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HBO to premiere emotional ‘Last Truck’
A new documentary about the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Ohio will premiere this weekend.
Sound a little too close for comfort?
“The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant” debuts at 9 p.m. Sept. 7 — Labor Day — on HBO. The 40-minute film is a montage of interviews with dozens of workers in the days leading up to the closing of the Moraine assembly plant near Dayton. The plant closed in December, two days before Christmas.
The parallels to Youngstown and the Lordstown GM plant couldn’t be stronger. The closing has ripped the heart — and a big chunk of the economy — out of Dayton.
If Lordstown closed, the effect on the Mahoning Valley would be even worse.
But Lordstown, of course, isn’t closing. In fact, last month GM announced it would recall 1,000 workers to keep up with growing demand for the fuel-sipping Cobalt.
Therein lies the difference. The Moraine plant built trucks and SUVs — gas guzzlers that buyers shunned.
“The Last Truck” focuses not on the company, but on the rank-and-file autoworkers who built the cars, and built the lives around the plant.
Ohio-based filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert followed the workers into the plant, the parking lots around it and the bars where they congregate to capture their emotions as the clock ticks down. Then they carefully edited their interviews, boiling them down to the most pithy and poignant comments.
“The Last Truck” succeeds in capturing the range of emotions — shock, anger, bitterness, sadness and anxiety, in that order — that the workers went through.
The filmmakers reveal the men and women who work in the plant as real people who take great pride in their work, live middle-class lives and appreciate the opportunities afforded to them by GM.
They also let the workers defend themselves against the undercurrent of opinion that exists in all GM towns (including Youngstown): Autoworkers are overpaid, undereducated, lazy and undeserving of their good fortune, and as for the plant closure — they had it coming.
One female worker said she could barely control herself after hearing such comments from a group seated in the booth next to her at a restaurant.
She described the mental and physical rigors of the assembly line, the strength and mind-set required to do this repetitive and sometimes dangerous work for eight hours a day, year after year.
The film also explains GM’s claim that its labor costs are $78 an hour, compared to Toyota’s, which are in the upper $40s.
That number not only includes pay, insurance and other benefits, but also GM’s heavy retiree burden, which far outpaces other automakers. For every one active GM worker, there are four retirees receiving a pension.
The workers say they make nowhere near $78 an hour.
The documentary opens with the camera scanning the massive plant and its parking lot on a bleak winter day.
Then it flashes back to June 3, 2008, at a press conference where GM’s then-CEO Rick Wagoner announced that four plants, including Moraine, would close by the end of the year. Moraine, which opened in 1981 and employed 2,200 workers and 200 managers, is three-quarters of a mile long, and is bigger than the Pentagon.
What follows for the rest of the short and powerful film is a series of interviews. “We don’t own it, but this is our plant,” says one worker.
Many of the best comments come from a bearded 52-year-old toolmaker named Paul “Popeye” Hurst. “A good toolmaker,” he says, “is a frustrated artist.”
As the closing nears, and tears become more frequent, talk turns to what’s next.
The workers realize that going to school might be necessary, but some of the old dogs are reluctant to learn new tricks. They also worry about the future.
“My grandson won’t have a better life than me,” says Hurst.
There are lots of choked-up voices as closing day nears, with grown men turning away from the camera because they are too emotional to speak.
On the last day, when the last truck comes down the line, workers gather around to say goodbye and take photos, as they realize they will no longer be seeing the “family” they’ve known most of their lives.