Paget Films

17/03/2025

On Route 66 in Shamrock, Texas for .

01/03/2025

Shooting the Route 66 Crusin’ Car Show in Amboy, CA.

01/03/2025

Santa apparently lives at an empty mall in Barstow, California.

27/02/2025

Shooting Route 66 . Follow the doc film project - eignt states, 2400 miles, 100 years.

29/01/2025

The Window at Meteor Crater. A favorite photo opp along Route 66 - the simple brick wall with an opening creates the illusion of a living landscape painting. Visit to follow my current project.

30/10/2024

Happy Halloween from Harrison County Courthouse in Cynthiana, Kentucky.

23/10/2024

18/10/2024

This week I was honored to deliver the opening keynote at the 2024 Washington American Planning Association conference.

What does a filmmaker have to say to professional planners?

Here was my core message: it's not enough to have a plan – you need a story!

So many American cities, towns, main streets and rural lands were devastated by urban renewal and sprawl. It profoundly impacted me when I made my first documentary on Route 66 in 1994 and experienced a 2400-mile string of main street towns - too many ruined by urban renewal and all struggling to survive during the zenith of America's voracious suburban sprawl.

My hope is that planners, city officials and developers can acknowledge the historic mistakes made in the past, as a humble prelude to introducing their plans today. This is storytelling.

This kind of story can help a community better understand the roots of their current predicament, so that they can begin to trust and find the courage to embrace our new plans to restore and fix places.

Thank you to the American Planning Association Washington Chapter for the invitation!

BTW - The closing keynote speaker gave a fantastic talk on the public spaces of Europe (glad I did not have to follow Rick Steves!).

07/05/2024

Historic 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

06/02/2024

"It will make you cry." - Stephanie Barber Geter.

I was honored to meet and interview Stephanie Barber-Geter for my film "Buffalo: America's Best Designed City." (see an excerpt below)

Mrs. Barber-Geter (1954-2024) was a "community pillar" for Buffalo - an original opponent of the destruction of Humboldt Parkway, and a tireless champion for restoring it.

Eleven years ago, we released the film in which she appears, which now has 1.2+ million views.

The film reminds Buffalo that it was once "the best-planned city in the world," and recounts how it later squandered that legacy in a series of tragic decisions: Buffalo rammed freeways through its one-of-a-kind world-class Olmsted parks; and for good measure, the city added a freeway all along the entire waterfront, cutting off downtown and historic neighborhoods from access to the Niagara River and Lake Erie.

There really is only one path forward for Buffalo. It's especially obvious now that even the economic development experts (after so many failed silver bullet projects) have realized that the best economic development is actually .

Buffalo can easily reclaim its title as America's best-designed city - and it does not require some insanely expensive expenditure or innovative invention. The money and technology to fix it exist right now. It is eminently doable. It simply requires removing the freeways.

This is not even a radical proposal anymore. Freeway removal has been done in cities all across America and around the world, and it has worked every time. Milwaukee, Seoul, San Francisco, Rochester, the list goes on.

Stephanie Barbe-Geter spoke the truth. Hopefully, other civic leaders will finally rise up and call for the removal of freeways, the reconnection to the waterfront, and the complete restoration of Olmsted's parks and parkways.

Excerpt from the documentary "America's Best Designed City" featuring Stephanie Barber Geter."Stephanie Barber Geter harbored a dream of seeing the return of...