Film portrays area’s hidden hotel life
Central Florida’s latest portrayal on the big screen shows a darker slice of the tourist-centric region — children growing up living at old Kissimmee area hotels in the shadow of theme parks.
“The Florida Project,” named for Walt Disney’s vision to remake much of Central Florida, centers on a 6-year-old girl frolicking unsupervised around the grounds of the 1960s Magic Castle hotel where she and her rebellious mother eke out an existence.
“It is neither too graphic or too tame. It’s what people actually experience and what people actually go through,” said Travis Vengroff, whose company is converting an old hotel on U.S. Highway 192 into apartments and has more than 1,300 rental units for low-income residents mostly in southwest Florida.
“The Florida Project,” showing in Orlando and other select
cities, touches on an increasingly common way of life in Central Florida. While some Florida school districts have seen declines in the number of homeless students, the number of children living in hotels and motels has grown in Orange and Osceola counties, according to school officials. Those two Central Florida counties lead the state for students who head home to a motel at the end of a school day, according to researchers at the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies at the University of Florida.
Director Sean Baker called it “the juxtaposition of having kids growing up in motels right outside ‘the happiest place on earth.’”
“The Florida Project” also shows the underbelly of a place where rooms rent for about $40 a night — prostitution, violence, bedbugs and hunger. The film opens with children barely older than kindergartners sitting at a balcony railing and spitting onto a car before getting caught and launching into a raucous round of expletives.
The realities of living in an old hotel can include seeing fights break out in the parking lot and hearing clients leave a prostitute’s room during the night, Vengroff said. Unlike lodging at established hotels, this class of renters sometimes has to be reminded to clear outdoor walkways of bikes and cover bare breasts at the poolside. In some cases, the renters have to register their guests at the front desk, he added. They cook on burners in their rooms and often lack healthy food, he added.
“They have to learn a new way of cooking,” the landlord said.
But in reality, he added, those tougher sides of hotel living are usually managed by a vigilant overseer who maintains better control than Willem Dafoe’s character does in the film.
While the Dafoe character wraps up a bed-bug-ridden mattress and tosses it in the dumpster, Vengroff said his managers remove everything in the unit or never see the end of the pests. And even though the film shows children running around unsupervised, managers typically will not tolerate free-range kids and quickly call in the state Department of Children and Families.
Vengroff said DCF visits are a regular part of life for affordable-housing renters in Florida. He said one of his tenants lost her children under similar circumstances but they were recently reunited.
“I saw her yesterday and she was with her kids, looking over them and making sure they weren’t getting into trouble,” he added.
Orlando has been the setting for other critically acclaimed films in recent years. Together with “Queen of Versailles” and “99 Homes,” “The Florida Project” underscores life on the fringe of a boom-bust tourist destination. Each of the films took a few liberties but largely captured a piece of Central Florida drama.
The film rang true for Orlando resident Jaydelise Volquez, who said she thought the film showed the old hotel life.
“I think people who live in the Orlando area can watch this film and relate to it on a certain level because the life is captured so perfectly and authentically,” the local actress said Friday.
With the film, Baker creates a poor-man’s theme park experience complete with fireworks from afar, a cattle-pasture “safari,” whirling shopping carts, water activities, rainbows and haunted-house vacation rentals. Street scenes will be familiar to those who frequent Kissimmee: the wizard-faced souvenir shop, iconic Twistee Treat ice cream stand and streets named for Disney characters.
Some authenticity hails from a screenwriter on the film, Chris Bergoch. He has spent time in the area and his mother lives in the Orlando-Kissimmee area, Baker told slashfilm.com.
The movie’s plot turns as state child-custody workers ultimately intervene in the lives of the mother and daughter. And then the movie takes its biggest turn from reality:
Two childhood residents of Magic Castle Hotel run away from their “home,” somehow get past the Magic Kingdom turnstiles and run wildly toward Disney’s Cinderella Castle.