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Many college students had a professor who changed their lives. Not many of them lived with this professor, and even fewer never saw him in a classroom. If you think this sounds like a great setup for a hilarious college comedy, you’re not far from it.
This August, Austin-based Onion Creek Productions will begin filming Home Free, a comedy film about an uninhabited professor and the 19-year-olds who took him (and other neighbors) in their six-bedroom home.
The plot of the film is drawn from the real experience of Onion Creek founder and director Aaron Brown and his University of Texas roommate who became a production partner, Entertaining Entertainment writer Lenny Barszap. Home Free is filmed in Austin and is expected to be released in time for the 2022 film festival season. The aim of the film: To start a poignant conversation about homelessness with mainstream audiences.
The professor was something of a movie trope in real life: experienced, intoxicating, and intellectually liberated beyond the point of social assimilation. A press summary calls him “the philosopher king of the homeless”. In a coming-of-age film, the professor, despite his social mission, triggers the confused heroes Owen and Richard to question their careers as good, useful people.
He told a comfortable, glamorous story: He was a professor who voluntarily gave up science to live on the streets. The college kids bought the story, not wondering what could be bad enough to make that decision. Although they never learned the truth about the professor, Barszap wrote a statement on the character to reinforce the harsh realities that make an alleged choice necessary.
“Each of the characters in the film who are homeless has a different reason that brought them there,” explains Barszap. “These are people who need help. You are in this situation that is really hard to get out of. And most of them – I would say almost all of them – want to get out. “
Reality takes priority in Home Free beyond what appears on the screen. Onion Creek has drawn on the expertise of two organizations that are more committed to the needs of the sheltered than some well-meaning college students. The Other Ones Foundation, a nonprofit holistic community management nonprofit, organizes temporary housing, paid work, and sanitation for the Austin homeless community. Its benefactor, Free Lunch, provides meals for nutritionally insecure Austinites and raises funds through magazine subscriptions. Together, the three organizations started filming a partner documentary series on the feature film called Been There.
Much like #MeToo, the TV series Been There is about destigmatizing the experience of being without permanent shelter by acknowledging how many people have lived it and how broad those experiences have been. There is no one who can say he was there, or just a circumstance that brought him there. And there is no easy way out. Yet many have broken the pattern and achieved very visible success from almost invisible beginnings.
Been There highlights the community’s efforts in the United States to create a path to long-term security, attract the attention of high-profile musicians, and humanize uninhabited communities with concerts just for them. The first episode is currently in the process of editing and will likely be released later this year, but where viewers can see the series is still a work in progress.
Working with a production team from Austin’s more than 150-strong camp, the Esperanza Community, the Been There crew hired renowned music groups such as Wild Child, Grupo Fantasma and Black Pumas (whose Adrian Quesada composed the soundtrack for Home Free) to help make greater impact.
The team also hosted auditions for community members and featured Esperanza neighbors like Donald “Hippie” Montgomery in the final lineup. The show was one of many engagements led by The Other Ones Foundation, which aims to restore not only basic needs but also dignity and a human connection in Esperanza and beyond. The event, Brown said, brought together benefactors, the press, artists and community members on an equal footing. Everyone there wanted to be there.
Home Free will expand this ethos of mutual benefit by receiving donations for The Other Ones Foundation and sharing profits while involving community members in the cast, crew, and soundtrack.
“Doing good doesn’t have to be sad,” says Brown. “That’s part of the experiment. … When you bring up a topic there is the possibility of making the films that you want to make, the music that you want to make, but when you combine it with something good that has an impact, it’s so strangely symbiotic Thing.”
The duo want to cast a spell over audiences with good times and help them internalize the feeling of doing something to help. Especially in Austin, organizations are creating replicable blueprints to provide affordable protection and stability.
Barszap learned from diving too deeply and says: “Every problem that feels insurmountable doesn’t have to be solved in order to really have an effect.”
When the UT crew redefined their boundaries and sent their neighbors back into the world, the professor offered them a goodbye wisdom: don’t feel bad. “Keep doing good”.
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