When the New York’s Daily News famously blared “Ford to City: Drop Dead” on its front page in 1975, the paper was only making things official.
For all practical purposes, local, state, and federal authorities had abandoned the flat-broke metropolis. Federal money would not be forthcoming; civil order would break down; crime, garbage, and arson would rule the day.
“We understood exactly what the sentiment was: You’re not part of America,” says scene-shaper and movie producer Michael Holman in Downtown Calling, Shan Nicholson’s doc about the art scene that blossomed out of that bleak time and place. “And so we were like, ‘bet.’” As business, money, and order flowed out of the city, in other words, creativity – in the form of hungry, cast out, avant-garde, freaky, and, yes, funky visual and conceptual artists, musicians, and writers excited by the bombed-out city’s challenges as well as its cheap rent – flooded in. This particular bomb – possibly unnoticed at first amid the burning buildings, gunfire, and beatdowns – detonated primarily in the wrecked and dangerous Lower East Side and then radiated outward like the cultural shockwave it quickly came to constitute.
Nicholson’s film makes the most of blown-out archival footage – beautiful and energizing the way only blown-out archival footage can be – which attests to the city’s incredible blight and danger (almost impossible to reconcile mentally with present-day lower Manhattan), as well as to the enduring coolness of its subjects. First-hand accounts and freestyle theorizing from its hyper-brainy (also largely still good-looking and charismatic) participants – Holman, Fab 5 Freddy, Talking Heads drummer Chris Franz, music critic Nelson George, Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, No-Wave visionary James Chance, Mos Def, Ed Koch, and many more – provide a vivid verbal counterpart, so the ride is pleasurable, even thrilling.
Especially refreshing is that, though narrated by Blondie’s Debbie Harry (sounding vaguely Jersey-ish for some reason), Downtown Calling avoids fixating on the go-to scenes referenced by most accounts of late-Seventies and early Eighties New York: punk and New Wave music (that scene has yet to receive its documentary or narrative due), the Soho/East Village-based Neo-Expressionists, the denizens of Studio 54 – or, for that matter, the graffiti and burgeoning DJ scenes simultaneously making hay throughout the boroughs. Rather, the film bores into the specifics of how and where the downtown scene grew (the clubs, the players, the parties, the politics): both borrowing from and throwing punches at late-disco poshness; establishing a dual strategy of genre cross-pollination and coke-fueled, breakneck speed; and intertwining with uptown disco and South Bronx hip-hop street culture, bringing the latter downtown and therefore eventually into the gaze of mainstream American youth culture, which it would go on to dominate for the next 20-odd years.
Though Holman notes near the end of Downtown Calling that “the jocks and the assholes are all that’s left” in the city (“and who wants to party with them?”), the film’s half-hearted coda takes a stab at celebrating the eternal nature of New York’s cultural sway. It’s an unconvincing and aberrant moment; on the whole, Downtown Calling makes an information-packed, arresting, and frequently amusing case for the massive influence of a few hundred people on a tiny plot of practically abandoned space during the half-decade that it catalogs. In this case, once was plenty.
Downtown Calling screens Thursday, Oct. 29, at 7pm, The Independent at 501.
This article appears in October 23 • 2009.