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For at least the past 20 years, Oakwood has owned the undisputed title as Raleigh’s most eccentric neighborhood, boasting its own marching band, majorette squad, over-the-top Halloween house and a pig pickin’ celebrated in the middle of a graveyard.
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Nearly all of Raleigh’s oldest houses stand there, the yellow and green Victorians with wraparound porches and gingerbread trim — open every Christmas for the Candlelight Tour, decked out in Dickens-style charm with garlands and wreaths and chandeliers.
It’s a place that holds its own Mardi Gras parade — called Samedi Gras because it’s held on Saturday — and each year crowns a new King Leonidas and Imperial Empress while neighbors dance in the street draped in feather boas and beads.
Now Oakwood’s quirky elegance has inspired a pair of filmmakers to celebrate it with a 91-minute documentary, one that spotlights how Raleigh’s most curious neighborhood nearly got demolished in the 1970s, rescued largely by the gay community that restored its crumbling, century-old houses.
The film — “There’s Something About Oakwood” — premieres Aug. 15 at Carolina Theater in Durham, part of the OutSouth Queer Film Festival, then moves on to the LGBTQ film festival in Palm Springs.
The Oakwood characters who inhabit those streets just east of downtown, who spend their spare hours practicing the saxophone, twirling a baton or turning their front lawns into a live-action Halloween horror show all appear on camera, professing an unabashed love for their neighborhood and each other.
“Everybody is a little odd,” confessed Agnes Stevens.
Inspiration struck Margaret Maloney, the film’s producer, on trips from New York to visit friends in Raleigh, who introduced her to Oakwood Garden Club tours, which featured high teas and elaborate hats.
Later, in Los Angeles, she talked up the neighborhood to her director friend Kate Gleason, describing a Southern neighborhood that gay couples had saved from the wrecking ball, how they were both lauded and respected there, and how, by the way, neighbors held a Samedi Gras celebration with kings and empresses and a group of baton-twirlers called the Awesomettes — all members over 50.
Even in California, Gleason took the hook, telling Maloney, “I hope you’re going to write that movie.”
Four years later, they offer the finished product as an inspiration for finding deep connections just one house over. And in one of the film’s opening scenes, Matthew Brown introduces this idea from the Oakwood house he restored and whimsically furnished, speaking with a telescope and skull in the background.
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“My brother was saying at his job, at lunch, they all look at their phones,” said Brown, both a former King Leonidas and a trombonist in the Oakwood Second Line band. “They don’t talk to each other. Well, this is the kind of place where you talk to each other. You don’t watch life. You live life.”
The most admirable quality of this movie, to my thinking as an almost-resident, fellow band member and friend to all of these people, is that it tackles some of the elephants wandering around Oakwood streets.
The neighborhood is almost entirely white, a sad truth that is at least partially explainable by the legacy of forced segregation. On top of that, Oakwood houses are now so expensive that the longtime, pioneering residents who helped make them attractive could not afford to buy any of them.
But “There’s Something About Oakwood” also dives into the long legal battle over a Modernist house built on Euclid Street — sacrilege to a neighborhood that sits inside Raleigh’s first historic district. The story of a neighbor’s complaint, and the preservationists who rallied around that complaint, made the pages of The New York Times.
To Gleason, the director, this made Oakwood’s story more appealing: his is the stuff of neighborhood debate.
“There’s going to be little moments where people have little battles with each other,” she said. “That this is the fault line, that’s the interesting part.”
But mostly, the film emphasizes the odd but endearing moments around Oakwood: the wine and cheese parties where the fixer-uppers discuss how to change washers in a bathtub, the gay and lesbian couples who feel natural kissing in public or holding hands on the sidewalk, the streets closing to cars on Halloween to accommodate the thousands who pour in for Raleigh’s best trick-or-treating — arriving by the church busload.
It’s something.
“People that leave want to come back,” said Arlene Sanders near the film’s opening. “I have a neighbor up the street, they sold the house, came back two years later and bought the same house.”
“There’s Something About Oakwood” makes its world premiere at the OutSouth Queer Film Festival on August 15th at The Carolina Theatre of Durham. Buy tickets here.
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