BEFORE: This is one of those films that I spotted on Netflix last year, and it stayed on my radar, even though it's scrolled off of that service. That's happened with a lot of films, and usually that means that I'm less interested in watching it, but in this case, I'm still very invested in crossing it off from my list, even if I have to pay $2.99 to watch it on iTunes now. Some documentaries have migrated to Hulu after vanishing from Netflix, some might even be on Amazon Prime, but this one I'll have to pay for.
The IMDB says there are only 6 people appearing in this documentary, one of whom is Ed Koch. That just CAN'T be right - I went through this last year with the rock/pop music docs, it seems that a lot of documentary filmmakers don't bother to make sure their IMDB listings are complete, so when I watch these films, I have to take notes on my phone whenever I see a face I recognize, or the name of someone being interviewed comes up on the screen. Then there's a process for making suggestions to the IMDB, and I end up doing that a lot. Sometimes they listen to me, sometimes they don't - we've got a difference of opinion over what constitutes an "appearance", it seems. Like if I can verify that's the voice of Walter Cronkite in a news report, that makes it an appearance to me, and the IMDB will sometimes reject my suggestions. Agree to disagree.
But I had to make my linking based on the IMDB listings, so if they're incomplete, that hampers me quite a bit. In my selections for this year's doc chain, famous names like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton came up a LOT - and so far, that's not counting the uncredited appearances, which I have to track on the fly. I'm not sure which President is going to end up being this year's "Paul McCartney" (Paul surprised me by appearing in 19 of the rockumentaries, and ended up with the biggest total for the year) - but I think it could very well be a very visible President this time around. Or it could be Trump, or Hillary Clinton, or even Joan Rivers - I'll just have to play out the games.
Today Ed Koch carries over from "13th", and so does at least 1 other politician.
THE PLOT: A documentary on Ed Koch, the mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989.
AFTER: I was right, there were a ton of people appearing in this documentary that were uncredited in the IMDB. I ended up submitting 50 names, 21 of those were the people INTERVIEWED on screen, and 29 were people appearing in archive footage. I mean, jeez, if you can't keep track of the people you interviewed on camera, what are you DOING? People do interviews because they want screen credits, I mean, what other reason could they HAVE for appearing on camera. Telling their story? Setting the record straight on historical events? Bah, it's all about who can get the most screen credits, as far as I'm concerned. These news reporters and political pundits probably weren't getting paid much for their time, so I'm here to get everyone the credit they deserve - I won't stop until the IMDB database editors see my submissions and say, "Oh, god, not THIS guy again. The documentary credit freak is at it again..."
I'm not even a news junkie, so the names of NY Times reporters don't really matter to me, but I've been reading the NY Daily News at least weekly since I moved here to go to college in the fall of 1986. I made my newspaper selection on which paper had the best comic strips - what other parameters could there possibly be? This was before people got daily comics delivered by e-mail, and back when there was still a Village Voice and the Times wasn't "failing" or being called "fake news". I arrived in town when Ed Koch was mayor, but only until David Dinkins got elected three years later, capping Koch at three terms, not four. Hell, that was so long ago that back then everybody pronounced "Koch" as if it rhymed with "watch" or "crotch", not as a homonym for "coke", like the current fashion is, apparently.
So I sort of only really know the tail end of Mayor Koch's story, and I stuck around as Dinkins got replaced by Giuliani, who got replaced by Bloomberg, and now we have DiBlasio. (The world's tallest mayor replaced the shortest one, I think, and there's some kind of carnival/freakshow metaphor in there somewhere.)
But the film starts with a key moment in NYC history - the 1977 summer blackout, which helps me keep my "hot, sticky racism" theme going, even if my material has moved above the Mason-Dixon line. If you want to talk about hot, try making it through a couple days in a NYC July with no airconditioning, no fans and nothing that relies on freezers, like ice cream and cold beverages. I might not have been in New York in 1977, but I was here for the one in August, 2003, and it was not fun. Umm, except for the delis giving away ice cream and beer that they couldn't keep cold, but I think those might be rumors, it might not have really happened. Anyway, Koch used the 1977 blackout, and the looting that followed (no electricity means no security systems, no alarms) to his advantage to become a serious contender in the 1977 mayoral election. As a "law & order" candidate, he criticized Mayor Beame for not calling in the national guard to stop the looting and maintain some order.
The other main contender was Mario Cuomo, who was leading in the polls even before those "Vote for Cuomo, not the homo" signs started popping up in the subways. Yeah, it was a different time, I'm pretty sure signs like that would be frowned upon today, or would at least cause a backlash against the candidate who approved them. For the record, Cuomo's campaign never copped to posting those signs, but then, who did? And that's when people started wondering about Koch's sexual orientation, and he not only never answered questions about that, he would argue that nobody even had the right to ask. Which usually is a de facto answer, right? But I can see Koch's point - it's a slippery slope to allow reporters to get in the habit of asking about that, and everyone needed to learn to respect people's decisions to come out in their own time.
But Koch took a different tact, he brought in Bess Myerson, a former Miss America, to accompany him to events, acting like a default First Lady, and allowing Ed Koch to appeal to both the gays and the straights. Koch later admitted they were "just friends", though that phrase has several meanings, and even when interviewed for this documentary, when it was pointed out that as NYC's first gayor he could have had an enormous impact for change, his answer was still "That's none of your eff'in business."
Through the recounting of events in his first and second terms, I started to notice some similarities between Koch and future President Trump - like both had enormous egos, perhaps that's something that's necessary to run for office. Koch believed he was truly the best NYC mayor ever, that he was somehow uniquely qualified to hold the office, and that sounds a lot like Trump saying, "I alone can fix it." Hey, they're both native New Yorkers, maybe their shared ego and self-promotion abilites stems from that. Both men are/were also very image-driven and self-conscious, through Trump's more of the "fake it till you make it" type, and Koch was always, always asking everyone "How'm I doing?" Same principle, one just seems a little more needy than the other.
Both men were builders, too (allegedly, on Trump's part...). After saving the city from bankruptcy and laying off a lot of city staff to balance the budget, perhaps Koch's biggest accomplishment was creating more housing, both public and private. This doc has images of the Bronx that make it look like a wasteland, like Dresden after World War II or something. Buildings that were literally crumbling after years of neglect or waves of arson, looking like collections of bricks that were barely holding together - with other nearby buildings already having collapsed or in the process of being torn down. Koch helped secure financing to put up new buildings all over, especially in the Bronx, because investing in more housing means more property taxes, more money for the city to provide services, and better financial status for the city.
Same deal with Times Square - what was once just a collection of porno theaters and lousy diners started to transform during Koch's administration (this process really took off under later mayors, but it started with Koch) into the vast entertainment wonderland it is now, namely a collection of Disney stage theaters and chain restaurants. That's progress, I suppose - eh, the porn theaters were eventually going to be killed by the internet, anyway. But I miss some of the diners - hey, is Tad's Steakhouse still around?
The film then follows Koch through the events of each year he was mayor - the transit strike, the police strike, a gay rights bill (in 1986!) - though for each crisis he handled well, it seems there was also another one he didn't handle well. Gay activists were unhappy that he closed the city's bathhouses, but that was done with their best interests in mind, as a lot of unsafe sex was taking place there. He closed a municipal hospital in Harlem, which admittedly was underperforming, but that didn't exactly endear him to the community there. And then the worst disaster of all, the publishing of his memoir, "Mayor" and the opening of the Broadway musical that was based on it.
Then came the PVB scandal in his third term, which revealed that his political allies were basically allowed to stock city agencies, like the Parking Violations Bureau, with their friends. While Koch was not directly implicated for any wrongdoing, it seems that city contracts for parking violations computers were awarded to companies owned by his friends. It might be legal, but there's still something fishy about that. And other businessmen admitted to bribing PVB officials who were friends of the Queens borough president, who then tried to kill himself when the news broke. All I really know about the PVB scandal is that I indirectly benefited from it, apparently some of the people accused of bribery or some financial malfeasance invested in real estate, and one of the properties that got seized by the city after the scandal was a supermarket building in Park Slope. A few years later, after years of lying dormant, the building was converted into 14 units of condominiums, and I bought one of them with my first wife in 1993. When we split up I bought out her share of the property and lived there for 11 more years, during that time it increased in value so that when I sold it, I could buy (most of) a bigger house in Queens. So for me, something good came out of Ed Koch's biggest scandal - I might still be living in an apartment, with no real estate equity to my name, if not for that.
Very little is said in this film about Koch's years after being NYC's mayor, like there's no mention about being on "The People's Court" after Judge Wapner's time, or being an adjunct professor at NYU. When I was at NYU, everyone sort of knew that Koch had an apartment near Washington Square, I think it was on Waverly Place - he was one of those mayors who chose not to live in Gracie Mansion, I think. Dinkins did, but Bloomberg didn't - living in a mansion would have been a step DOWN for Bloomberg. I'm pretty sure DiBlasio moved his family in to Gracie Mansion, as did Giuliani, but in the middle of Rudy's time as mayor he divorced his wife, and the wife and kids got to stay in Gracie Mansion while Rudy moved into a room in the apartment of a gay couple. Wait, that doesn't sound right, am I remembering that correctly?
Koch stayed pretty active until he died in 2013, he worked at a law firm, did movie reviews, and made the rounds on the political party circuit - the documentary shows him on election night, holding court while Chuck Schumer was claiming victory in the background, then trying to make peace with the Cuomo family by congratulating the new governor, Andrew Cuomo, son of Mario. Though the microphones reveal that Koch didn't really forgive OR forget. Well, he didn't recognize a lot of people he knew at the party, so maybe there was a lot of forgetting near the end of his life. But mostly he comes across here as a man who held very strong opinions on most issues, and if you happened to disagree with him, he'd cut you off to mansplain immediately why you were wrong.
Also starring Michael Bloomberg, Charles Rangel (also carrying over from "13th"), Christine Quinn, Carl McCall, George Artz, Wayne Barrett, Abe Biderman, Calvin O. Butts III, Diane Mulcahy Coffey, Maureen Connelly, Greg David, Fernando Ferrer, Ethan Geto, Michael Goodwin, Bob Herbert, Charles Kaiser, Sarah Kovner, John LoCicero, Johnathan Mahler, Felice Michetti, Michael Powell, Jennifer Preston, Joyce Purnick, Sam Roberts, Henry J. Stern, Carl Weisbrod, with archive footage of Bella Abzug, Herman Badillo, Abe Beame, George W. Bush (also carrying over from "13th"), David Dinkins (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Andrew Cuomo, Mario Cuomo, David Garth, Rudy Giuliani (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden"), H. John Heinz, Larry Kramer, Sandra Lee, Donald Manes, Eddie Murphy (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Bess Myerson, Dolly Parton (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), William Proxmire, Al Sharpton (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Sheldon Silver.
RATING: 5 out of 10 ACT-UP protestors
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