Previous: Friday at the festival

Saturday, May 11, 2002
12:45pm
The Family Festival is in full swing as I arrive in Tribeca. It's an absolutely gorgeous day, warm and sunny and breezy, and a stretch of Greenwich Street, blocked off to vehicular traffic, is jammed with people and dogs and activity tents and food stalls. Street festivals are a regular thing in Manhattan in the warm months, and they're almost always identical, whether they're taking place in the East Village or the Upper West Side. The same curry vendors and hot-dog carts and street musicians and flea-market hawkers turn out for all of them, with the same perfunctory attitude as the punters -- we'll all be doing the same thing again next weekend 20 blocks north, after all.

But this one is different, with a cheerier atmosphere. It feels more like a block party than the typical NYC street fair -- this is exactly what the neighborhood needed, the chance to remind itself that it is a neighborhood, a community of neighbors, residents and small-business owners coexisting side by side. This isn't a crime scene or a disaster site and a historical marker: it's where people live and work and spend their lives. The Greenwich Street restaurants that have set up dining tables on the sidewalks or are offering take-aways seem to be doing extremely good business.

Tall, colorful banners flutter in the wind around kids, so many little kids, with balloons, with painted faces, with ice cream. A performance stage at the north end of the festival is occupied, every time I pass by it during the day, by groups of kids being wildly creative: one bunch does a stand-up comedy routine; another demonstrates some kind of martial arts to rap music. (The crowds love them.) The littler kids are a few blocks down, doing artsy-craftsy stuff in the Barilla Pasta tent -- lots of moms will be presented with dried macaroni necklaces on Saturday night, I bet. Some kids pose for pictures with a guy in a foam Hey Arnold! costume or with the wax statue of Whoopi Goldberg from Madame Tussaud's.

But these are the real heroes of the day, and not only to the kids:

The little boys -- a handful of them, each maybe 5 or 6 years old -- who are actually in the firetruck are ecstatic at their good fortune, and will probably have to be pried out of the truck eventually. But what's the story with the grown man getting his picture taken with a fireman next to the truck? I can guess: It's still hard for me to resist hugging every fireman I see, and it doesn't help that every last one of them seems to me to be the handsomest, bravest man ever to walk the face of the Earth. And it's not just me: firemen, who never suffered from a lack of cool in the first place, have become like minor gods in New York. Maybe this guy figured asking for a photo was a more manly request than asking for a hug.

1:30pm
One of my pet peeves -- the generally poor depiction of science onscreen -- is being addressed at the festival through The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Series, which is celebrating the instances when movies get it right. In addition to two panel discussions on the subject -- which I'd have loved to attend but I'd have needed to clone myself to do so -- four wonderful science-themed films are being screened: Pi, October Sky, Enigma, and GATTACA. I didn't plan it, but the one I'll get to see right now is the one I haven't seen before: Enigma.

Based on Robert Harris's novel, Enigma sets a fictional murder-and-espionage mystery in the real historical setting of England's Bletchley Park, a facility whose secret purpose during World War II was to decode German communications. Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet play, basically, geeks, math geeks whose knowledge of a stolen Nazi code machine helps them unravel a conspiracy among spies and turncoats at the Park. It's a terrifically suspenseful film with a fabulous cast, including the delicious Jeremy Northam as a posh intelligence agent.

4:13pm
I missed lunch at the Hospitality Suite! So I buy a slice of what turns out to be excellent pizza and sit on the curb in the middle of the family festival to eat it. When I'm finished, I go in search of a garbage bin for my greasy napkin, and find this:

The Twin Towers aren't gone -- they're still all around us, everywhere we look.

4:52pm
This is the eeriest thing I've seen in a long time:

In a covered walkway that's part of Pace University -- where some of the festival events are taking place -- there's a whole bunch of bicycles chained to bike racks. You'd never guess they were abandoned, except for the fact that they're covered in chalky gray dust, the kind that coated Lower Manhattan when the towers disintegrated. I ask a couple of students hanging around if the bikes have actually been there since September 11, and they say Yes, probably. And I can't help but wonder why. Did they belong to students who evacuated on 9/11 and couldn't endure returning to school afterward?

The reminders are everywhere. If you can't bear to look up at the empty skyline, well, looking down at the ground isn't always much of a comfort, either.

5:10pm
Things are still running like a well-oiled machine, and this is just about to get started. I can feel how antsy the audience is, itching to know who'll be participating in this panel discussion: "New York, New York: A Moviemaker's Muse." With a tantalizing title like that, there are so many fascinating artists we could be treated to.

And then come the announcements: Moderating the panel will be Nick Davis, whose documentary New York at the Movies aired on A&E back in March. On the panel will be Jay Cocks, film critic turned screenwriter (so it can be done -- there's hope for me yet); Richard Price, novelist and screenwriter; and director Martin Scorsese.

I'm in heaven. Scorsese is one of my movie heroes. His GoodFellas is no. 10 on my list of movies that warped my brain and made me the critic I am today. It was partly because he attended New York University's Film School that I wanted to study there, too. This is so cool.

The discussion is both wide-ranging and intimate, with all three panelists and Davis exploring both what the city means to them as artists and as New Yorkers, and how the city is depicted on film. And it echoes just about every conversation with fellow New Yorkers about film I've ever had. Some choice tidbits:

Cocks: "One of the biggest disappointments is to see another city double for New York." (Toronto ain't ever gonna pass for NYC.)

Price: "California is about open spaces, and New York is about containment." (Crowded subways and confined apartments make us all neurotic.)

Scorsese: "Shooting becomes a part of the street life." Price concurs: "You don't have to worry about anyone looking into the camera." (You only have to worry about them complaining that they're shooting another movie on their block.)

As happens with all New York conversations, it turns to September 11. Scorsese and Cocks talk for a bit about Gangs of New York, their new film about pre-Civil War Manhattan that will hopefully, finally be released this year, and how it has some startling resonance with current events. Now I'm dying to see it all the more.

8:05pm
I can't get into a screening of Insomnia. I can't get into a screening of The Importance of Being Earnest. In fact, all of the evening's screenings have been Xed off the board in the press office -- no more press tickets. Bummer. Insomnia and Earnest are opening theatrically very soon and I'll get to see them shortly after the festival, at regular press screenings, but I'm loving the atmosphere of the festival too much for that to be much of a consolation. [my Insomnia review] [my Earnest review]

Next: Sunday at the festival

--MaryAnn Johanson

all photos by yours truly