Count Dominique Mouton as the latest Hollywood-bound talent from Oakland to get inspired by her hometown’s 21st-century growing pains.
Following the success of Ryan Coogler, Boots Riley and Daveed Diggs, with their various Oakland-centered film and TV projects, writer Mouton has crafted an ambitious neo-noir drama that tells a story about people in this multi-faceted city grappling with race, crime, culture and class conflicts.
But instead of a TV series or movie, Mouton’s “The Lower Bottoms” comes to audiences via a 10-part fiction podcast series with some well-known Hollywood and Bay Area names attached. The series premiered Tuesday and is distributed by by the iHeartPodcast Network.
Emmy-winning “Frasier” star Kelsey Grammer provides the narration, while a slate of up-and-coming TV and film actors — Ryan Destiny, Theo Rossi and Omar Dorsey — bring alive the characters of a social activist, a mayoral candidate and a Baptist minister, respectively. Rounding out the cast are East Bay rapper Dru Down, playing a pimp, and real-life activist Elaine Brown, the former chair of the Black Panther Party, appearing as, well, herself.
As the title suggests, the series is set in the traditionally working-class but gentrifying West Oakland neighborhood, as it is beset by growing tensions between longtime residents and newcomers amid a mysterious rise in vandalism and arson fires.
“Who’s starting the fires?” asks a young woman named Beulah, voiced by “Empire” and “Chicago Fire” actor Annie Ilonzeh, at the start of Episode 1. “Some say it’s anarchists. Others have conspiracies about Russians or blood-thirsty Satanists. Only in Oakland can all those be the same person.”
The episodes may take listeners closer to discovering the perpetrator of Lower Bottoms’ crime wave, but they also open the possibility that certain characters have secrets and hidden motives. Mouton said the situations and characters are drawn from people and situations she encountered when she lived in West Oakland from around 2010 to 2013.
“I spent a lot of time on 7th Street especially,” Mouton said. “I had a lot of friends in that area. There was the Revolution Cafe, right across from the West Oakland BART station, which was the center for everything. There was so much culture in the neighborhood. There was a mesh of personalities, and all these crazy sort of rumors going on all the time. It was a really interesting time, which sort of passed.”
That “interesting time,” Mouton says, was before gentrification really started to take hold. Since then, the Lower Bottoms and other neighborhoods have seen an increasing influx of more affluent professionals moving into new condominium and loft developments, creating new economic opportunities but also leaving longtime residents feeling displaced.
“What I thought was special about this time is that you had regular working-class people, regardless of race, coming together at this cafe,” Mouton said. “There were funk and soul parties every first Friday of the month. You’d have, like, old Black men and young white hipsters from Minnesota all in the same room, dancing and having fun.”
Mouton, a graduate of San Francisco State, moved to Los Angeles in 2016 to pursue her dream of writing for TV. She admired such series as “Sons of Anarchy,” “The Shield” and “The Wire,” that told the kinds of layered, nuanced stories that were once exclusive to movies.
She originally wrote “The Lower Bottoms” as a TV script for a writing program at UCLA. But it soon attracted the interest of podcast producer Jack Levy, who thought it could work well in an audio format and signed on to direct.
The project was taken on by a partnership between leading podcast publisher iHeartMedia and Will Packer Media, the production company led by the producer of hit films “Girls Trip” and “Think Like a Man.”
As a podcast, “The Lower Bottoms” unfolds almost like an old-fashioned radio drama. Mouton’s incisive dialogue and the actors’ vocal performances drive the action. But the podcast also benefits from the top production values of today’s best podcasts, enveloping listeners in the sounds of West Oakland — train horns, ships arriving at port, jazz music and the music of underground hip-hop collective the Hieroglyphics.
Mouton said the producers also were eager to nab either Grammer and George Takei for a stentorian-voiced narrator to lend some gravitas to certain segments. Grammer jumped at the opportunity when his agent showed him the script.
Mouton said that one of the benefits of “The Lower Bottoms” becoming a podcast, rather than a TV series, is that the less complicated medium allowed her to be closely involved in production, once it began in February. She said she’s still hoping to write for TV, but also appreciates that podcasting allowed her to get another story about Oakland out into the world that depicts it as something other than “a cesspool of crime.”
“I think there’s something about Oakland you can’t quite put a finger on,” Mouton said. “Some people might view Oakland as crime-ridden, but then why are people moving here? Obviously something is drawing people here. It’s the people and the culture, and the fact that people here are very real.”
Details: Access the podcast at www.iheart.com/podcast. Also available on such streaming services as Spotify, Amazon and Apple.
