“I love St. Louis,” Smoke City web series creator and For the Culture TV founder Cami Thomas opens in a new video. “And to love something means to want the best for it.” And Thomas is making moves on helping St. Louis be the best it can be. The video is part of an Indiegogo campaign Thomas just launched to raise $27,000 to produce the third season of Smoke City, her series that was born of the Ferguson movement and explores a different part of St. Louis in each episode. But Season 3, Smoke City: Ultimo, will be different—Thomas has plans to make it feature-length and release it in early November. Another change for Thomas: She’s turning For the Culture TV into a production company that will make original inclusive programming, with two more docs—one about religion in St. Louis and one about dance—coming down the pike. St. Louis Magazine caught up with Thomas, whom we recently named to our 2019 A-List, to ask about her plans and Season 3 of Smoke City.
Was turning For the Culture TV into a production company always part of your plan?
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Everything I’ve done in relation to FTC TV has been from identifying need in the community, and then answering it in the form of an artwork. Creating original programming and seeing, hey, this, especially when done with a diverse team and with the goal in mind that helping the city can be really, really good for progress, that’s something that I want to keep doing. So it wasn’t necessarily always the plan, but it feels like the most natural next step. It feels right—almost like it was meant to be. But in order to get to this point, I needed the city’s support every step along the way, which is what’s been happening these last three years.
How has the city supported you?
When I first created the Smoke City series, I was very new, the experience was very raw, and I’d never produced something from start to finish. That was the first time I directed, assembled a team, conducted the interviews, edited, that kind of caliber of a project. And in doing that, I leaned heavily on other friends, on suggestions, on input from not only my friends but family, just people who I came across. Everyone offered a lot of love and support in cultivating this project, even from the beginning. That’s something that, looking back, I realize how crucial it was to have the input of the city, because Smoke City is something that is for St. Louis. It’s about St. Louis, by St. Louis, and for St. Louis. For it to work and be authentic, it can’t have just my voice. …. That gave me the confidence and the fuel to be more ambitious with the second season. The first season, each episode was about 10 minutes. But in the second season, just because of all the support and people’s guidance, we were able to have 30-minute episodes that go a lot deeper and take it to a different level, even cinematically. Even in this third installment, we’re wanting to try something new and say, Hey, we could take this series and make it into a full feature, and give St. Louis voices the platform that we’ve always needed, that I think we especially need during this time.
What will be different in Season 3 of Smoke City?
The structure will change a little bit. Instead of breaking up solely into different areas, I want more voices to be included. There will be kind of an interview pool portion, where there will be about 10 to 15 St. Louisans who will be offering their perspectives in more of a sit-down interview format throughout the entirety of the video. From there, we’re going to explore three bigger chunks of areas. So instead of focusing on one particular county or one particular suburb, the plan is to kind of break things up more economically. Especially, for example, around the Delmar divide, there’s a lot of economic segregation, racial segregation. Then, I’m working with a psychologist who’s going to provide some background into how our implicit biases are formed, what can we do to break them down, what are the ways biases manifest that we might not necessarily recognize? And ultimately, how does that fuel the city’s issues? And how can we directly challenge them?
What do you hope audiences take away from Smoke City: Ultimo?
I really want people to walk out of this one with a clear roadmap, not just of, “Oh, this is what a different neighborhood looks like,” but more so “These are the ways that I—because every single one of us does this, whether we know it or not, probably subconsciously—but these are the ways that my implicit biases fuel my decisions in ways that I didn’t know. And here are ways that I can change that.” So as soon as people walk out of watching Ultimo, I want them to have a step-by-step guide on how to navigate around St. Louis in a way that’s more productive and more inclusive.
Which areas do you plan to cover in Season 3?
The series was fueled by the aftermath of Ferguson, and I think in Season One, I had a shorter episode on it, but I really do want to give due diligence and pay respect to the people who are part of that movement. So [one area will be] the kind of bigger chunk of Ferguson, Florissant, and the surrounding area in North County, I’m going to cover that on a more inclusive scale and not necessarily separate them.
I wanted to cover more of the Central West End and do another dive into the Delmar divide. In Season 2 of Smoke City, we covered U. City, which I think is a great microcosm of St. Louis, and how you can live within a mile of someone and have a very, very different experience. And I think that can also be seen pretty starkly within the Central West End. So starting with the Central West End, I want to tell that story, especially around economic segregation.
For the third one, just because the school I went to, I had a lot of friends who grew up in Chesterfield, doing more West County, so Chesterfield, Ballwin. If you’re not super familiar with those areas, there’s a lot of history around that. If you’re from North County and haven’t really been too far out west, there’s a lot of mystery about the big houses and who lives out there, and what are people like, and that’s something I wanted to lift the veil on a little bit.
