80 Blocks From Tiffany's (1979) - Part 2 of 2 - 70's Gang Culture
80 Blocks From Tiffany's - Part 2 of 2 ---
Uploader: forthedishwasher ---
'We gave it that title because it was 80 blocks away from Tiffany's on Fifth Avenue and these guys never, ever left the Bronx'.
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.
Uploader: forthedishwasher ---
'We gave it that title because it was 80 blocks away from Tiffany's on Fifth Avenue and these guys never, ever left the Bronx'.
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.