On Goingness: On Community in Skid Row
Adam Trunell is an LA-based filmmaker. In the past, Adam's been a writer, producer, and editor, depending on the job. Eventually, by necessity, he had to do all those things at once, including camera. That, plus the need to make anything into something, is where you end up with "filmmaker." In this conversation we focus on Adam's feature documentary The Row that he shot and produced on his own in Skid Row, Los Angeles during Covid-19. We chat about unraveling typical expectations of community and the nonprofit harm reduction organization called The Sidewalk Project.
The Los Angeles Times: These pay phones around L.A. let you say goodbye to someone ‘before it’s too late’
“Initially, I wanted to hear people’s voices,” Trunell says, noting that perhaps the project was a reaction to our social media-driven age as much as it was a throwback to, say, communal phone lines of yore. “I wanted a place where we would get to hear people saying things. We just didn’t have that. There was no big epic idea. It’s filled in around us.”
KCRW: What goodbye message would you leave using LA’s last payphones?
Trunell says this project stops him in his tracks daily. “You hear a voice, and you're suddenly in somebody else's heartbreak. And then you walk down the street, and you pass a stranger, and you remember that we're all carrying something that we all love, that we're all loved, that we all say goodbye, and we get said goodbye to, that we'll miss each other, and we'll be missed.
NPR: A call for connection: Using payphones to say goodbye
A new project in Los Angeles invites you to use a payphone to say goodbye to something or someone. The artists behind “The Goodbye Line” say they have been receiving a range of messages and are now sharing them to build community.