Drop Dead City – New York on the Brink in 1975
(USA, 103 min.)
Dir. Peter Yost, Michael Rohatyn
Section: Closing Night (World Premiere)
Economic disparity and a distrust in government are at an all-time high. Many people believe that their elected officials do not have their best interests at heart and are instead selling out to corporations while leaving the working person to pay more for less. As a result of this dismay, people elect a conservative majority into Congress, led by a wealthy celebrity socialite who promises to bring “change.” This sounds like an accurate description of today, but it happens to sound eerily similar to 1976, when Ronald Reagan came close to challenging Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination after an economically disastrous two years in the presidency following Richard Nixon’s resignation. Four years later, Reagan would win in a landslide, introducing an economic system that, ironically, would only further entrench the nation’s wealth gap and continue to do so for the foreseeable future. There’s a sense that the irony coming for the United States in 2024 is also eerily similar.
Perhaps that is why Drop Dead City, named for that notorious headline attributing Ford’s advice to NYC, feels like an essential documentary for this moment. Winner of the Library of Congress’ 2023 Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, an honour bestowed on richly detailed and diverse documentaries on American history, the film recounts and reexamines New York City’s 1975 financial crisis under Ford’s presidency. Spurred by state comptroller Harrison J. Goldin’s desire to do the city’s first independent audit in 1974, NYC’s bookkeeping (or lack thereof) revealed a pattern of reckless government spending. What was thought to be a city-wide debt of a few hundred million turned out to be closer to six billion, which sent the city into such a desperate financial freefall that hundreds of public servants, including policemen, firemen, teachers, and sanitation workers, were laid off. This, naturally, worsened the city’s quality of life and contributed to New York’s reputation for rampant crime, a narrative that still flourishes in politically conservative circles to this day. The film feels simultaneously like a time capsule of a bygone era and a woefully relevant exposé of the failings of current, greed-fuelled bureaucracy.
There’s plenty to unpack in this often forgotten period in the Big Apple’s history, and directors Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn do so in abundance. Drop Dead City features interviews with almost every major player in the cause and effect of the crisis (at least those who are still living) and then some, throwing in a mix of financial experts, historians, and working class leaders. It’s a dizzying array of characters who don’t often feel distinguishable enough from each other in either personality or contribution. It can often feel overwhelming to keep track of names, roles, and who is more relevant when. Viewers will likely latch onto a select few talking heads and use them as a throughline, and the film might have been better served by focusing on those characters rather than the broader peanut gallery. It doesn’t help that the interviews are scattershot in their framing and composition, often cutting together like a hodgepodge of thrown-together sit downs rather than a cohesive artistic vision of how the filmmakers wish to portray their subjects.
All that said, it’s arguable that the film’s most important characters aren’t the ones being interviewed in the modern day but rather the ones who appear in the film’s wealth of archival footage, such as Mayor Abe Beame. Amongst the film’s ensemble, he is by far the most thoroughly realized through both footage and interviews as a well-intentioned but ultimately unqualified fall guy for the crisis as a working man who wound up betraying the very people he sought to protect. However, the most important character in the story is New York itself, which is given cinematic life by transporting archival that recaptures not only its vibrant mid-’70s energy but also the chaos that reigned as a result of the crisis: streets lined with garbage, rampant city fires, and teachers on strike. The very nature of these events is incredulous enough to warrant a film about them, but to see the impact on celluloid feels like a call to action, a sobering reminder of what societal disaster as a result of political ineptitude actually looks like. This fervour shines brightest in archival street interviews with average Americans, including charismatic protestors who are unafraid to speak their minds. As fractured and false as the American dream can often feel, it is emboldening to see people who genuinely embody it.
Unfortunately, these moments ultimately play second fiddle to the film’s focus on plot. The film frequently goes deep on explaining the processes through which the city earned and later recouped its debt, consisting of accounting lingo and backdoor conversations that, to the layman, are mostly noise. On top of that, the film tackles numerous political narratives as a result of the crisis, particularly the decline of New York’s image as a progressive haven and who, or what, takes responsibility for that. Though Yost and Rohatyn’s comprehensive take on the period is admirable, it pads around the heart of the matter, that being the cyclical reality of politicians cowering under the thumb of big banks at the expense of their constituency. The film only realizes this toward the end when it feels as if this philosophy is clear from the beginning and affords the doc its energy for the first hour – though a jazzy soundtrack also helps. By the time Drop Dead City sputters to its end, an informative documentary feels more and more like reading through a textbook rather than an epic saga. It’s an informative piece of filmmaking that nonetheless is more important than it is compelling.
