Steal the Heart

The event last Saturday at the Granada Theatre celebrating Andy Davis’s 1995 film Steal Big Steal Little was not only the best cinematic homage ever to the beauty and the spirit of Santa Barbara, but it was also a celebration of the artful joy and humanity of filmmaking.

Over my 35 years here, I’ve had the privilege to get to know Andy, a distinguished writer and director whose intelligent, original, and very entertaining work I already admired since the 1980s — The Fugitive and Holes are high on my list of favorites. Watching this film, which he made generously, with the collaboration of so many local folks and talents like actor Bob Lesser (among the many “background artists” myself as a one-day extra in the rainy funeral scene!), as well as major film stars led by the great Andy Garcia and Alan Arkin (who we miss so much) and including the divine Holland Taylor, last Saturday night I felt, perhaps for the first time, that I was part of the big, good-hearted, marvelous family that this town can be. (Some of this feeling came, of course, from seeing familiar landscapes, streets, houses, and people I knew, such as Roman Baratiak, all of us together on the silver screen!)

What’s really amazing is that when I first saw parts of Steal Big Steal Little in 1995, it seemed like a meandering or almost amateur romp, a personal whimsy which its young director indulged in with gleeful abandon, but now, almost 30 years later, its carnivalesque form and esprit has a social, political and artistic relevance that transcends place and a moment in time, that speaks to us in infinitely richer and more comprehensive ways today.

Suzanne Jill Levine is a distinguished professor emerita in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Santa Barbara.