P.S.A. (Public Service Announcement)

The scene opens with a couple in their 50s in a nondescript suburban livingroom watching TV. The woman is seated on a Queen Anne sofa and the man is reclining in a La-Z-Boy. The images that flicker just out of focus on the television give the impression of a police procedural. The table lamp is on, it is evening. Because the scene is being shot in black & white, everything is grayscale. A deep, male voiceover says:

THIS COULD HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE . . . .

Loud sounds come from outside the house. The room begins to shake. Plasterdust drifts down from the ceiling. But this is not an earthquake, the sounds from outside are mechanical, heavy trucks moving. The faces of the couple show terror. But just for a moment theirs eyes meet and some acknowledgment of what's happening passes between them. As the camera pans after them, the couple flee through a door at the back of the room and down a flight of stairs.

We are now in the unfinished basement. A hanging lightbulb swings, casting shadows that arc back and forth. The couple huddle together in the center of the cement floor. The sounds of giant equipment grow louder. The cinderblock walls shudder. Bright lights flood through the glassblock windowwells. A horrible drilling noise begins, accompanied by the screeching of hardened steel tearing aluminum, brick, and wood. The camera zooms in on two large bolts boring into either end of the front wall of the basement where frame meets foundation. The drilling stops. The two-inch diameter bolts protruding through the wall are surrounded by splinters.

The scene shifts. We are now outside. The camera is high up on a boom so we get a full panoramic overview. It is nighttime, but tall floodlights have been set up and illuminate the area. It is a construction site. The yard is torn up, the houses all around, demolished. Amid all the earthmoving machines, the camera pans in on two bulldozers. Steelmesh cables run from hitches on the rear of the caterpillars, and are clamped to the eyehooks of the bolts sunk into the house.

A huge crane is positioned behind the house and the cables are looped through a pulley at the end of the swing arm. The bulldozers move, tank treads bite into the ground. The front of the house lifts off the foundation and the structure is inexorably tilted backward. The walls begin to crumple. Hinged on the rear wall, lifted from the base of the front wall, the building topples onto its back in ruin. Huge metal jaws suspended from derricks rip up chunks of the house and drop them into a mammoth Dumpster.

The boom camera pans over the exposed basement. Sparks from sheared electrical wiring sputter, and water spouts from ruptured pipes. The couple are sprawled on the concrete floor. The camera moves in as a man in a white hazmat suit wearing a hardhat steps up to the edge of the foundation. A set of fifteen-foot-long pincers is attached round his waist with a wide strap. The man reaches down with the pincers and grabs the woman, who is squirming like a worm. He lifts her out of the basement, leans back and swinging over, drops her in the Dumpster. He repeats this with the man who beats at the pincers in frustration. The camera zooms out, and the deep, male voiceover says:

 SUPPORT AFFORDABLE HOUSING.