Filmmaker Neil Barsky discusses the making of his film, Koch.
POV: So for those who have not seen the film Koch, or who do not know Ed Koch, tell us a little about the film and who he is.
Barsky: Well, the film is about sort of has interweaves two stories. One is the story of New York City in its darkest days, basically through the arc of his political career, let's say 1978 through 1989 with all the plagues that New York was beset by — crime and graffiti and crack and AIDS and homelessness — and his attempts to sort of steer the ship for good or bad. Then there's a secondary story of the arc of his personal life, more of a contemporary story. We filmed it in 2010 – 2011. We filmed it when he was about 86, 87, and it's really about a man struggling with mortality and his legacy while trying to stay relevant. And so by weaving the two stories, I think we painted an affectionate picture of Koch, warts and all, but also we wanted to help people understand how contemporary New York came to be. As you know, the New York of 1985 – 1989 was dramatically different from how it is today.
POV: So take us back to that period 1979, before he became mayor.
Barsky: He was elected mayor in a very colorful race in the summer of 1977. That was the Summer of the Son of Sam, a mass murderer who had scared New York City out of its wits. It was the summer the New York Yankees won the World Series, it was the summer of a horrible blackout with rioting — eventful on many levels. And this was one of the most colorful campaigns any city had ever seen. Larger than life characters like Mario Cuomo, who was Koch's bette noire as he's described in the film, Ed Koch, Bella Abzug who was a prominent feminist congresswoman, Herman Badillo, the first Hispanic or Puerto Rican congressman, and Percy Sutton, a leading African American politician. So these were real giants clashing. And it was against a backdrop of New York having just escaped bankruptcy, where there was a need to restructure its finances at the state level. But it was far from clear then that New York City would recover. Become a world capital that it is today. I mean it was a very depressed city back then, colorful but depressed. And depressing.
POV: We have cities going through bankruptcy now. What was it that Koch was able to steer the city through that process?
Barsky: Well, I think he had two major contributions. One, he was a fiscal conservative, as in he understood intuitively that you had to say no, which was not a word New Yorkers had heard very much, and Koch thrived on it. In fact, he had such a style that this became his trademark: Engaging with people, arguing with people, pushing people around. So in an era of shrinking resources, he was able to recognize that very early and do what he had to do to right the fiscal ship.
Second, he restored the city's morale. As I said, New York City was depressed. Its previous mayor Abe Beam was literally a smaller than life guy who was an accountant. New York City lost a million jobs in the decade before and Koch by virtue of his personality — "How'm I doing?" his trademark, his humor, and his ability to engage with the public — he sort of got New York City its mojo back. The economy was still terrible, but between restoring the fiscal ship and really injecting an energy into New York, he became quite popular and he won in a massive landslide his first reelection and his second reelection.
Subsequently, a matter less recognized by New Yorkers and one of the things we dealt with in the film, once the city's fiscal situation was righted, he invested over $5 billion rebuilding its neighborhoods. Koch's housing program was largely responsible for the rebuilding of the Bronx, rebuilding of the many neighborhoods, and I think it was something we didn't think he got a lot of credit for. It was something he didn't even seek a lot of credit for, but he understood once you have a city that's fiscally strong, there's great things government can do. And so he understood both ends which few politicians I would say do today.
POV: Often described as one of his greatest legacies is the revitalization of those outer borough neighborhoods. But describe those neighborhoods before the mid-70s, and that transition process.
Barsky: The South Bronx was the international symbol of urban decay. My family grew up there, my parents grew up there, I was born there, and through the '70s and early '80s there was a massive disinvestment, arson, and you could drive for blocks and blocks and just see rubble. I mean it's mind boggling today. When Ronald Reagan visited Charlotte Street, he said we've got to rebuild this rubble lot. Four years later Jimmy Carter visited it, and it was a nagging sore in the country. One of the reasons I was inspired to do the movie started about eight years ago. My daughter, who is a social worker, was in high school at the time, and I mean it's a cloudy day and I had not really been through the city's neighborhoods for many years and I said to her, "You want to see what slums are like, let me show you how people really live in New York," and we drove through the Bronx. I went over the Cross Bronx Expressway to the Grand Concourse and through the Bronx, and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and the rubble was gone. Entire neighborhoods had been rebuilt and I hadn't been there in ten years and it struck me, how did this happen?
I don't think as New Yorkers we really understand that it was not inevitable that New York would be rebuilt, that it would come back and so the film in part tries to trace the seeds when New York was still terrible when he left, but we try to show the process by which New York reversed its fortune.
POV: Describe Ed Koch as a Personality.
Barsky: Ed Koch was a completely honest human being and an utter narcissist. People loved him because he was in their face, he said what he felt, he was not a politician in the classic sense. I'm diagnosing him, maybe I'm not qualified, but while he was able to engage with the public in a way that few politicians ever could--his street smarts were amazing--he also ultimately had difficulty empathizing with people. That would became his downfall I think. That's why he lost and that really tarnished his legacy a bit.
While he was a lover of New York, he didn't live here his whole life. He spent really much of his childhood in Newark, New Jersey but he came back after serving in World War II and lived here his whole adult life. He was one of the proudest New York – obsessed people of all time for good and not so good. I would say he lacked empathy often. During the AIDS crisis, I think he was perceived as not seeing this as a human catastrophe. The city was quite racially divided when he was here and I don't think he did anything to heal those wounds, I think he exacerbated them because he was such a fighter, and he didn't understand the pain of having your hospital closed or being homeless. So while he was out there in the classic sense of being candid, telling it like it is, when people suffering were involved he had very little empathy, but he also had very little empathy for himself. I spent countless hours with him; he never complained about anything. "I had a great life, I have no regrets." He as you may know did not have a life partner. "I'm not lonely, this is the life I chose." Even when we were shooting the film, when it got hot or cold, he would never complain. He was a guy who singularly lacked self pity and empathy. It's complicated and I don't feel fully qualified to give a psychological diagnosis but people have said this is what narcissism is. It's an inability to see beyond yourself.
POV: You talked a little bit about how your going through the Bronx with your daughter was part of the inspiration in starting the film, but how did you reach out to him and persuade him to participate?
Barsky: Sure, I when I decided to pursue the film, I reached out to Diane Coffey who was his chief of staff, who is in the film very prominently, very close friend of his and really his gatekeeper after she stopped working for him. And I met with her, I told her roughly what we wanted to do and she said let's meet with Ed. And I met with him and within five minutes he said let's do it. There were no stipulations. No conditions. He did ask that he see a cut of the film before we finished, before we locked so he can comment with no ability to make any changes. And I later learned this is quite rare for a public figure whether it's in the entertainment or sports or political world to have no control at all over the film. He encouraged people to help us, he said ask me any question, and so it was truly an arm's length independent film.
After a long time, almost two years after we started which was as you can imagine a little longer than we anticipated he finally came to our screening room with Diane to see the film. It was my producer, my editor and myself, and we watched them watch the film. And at the end of the film he said, "I'm going to take the reel with me to my grave." Meaning, he was so relieved or happy, which you don't want to hear as a filmmaker because we're trying to show a multi dimensional man, but after he left, after they left, Diane called me and she said thank you. I said why? She said well, he was concerned that the film was going to be released after he died and that the film would basically chop him up and that this would become his legacy and he was relieved that he felt it was a three dimensional film. And so as you know he did pass away on the day the film was released, but this was a man who tremendously cared about how people viewed him especially as mayor of New York. The day I met with him a survey had come out and had ranked him the fifth greatest mayor or the eighth greatest mayor of all time and it killed him. It killed him that Rudy Giuliani had been ranked in that survey, I mean it would kill me too, ahead of Ed Koch.
POV: I want to just go onto his legacy a little bit more. What were some of the other areas where he was able to create a great shift around and also some of the areas that he really had failed in...can you talk about them?
Barsky: It's interesting, certainly his greatest legacy I think materially is housing. Independent judiciary, smoking reform, pooper scoopers were all done under his watch. I don't think he tamed the city, the crime rate was quite high when he left, but as I said I think he planted the seeds for many, many of the great things that happened.
However, there were two constituencies I think that he had quite contentious relationship with and to this day is really for many people an open wound. First the African American community. When he was mayor I would say that was his least fine hour in 1989 in the midst of a very contentious mayoral campaign, his fourth, there was a black kid who was killed in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn which was an all white neighborhood and in those days this was sort of a quite an incendiary thing. There were demonstrators walking through the streets of Brooklyn, there was a lot of confrontations and he had two choices. He could say Yusef Hawkins, the name of the kid that was killed, was a son of New York, this is a human tragedy and we should mourn him. Or you can do what he ended up doing which was saying don't march, don't blame the neighborhood, and he was not able to identify at all with the victim or the victim's family.
I think if he'd taken the first tack he would have been reelected. But it underscored for many New Yorkers then just how divisive he'd been and that was really his undoing. Subsequently, in the years hence, I think he built a lot of bridges with the African American community. He became friends with Al Sharpton, he was arrested in a sit-in, and I think he regretted how destructive his relationship was with the black community while mayor.
The other group would be the gay community. He was mayor during the AIDS crisis, he was widely perceived I think both fairly and unfairly as having been slow to address the AIDS crisis and he also, as the film makes clear, was, you know was Ed Koch gay? Ed Koch's sexuality was a critical part of his biography and he was always hounded by rumors that he was gay. He denied it, then he said it's nobody's business, but in the gay community and not only the gay community, he was perceived as being in the closet. So if you take this mayor who was mayor under the worst health crisis maybe that the country has ever experienced and he is not able to use his position to truly inspire, rally the city behind you know research, education, et cetera, I'm not saying this well at all...
Because he was perceived as being gay, and in the closet, his slowness in addressing the AIDS crisis basically poured fuel on this fire, and to this day many people in the gay community consider him criminally negligent in how he addressed the AIDS crisis. My own view is the city was slow and caught up very quickly. He was very pro gay rights, the city passed very innovative early gay rights legislation but he could not use his platform to truly change the world and as a maybe gay mayor, if he had come out, I think people see that as a massively lost opportunity.
And since being mayor, his reputation with the African American community may have improved, but among the gay community I'd say it deteriorated. And there's been some demonstrations outside his apartment recently when they wanted to name a street after him. He is beat up terribly in other documentaries that depict that AIDS crisis because he's perceived as having been slow, but the extra rage I think is partly because he is perceived as being in the closet at a time where political courage would have been very fruitful.
POV: Well, is there a particular responsibility on that position of being mayor of New York City which has a big significant gay community to speak up for the communities that are being marginalized?
Barsky: Well even let's forget that he was or not gay; let's put aside the whether he was gay. I think he was very forthright with terms of civil rights and he spoke very forthrightly about integrating people with AIDS into society and lowering the fear. He did that. But he was never able to articulate people's pain and he was never able to show that he felt their pain as AIDS sufferers. I mean this was a human tragedy. It was a public health tragedy, it was a human tragedy and I think if you overlay the perception that he was gay that failure is what is responsible for such an emotional reaction to his...you're right. He doesn't have a particular obligation because he may or may not be gay. But he was the mayor and I do think he showed good policy leadership and maybe poor human leadership during the crisis. And that has led to the bitter view that many in the gay community feel toward him today.
I said earlier Ed Koch was honest, candid, no B.S. but he made deals and when he ran for office in 1977. He went to Harlem, went to the county leaders and he said I'm going to keep this hospital open. This was a hospital in Harlem which was suffering, didn't deliver the best healthcare but it was an important symbol on the community and said I'm going to keep it open. Two years later his budget people said we should close the hospital. He said we're closing it. So again, had he said this is a horrible loss to the Harlem community, we will replace its healthcare, we have no choice but to do this, he probably could have worked with the community but instead he pushes back. He says I'm not a racist, you're a racist. And there were demonstrations. And this was 1980, he'd only been in office two years, and this was really the beginning of the deterioration of his relationship with the African American community. It wasn't just that he closed the hospital, it's that he told them that he wouldn't when he was running for office.
POV: Let's talk a little bit about his outside of New York City. He ran for governor of New York. And he was also a congressman prior to being mayor. What was his life outside of that?
Barsky: I would say he might have been the most famous mayor that the country has ever had. He was on the cover of Time magazine, he was on Saturday Night Live at least four times. He had a best-seller. A national best-seller for two months. His "How'm I Doing" motto was sort of widely known. We had Mayor Daley and there are others who are notorious, but he was actually famous and while in New York...what works in New York politics seems to never work outside New York. Rudy Giuliani didn't go anywhere nationally. John Lindsay ran for president, people might not remember 1972, went nowhere. But he basically had an international profile, in fact it was said of him that New York City is the only city in the country with a foreign policy. He gave President Carter fits over the Middle East. He battled with Jesse Jackson over the Middle East. He went to Poland, he went to Egypt, he waved at the pyramids and wave at the people especially in his hey day before the municipal scandal. He was arguably the most famous mayor the country has ever had.
He knew how to use media. He had a humor that was quite endearing to even people outside of New York. And so yeah, I would say he was probably the first national figure who never went any further than mayor.
POV: So what happened to his run for governor?
Barsky: Well his run for governor was 1982, the peak of his popularity, and he was egged on to run by the New York Post run by Rupert Murdoch. He had a good chance. He was running against Mario Cuomo, as I said his nemesis who he ran against in many venues, and he was leading in the polls. And then in the middle of the campaign it turned out six months earlier he'd given a Playboy interview. In those days Playboy magazine had these massive interviews and he sat for days with a Playboy reporter, not knowing, not realizing he'd be running for governor up the road, so he trashed the suburbs. He called them sterile. He says why would you want to live upstate, what are you going to drive in your pickup truck to Sears? I mean he was very funny but he disparaged basically half the population that he was running whose votes he was eventually seeking. So he lost in the primary to Governor Cuomo. He'd later say thanks, living in Albany would be death. But it was a setback and it also fueled this personal rivalry with the Cuomos which exists all through the movie up to the very end when Andrew Cuomo in 2010 wins for governor and snubs Koch. I mean the Cuomos and Koch have had a rivalry, a bitterness that really lasts to this day, even you know past Koch's death.
POV: So there's an ongoing conversation with Koch, public versus private. And he was fiercely protective of not answering those questions. Where did he draw that line and how did he enforce it, and as a filmmaker how did you breakthrough that?
Barsky: So when we met Koch, when I met Koch at first I said the elephant in the room is his sexuality. I mean it's a critical part of his biography, we couldn't ignore it, but nor did we want to investigate his sexuality. That wasn't what the film was about so I said to him we will go as far on this issue as you want. You've made public statements, we'll include those and if you want to talk about it we'll talk about it. But we had no desire to investigate his private life and come to conclusions. That wasn't what the film was about. But we had to deal with it.
And we finally had the day, you know the day that we were planning on asking him questions about his sexuality. And we had dinner that night and I sort of said these are what I want to ask you and just to you know prepare him and he said ask me anything you want. And we did. And every filmmaker, every interviewer wants to be the one to get the subject to say what he's never said before on camera. That was not going to happen. I mean this is a guy that is more practiced at being interviewed than maybe any politician in history. And very often I felt that as an interviewer, you know you want to control the subject, but I felt he was controlling us and we were very frustrated that we couldn't get him to say anything beyond what he said in the past, which was none of your business.
But if you know if you ask somebody something enough times and you depict it enough different ways, sometimes they reveal by not revealing. So for example every time he talked about it he would use a swear word. None of your f-ing business. You'll notice in the film. And he would get much more angry. I don't give an s. You know things like this. And so we let it stay there and I think he revealed a lot just by showing how tough and stubborn he was and then there's a scene at the end of the film where after this long night of campaigning, it was election night 2010, we follow him home past the doorman, up the elevator, down the hall, by himself, and he closes the door, and to me the issue is not whether Koch was gay, it was that Koch was alone. And that that has, I'm not saying it's not important whether he was gay or not, but that is what informed him. He did not live with another adult his entire adult life. And there is a poignancy to that. And a sadness to that. And if he was gay, I would say that was a price he chose to pay. He had a good life. I think he had no regrets but there's something sad about that and we say in the film, one of the people we interview, the public was his family. And that's a cliché and it's true. When he went outside he lit up, he was the most approachable person on the street. He loved to engage with people and I do think there was a cost. I think that he paid a price and you could say it was generational. If you were gay in the '60s you could be gay or you could be mayor of New York. You couldn't be both. And he may have made those choices. And people you know what did the pope say, who am I to judge? I don't really have a strong view one way or another, I think he would have been happier if he told the truth about who he was through his life, but he did it his way and he loved talking about it by the way. It's not like he didn't want to talk about it. He loved saying none of your f-ing business. He liked the subject. He wrote articles about it for New York Magazine, so it was the elephant in the room and we can all have our opinions and I probably have mine and I assume he was gay but I don't know.
But there was something I think what was more interesting was that he never had anyone he had to care for or who cared for him under the roof, under his roof, and I did find that somewhat sad, especially as he got older and he relied more and more on his older friends. And he had a sister with nephews who he loved so he wasn't completely alone, but he was basically alone.
POV: So take us back to that period 1979, before he became mayor.
Barsky: When I was growing up I lived in New York in the 1970s, and it was assumed that cities deteriorated. Since World War II American cities deteriorated and a lot of the Midwest still, obviously Detroit has just filed for bankruptcy. And when I was living in New York it was an article of faith that it would get worse every year and it didn't. It turned around. It turned around for very specific reasons to New York but there were also some very universal reasons it turned around and I think just if anyone is interested in urban history and what makes cities the way they are, I think this would be a hopefully a meaningful film but beyond that this is a film about an 86 year-old man who hasn't been mayor for 24 years who is struggling to stay relevant and is speaking at the most obscure public places and campaigning for obscure officials and deep in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens and I think there's a poignancy to the movie irrespective that he was the mayor of New York and it is how do we live our lives as we get older as the glory fades.
He did a very good job frankly of staying alive because he was so engaged with the public but I would hope that people could also see the movie as a picture of an older gentleman struggling with mortality, legacy, as he is deep into his old age.