Tony Buba has been chronicling the decline of his hometown, Braddock, PA, for some fifteen years in documentaries ranging from J. Roy-New and Used Furniture and Betty's Corner Cafe to the better-known Voices from a Steeltown. (Buba appeared in person at PFA in 1986.) It is one of the reel world's fine ironies that, in its death, this once-booming steeltown survives, and brilliantly, in the spunky, humorous and penetrating observations that are Buba's stock-in-trade. Another irony not lost on Buba is that, with steel-mill layoffs a hot media topic, his star rises as Braddock's falls. Witness Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy, his first feature film. An offbeat amalgam of autobiography, documentary and fiction, it is the tale of a documentary filmmaker (Buba) hounded by a celebrity-hungry former subject (Sal Caru) when the filmmaker is offered a Hollywood gig (that's the fantasy part). Sweet Sal, as he is known, turns sour when he thinks that it was he who made Buba the luminary (!) he is today, merely by his commanding presence in an earlier documentary. With their antics set against the town's crumbling landscape and sad steeltown politics, clearly old Sal is a stand-in for Braddock itself, a town too tired to bite back. As Lisa Kernan observed for the San Francisco International Film Festival '89, "For all its structural playfulness, a more honest and incisive film about the economic picture of late eighties capitalism and the filmmaker's place in it would be hard to find."