Shooting Treme

Yesterday I worked in an episode of an upcoming HBO series called 'Treme' (a lower income and heavily black neighborhood famous for great musicians in New Orleans partially destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005) that has been filming here since November. The series Treme starts at about three months after the hurricane and is about the lives of some struggling locals (many of whom are musicians made homeless by the floods of the storm) as they try to rebuild the city.

The series uses many real life local musicians and chefs in an attempt to be realistic and to capture the character of the city.The Treme section of the city is slowly being rebuilt. It is one of the poorer and older sections and the home of many black residents, and though it was less damaged than other sections (including some affluent white areas that were completely
destroyed), it has the appeal of a "poor section rising again", and thus was picked as the focus of the show. I have worked in three of the episodes, two of which were shot in Treme itself to give the show more authenticity. This makes me curious as to whether the series will be another vacuous Hollywood spectacle or a real life study of this city after the hurricane.

There are other signs this may be a more serious and realistic series. For example, on Mardi Gras day when in the French Quarter section I saw Treme shooting real life scenes of locals celebrating the festival rather than the more typical Hollywood idea of recreating carnival here in an artificial Hollywood image. Too, almost all the musicians being used as performers or actors/actresses in Treme are New Orleanians. The episode I worked in yesterday had a "real" Cajun zydeko band performing (all I did, with about 100 other extras, was to look excited and cheer on the band's performance). There was a fiddle player, an accordionist, two guitar players and a drummer, and the singer sang a lively standard in the Arcadian French dialect one still hears in Acadiana, (about 80 kilometers from New Orleans) just as almost all Cajun bands do. The club used for the shoot is a famed local joint, Tipitana's. It all seemed authentic that day.

It's my understanding that many of the kinds of "characters" (uh.. some of the eccentric people here) that New Orleans is famous for will be models for the fictional characters that will appear beside the real life ones. I hope a balanced view of the city will be shown and that it will not be made to appear that Treme is New Orleans and New Orleans is Treme. It is not. The city is far more diverse and interesting than any one of it's neighborhoods, even Treme. But then, I think the show intends to show Treme as a microcosm of the struggle of the city, and that it will make it clear to viewers who know nothing about New Orleans that what is being shown is only one component of the city. I'll know when I see some of the episodes of the show later this year.