BookWars

BookWars (2000)

The Word is on the Street

The gritty world of New York City street booksellers is exposed in a remarkable story that chronicles their lives and loves and their unique perspectives on life. Made on location at the sidewalk book tables of New York by a fellow street bookseller, 'BookWars' explores the other side of the book tables along the streets of the Village, on the Lower East Side, along 6th avenue, and elsewhere in New York City. See the Mayor, the University and the NYPD try to shut them down!

Date of release
2000-06-09
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (5)
Runtime
1h 19m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Jason Rosette

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: New York City

BookWars is a New York bookseller documentary by Jason Rosette produced by Camerado, about the life and times of New York City street booksellers. Made on an ultra-low budget in a jazzy, impressionistic style reminiscent of the films of Robert Frank and poetry of the Beat Generation, BookWars is the only first-person documentary made during then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's controversial "Quality of Life" campaign, which sought to limit and control individuals engaged in informal economic activities on the streets of New York City.

Production

The concept for BookWars was developed after a chance meeting between filmmaker Jason Rosette—who had been selling used and out of print books at a streetside bookstand to generate cash between film production and editing jobs—and Emmy Award-winning New York-based documentary filmmaker Michel Negroponte, at Mr. Rosette's sidewalk bookstand in 1995.

Mr. Rosette and fellow bookseller 'Slick' Rick Sherman had already been bringing a video camera on occasion to the book stand to document fellow booksellers and day-to-day life on the streets and sidewalks of New York. With a documentary concept in place, he began to bring a video camera daily to document the sights and sounds of the city of New York as seen from the perspective of a sidewalk bookseller.

Initial shooting was financed by the sale of the various used and out-of-print books at the filmmaker's bookstand. As more books were sold, more film and video stock could be bought, and production would continue.

Following the initial stage of shooting in New York, the director drove from New York to New Mexico where he had edited an earlier film at a colleague's Albuquerque-based production studio. In New Mexico in 1996, the first assembly of the movie, called The Book Wars, was edited on a tape-to-tape analogue system; that rough assembly was screened for the first time in on Super Bowl Sunday as part of an exhibition produced by Basement Films of Albuq…

Given that desktop editing solutions were not widely used or available at the time - and were expensive to rent - the filmmaker next drove out to Los Angeles with the assembly edit in hand, in order to attempt to secure access to one of the two primary nonlinear systems available at the time – an Avid or Media 100 system.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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