RCA: Press Coverage

Rich History, Wayward Editorial
Reston documentary deserves high marks for history storytelling despite editorial lapses.
By Jason Hartke - August 16, 2006

Courting Controversy
For three and a half years, Reston resident Steve Resz filmed and edited nearly 150 hours of video footage, and then whittled it down into a three-hour film about Reston’s history.
While researching for the film, Resz scanned nearly 1,000 pictures and documents. His documentary also features archival footage of several prominent Restonians and historic moments. A visual collage of everyday activities in Reston — like Founder’s Day, the Reston Triathlon, the Multicultural Festival, the Reston Festival and the community pools and lakes — are a creative break from the chronological history.
So how could the film be controversial? In the last portion of the film, Resz makes his on-screen debut as part of an impassioned case against bringing Metro rail to Reston and an argument for the incorporation of Reston into a town.
Below are narrative excerpts:
* “Continuing the massive overdevelopment of commercial properties while leaving them free from contributing their fair share to the community is a recipe for disaster, and Restonians have no idea [Supervisor] Cathy Hudgins and the eight other supervisors have already planned for them.”
* “In 2001, long before Metro heavy rail, which arbitrarily declared without a vote of the citizens to be, quote, the locally preferred alternative, long before the engineering was done, long before the real costs could be known, long before the environmental impact statements were complete, and long before the effects on Reston could be evaluated by residents, [Supervisor] Cathy Hudgins and the supervisors did this massive increase in the comprehensive plan around proposed Metro stations at Reston Parkway and Wiehle Avenue.”
* “Metro will be the excuse for more, much, much, more commercial development.”
* “To summarize, [Del.] Ken Plum’s choo-choo train only addresses a very small percentage of persons’ trips because of its inherent inflexibility of being tied to tracks. Only a small percentage of people will use it even to commute to work.”
* “There is something else that [Del.] Ken Plum and Cathy Hudgins and other choo-choo train supporters aren’t telling you, at least not yet anyway. They know the current train tunnel under the Potomac River can not even handle the small amount of additional traffic that the extension into Reston will bring … In 2001, Metro put the cost of a new tunnel at $6 billion.”
* “Why are [Del. Ken] Plum and [Supervisor Cathy] Hudgins supporting such taxpayer subsidized pollution? Because it benefits their developer buddies. That’s right. Plum’s choo-choo train isn’t really about transportation at all. It’s about massive high-density overdevelopment to benefit a handful of developers and that is the real threat to the Reston community.”
* “If Restonians had control of their own community through a locally elected town government, these detrimental effects of Metro heavy rail could be stopped, ameliorated or, at least, taxed to pay for all the wear and tear of existing infrastructure and the new infrastructure that would be needed. Not surprisingly [Supervisor Cathy] Hudgins and [Del. Ken] Plum oppose letting Restonians decide for themselves whether they want a local community-based government.”
* “In 1989, Del. Ken Plum, to his everlasting shame, introduced and ensured the passage, without public hearings, of a bill in the [state] legislature to repeal the Wiehle [town] charter, which would have provided for Reston town local self government. Thus making such a sensible endeavor considerably more difficult in the future."

If thought about for any amount of time, the documentary title of “Reston: Past, Present and Future,” Steve Resz’s detailed tour through Reston’s history, is confusing.
What’s the “future” doing in a documentary? More importantly, how does a filmmaker document the future?
The answer is that it can’t be done.
So, even though the Reston resident and first-time filmmaker traces an amazingly rich, three-hour tale of Reston’s beginnings, the last 30 minutes falls off the documentary trail into an opinionated personal harangue. (See “Courting Controversy”).

THE FILM OPENS to a beautiful winter morning scene of snow-covered Lake Anne with a sad folk song playing in the background. The view smoothly fades out to reopen inside the Reston museum before settling on the pair responsible for the music, singer Lea Coryell of Herndon and longtime Reston resident Ralph Lee Smith on the dulcimer.
A moment later, the film jumps awkwardly into its story. In a few sentences, Resz’s narration covers the American Indians to early Spanish and then English colonies.
The film’s pace is quick, but filled with jaw-dropping historical morsels. For instance, a young George Washington helped survey and hunt a large swath of land that encompassed Reston.
Resz uncovers a rail timetable from 1860, showing a route starting at Alexandria going west through Thornton (now Reston), Herndon, Guilford (now Sterling) and Farmwell (now Ashburn).
During the Civil War, viewers learn General Robert E. Lee marched his troops north on Ridge Road, parts of which are now Old Reston Avenue and Reston Parkway, for the battle of Antietam.

AFTER SEVERAL chapters, which include two failed attempts to start a town where Reston is today, including Max Wiehle’s town charter of 1898, Resz reaches the early 20th Century where he pauses for an almost mini-documentary on the life of Reston’s founder, Robert E. Simon.
From there, nearly an hour into the film, Resz segues into Reston’s early years during the late 1960s.
For the next hour and a half Resz traces Simon’s firing, Reston’s ownership by oil companies, first Gulf, then Mobil, the formation of the Reston Citizens Association, and early versions of Reston Association, the governing homeowners association.

WHILE THE MOVIE is mostly a story of how Reston came to be and how it evolved, “Reston” chronicles problems and hardships that nearly drowned Simon’s vision, mostly the result of not having “a locally elected town government” and being reined in by the vagaries of Fairfax County, according to Resz.
To end the movie, in what feels like a fireside chat, Resz spirals into an editorializing diatribe of Metro rail coming to Reston and a thematic lamentation that Reston never achieved town status.
This final turn, all within Resz’s right as sole producer and director of the film, detracts from, and for some may sink, what is the seminal video history of a place called Reston.

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