Reviewed by
Harvey Karten
BOOK WARS
Director: Jason Rosette
Writer: Jason Rosette
Cast: Booksellers, narrated by Jason Rosette
My favorite Ray Bradbury sci-fi novel is "Fahrenheit 451,"
made into a relatively unemotional, slow-moving movie in
'66 by Francois Truffaut--his only English language
contribution. My view is that sci-fi at its best must not
only tell a great story but must have an edge, preferably
satiric. It must say something about contemporary society
that can best be put into an imaginative, futuristic
setting. In "Fahrenheit 451" all printed materials were
banned by the government because, among other reasons, the
government held that books can make people sad. This was to
be a "don't worry, be happy" era. But one small rebellious
group of book lovers retreated to a sylvan utopian
settings, each having memorized one book, each with the
task of transmitting the text of that tome to future
generations.
Would you be surprised if we suggested that we today in the
U.S. are living in that sort of time? Look at the subways.
When I was a kid, everyone read. Even if the newspaper of
choice was the tabloid Daily Mirror or Daily News at two
cents a pop, people were reading! Barber shop seats were
crammed with all the newspapers that flourished in New
York: the Journal America, The World, The Telegram, The
Sun, PM, the Herald Tribune, the New York Times. What do
you see today on the trains? People are wired. Walkmans
have replaced periodicals just as the cell phone seems to
have replaced a good deal of face-to-face conversation.
If this situation makes you mad, make you furious, you've
gotta like "BookWars," which won the Best Documentary award
at this year's New York Underground Film Festival last
March. By the conclusion of its seventy-seven minutes, the
doc may have just about reached the end of its welcome
since, after all, "BookWars" is the product of just one
guy, Jason Rosette, who spent five years making this on a
shoestring.
Rosette, who studied philosophy at New York University and
switched to the film school from which he graduated in
1991, borrowed some bucks to get the project launched,
while the only establishment decent enough to give him some
post-production funding was the Playboy Foundation. Maybe
only a few people will look at "BookWars" as an epilogue to
"Fahrenheit 451", but as I see the picture, we're dealing
with a raggedy-taggety group of true Kerouacian
entrepreneurs who defy the TV culture, and go against the
mega-corporate structures of Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
(Even these book businesses have turned to pushing CD's and
greeting cards and calendars and other non-book items to
survive.)
Though "BookWars" gets its title from the conflict between
the peddlers of the printed page and a particularly mean
local government in New York City, its focus is on the
dealers themselves. These folks--scruffily bearded,
long-haired, bearing ethnic accents (except for the movie's
Ohio-bred narrator), opinionated, edgy--have been thought
of by some local denizens as homeless, as bums, as bearers
of stolen property. This is true in a small minority of
cases only, if we are to believe the hard-working
director-writer-editor-narrator of this unusual underground
movie. Truth to tell, they get their mostly used fare--good
stuff too, like Kerouac, Dostoevski, Mailer and the like
which seem to sell better on the street than even popular
fiction--from yard sales and estate purchases. They haul
crates and boxes of paperbacks, hardcovers, some of which
have seen better days and have been Elmer-glued, scissored
and carefully wrapped in plastic by these street
capitalists, and often put in long, long days on the curbs.
Often working from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. during decent weather,
they consider a take of $200 to be decent enough--and
that's gross, not profit.
Despite their enthusiasm, their energy, their commitment to
a literate public averse to spending $27 for a 200-pager at
the local Waldenbooks and to people who insist that they
are finding stock unavailable anywhere else--they are being
harassed by the Giuliani administration. Because of the
First Amendment, they cannot be summarily kicked off the
block. But the mayor has mandated Tax I.D. cards and
carefully painted borderlines under his so-called quality
of life program, an approach that seems curiously designed
to protect traditional business and the principal
university in the area.
Rosette focuses on just a couple of blocks of Manhattan,
all in the Greenwich Village area. Sixth Avenue around 9th
Street sees a concentration of comic books and some porno
while the good stuff is on West Fourth Street, embracing
the director's alma mater, NYU. Rosette introduces us to a
variety of idiosyncratic characters who are really only a
step away from welfare, who probably live on pizzas sold by
the piece throughout their working days, and though he does
not go into the nitty-gritty details, one wonder how they
even take breaks to relieve themselves given the absence of
public restrooms in our heartless town.
California-born Thomas is the mega-guy, a bearded but
neatly trimmed slim guy who seems in his thirties and who
eventually opened up his own indoor store. Another is Pete,
a loft artist from Newark who picked up gobs of volumes to
make collages and wound up selling the books themselves.
Adding to the variety of types is Rick, who does street
magic to pick up a few extra bucks; Boris from Russia; at
least one fellow from Jamaica who is quite opinionated
about the mayor's office and another guy from Poland. The
customers seem almost as odd as the sellers, but given the
nature of the Village and of a large urban metropolis like
New York, that's to be expected. A couple of young girls
are fooling around with passersby asking to get a better
look at their butts. An elderly woman with a colorful hat
is being flattered shamelessly by one salesman and
predictably enough, she buys.
A few of the so-called customers are downright deranged and
give these enterprising workers a hard time by leaning on
their tables. One clean-cut fellow has a volume in his hand
about the size of War and Peace. The camera stares at him
for what we are told is twenty minutes, the implication
being that he's not the Big Spender from the East but
someone who shows up every day at the same time to read
another chunk of printed material from that tome, standing
up, only to replace it gently when lunch hour is over.
This doc is not as amusing as something that could come
from the camera of Upper-West Sider Michael Moore, but then
again Moore has a lot more dough at his disposal than
Rosette--who has yet to pay off his student loan at NYU.
Nor do we expect the camerawork featured in John Woo's
"Mission Impossible 2," given the dimes and quarters that
were used to finance "BookWars." The film sometimes looks
as grainy as the sellers are scruffy, as Rosette used Mini
DV, Super 8, Regular 8 and Hi-8 video and Super VHS and
what's more he had to keep his cameras as unobtrusive as
might James Bond. "BookWars" gains variety from its
combination of eloquent narration and some patter from the
sellers and kibitzers that would set Henry Higgins' hair on
end. In the final analysis, this movie is as urban as the
World Trade Center, a reminder of what makes us Gothamites
live in and love the Big Apple.
Not Rated. Running time: 79 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey
Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com