Peaceful Times After the Tumult of 'Dark Days'

By JOHN CLARK

Aug. 31, 2001 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

NEW YORK — Two years ago at the Sundance Film Festival’s awards ceremony, a fashionably shaven-headed Brit made repeated trips to the podium to accept awards for a documentary about people nobody wants to see.

Called “Dark Days” and airing tonight at 9 on the Sundance Channel, Marc Singer’s film is about a group of homeless people, about 45 in all, who lived in a New York City railroad tunnel, some for as long as 20 years. They built shanties, cooked meals, tapped the city’s electrical system for power and its plumbing for water, and kept pets. It was a surreal approximation of suburban life, except instead of commuting to work, they went above ground to scavenge the city’s garbage for food, clothing, building materials and appliances (such as stoves, refrigerators and washing machines). Of course, no matter how many creature comforts these people managed to build or accumulate, they still lived in a dank, often freezing tunnel, warmed by campfires, going to the toilet in a bucket, harassed by rats and the police. They also labored under mental illness, drug addiction and sometimes just plain old bad luck.

Singer, a dropout of the British rave scene who went to high school in Florida, found these people to be kindred spirits--outsiders, as he is. He lived with them off and on for more than a year, at first as a fascinated, if occasionally repelled, onlooker and then increasingly as a friend and activist.

While Singer was there, Amtrak officials were evicting the occupants of the tunnel, so he, along with others, helped cut through red tape and find them decent places to live. And perhaps nearly as important, he documented their way of life, using them as crew and sharing the film’s profits. (So far there haven’t been any, but Singer has high hopes for the upcoming DVD release.)

Needless to say, all of this wasn’t easy. Singer had never picked up a camera before, which is intriguing, given that he ultimately won Sundance’s documentary cinematography prize at the 2000 festival. He had to siphon off electricity from the city’s grid for power and use abandoned train tracks for dolly tracks. There was never enough money. In fact, the film was stalled in postproduction for more than a year because he didn’t have enough money to complete it.

“I put in time,” Singer says, understating matters a bit. “They were my best friends and still are, a lot of them, closer to me than almost anybody else in the world. I trust them with my life. I would be asleep sometimes, and they’d wake me up and say, ‘This is going on, we’ve got to film it.’ And the cameras would be ready.

“Filming this film wasn’t as hard as other documentaries,” he continues, “because first of all, they’re homeless, so they don’t really do too much, apart from survive. So this guy goes in the garbage every night to eat. This guy is going to take a shower every day. And this guy is going to dump his [waste] bucket every other day. And this guy is cooking for the rats every other day.”

The beauty of “Dark Days” is that audiences don’t have to know any of this compelling back story. Confronted by stark, black-and-white images of the homeless going about their daily business, viewers experience a series of responses similar to Singer’s when he first went down the rabbit hole on Manhattan’s Upper West Side: amazement, horror, disgust, anger and finally compassion. And amusement. At times, “Dark Days” is appallingly funny.

Now, five years after these people left the tunnels and a year after he finished promoting the movie, Singer is living in Florida, working for a scuba-diving group, called Global Underwater Explorers, that explores caves and shipwrecks. Although he acknowledges that it might seem like he’s spending his life “underneath”--the streets of New York, the surface of the Atlantic--he sees no correlation.

“I don’t give it too much thought,” he says. “I’m quite comfortable jumping out of a plane too. It’s very peaceful underwater.”

Peace is what Singer wants, at least for now, after spending seven years on “Dark Days” and living like a street person for most of that time.

He’s deeply in debt. The agents, publicists and media that descended on him after his triumphs at Sundance and other festivals have all fallen away, leaving him with a small group willing to support him when he decides what he wants to do next--after, he says, he figures out who he is, which he didn’t have time to do while shooting the movie and now literally can’t afford to do in New York City.

Meanwhile, he looks back on “Dark Days” with a mixture of wonder and pride. The film was a success, and the folks he helped off the streets have stayed off the streets. Whether he admits it to himself or not, it must be hard for him to imagine doing anything quite that pure again.

“We had a goal that we set for ourselves, and we accomplished that goal against every single odd that there could have ever been,” he says. “The goal was to get people out of the tunnel, and that happened. And so from that point forward, everything else was icing on the cake. The film, for a documentary, did brilliant. We had nothing, nothing, and we didn’t have a clue what we were doing. When you look at it in that context, it just doesn’t matter. People take it for however they take it. And they get something from it. And it did a lot of good, helped a lot of people, and that was what most important.”

“Dark Days” can be seen tonight at 9 p.m. on Sundance Channel. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).