. I gave him a lot of leeway and he did a remarkable job with the footage, given the sound problems we had with some of it. I would say that the film depended 10 percent on the filming and 90 percent on putting it together.”
If all goes well — and Raben said the Friday night show was sold out and the Saturday night show might be sold out by now — he said he might break even . . . provided he also sells 5,000 DVD copies of the film.
Despite all the financial headaches, Raben is looking to do another film. He’s had an offer from a producer, he said, that’s “fairly lucrative.”
That, in the end, may be his payoff.
Italian Americans and Federal Hill will be screened at the Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence, with doors opening at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 1 p.m. Sunday. Screenings will be preceded by performances by the Pandora Mandolin Trio and guitarist Lino Del Signore, all of whom appear in the film. There will also be a sampling of Italian wines by Gasbarro’s Liquors and an assortment of sweets from Scialo Bros. Bakery.
Tickets are $25, which includes the souvenir book and the pre-film music. To order tickets for the Sunday matinee and any remaining tickets for the Saturday show, phone (401) 942-3779; tickets will be held at the door.
You can get more information about the film at www.italianamericansand federalhill.com.
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