The blues fades in scratchy and soulful. A one-track, one-take recording of Robert Johnson’s “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” fills the open space of the dining room. Filmmaker Craig Butta stands by the speakers and tells Johnson’s story. “He always wanted to play his guitar, and no one would let him play. It was like “Robert, you’re no good.” Supposedly, he was a terrible musician. Awful. So, one day after years of him just cleaning the halls, it was the dead night, no one’s in the club, and so a bunch of the blues musicians were like, “Robert, go up there. Do your set.” They all went outside to smoke a cigarette. So, he’s in there all by himself playing, and they couldn’t believe what they heard.

“To their disbelief it was Robert, and one of the blues musicians—I forget his name, but he was quite famous at this time in American history—said, “I swore he must have sold his soul to the devil to learn how to play the blues like that.” You hear a story like that, you go out and buy the CD.”

Butta cuts the recording, returns to his seat at the table. His short film Coney Island USA is the topic of conversation. The dialogue dances in several directions, touching on gentrification, touching on artistic inspiration, touching on all the good things about being an artist, a filmmaker, a person who creates, if for no other reason than just to create.

“Don’t recommend art to people if they don’t want to be anxious, if they don’t want to be a little insane. There’s something insane about this, don’t you think?”

Sitting in his Carol Gardens apartment, Butta’s comfortable, his right leg slung over his left in lazy crossing, a masculine gesture of ease. His family lived here, his grandfather built the bookshelf in the study, before or after World War II, Butta can’t remember. It’s been there quite a while.

“I’m happy to live in this apartment until I die,” he says. “I walk up and down Smith Street every day, and I wave to everyone in the stores. I bring the dog into the wine store, and we go to the bar. I help the old lady with her garbage. I love it here.”

Surrounded by various paintings, abstracts and a striking portrait of the Virgin Mary, Butta’s taken off his tie, the professional vestige of a job as a high school teacher. A business major as an undergraduate, Butta’s good with math, was offered six-figure jobs at companies and turned them all down. He couldn’t make the sensible choice, he admits. Instead, he’s ended up here, in this apartment in Brooklyn, living with his longtime girlfriend Anna and his schnoddle pup. He acts in theater when he can, makes films when he has a crew, concocts stories and plans in his imagination all day, too many to note or undertake.

“I’m never in my lifetime going to make all the films I have in my head. Right now I’m four features behind,” he says.

Although perhaps, we’ve jumped ahead and should return back for a minute to Coney Island USA, an eight-minute short film about a carnie discouraged about witnessing the twilight days of Coney Island culture and then further unsettled by the silences in his attempts at personal connection. It’s a film, Butta says, that was made on the smile of its lead actress.

“I’d see (Insectavora, whose given name is Angelica) going to work everyday when I’d go to work. We’d cross paths, and here she is a fully tattooed woman, the type of girl that a guy from my background would think is a freak, and I being the type of guy that a girl from her background would probably think is a square, she would give me this beautiful smile every day,” he says. “I’ll change my whole life on a smile. That’s more than enough for me.”

The nod to Frederico Fellini’s La Strada never made it into the short, though. Rather, the tone kept to its steady resigned pace. “(The film’s) a blues song. It’s recognizing that you’re poor, recognizing that you’re struggling, recognizing that life is shit, recognizing that the girl you love doesn’t love you,” he says. “What are you going to do? You’re just going to live. So what? I’ve got the blues. This is my life. Deal with it.

“Chekov does that all the time. Chekov would have liked the blues,” he says.

Shot on a 50 dollar budget with a Cannon XL-2 that Butta borrowed from his school, the short was made on the fly, buddies Alex Schwartz, Loren Hammond and Peter Seidman working collaboratively to capture footage on the quick.

“We’re like National Geographic photographers; we feel like we’re always chasing a bear,” Butta says. “If I want a shot of a train coming by, it’s like, ‘There’s the train. Come on. Come on. Let’s get set up. Here we go. Here we go. Are we in focus? There we go. We got the train. We got the train.’ Then somebody walks in front of the camera, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing?’ ‘Fuck! It’s 25 more minutes for the train to come.’

“That’s how I make a film, so it’s hard to have this Altman-esque, ‘Yeah, guys, just be in the moment.’ No. It’s never peaceful; it’s never artsy when you’re with me. It’s craziness and this wild energy of, ‘We’ve got to work. Fuck, the cops are coming. Let’s act like we don’t have cameras. Hide the camera. Hide the tripod.’ We’ve got people hiding tripods up their shirts so it looks like we’re not a film crew. All the sudden, it’s like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s shoot this.’

“There was this scene on the Boardwalk on Coney Island where I walk into the sunset at the end…We’re doing this, and these great big rain clouds are coming, and it’s going to pour on us. It’s the last day we have (Insectavora), so we have about eight minutes to get the shot in or we’re done.

“During this time, this homeless guy comes over, and he’s like, ‘Dud, let me show you how to kick it to her.’ ‘Dud, we’re trying to shoot here.’ ‘Nah, nah, nah but you’re shooting it all wrong.’ What’s filmmaking? What’s art? I have no idea. I just know how to get that bum out of the way and shoot the scene.”

Unlike many independent filmmakers, when Butta began the project, he had no grand aspirations of directing, of traveling the festival circuit, of claiming a place in the modern indie cinematic library of our time. In fact, quite the opposite. During Coney Island USA’s run at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival, Butta ducked out of the party scene, opting instead to spend downtime alone with his girl Anna.

“I want to sit in a tavern, drink beer and talk all night. If that’s a job, I’ll take that job,” he says. “I know more about story than I do about film. I understand how to tell a story. I can keep someone engaged. I can sit down and talk to someone forever. I could tell you a whole book without you wanting to leave.”

The recorder reads 45 minutes. The digital counter ticks with little silence in between the spaces. Every second here seems critical somehow, as Butta says time in all art does.

“All my painter friends lock themselves in the house for days. For days you call, you bang on the door, they don’t come out. They’re working on a painting. They’re not going to answer the door until they’re done,” he says. “You can’t understand the urgency. You can’t understand that it has to be done now. Nothing else matters but doing that now, and that’s how I feel with the film.

“I just feel like things are running away from me, and I have to catch them. Coney Island, I’m afraid it’s gone, September 9, or whatever date Labor Day is this year, is the end, and I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to get this thing done. I’ve had this story that’s been in my head, and I have to get it out. I can’t deal with it in here anymore,” he says, placing a hand to his head.

With Coney Island redevelopment plans underway by Thor Equities, Butta’s fears are somewhat tangibly justified. What was once a nostalgic nod to old school amusement may very well make way for Vegas-inspired kitschery, high-end boutiques and imminient gentrification. There’s only one grand roadblock, Coney Island’s C-7 zoning tag that restricts commercial and residential development along the boardwalk.

“Technically you can’t have a sit down restaurant in this area,” Butta says, pointing out the extensive Thor Equities owned property on a map of Coney Island. “But (city council’s) been making exceptions and variances for people because no one wanted to open a business there.”

When former New York City Mayor John Lindsay pushed for low-income housing development adjacent to the boardwalk, a projects section now called the Luna Park Houses, Coney Island fell further away from its heyday.

“Coney Island from the 80s to the mid-90s was a ghost town. Well, I shouldn’t say it was a ghost town. It’s never been a ghost town,” he corrects himself, although to pinpoint his exact meaning he pulls out a photography book and flips to Weegee’s Crowd at Coney Island 1940. In the timeless black-and-white photograph, the beachfront is packed, men, women and children pressed up one against the other, a scene now common to spots of the Jersey shore.

“When Coney was in its heyday, you had everyone in New York going there in the summers. So, in 1940, if you don’t have an air conditioner, where would you go if it got too hot? You go to the beach,” he says.

The energy captured in the photo is merely a reminder of what was, not a promise of what Coney Island is, or as Thor Equities hopes, could be.

“You hurt. You don’t make good money,” Butta says, this time pointing to a red dot on the map, a section on the Bowery where he used to hustle as a carnie. “Yuppies that are coming down there, thinking Coney Island is cool, they bring their cameras and take pictures of you like you’re a freak. But, they’re not buying anything. You’re not going to get some yuppie that has a $2,000 apartment in Park Slope to come to Coney Island to eat a corndog and drink soda. They don’t do that. They want an organic salad with crispy calamari and a glass of white wine.

“We’re selling beer and hotdogs, really bad food, shitty prizes, stupid games and dangerous rides. So while there’s nostalgia and people come for that, they’re not really putting money back into the system.”

And, that explains the variances, explains Thor Equities desire to uproot the unprofitable.

“What (Thor Equities) does is that it buys everything, knowing that the development foundation, which is basically part of the city council, is going to eventually change C-7,” Butta explains. “Now, the slick move they’re doing is that they want to put in residential houses, condos because that’s where the money is. What they’ll do is take something like Astroland and put in a 40 to 50 story building with beachfront condos and sell off each piece.

“To make a point to City Hall, because City Hall was taking too long to change the variance, they’ve demolished all of this,” he says, ringing his finger around a large area near the newly redeveloped KeySpan Park, the up-to-date baseball stadium built for Brooklyn’s minor league team the Cyclones.

“They’ve just left it there. It’s like, ‘You know what, City Hall? We own everything. We can demolish the whole thing, make Coney Island a ghost town, and everybody loses until you hurry up.’ So they got aggressive with City Hall doing what big billion dollar developers do, which is bulldoze shit because it’s their property. They can do whatever they want.”

The backlash for Thor’s plans comes not only in the silent protest of Butta’s Coney Island USA but also from groups like the recently established Save Coney Island Foundation. From burlesque dancers to diehard Coney enthusiasts, the passion behind maintaining Coney Island’s spirit now runs deep, support even coming from the corners of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office.

“Some enthusiasts and people who are very nostalgic, want everything to be old circus, but it’s not going to be. Coney Island needs to make money,” Butta concedes.

Some enthusiasts and people who are very nostalgic, want everything to be old circus, but it’s not going to be. Coney Island needs to make money,” Butta concedes.

“While people have put money and interest in Coney Island, at the end of the day their dreams might be bigger than what reality can handle. Coney Island is for the middle class, and the middle class don’t have the money that the Park Slope people have. Coney Island’s not going to be Park Slope. Coney Island’s not going to be another Williamsburg… There are too many real people in Brooklyn, too many cops, too many fireman, too many teachers, too many regular folks. That’s the only place that they have.

“My friends with kids, Sunday it was hot in New York City, the kids are young, they want to go outside, they want to play. What are you going to do with your kids when you don’t have money? Go to Coney Island, and that needs to still be an option. Where are these families going to go if they don’t have Coney Island?

Where are these families going to go if they don’t have Coney Island?

The question unanswered hangs in the air, the concern quite palpable, expressed in Butta’s animation, his tendency to sit up, sit back and walk around the room at random intervals.

“Now my opinion: Nothing’s going to happen. There’s going to be a giant stalemate. I don’t think City Council’s going to let Thor get away with the plans they want. I think too many people are not keen on what they’re doing. I think enthusiasm for Coney Island is at an all-time high. I think more and more people are involved in giving money to Coney Island in the foundations, in developing things like the burlesque shows and sideshows. I think people are excited about KeySpan Park, and they are excited about the idea of a roller rink.

“People now are paying attention. It’s not as easy to backdoor Thor’s plan of putting in the condos. I’ve a feeling that they’ll be holding onto these things and not being able to do what they want. Maybe immenient domain comes in, maybe they sell it, flip it to someone else. But, I have a hunch.

“Look, Astroland wasn’t supposed to be open this year, and it’s open. Ruby’s, this famous bar— last summer this great writer for the New York Post wrote a good-bye piece to his last beer at Ruby’s, this great piece about being at an outdoor bar on Coney Island where he’d been going since the 1960s, and it was supposed to be the summer last year, but it’s open again. And, they’re saying this year is the last summer, but I have a feeling next year…,” Butta shrugs. “This sense of impending doom has been about for almost a decade now.”

Fittingly, Butta’s debut feature film, based in part on the short and with production scheduled to begin this summer, is currently titled The Last Summer. While it does make note of Coney Island, it’s not a film about politics or overriding social issues. It’s simply a film about one displaced man trying to make good out of his transgressions.

Receiving the news that his father has died, Richie returns to Brooklyn after long absence to inherit a dying game on the Bowery. “He decides this is how he’ll make peace with his dead father,” Butta says. “He’ll try to make this game work. He’ll go against the odds of what everyone’s telling him, and that will atone for the sins of his relationship with his father, for leaving the family.

“He does have the carnie in him. It comes out, but it’s useless because people don’t want it anymore.”

While certainly a piece of fiction, The Last Summer does pull from childhood memory.

“I hated Staten Island and Brooklyn,” Butta says. “My girlfriend grew up with artists in the Lower East Side, downtown. They drank wine at dinner and had filmmaker friends. I didn’t have anything like that. I grew up in Good Fellas or The Sopranos. That was my life. There was only one type of person. I assumed, almost up until I was 18-years-old, that 80 percent of the country was Italian-American and Catholic. I didn’t think that was being ignorant. Eighty percent of what I saw was Italian-American, and if you weren’t Italian, you were Irish. Maybe you were Protestant, but there was only that one Protestant church down there.

“Sometimes you might love the thing you get, but I hated it. It drove me crazy. It was full of ignorance, full of violence, full of suffering. It wasn’t nice. Not that I didn’t like my childhood. My childhood was beautiful, but I didn’t want to be in Staten Island. I didn’t want to speak the way I did. I was so embarrassed about my accent. The word “yous” ‘Hey, how yous doing?” I thought that was the fucking plural of you…My teachers were from Brooklyn and Staten Island, and that’s how they spoke.

“So, when I finally got out I felt like a free man. I was embarrassed. I’d get teased in a good way. Girls loved it. Girls thought it was so sexy that you have this Brooklyn accent or whatnot, and I hated it. It almost made me want to hide and cry that the thing they’re attracted to in me is the thing I want to hide from. The thing I hate the most is the fact that some people think I have some gumba Brooklyn accent. I spent years in the theater trying to speak properly and lose my accent. Then you meet a girl, and she thinks that’s sexy.”

As a high school teacher, Butta sees his own youthful angst mirrored in his students, in their expectations as they begin to realize that the world is much more complicated and difficult than it’s sold.

“You’re starting to see that the world is nothing like what you’re parents told you. You can’t grow up and be whatever you want. You can’t do whatever you want. You can’t just be happy because you want to be happy. That’s the realization.

“I have a cousin who wanted to be a ballplayer. You couldn’t have trained harder. You couldn’t have tried harder. He used to make me pitch him Skittles and M&Ms to perfect his eye, so he could hit something that small, so the baseball would look huge. He played NCAA Division 1, and at some point it hits, and they’ve got a better guy.”

Butta’s phone rings, as it has once before in the conversation.

“Oh, my God, it doesn’t stop. Everyone knows I just got off work,” he says.

The downtime is good. It lets the dance of the conversation evolve, back to the film now from its story to its themes.

“How does one do penance in this lifetime?” Butta asks. “We sin. I’m a sinner, and I want to make up for my sins. How do I do that? Do I say I’m sorry? Sorry’s shit. If you cheat on your husband and say you’re sorry, that doesn’t do anything. Who cares that you’re sorry? What are you going to do? What physical things can you do to make up for your sins?”

While The Last Summer’s Richie stays, albeit in futility, on Coney Island in memory of his father, there’s no such recognizable atonement for Butta himself: “As much as I say I’m not Catholic anymore, I do believe in suffering. I do believe you’ve got to make up for your sins in this life, or the last life. That’s okay, and sometimes you do, you bust your ass. It’s not about being happy all the time. It’s not about you. It’s something bigger than you.”

Although what that bigger something is, Butta doesn’t speculate, doesn’t philosophize. Nor does he do so with regards to his own filmmaking. He’s hesitant to point out any benchmarks of forethought in his work and doesn’t identify lessons learned along the way.

“Once (Coney Island USA was) over, did I learn anything from it? Of course. Big things. But, not necessarily by watching it. You watch it. If you learn something, great. If you learn something about me, fantastic. If you learn something about you, much better. That’s the point. I don’t need to learn anything from it. I made it.”

Butta wanders to his bookshelf, picks up Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll by Greil Marcus. “’Maybe one of the most interesting American struggles is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to,’” he reads. “That’s exactly what we were talking about.”

He thumbs the pages, makes note of the chapters. “I think this is the book that has the story that I was telling you before…”

It’s stored in the memory, and on the recorder, which now reads over a two-hour mark. It’s the story about Robert Johnson and how it was said that he sold his soul to the devil to play the blues.

“But who knows? I could have made up the story,” Butta adds. “I felt like I was telling you the truth before, but I could have fabricated a little to keep you into it. I might have liked the expression on your face so I went more in one direction than the other. That’s fiction, and that’s what’s fun about it.”

The space suddenly feels significant, as if perhaps it were an intimate stage, the fourth wall broken to all eyes but our own, and Butta acting, as is his habit, as is his passion, knowing that just beyond his physical perception, some greater audience was watching.

“The thing that will keep me sane is the work, the loyalty to the work and the discipline of the work,” Butta says. “That’s the religion, and that’s the passion and that’s the structure in your life. It's a good ending, no?”

For more information visit www.myspace.com/theconeyislandproject.

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