MCN Voices: Andrea Gronvall

Brooklyn. Basketball. Male bonding. Three things I know very little about first-hand. So as I began to watch the new documentary The Boys of 2nd Street Park,which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and debuts on Showtime this weekend, I half-expected to lose interest within the first ten minutes. Rarely am I as happy to be so wrong.

At first the movie doesn't look much different from a lot of standard-issue docs: digital camera, talking heads, roll in some archival footage, serve it all up with tracks of solid golden oldies. But the simplicity of the format is the only deceptive element of this remarkable film. A story of friendships begun and lives shaped on a Brighton Beach playground in the 1950s and '60s, The Boys of 2nd Street Park builds with raw honesty to a powerful emotional pitch, not once resorting to cheap sentiment. By the end, I felt I knew the main "cast" of six men--and one ex-wife--as though they were my family. Veteran filmmaker Michael Apted, beginning with 7 Up, achieved this intimacy in a landmark documentary series where he returned every seven years to catch up with the same group of people. First-time directors Dan Klores and Ron Berger get a similar result in just 91 minutes.

Maybe the comparison is unfair, as traditional British culture is notably more reticent and formal than that of a postwar Jewish working-class enclave like Brooklyn, where life was as in-your-face as the aggressive games Bernie Bandman, Frankie Bass, Larry Brown, Bobby Feld, Brian Newmark and Steve Satin played daily on the concrete courts of 2nd Street Park. Offspring of largely blue-collar families, some of them headed by Holocaust survivors, and residing in highly concentrated apartment blocks (100,000 people in a six-block area), these kids lived for shooting hoops when they weren't pursuing the educations their parents envisioned. Basketball not only took some of them on to college, it also laid the groundwork for a communal mindset that was ripe for the tsunami of Sixties counterculture. Cross-country road trips, drugs, shared habitats, open marriage, draft dodging and alternative, eco-friendly attitudes all molded this group into the mensches they are, in their mid-50s, today.

But as anyone who has lived long enough knows, the underbelly of the peace-and-love movement was the darkness that unbridled excess can lead to. A couple of the men became drug addicts; even the murder of one of the old gang, a womanizing dealer who overplayed his hand, was not enough to straighten them out initially. One young marriage could not withstand the pressures of a domesticity shared with numerous single friends who were always around, and tanked in less than a year. The "go with the flow" vibe proved self-destructive to one monumental underachiever. He, along with another buddy, a classic overachiever, did not find sustaining love until middle-age. And for two who started families, the spectre of a child's life cut short by incurable disease was the catalyst that launched one toward a career in psychology, medicine and public service, and the other bottoming out in homelessness.

It should be noted that filmmakers Klores and Berger have an advantage with their interview subjects, as they grew up and played alongside them in those Brooklyn playlots decades ago. This goes a good way toward accounting for the astonishing candor of the various disclosures; clearly, if you were part of that group then, you are still part of the group now, regardless that you're behind a camera. But then, neither Klores nor Berger are show business or mass-media neophytes. Dan Klores Communications is one of the country's biggest marketing/PR agencies, and Klores got his feet wet in production on Broadway with Paul Simon's Tony-nominated "The Capeman" (Simon contributed two songs to the soundtrack of The Boys of 2nd Street Park), and in film as executive producer for City By the Sea. Berger is a founding partner and CEO of the megabucks ad agency EURO RSCG Partners (you couldn't avoid Dunkin' Donuts' "Time to Make the Doughnuts" saturation campaign if you had wanted to, unless you're a Luddite).

Equally laudable is the tremendous contribution made by editor Michael Levine (The Cruise, the TV mini-series Baseball and The West), who shaped 80 hours of interviews with 25 people into an hour-and-a-half microcosm of America as experienced by six men in the second half of the 20th century. There are so many chronicles of the Vietnam War generation one would think we scarcely need another. But the final sequence of The Boys of 2nd Street Park shows us why this one holds it own. The old neighborhood participants--those whose interviews made it to the finished film, and those whose reminiscences landed on the cutting room floor--have a reunion on the playground. The encounters are variously wry, self-deprecating and heartwarming, no less so for having been set up by the directors. What is the point of going back over so much shared history, some of it deeply painful? Looking across these weathered survivors vying once again for baskets, we totally understand Bernie Bandman when he says, "Seeing everyone was like such pure joy, and I have to remind myself not to lose sight of that."

Welcome advice for a jaded generation.

The Boys of 2nd Street Park will play on the Showtime network Sunday, September 28th and Tuesday, September 30th.