Dadetown

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

It looks like a documentary, the characters seem to be real people telling personal anecdotes and the story certainly is not the stuff of feature films. Cinéma vérité, right? Nope. It's a joke, a feature packaged as a documentary. But director Hexter will not get the last laugh. He died of an aortic aneurysm in April 1996, shortly before Castle Hill bought distribution rights to the film. Set in 1994, in upstate New York, the movie follows the filming of a PBS segment, Small Town America: Where the Heart Was. The filmmakers stick around after PBS leaves, capturing Dadetown on the brink of destruction as a high-tech firm moves in and the town's biggest employer, a metal-bending factory, closes. Dadetown chronicles the animosity between the high-tech yuppie executives and the blue-collar townies as they try to coexist in the small, economically strapped town.