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Authors: Mark Jacobson

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A chunky shopper with headphones slapped on her ears strolled by, blissfully oblivious to the urban tumult. She never saw the bum-rushing zombie.


Dead Roses
!” the zombie grunted, shoving the DVD box in the shopper's face.

“Ahhhh!” the shopper shreiked, dropped her plastic bags, and ran down the street.

The zombie followed. “Wait, lady … wait! I'm not a real zombie! I'm only a
promotional
zombie!” The woman kept running, into the crowd.

This was the downside of direct marketing, allowed Robert McCorkle, the director and writer of
Dead Roses
, almost certainly the most ornately plotted full-length zombie movie ever shot exclusively on location in the housing projects of Bedford-Stuyvesant. (Hence the film's tagline: Brooklyn Has a New Evil!!!) Until recently a financial analyst's assistant cooped up in a cubicle at a Midtown investment-banking firm, it has always been the ambition of McCorkle, a thirty-five-year-old monster movie freak, to make his own “epic horror films … you know, that end-of-the-world stuff with millions dying.” Alas, McCorkle's budget was decidedly less than epic (it was, as he says, “less than indie, it was sub-sub indie”). This was a problem since even if rappers producing their own discs in their bedroom and selling them out of the back of a car are a dime a dozen these days, a brother making his own movie, with his own money, was a whole other, much more complicated affair. For one thing, you needed a camera, which McCorkle did not have. And you needed to know how to operate that camera, which McCorkle only kind of did. You also needed a distribution method, which is what the foray to 125th Street was about. As McCorkle says, his layers of latex starting to peel, “Who better to sell a zombie movie than a zombie?”

Then again, as an auteur of street cinema, McCorkle's
mise-en-scène
has never been less than gung ho. “People told me, all the zombies needed was a little talcum powder on their faces,” says McCorkle, who personally designed and applied all the film's makeup. “To me a zombie isn't a zombie unless he's decayed. Putrefied. Mutilated. All messed up. Totally fucked. I mean, they're
dead
, right? So I taught myself how to put this stuff on, from reading
Fangoria
magazine and on the Internet. Just because we're low-budget doesn't mean it can't be realistic—at least movie realistic.”

Whether or not
Dead Roses
is movie realistic—or at least
Plan 9 from Outer Space
realistic—depends on how you look at those kinds of things.
Shot and edited in digital video for $6,000 over a year's time, the film has pithy dialogue that's occasionally inaudible, an unsettling obsession with dismembered body parts, and lighting that goes blooey every so often. But
Dead Roses
is still imbued by a defiant sense of the verisimilitude.


Night of the Living Dead
in the projects? Now that's a concept I can get behind,” said
Dead Roses
producer and star Johnathan Tucker when he first met McCorkle at the aforementioned banking firm where Tucker ran the mailroom. Having grown up in Bed-Stuy wanting to be an actor—and having acquired some street cred for an (uncredited) part in the pioneer hip-hop film
Krush Groove
—Tucker, a large-voiced guy with a rakish look and demeanor, had tried writing for TV and taken several film-production classes. But he was frustrated.

“I had that pay-bill frustration, that work-at-Home-Depot-on-the-weekend frustration. Robert changed that. He was kind of quiet around the office, kept to himself. I didn't know what to make of him at first. But we got to talking. He's kind of what you'd call a dreamer. Head in the clouds. Really out there, man. He told me about
Dead Roses
and I said:
Yeah, screw the system. Do it ourselves
.”

Sharing McCorkle's fervor for slasher/sci-fi/horror movies, especially the moment when Linda Blair's head does that 360 thing before spitting up a pint of pea soup in the first
Exorcist
, Tucker, a thorough-going pragmatist who spent ten years selling real estate in Park Slope, recognized the zombie genre as exceedingly budget-friendly. “What you need, in the end, is a bunch of screwed-up-looking people stumbling around with their hands held out in front of them.”

“We shot mostly at night,” Tucker recounts. “A lot of it was done at the low-rise project where Reevse Bobb (
Dead Roses
' cowriter and cinema-tographer) lives near Boys and Girls High School. We got the zombies from the neighborhood. We saw people hanging out and asked them, ‘Hey man, you want to be a zombie?' They'd stand there for a while and then say, ‘Huh?' We say, ‘you're perfect.'

“Robert wanted each zombie to be unique, you know, with their own distinctive running sores and stab wounds. So it took a while for each of them to get made up. After an hour or two these street guys would have,
like, five pounds of junk on, and they'd begin asking, ‘Hey, what I'm getting paid for this?' We'd tell them, ‘Well, nothing.' Some got testy and start yelling, ‘You put all this shit on my head and I ain't getting paid?' We told them they could have points. On the back end. That shut 'em up.

“All sorts of strange stuff happened. We had a scene with fifteen zombies and wham, our generator blows out. I convinced this old lady to let us run an extension cord through the window. Robert says, ‘Action,' and the electricity goes out again. I ran up to the lady's apartment and her granddaughter is standing there with the cord in her hand looking really pissed off. She just got off the swing shift cleaning office buildings and pulled the plug. She's screaming, ‘
You'll not be stealin' my grandma's 'lectricity!
'

“Another night, we were doing this scene where a bunch of zombies get their head blown off with sawed-off shotguns. I guess maybe we should have done it indoors, not out on the street. It's like two in the morning and these people are hanging out the windows. This guy was yelling,
they're blowing the fuck out of zombies down there
. They thought it was real. Then, out of nowhere, these cop cars are coming up from every direction. Lights. Sirens. The whole deal. They got their guns drawn, spread-eagling us against parked cars. Then one of the cops is pointing at the street and says, ‘What's that?' I told him it was brains.

“‘Brains?'

“‘Zombie brains.'

“Now there's six cops with their guns out at Troy and Decatur, looking at a pile of fake brains. We were using beef fat from the Spanish butcher's. One of the cops is knocking at the fat with his foot. It kind of oozed. I thought he'd lose it right there. Finally they told us to get a permit and left.”

It is no small tribute to cross-cultural, semiprofessional horror-fan mania that
Dead Roses
came out more than watchable—way more watchable, say, than Melvin Van Peebles's
Sweet Sweetbacks
. McCorkle has a way with cheesy FX, and Tucker's final confession of remorse (he plays the gang leader who has wronged the heroine) is kind of touching, at least until he's ripped apart, limb from limb, by a gaggle of underfed zombies.

But creation is only the outset of art. It must be brought to the marketplace. “We weren't exactly going the Sundance route,” says Johnathan Tucker, unloading a stack of DVDs from the back of his Chevy Tahoe in front of the Target department store on Flatbush Avenue. Business is brisk; in an hour, Tucker and McCorkle (sans makeup this time) move sixty “units,” for a total of near twelve hundred now. “Keep this up and we'll be in profit soon enough,” says Tucker.

Just then a guy in a Nissan Pathfinder comes wheeling around the corner near the Williamsburg Savings Bank building. “Saw the movie, man!” he shouts. “Scared the shit out of me!” Watching the Nissan head down Atlantic Avenue, the filmmakers agreed, you couldn't ask for a better review than that.

5
Chairman of the Money

Charlie Rangel has been Harlem's representative to the United States Congress for the past thirty-six years and counting. This is the story of the dean of New York delegate's most impeccably American journey. From
New York
magazine, 2007
.

When Charlie Rangel, DeWitt Clinton High School dropout, first became a congressman from Harlem in 1971, beating the iconic Adam Clayton Powell Jr. by 150 votes, he would drive to Washington from his home on 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue in a beat-up Buick. “It was cheaper,” says Rangel in his quarry-pit voice. But mostly Rangel has flown the shuttle. Figuring how many times he'd made the trip, Rangel said multiply 36 (the years he's been in office) times 52 times 2 (round-trips per week). From that, subtract the time Congress wasn't in session. Still, it's a lot of flights. But never had Dan Rather risen from his window seat to greet him.

“Mr. Chairman,” Rather said, with a slight nod of the head.

This is how it is for Charlie Rangel post-11/7, since the Democrats won Congress and the seventy-six-year-old Harlem rep became the chairman-to-be of the House Ways and Means Committee, a body usually prefixed by the adjective
powerful
. Delineated in the Constitution, the committee has the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts,” that is, Ways and Means is where the deals are cut on
taxes, borrowing funds, Social Security, and control of trade and tariff legislation.

In other words, Rangel rasps, “the money.”

The Chairman of the Money tends to be a popular guy. Then again, Charlie Rangel has always been popular in Harlem, where many residents have never known another congressman. What is now called the Fifteenth District has been represented by exactly two men since 1945—Rangel and Powell. Asked if this was democracy, two guys in sixty-two years, Rangel honks, “The people know what they want.” Rangel has been reelected seventeen times, usually with more than 90 percent of the vote. Since “the chairmanship,” however, on One-Two-Five Street and up in Dominican Washington Heights (Hispanics make up 46 percent of the district now), wherever Charlie shows up, silvery hair swept back, iris shock tie and pocket handkerchief matched up just right, he is shown an extra helping of love.

“People come up to me saying, ‘We did it, we finally made it,'” reports Rangel, who's been on Ways and Means since 1975, the last ten excruciating years as ranking member of the minority Democrats. “It's like the whole neighborhood's moving up.”

Ride with Rangel for a few days and congratulations come from every angle. They're lining up to kiss the outsize green opal ring on his finger. One minute State Assembly strongman Shelly Silver is calling him “my great friend, one of our own … whom we can trust to do the right thing.” Then Mickey Kantor, former U.S. trade representative, is on the phone. Congrats on the chairmanship, says Kantor, and, by the way, maybe Rangel might want to talk a bit about U.S.-China trade relations? Mary Landrieu, senator from Louisiana, adds her good wishes, but what about that offshore-drilling bill?

And here comes Hillary, charging down the buffed hallways of the Capitol Building, with a hearty “Mr. Chairman!” Just the other day, Rangel ate breakfast with the senator in Harlem. Rangel figures he'll overlook Hillary's early prowar stance. “If I swallowed John Kerry, I can swallow that,” he says. Rangel (who told Barack Obama to “go for it if you want; if you don't, you'll wind up hating yourself”) doesn't think Rudy Giuliani's
running (“He's just building up his billings”) but hopes he does because “it'll be fun, kicking the crap out of him.”

The whiplash over the power shift from lily-white Houston boardrooms to Sugar Hill has only begun. The other day, men from Pfizer dropped by Rangel's 125th Street office. “He just wanted to say hello,” Rangel recounts. As for those nasty details about drug pricing (“gouging,” Rangel calls it) and exactly how the new chairman—a harsh critic of the status quo “health-care disaster”—was likely to view the role of big-time pharmaceutical companies, well, that was another conversation.

“I've got so many new friends these days,” Rangel says with mock amazement.

Rangel's new status was clear enough during the recent dustup over the draft. Appearing on
Face the Nation
, Rangel kept to less sexy Ways and Means issues, like the alternative minimum tax currently draining middle-class 1040s. As Charlie Rangel performances go, it was fairly uneventful. At no time did Rangel call Dick Cheney “a son of a bitch” or suggest the vice president check into “rehab [to deal with] whatever personality deficit he may have suffered.” Nor did Rangel, as he did following Hurricane Katrina, refer to George W. Bush as “our Bull Connor,” a man who “shattered the myth of white supremacy once and for all.” Then host Bob Schieffer asked Rangel if he still believed in reinstating the draft.

Military conscription has little to do with Ways and Means, but Charlie Rangel, the most canny of loose cannons, has never been one to underplay his hand in a big spot. “You bet your life,” said Rangel, who has long opposed the volunteer army, saying politicians would think twice about starting wars if their own children had to fight them.

Rangel told Schieffer: “If we're going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can't do that without a draft…. How can anyone support the war and not support the draft?”

The reaction in the blogosphere and every other “-osphere” was loud and unanimous: Rangel was bonkers. The limp liberals of the
New York Times
editorial page, haven to who knows how many recipients of 2-S college deferments, said a draft would not achieve the aim of making “the
armed forces more equitably representative of American society.” The chicken hawks of the right wing lambasted Rangel's assertion that the military was inordinately composed of “people who can't get a job doing anything better.” There were plenty of potential Rhodes scholars and Hardee's CFOs slogging through the Iraqi sands, angry radio voices declared. To suppose otherwise was downright unpatriotic. As a testament to Rangel's runaway moonbatism, commentators pointed out that when he introduced his draft bill in 2004, it was defeated 402 to 2.

BOOK: American Gangster
4.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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