Drop Dead City
Drop Dead City: New York on the Brink in 1975

Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn's exploration of how New York City almost went bankrupt in 1975 may not be groundbreaking cinema, but it's an engaging and well-constructed documentary that comes at a particularly interesting time. The film depicts what right-leaning commentators warn will happen again under New York's new socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, but digs deeper than shallow comparisons between two radically different eras. The screen is filled with footage of striking workers, piled up garbage, burning buildings, people living in squalor, and footge of both corrupt and well-meaning leaders, but it clearly and intelligently breaks down how things got to where they got by the time President Ford's views toward bailing the city out were ufamistically characterized as telling the city to "Drop Dead."

The reasons for the city's economic situation in 1975 are akin to what led to the "too big to fail" financial disaster of 2008 as much as they are to the policies Mamdani ran on. The film explores how the progressive values of 1970s New York, which were trying to fortify a vigorous working class, combined with years of overspending, lost tax revenue caused by white flight, unstable debt securities issued by banks to fund public projects, the willful ignorance of voters, and the constant can-kicking by those in leadership, almost destroyed the nation's greatest city. The filmmakers assemble a solid cast of talking heads to explain things convincingly without dumbing them down, and they manage to make the movie fairly entertaining as well.