Andrew Kolker

Many of our previous films touched on class issues. American Tongues, for example, is ostensibly about regional speech and the way people talk, but inevitably when people talked about other people's accents they were talking about what social class they came from. People put each other down left and right because of it. So we were interested in doing something more comprehensive. And although class stories are a staple of novels and Hollywood movies, there really hasn't been an American documentary which deals with it head-on. Maybe we're a bit masochistic, but we like to go where other filmmakers haven't gone.

Louis Alvarez

Making this film has not exactly been a walk in the park. Americans may think about class both consciously and subconsciously all the time, but generally they tend not to acknowledge it or be particularly good at talking about it. It's like someone we interviewed said — "Class is like the elephant that sits in the corner—everyone knows it's there, but nobody talks about it." So we have to find those individuals for whom their class has had a particular impact.

So much of this is about perception. Who is middle-class or working-class and who isn't? Everyone seems to be running around with a class meter in their heads. We judge each other by the way we dress, where we live, our accents. So pious pronouncements aside about how "we're all Americans" and "we're all one people," it's really all about making distinctions between people. It seems to be wired into us. We can't help ourselves.

Is class in America just about money? Lots of people say it is. But others would say it's about breeding or taste. It's all a great mish-mash, and we're somehow trying to untangle it. And it has repercussions in so many aspects of our society. If we can make Americans have a better understanding of how social class effects their lives then we have done a service.

Most people have some kind of story about class, but it isn't necessarily filmable. There are always class schisms within families — you know that "other" side of the family that doesn't live up to our expectations or who we don't socialize with because somehow we think we're better than them. But what happens when everyone gets together at a wedding or a family reunion? That would be an interesting story. What's curious is how this cuts across racial and ethnic boundaries; so perhaps we'll have a story about social climbing among African-Americans at a debutante ball or among Mexican-Americans at a quinceanera. Everything is fair game.

One of the stories we're doing is about how class works in a rural county in southern Ohio. Most of the folks there are blue collar or middle class but the county all has many low income people who live in trailers. These folks are uniformly aware and proud of where they're from and who they are and where they fit on the social scale. They are likewise aware of those who strive to improve their circumstances above and beyond their background. And they are not always supportive of people who strive too hard to rise in class. They call it "not gettin' above your raisin's" and it can be very difficult for those who don't want to conform. As a basically middle-class guy who was encouraged to excel, I found it strange to encounter this attitude.

We're constantly surprised about the lengths folks will go to avoid using the word "class." It's worse than a swear word or even a racial epithet. It appears to go against our democratic nature in this country to develop a class analysis about what we do or who we are. Businesses which deal with the public have their own euphemisms: professional marketers who certainly break the world down into socio-economic groups in order to sell products effectively, speak of "demographic clusters." And ordinary Americans don't exactly get involved in a Marxist critique when we ask them about it. But it's here, all the time. We hope our film will help explain it all.