Lot Lizard is Dan Livingston’s first and last film. In some ways, it’s a blip in a career that tends to be more focused on politics, including a recent run for Broome County Clerk.
In other ways, the film project plays to a strength that proves handy in politics: an ability to talk to strangers, sometimes about tough situations. And Lot Lizard, a 72-minute documentary directed by Alex Perlman, is a tough film, depicting the lives and realities of truck stop sex workers with both clear eyes and compassion.
The SUNY Broome community will have a chance to see Lot Lizard – the name is a derogatory word for these sex workers – at 6 p.m. March 22 in Decker 201. The event, sponsored by the SUNY Broome Women’s Institute, is free and open to the public, and includes a reception, food and raffles.
It will also feature a Q&A session Livingston, who worked alongside Perlman as the field producer for the project, conducting interviews and keeping track of the finances and the equipment – or, as he put it, making sure the bits of the camera didn’t get lost. In that, he was successful – mostly.
“We did lose a lens cap,” he admitted.
That’s understandable, though, when you consider the nature of the filming. “It’s such a volatile environment. You’re filming and the cops drive by and you have to back everything up and run,” he explained.
Dan Livingston
In a sense, Livingston’s own history helped plant the seed for the project. The Oxford native dropped out of Binghamton University after three semesters, then spent the next two years homeless and hitchhiking around the country. Perlman – the younger brother of a close college friend – found Dan’s story fascinating, and hitchhiked himself from New York to San Francisco along the way.
During that fateful trip, Perlman met truck stop sex workers. After he returned to his life as a camera operator, he told stories about his hitchhiking experience, which eventually led to the film. Livingston signed on to help.
The access they were able to get to their subjects’ lives surprised them. They met their families and parents, and found out about their romantic lives.
“One of the things I learned when I was hitchhiking was that you need to give people the benefit of the doubt. I was very wary of projecting any judgment on the folks in this world,” Livingston reflected. “When you really learn about people’s life story, you realize that most of us are geared for the same type of survival as the next person.”
