James Hamilton has a romantic eye. A slightly sullen yet bemused gaze suggesting a smart and casual affair between subject and lens. He is a music lover, indeed a lover of all the sensual arts, but for my intention he is a man who lives by the charm of music. His heroes are the otherworldly: James Brown, Dinah Washington, Frank Sinatra, Smokey Robinson, Billie Holiday.
The hours, days, weeks, months I spent tiptoeing through four decades of James’s contact sheets I realized the soul of the artist gleans genuine respect and distinct recognition from a photographer who shares their emotions. The messengers of music, the “angels”—as Sun Ra would suggest—play for a timeless existence. To capture them with photography is to defy their elusive state, to steal them to common ground, as is the journalist’s duty. But like so few, James Hamilton solemnly suggests camaraderie, friendship, and shared artistry. His photo archive, not only of music genius, but of street life, politics, filmmakers, poets, authors, and artists is an astounding history of late-20th century New York City. A time when the downtown world below 14th Street experienced its ultimate existence as a true village of creative pursuit. One can still feel this last vestige of bohemia by taking a magic turn on any given street at any given time, but it is fleeting. And its vintage glamour has a wizened smile in the shadowy recess of a newly minted lifestyle.
We depend on history to recount what is vanished, missed, dreamed of, and mythologized. In James’s archive I encounter a universe of sweetness, of salaciousness, and a spellbinding grace and natural wonderment that keeps me coming back to the city that defined romance for me and so many others. The romantic eye as love, as music.
The roots of the film lay in a lengthy 1977 Esquire article written by Jon Bradshaw about two gangs who operated in the South Bronx – the Savage Skulls and the Savage Nomads. “I’d always liked non-fiction and I read that piece,” Gary Weis tells the Guardian down the phone from California. “Bradshaw was a guy who wrote about Baader-Meinhof, went to Angola … one of those hard-drinking journalists who went to crazy places. I hadn’t really thought about doing it as a film, but then one week Raquel Welch was the guest host on Saturday Night Live (Weis was the show’s in-house film maker) and her manager was Carolyn Pfeiffer, who was living with Bradshaw. And later that summer I was asked by NBC to do three longer films for their late-night time slot, so I did a couple of comedy shows and then suggested we do this piece on gangs.” This was quite a change from his best-known previous work, The Rutles’ Beatles spoof All You Need Is Cash, co-directed with Eric Idle. Weis’s original route into the gangs’ milieu was via community organiser Joan Butler and Bob Werner, leader of the NYPD’s Youth Gang Task Force and the kind of cop you would generally assume only existed in the imaginations of late-70s screenwriters and the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video. Sporting a bandit moustache and Aviators, he’s first encountered unwinding on a firing range, claiming that he’d requested a transfer to his current precinct because his previous stomping ground was “too quiet”. At one point later he’s cheerfully advising an aspirant felon as to why his theoretical plan to kill a cop and “just do seven years” is fundamentally flawed: “Because your life would end right on the scene.” And yet, despite his position, Werner seems able to stroll around the area, even being invited to the block party that closes the film. “When we first went to meet them,” Weis recalls, “Werner would climb into their building with his gun drawn, then bring the guys out for us. He’d leave us in the car. It looked like Dresden.” Even Butler describes her own neighbourhood as “a land of nowhere”. Neither of them are exaggerating. If nothing else, 80 Blocks From Tiffany’s serves as an excellent corrective to all those complaints you started hearing about 10 years ago that the city had been “totally cleaned up and lost all its character”. The film is a stark reminder of the damage that had been wreaked on parts of New York throughout the 70s; the depopulated districts, burnt-out buildings and human waste serving as the end point for a decade of mismanagement and unaddressed social problems. The spirit of these dark, troubled times was captured in a Daily News front page from October 1975 after the president vowed to veto any attempt to bail out the city from bankruptcy – “Ford To City: Drop Dead”. (In reality, Ford never actually said those words and two months later would approve federal loans, but the sentiment stuck in the popular memory.) And while announcing the 1977 World Series from Yankee Stadium, commentator Howard Cosell supposedly declared that “the Bronx is burning” as roving cameras panned over streets alive with fires. In the 1981 cop film Fort Apache, The Bronx, Paul Newman came to a similar conclusion. More than 30 years on, Weis still recalls leaving Manhattan for filming. “It was really like a foreign land. We gave it that title because it was 80 blocks away from where Tiffany’s was on Fifth Avenue and these guys never, ever left the Bronx. All the buildings were boarded up, a lot of the buildings were burned down.”
Left living in the wreckage were two predominantly Hispanic gangs – the Savage Skulls and the Savage Nomads. Decked out in a strange combination of biker denim and bandolero chic, both gangs now look anachronistic, almost romantic. “I think the look all derived from biker stuff,” muses Weis. “They called themselves a motorcycle club, but didn’t have the money for motorcycles. I did feel scared around them on occasion, but really it was a different time. Now it’s about money and drugs, but to me the film looks more like West Side Story. They were tough guys but it almost looks nostalgic.” To a modern audience, much of the film’s impact comes from Weis’s light touch. There is nothing in the way of narrative or moral judgment imposed on the film: cleaving more to the Direct Cinema techniques then being pushed by the likes of the Maysles brothers (Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter etc), Weis simply records the Skulls, the Nomads, the police and the citizens as they are. “I just went in,” he says. “I didn’t have an agenda, no social commentary, and they picked up on that. They weren’t stupid.” Indeed, it was the few parts of the film where Weis deviated from these principles that ultimately proved to be its undoing. “Obviously, we couldn’t film them actually breaking the law, as they wouldn’t do anything in front of the camera that was a robbery. So what happened was, when we heard those stories about what they’d done, we recreated them and filmed them pretty quickly, so we had a dramatisation to put in there.” Nowadays, this sounds like fairly standard reconstructive documentary behaviour. But these vignettes saw the film embroiled in an internal dispute over the fact that it had been made by the entertainment division rather than the news division, and it was duly shelved. “It was frustrating,” admits Weis with magnanimous understatement. Much of the fascination in watching 80 Blocks From Tiffany’s lies in seeing a selection of now-lost worlds. The gang culture portrayed may be violently amoral, but it precedes crack and the routine carrying of guns. The film also sits just before hip-hop arrived and self-documented much of the city around it; a street party is soundtracked by Chic’s Everybody Dance and the Bar-Kays’ Let’s Have Some Fun, along with some embryonic MCing. But perhaps the most striking difference between now and then is that the director benefited from having subjects who weren’t precociously aware of a need to “perform” for the camera, manipulate their emotions to grab a few more minutes of the final edit or contrive their own story into a predetermined “journey”. For the most part, Weis’s ultimate success as a film-maker rests in the fact that the people in 80 Blocks From Tiffany’s look like they couldn’t care less whether he filmed them or not.
“A lot of people said, ‘What the hell are you guys doing?’ ” remembers Yauch.
Two years later, the gamble is starting to pay off: just two weeks after Miramax Films closed its doors for good, Oscilloscope landed a fairly prominent role in the upcoming Oscar race. “The Messenger”, director Oren Moverman’s slow-build account of soldiers assigned to notify next of kin about relatives killed in action, which Oscilloscope purchased after the film’s Sundance premiere in 2009, garnered nominations for supporting actor Woody Harrelson, as well as screenwriters Moverman and Alessandro Camon. The company also landed a documentary nomination for “Burma VJ”, a stark portrait of political unrest in Myanmar, incorporating a variety of clandestine footage shot throughout 2007.
Whether or not any of these nominees win, the inclusion of Oscilloscope’s films by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reflects the label’s rapid progression to the upper tier of the specialty-film world. Last year, the company was thought to have a shot at Oscar glory with Kelly Reichardt’s art-house favorite “Wendy and Lucy”, but Michelle Williams’ nuanced performance ultimately failed to yield a nomination. If Yauch and his team learned from that experience and amended their campaign strategy accordingly, he won’t reveal their secret. “The really great thing about the Oscars is that a bunch of people know about these films,” he says. “For filmmakers, this is evidence that the staff at Oscilloscope knows what they’re doing.”
While the company’s first release was Yauch’s own directorial effort, the Harlem basketball documentary “Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot”, his motives went far beyond personal gratification. “My interest in starting this company was not to distribute my own films,” he says. “I was interested in the idea of working with filmmakers.”
Oscilloscope’s assiduously curated library of festival hits ranges from domestically produced dramas like The Messenger to social-issue documentaries (Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father; No Impact Man) and foreign fare (The Paranoids, from Argentina; Irish flick Kisses), all of which it distributes on DVD as well as theatrically.
The company puts out 10 to 15 films a year, most of them acquired on the festival circuit. Upcoming releases include Michel Gondry’s family documentary, “The Thorn in the Heart”, and “The Exploding Girl”, the expressionistic story of a seizure-prone college student (Zoe Kazan), directed by Oscope regular Bradley Rust Grey, whose wife and producing partner So Yong Kim’s children-in-distress narrative, “Treeless Mountain”, was released by the company last year.
With its star-filled cast and budget, The Messenger is the biggest project to come out under Oscope’s auspices. Moverman says the company’s newbie status was part of the appeal. “Adam said he hoped one day to be able to release a movie like The Messenger,” the director recalls. “I said, ‘Why not now?’”
To date, the only Oscope release to cross the $1 million mark at the box office was Wendy and Lucy, and it just barely stumbled over that hurdle. But the niche qualities of Oscope’s films play a key role in the cultivation of its brand. “A lot of times, the movies with greater marketing challenges are the ones that fall to us,” says Yauch.
Like a hip, youth-oriented version of the Criterion Collection, Oscope combats those challenges with keen grassroots strategies. Shoppers at Whole Foods and Urban Outfitters may discover Oscope DVDs at the checkout counter, and journalists are often treated to press releases containing Yauch’s eccentric plugs for the company’s latest acquisitions. A statement pimping the surreal Danish cop drama “Terribly Happy”, opening this week, bears this blurb from Yauch: “It is just further proof that Danish people are clearly out of their minds.”
Yauch positions Oscope’s handcrafted approach in opposition to the neglect associated with larger companies. “When I pick up a DVD in a piece-of-shit case, with a piece of paper stuck in it, I feel like the distributor is just throwing it away,” he says. “We want to respect our films more than that.”
While he would like Oscilloscope to explore “larger projects,” he remains wary of the commercial realm, where the boundary between substance and sell can be slippery. “Sometimes, it’s just somebody’s idea of how they can market something, like Matthew McConaughey with his shirt off,” he scoffs.
