80 Blocks from Tiffany's

80 Blocks from Tiffany's (1980)

NEW YORK STREET GANGS vs. NEW YORK COPS: AUTHENTIC, EXPLICIT, and SHOCKING

This 1979 documentary depicts the daily life of gangs in the South Bronx. It deals primarily with two African American and Puerto Rican gangs known as the "Savage Skulls" and the "Savage Nomads".

Date of release
1980-03-04
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (26)
Runtime
1h 7m
Genres
Documentary, Crime
Director
Gary Weis

Casting

Interesting facts

80 Blocks from Tiffany's is a 1979 documentary directed by Gary Weis. It depicts the lives of gang members living in the South Bronx.

Production

Director, Gary Weis, created film shorts for Saturday Night Live in the late 1970s and NBC's entertainment division subsequently commissioned him to direct some full-length films to be aired during SNL's timeslot when the show was on summer hiatus. The film was shot by Weis and six crew members over the span of two weeks during the summer of 1979.

Other than the odd trip to Yankee Stadium, 80 Blocks from Tiffany's marked the first time that Weis had been to the South Bronx. In a 2010 interview with The New York Times, Weis reflected upon seeing the streets of the South Bronx for the first time—with its burned-out buildings falling to rubble and stripped-down cars abandoned in the streets—and said that the scene looked to him like "postwar Dresden".

In reference to the movie's title, Weis told The Guardian in 2010: "We gave it that title because it was 80 blocks away from where Tiffany's was on Fifth Avenue and these guys never, ever left the Bronx."

While the documentary was filmed for NBC, it did not make it to air. In a 2010 interview with BlackBook magazine, Weis said that NBC was reluctant to air the film because of a recent legal case brought against ABC related to a movie made by their entertainment division of the news. "They said it would have been fine if the news division [of NBC] had done it," Weis explained.

The film is distinctive because it captures an era of the South Bronx that was rarely captured on film. It also captures New York City just prior to the explosion of hip hop, the crack epidemic and the proliferation of guns among street gangs. The VHS version of the film increased in demand as the film gained a cult following, particularly among hip hop fans. Weis was unaware of the film's popularity until he came across it on YouTube in 2007.

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

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