With the help of an entire community, out writing-directing duo Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer track the gentrification of L.A.'s Echo Park in their Sundance award-winning film Quinceañera.

By Ken Knox

It’s a steamy-hot Saturday afternoon when I meet filmmaking duo Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer for lunch at Costa Alegre, a colorful, authentic Mexican eatery located smack-dab in the middle of the Echo Park neighborhood the two men call home. “We love this place,” Glatzer tells me as he orders a shrimp cocktail and an ice-cold horchata, a traditional Mexican drink made from a heady mixture of almonds, cinnamon, rice, lime zest and sugar. “It's got such great energy.”

And how. Potted plants hang from just about every corner of the establishment, while vibrantly colorful paintings of cartoonish Mexican figures hang on the walls and festive Latin music wails from the speakers. It's the kind of place some might call rustic, but the family eatery is just one of the things about Echo Park that Westmoreland and Glatzer admire. “I found Los Angeles to be quite difficult to live in until I came to Echo Park,” Westmoreland admits as he eyes a bowl of red tortilla chips. “It was the first place where I felt a sort of community.”

“It was that kind of really laid-back thing, and everyone was out on the streets and there'd be dogs running around and chickens walking down the street,” Glatzer laughs. “We immediately fell in love with the neighborhood. And then, over time, things changed.”

Glatzer is speaking, of course, about the ongoing gentrification of Echo Park. As more and more upwardly mobile people—including a rather large number of gays and lesbians—move into the neighborhood, tear down houses and build new ones in their place, Echo Park has been getting a bit of a facelift—but at what cost to its longtime residents? “People have told me, 'Oh, my God, we got this house for such and such amount of money' and 'You wouldn't believe how the neighborhood's gone up,' and all that kind of enthusiastic realtor-y talk,” Glatzer comments. “And it's like, 'But what are you ignoring? You're ignoring the racial element where you're eliminating minorities and you're ignoring the fact that people who may have lived there for 20-odd years are being displaced.' And we just thought it was time to see the other side of things.”

It is that point of view that provides the moral backbone of Quinceañera, Westmoreland and Glatzer's lovely homage to their beloved neighborhood and its struggle to adapt to change. With its gentle story of a Latino family torn apart—and brought back together—by an unplanned pregnancy, one character's homosexuality and, yes, urban redevelopment, the film has been enthusiastically received by critics and audiences alike, recently winning both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival and receiving a centerpiece screening at the recent Los Angeles Film Festival, where it got a thunderous standing ovation.

The duo shot the flick in a mere 18 days, on a budget of just over $400,000, using four houses on their block as the principal locations to tell the story and tons of neighbors, friends and people walking down the street as extras. It was, as both men say, the very essence of a community effort. “It was just whole families—mostly not professionals who weren't even thinking about being in the film business—coming out to help,” Glatzer says. “We knew we had some friends that we hoped would be there for us, but we just didn't realize the way in which entire clans would get involved. The extent of people's loyalty and excitement over it… We never could have anticipated that.”

Rather than watching Latino movies for inspiration, the duo looked to the “Kitchen Sink” dramas of 1950's British cinema—particularly Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey—to help them establish a sense of natural realism. “I grew up with a lot of Kitchen Sink movies, and they were a breakthrough in British cinema, because they gave a voice to characters you hadn't really heard from before,” Westmoreland explains. “They had a real sense of place and an oblique sense of politics. They were just about how people lived their lives, and we thought that was very appropriate for our story about Echo Park.”

Indeed, rather than hit audiences over the head with overly didactic statements about race and class (see: recent Oscarwinner Crash), Westmoreland and Glatzer instead chose to focus on the story of a 15-year-old Latino girl (newcomer Emily Rios) who discovers to her parents' horror that she is pregnant just a matter of weeks before her quinceañera (a sort of bat mitzvah for teenage girls that is a tradition in Mexican culture). Feeling ostracized, she leaves home and moves in with her Uncle Tomas (Sam Peckinpah fave Chalo González) and her cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia), who—having recently come out to his own disapproving parents—is also an outcast in the community. The gentrification of the neighborhood is subtly represented by the arrival of James and Gary (David Woods, David W. Ross), a gay couple who purchase Tomas' property and move into the house out back—and who promptly set their sights on the hunky Carlos.

Several issues are confronted in the film, from homophobia in the Latino community to the subtle form of racism James and Gary project when talking about Carlos to their affluent, white friends. “It's that thing of being attracted to a different race because they're 'exotic,' but you don't want to have them to the dinner party,” Glatzer says of the latter issue. “It's not a crass kind of racism, but we just thought that it was interesting that it's so prevalent but hasn't been represented in a film. We just wanted to provoke discussion.”

It was that point of view that attracted producer Anne Clements, as well as Executive Producer Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven)—both longtime friends of Westmoreland's —to the project. “This film was important to make because, at the center of it, it is about acceptance no matter what your sexual preference, age, religion or color is,” says Clements, who has nothing but praise for both directors. “Wash and Richard really know how to get to the heart of the story and then create a world around that. Quinceañera has universal themes, but it's understanding the center of the story and the world they create to explore those themes that make them unique storytellers.”

Both men managed to win over their cast as well. Garcia says that it was the duo's expertise that immediately put him at ease with the gay content in the film. “I never had any reservations about the role,” he says. “I had read the script and thought it was fantastic. I was telling my friend from the gym who's also an actor that I'd booked the role, and he said, 'Man, that's a dream role right there—a complex character with so many layers to play around with.'

“You go into any film hoping for the best, not really knowing how it will work out, especially on a low-budget, non-union film like [this],” Garcia adds. “I was just hoping to get a couple scenes to put on my reel. And something magical happened with this movie.”

Quinceañera marks a bit of a departure for the filmmakers, who are mostly known for their work on movies dealing exclusively with gay themes. Before they teamed for their first film together, 2001's gay porn exposé The Fluffer, Glatzer (a reality TV producer who also co-created America's Next Top Model) directed the 1995 festival favorite Grief, while Westmoreland—under the abbreviated name Wash West— cut his teeth on movies making several award-winning gay adult films (such as 2002's The Hole, a comedic spoof of The Ring that swept the 2003 GAYVN Awards).

Both say they tried very hard to move beyond “the gay ghetto” and create an experience that was more universal (they cite HBO's multicultural Six Feet Under as another inspiration) in its appeal. And, though they are aware some may stigmatize the film as a “Latino film” in much the same way The Fluffer was dismissed as a “gay film,” they are happy to see that Sony Pictures Classics is embracing the film's messages of tolerance and multiculturalism. “We were surprised they didn't say, 'You can't have a gay movie that's also a Latino movie!'” Glatzer cracks.

The men say they know the movie won't compete against Pirates of the Caribbean 2, but add that they never aspired to. “We don't know how big it's going to go in release, but for us, the more people that see it, the happier we will be,” Westmoreland offers. “It's a very small movie, but people really seem to like it. It's really sort of gotten into people's hearts. To me, no matter what the box office return is, that's the ultimate reward.”

And with that, we finish up our authentic little Mexican meal and walk out into the street to say our goodbyes. Walking down the street toward us, in full formal attire, is a quinceañera court making its way to a nearby banquet room. Westmoreland is the first to chuckle. “Well,” he says, “that's our Echo Park for ya.”