Doc Watch: Closed For Storm (2020)

Watched:  06/07/2022

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jake Williams

While I've been sick, I've been watching some urban explorer videos and whatnot, and one of the videos I was watching pitched a full documentary the team had put together about the abandoned Six Flags New Orleans.  It's one thing to make a YouTube video with some footage of derelict buildings and combine it with found images and video, and whatever history you can piece together from the internet (which is often shockingly in-depth), so I was curious to see what a full doc looked like when these same folks put in some doc-style labor.  

Closed for Storm (2020) is a solid feature-length-ish effort.  Like the short-form videos by the same team, it chronicles the intentions, financial big movements that impacted the development of the facility, the actual use of the facility, and the factors that led to the decline.  In prior shorter videos, those factors are usually directly economic paired with bad luck and one or two other things, forseeable and otherwise.

Closed for Storm has to grapple with 2005's hurricane Katrina and the impact on New Orleans and the rise and abrupt end to Six Flags New Orleans.  It documents the bizarre purgatory of the property as it sits, rotting more every year, no one making any moves to level the place or do something with it.  The film winds up being a microcosm of the well-documented perfect storm that is Louisiana politics, callowness of big business, economic disparity in action, and the undealt with trauma of a region

As a micro-budget production by folks doing their best, not all of the film feels as polished as it could be.  I was expecting as much.  But it shows promise for the filmmakers if they can continue to elevate this core concept of using something as crazy as an abandoned theme park as a story telling device to illustrate how shit kinda really works/ doesn't work.  

Unlike Astroworld, which was apparently simply financially failing (news to me), Six Flags New Orleans was lost to the storm and given up on by new owners of Six Flags.  From 2005 to the release of this film, the city of New Orleans, never famous for its decision-making, has left the remains of the park to simply rot, rejecting all proposals.  And if you've ever sat through a bureaucratic process like an RFQ proposal, you know there's intense disinterest and misunderstanding by the persons involved.  So, instead of having literally anything else there, the park has just rotted.

Interviews include attendees, former employees, and the folks trying to find ways to revive the property.  Everyone is deeply sincere, and it's a layer to the usual "why it failed" and "urban explorer" videos you see all over YouTube.  We're not just guessing, the video is talking to people who were there, who lost jobs and who saw a good thing for the community abandoned rather than rebuilt, like so much of New Orleans.  But it seems they couldn't get any of the city-folks who so cavalierly dismiss the park year after year.

If I felt like one major point roughly implied, but not directly stated:  the kinds of people who are making decisions about the future of the amusement park shown in the video are not the kind of people who would give one much thought.  I'm not saying they need to be amusement park nerds, but.  They strike me as the sorts of folks who can take days of vacation and jump on a jet and go to Disney if they want to see an amusement park, or go skiing or do whatever.  But vast parts of the population can't afford to and don't do those things.  In a city like New Orleans, which is largely aimed at adult entertainment or expensive pro sports, an amusement park is no small thing.   

Anyway - I hope these folks keep working on their films.  It feels like there's a lot here to consider, and using specific examples of entertainment properties and resorts is fascinating way to consider economic and cultural forces.