The Bluff is a part of Atlanta most people know well to avoid. Named as
an acronym for “Better Leave You Fucking Fool,” it’s regularly ranked
as the #1 most dangerous neighborhood in the city, and as of 2010 it was
#5 in the United States. Even a simple Google search will reveal that
if you’re looking for heroin, it’s the place to go, as long as you don’t
mind ending up with a gun in your face. Half the time you hear a street
name-checked in Atlanta rap, it’s a street somewhere in here.

Snow On Tha Bluff, a
new film set entirely on location in this hood, is a self-proclaimed
“docu-drama,” mashing up Harmony Korine-like juxtapositions with
stylized hood action. It follows the daily activity of real-life dealer
and stick-up man Curtis Snow, who actually lives the life displayed in
the film. Buzz from the film’s trailer, as well as a video of Curtis talking about the long scar down his neck from when a guy slashed him with a box cutter while trying to get out of an $80 debt, got actor Michael K. Williams, best known as Omar from The Wire,
interested in the production, calling Curtis “the real-life Omar.” A
couple weeks ago the two met for the first time and I was invited along
down to the Bluff to check it out.



We met up on a Thursday afternoon. It was hot and there were eight of
us packed into a large black SUV, though we didn’t have to drive too
long from the expensive midtown hotel where Michael was staying to the
hood. Atlanta is interesting in that cultural and economic divisions can
often change from block to block, with hardly any bleed-over between
expensive loft apartments and projects. I remember realizing we were
getting near the Bluff when passing a group of men standing on the
street shouted, “No pictures!” Most of the people we ran into throughout
the afternoon not involved with the film made a point of this: Fuck
cameras, and fuck you for aiming one at me. Most seemed to want their
neighborhood kept to itself. As we came along down streets lined with
houses that looked like they’d come through a hurricane, boarded over
and abandoned, torn to shit or half burnt down, Michael sat at the
window looking out and thinking aloud about the strange shift in
terrain. “The trick is not being able to leave the ghetto,” he told us,
“the trick is coming back.”

Which is what makes the Snow on Tha Bluff project so
compelling: Curtis and his crew seem unflinching in their willingness to
make a movie about their dealing and robbing lifestyle. The locations
you see in the movie are where he really lives, and while some scenes
enact dramatization (the film is ostensibly shot on a camera stolen from
some rich kids who’ve come to the Bluff to buy rolls and eight balls),
the people and locations you’re brought into are who they are. Curtis
has lived in the same neighborhood for 25 years, not far from where
Marin Luther King Jr. had once lived.



Curtis and his crew were waiting for us at the bottom of the driveway
flanking a long brick squat across from an empty chained-in field. Folks
ranging in age from two to possibly sixty-something sat out in the sun,
smoking weed and drinking Bud Ice. Curtis was drinking out of a paper
cup with bright red liquid in it. The grass was littered with Cash 3
tickets, bottle caps, Taco Bell sauce packets, plastic baggies, and
countless blunt wrappers and butts. Michael and Curtis introduced
themselves and immediately began to talk about the odd parallel made of
their lives: how Curtis lives in daily life what Michael represents on
the TV.



Like Curtis’s box cutter scar, Michael has the scar down the middle of
his face for which he is well known, the result of being slashed with a
razor in a bar fight, which happened to him the same weekend as his
first major media appearance. As late as the second season of The Wire
he’d been sleeping on the floor in his project apartment, waiting for
the chance to rise in the same way Curtis now is hoping to begin with
his film, though the reality of Curtis’s ghetto could not have been more
real. Stories of friends or neighbors who had been recently killed were
regularly delivered in a permeating cloud of weed. When Michael asked
Curtis’s four-year-old son, Curtis Jr., what he wanted to be when he
grew up, Curtis Jr. answered, “Five.”

“No, tell him what you really want,” Curtis Sr. insisted. The little
boy turned his head away shyly and said, “A singer.” Later, while
dangling by both hands on the iron railing of a stairwell, he grinned
and told me, “I’m a hellraiser.”



After introductions, Curtis and about 15 of his crew led us on a walk
through their neighborhood, through some of the places where Snow on Tha Bluff
was filmed. I was warned at least three times to be careful of sudden
cars appearing in the otherwise deserted streets, as drivers there will
gladly plough right through you. Among the mostly vacant and often
destroyed homes people passed in small groups migrating seemingly
aimlessly. All of them knew Curtis and shouted happily at him, saying
they’d definitely be coming by later. There were never any cops; in a
way it felt like we were in a version of Hamsterdam, one that spread out
over the Bluff’s four square miles.





“Got them Xanax!” a grandfatherly-looking man shouted as we passed,
about ten feet from a corner on the sidewalk where new concrete had
thirty-plus R.I.P. tags traced into it. We met a gypsy woman all the
guys called “Lady Heroin,” who was missing most of her front teeth. We
met an old woman who’d been living for years in a makeshift box on the
porch of a house with a cocker spaniel puppy, who kindly beckoned us on
her porch to see a memorial paper for a relative who had just died. She
blessed us all three times before we left.



Despite the surrounding damage, everyone seemed in good spirits. For a
place as notoriously dangerous as this one, people’s general tone was
positive, and good hearted. We visited a random safe house pretty much
in the middle of nowhere, independently run by a kind old woman who
regularly gave away free HIV and hep-C testing, as well as free food and
clothes and syringes for anyone who came in. One of Curtis’s crew
grabbed a handful of free condoms with a smile and said to himself, “I
use these in five minutes.” Michael seemed particularly moved by the
presence of this establishment, and recorded an impromptu plea to Obama
to make this a nationwide program.

I had to remind myself at several times how if I were here alone and
beyond cameras it would be a wholly different story, particularly at
night. More stories of recent violence, including one about a
15-year-old who was recently killed trying to barricade his home’s door
against robbers, reinforced that. “Beggars ain’t beggin’,” Curtis told
Michael. “They demandin’.”



Truly, life in the Bluff seemed like urban wilderness, a kind of wild
west set in destroyed suburbs. With no local grocery, the only nearby
place to buy food or anything else was a corner store or a liquor store,
where while visiting the latter to buy water after hours spent in the
sun a fight almost broke out. The owner came out from behind the glass
to tell Curtis he was not welcome, proceeded as he is his by his own
rep. I asked one of the younger guys in Curtis’s crew if he had hopes to
ever leave the Bluff, and he kind of grinned and said he wasn’t sure,
but that the one way out he knew of was “to use my knowledge, just like
Tupac.” Damon Russell, the film’s director, told me later that every
local dope boy gets buried by the same funeral home.

The trek ended back in Curtis’s apartment, a small, dark living room
with two deep-seated sofas around a big screen TV whose screen had been
damaged, making the picture look muffled under yellow oil. A kid’s show
about a rabbit played to no one. Two cold McDonald’s burgers sat on the
coffee table in their wrappers. Framed paintings of a bed and an angel
and an original painting of what I could only think of as Monet’s Waterlillies
on lean covered the otherwise light yellow walls. We chilled in the
dark and shot the shit. A girl showed up hoping to sell some Xanax,
eight for $10, though when she showed Curtis her pills he told her it
was Roxicodone and she looked sad and left. “People don’t even know what
they have,” Curtis told us. “I got real dope, watch this.” He went into
the back room and came back with a bag of Benadryl and other OTC tabs
and threw it on the table laughing, then sat down to roll a blunt.



As the afternoon wrapped up, Curtis talked to Michael about his hopes for Snow on da Bluff
to do well, though his attitude toward the progression seemed
realistic, ready for anything. “Nowhere to go but up,” he told us, slung
back on the sofa, smoking. Truly, for a film as uniquely considered as Snow on da Bluff,
and as fearless in its willingness to show real elements of the side of
a world most people could never set foot in will undoubtedly cause a
wide range of reactions. At a local film fest in Atlanta, viewers
shouted at the screening, nearly breaking out into a brawl. Snow on da Bluff
is raw, it’s ghetto, it’s full of guns and coke and ass, and at the
same time provides a look in on some people who only really want a taste
of something bigger, a place that’s wholly theirs. In the end, that
exploration seems true, regardless of whatever else there is to be said.
I could almost see Michael’s eyes in the dark through his sunglasses as
he gave the day its final word: “If you got haters, you doin’ something
right.”By @blakebutler

SNOW ON THA BLUFF

Release Date: June 19th 2012