‘5TH WARD’ POINTS A LENS ON HOUSTON NEIGHBORHOOD.
STORIES SOMETIMES STICK WITH STORYTELLERS, WHICH IS WHY FILMMAKER GREG CARTER THIS WEEK OFFERS “5TH WARD,” A NEW SIX-EPISODE SERIES ON THE URBAN MOVIE CHANNEL.
Carter’s show finds him expanding on themes from his first feature film — titled “Fifth Ward” — which he made 20 years ago.
“I had this wonderful cast, and this great team, but we were all kids learning on the job,” Carter says of the original story. “The film was well-received, but even then I felt like there was a bigger story that we couldn’t tell because of budget constraints. I wanted to revisit it and come back with this multiethnic, multigenerational story that intersects throughout the Fifth Ward and not just through one family.”
The first episode of “5th Ward” airs Friday, with the other five episodes following each Friday through April 6.
Carter is the son of a minister who moved to Houston from Arkansas when Carter was a child. They were only in Fifth Ward a short time, but the neighborhood left an impression on Carter.
He went to Texas A&M University to study engineering — “at least that’s what my parents thought,” he says — which is when he took a detour into drama. After graduation, he studied at Rice University’s Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts. After school, Carter wanted to tell his Fifth Ward story.
“There was a brief conversation about shooting it in California,” he says. “But I told everybody, ‘Are you kidding me? I’ll get crucified. I have to shoot in the Fifth Ward.’ ”
The “Fifth Ward” film was featured at the SXSW Film Festival in 1998 and set Carter on a path writing, directing and producing feature films, which often brought him back to Houston, as with the 2005 film “Resurrection: The J.R. Richard Story.”
Over the years, he kept developing a Fifth Ward story.
“I wanted to tell a story that was bigger than just one about being black, about being who I am,” he says.
His story captures the oftchanging demographic makeup of a neighborhood with a long history dating back to the end of the Civil War, when it was largely settled by freedmen. Even Carter’s lifetime has found the neighborhood in transition.
“People don’t understand that, historically, the Fifth Ward has not always been black and poor,” he says. “There were people who lived there who were poor, but there were also middle-class white and black people. You’d go down the street and see doctors and lawyers and teachers and musicians and politicians, not vacant lots. But there was a spiral that happened when black people moved out of the hood and into the suburbs. It’s a story you hear about in a lot of inner cities, about how they ended up the way they did.”
Carter wanted to infuse the show with a feeling of authenticity, so he prefaces his episodes with documentary-style interviews with residents, “people who were models in appearance and story to the four main characters on the show,” he says. “I wanted to give it that feeling, ‘This is Houston.’ ”
Among his storylines is one about a Pakistani family and one about a Vietnamese family. Pop star and actress Mya stars in one narrative, about a struggling single mother and aspiring singer.
Carter also hopes some viewers unfamiliar with the neighborhood’s history may find information threaded through the show. Carter combed through archival photos and music, old and new, for his opening credits.
“If a kid sees it and doesn’t know who Mickey Leland is, I hope he’ll want to find out,” he says of the late congressman. “And the music tells a story, too. I wanted some ragtime in the opening sequence: That feeling of the past going back to Reconstruction and then move it forward to a trap beat like kids would listen to today. I want it to revolve around a vernacular particular to Houston and its culture.”