Hardwicke Casts Real Homeless Skateboarder in 'Street
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- "Street Smart" premieres June 18 at the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas and does not yet have a distributor; Hardwicke co-wrote the screenplay with Nic Sheff, who she said had lived on the streets and connected her with the kids who inspired the project
- Isiah Hilt, a homeless skateboarder Hardwicke met at a Venice skate park, landed the lead role of Drex after telling her the character's backstory matched his real life — the week before shooting began, Covenant House helped him move into his first apartment and set up his first bank account
- Sally Struthers self-taped all her scenes at home and arrived on set with a carload of her own clothes to play a foul-mouthed Venice garage owner and den-mother figure
- Paris Jackson appears in a youth-hostel scene with an unreleased song, and Tyson Ritter of The All-American Rejects plays a mechanic's son and contributed both a song he wrote for the film and a track from the band's upcoming album
- Hardwicke — a former architect who designed low-income housing in Texas — said she hopes the film helps 'open the floodgates to build more housing,' and questioned the practicality of forced mandatory treatment proposals for unhoused people, asking 'How could you really achieve that in a humane way?'
- Hardwicke predicted an 'absolute explosion' in romantasy over the next two years driven by BookTok and women 'owning their power and their sexuality,' and praised Kristen Stewart's directorial debut 'The Chronology of Water' as 'almost just like watching a painting'
Why it matters: Hardwicke is using a personal Venice neighborhood story — and a lead actor whose life mirrors his character's — to draw attention to the area's homelessness crisis, while the film arrives distribution-less into a city where Venice's unhoused population has become a flashpoint. Her call for low-barrier housing pairs with a direct rebuke of forced-treatment proposals, giving the film's festival run a policy dimension beyond the typical indie spotlight.
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