Tales of Downtown decline at Tribeca: The end of CBGB, the collapse of Wall Street

By Kevin Lally

One of the strengths of the Tribeca Film Festival has always been its selection of documentaries, which play a prominent role in its programming. The Festival's quest for a New York connection in its films is also on display in two revealing documentaries that deal with very different aspects of the Downtown Manhattan scene: Burning Down the House, the story of the rise and fall of the legendary Bowery rock club CBGB, and American Casino, an incisive look at the short-sighted thinking and exploitation of minority communities that led to the subprime mortgage fiasco and the collapse of Wall Street.

Burning Down the House is directed by Mandy Stein, the daughter of Sire Records founder Seymour Stein and Linda Stein, the onetime manager of seminal punk band The Ramones, who was found murdered in her penthouse in October 2007. Both of her parents are interviewed in the film. On the scene at CBGB from the age of three, Mandy Stein began this project four years ago when she first learned the club was in danger of closing due to its back-rent dispute with its landlord, the Bowery Residence Committee, a homeless-outreach organization.

Opened in 1973, CBGB was the launching pad for some of rock's most influential artists of the 1970s and 80s, includingThe Ramones, The Police, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Blondie and Television. Many of those colorful musicians appear in the movie, paying tribute to the club's iconoclastic founder, Hilly Kristal. There's plenty of nostalgic footage of performances and the club's dessicated decor, including its notoriously gross bathrooms (which give the men's room in Trainspotting some pungent competition).

Despite an aggressive campaign to save the club from eviction and have this "filthy hole" declared a city landmark, the fate of CBGB apparently came down to bad blood between Kristal and Muzzy Rosenblatt, the director of the Bowery Residence Committee. The club closed in October 2006 (after a final concert including Patti Smith and Blondie documented here), and now its awning and part of its zany interiorare poignantly on display at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex in New York's Soho. Kristal died of lung cancer in August 2007. In true punk spirit, Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth is filmed on closing night shouting, "Whoever takes over this space is cursed!"

A curse of a different kind was cast on the many poor suckers who fell for the lure of subprime mortagages during the home-ownership frenzy that fueled the collapse of our financial system. Leslie Cockburn's aptly titled American Casino chronicles the unconscionable scam of speculation that played with and profited from the lives of naive first-time home buyers. Pointing out the illusory nature of the mortgage boom, Bloomberg reporter Mark Pittman notes, "I don't think most people really understood that they were in a casino. When you're in the Street's casino, you've got to play by their rules."

Cockburn's film contrasts the young Turks of Wall Street with a group of victims of the subprime shell game in an African-American neighborhood in Baltimore. According to the film, African-Americans were 3.8 times more likely to be given subprime loans in 2006, even though more than 60% of these same people actually qualified for less risky prime loans. One of the most affecting of the victims is Patricia McNair, an elegant clinical therapist at Johns Hopkins, whom Cockburn follows throughout her failed attempt to hold onto her home.

By contrast, an anonymous Bear Stearns analyst points out that agents along the real-estate value chain were always paid upfront and had "no skin in the game." In fact, some speculators profited handsomely from betting against people's ability to pay off their loans.

The film at times gets too caught up in the minutiae of financial schemes for anyone without an MBA degree, but it's an often devastating history of the greed, cynicism and short-term myopia that got us all into this current mess. "The Party's Over" plays sardonically on the soundtrack; let's hope American Casino adds to the sobriety.