Surveillance and Madison Square Garden: An Open Letter to James Dolan
On the day the Knicks return to the NBA Finals, a plea to release Frederick Wiseman's long-buried documentary on the world's most famous arena.
To: James Lawrence Dolan, aka JD, aka “Lord Jim,”
I greet you at the beginning of a great revival for our beloved Knickerbockers, jam-packed with the types of thrilling drives, celebrity encounters, and unbearably suspenseful long-shots at Madison Square Garden that remind us what we adore about New York basketball. The haters can no longer say you’ve consigned the Knicks to a permadrought (and if they try, you can just sic your pals from the NYPD on them, right?). You feel OK about booting Tom Thibodeau, and you sufficiently motivated the team into a Finals-or-bust mindset. They smothered the Hawks, after landing the largest halftime playoffs lead in league history! You even took time out from rehearsing with the Straight Shot to chat with the stinkin’ press at the arena this year! What more could everyone want from you?
Anyway, I’m not here to relitigate a season that all the gambler-subsidized podcasters will continue picking over for months to come. Rather, I approach with a different, more unorthodox request, one that has nothing to do with all the athletes or musicians (Springsteen! Rosaliá! Rick Ross! That Alex Warren guy!) set to bless the stages of MSG this summer, alongside your blues-strumming bandmates. I’m not even going to bring up all the surveillance stuff, no matter how many quirky photos you may have of my face from the annual Michigan State vs. Rutgers matchups. (That being said: Go Green!) I come before you today, rather, with a simple proposition, one that may appeal to your heart as a fellow artist, student of history, lover of this city, and custodian of a capital-E empirical legacy. I refer to the legacy of The Garden, the loving documentary tribute to MSG filmed by the late, great Frederick Wiseman at the tail end of the millennium, yet blocked from public view ever since. Thanks to you. Allegedly.
Wiseman passed this year at the age of 96, leaving behind an indelible record of this city through a corpus of—I’m sure you’ll agree—splendid New York films like The Cool World and In Jackson Heights. It seems an ideal moment, then, to complete that set with a belated public release of The Garden, a vantage point on MSG that preceded the buildout of your ubiquitous panopticon, featuring memories of the circus coming to town, the Knicks’ last pre-lockout season, the All-Star Game halftime revue that had Tim Hardaway rapping a number from Bring’n the Noise, Bring’n the Funk, and even the dog show. The gamut of the Garden, in all its glory, filmed in 1998 and booked for a big film-festival-and-PBS release in 2005—before you and your fellow Garden/Cablevision executives nixed that.
And look, you all had the contractual right to do so. In an unusual circumstance, Wiseman happened to offer your team final approval of the finished movie, and his ask for The Garden’s signoff came nearly seven years after he’d first graced Madison Square with all those cameras. A lot of things had changed by then. You took full control over the fine institution shouted out in Wiseman’s title. 9/11 happened. Bloomberg became mayor. Bernie Kerik began harassing Iraqis instead of nonwhite New Yorkers. The 2004 Republican convention (and some pesky hippie protesters) came to MSG. You lost Van Gundy and fired Don Chaney. No doubt: It’s stressful running an arena, and an affiliated network, and an entire cable-internet provider all at the same time, in the 21st century. If it’s true that, according to an anonymous source who spilled to David Blum, you “learned of [The Garden] and, without having seen it, ordered that it be made to go away”—hey man, I get it, the thing was three hours long and you were busy, probably with blues rehearsal come to think of it.
But some (i.e.- David Blum) have alleged that The Garden was obstructed because its final cut includes “three closed-door meetings in which Garden management discusses its strategy for labor negotiations,” interactions that The Lawyers described as “proprietary information about business strategy.” Just take out a couple bits of this secret chatter, your team insisted—but even if Wiseman had consented to leaving the fate of his hard-wrought film in MSG’s hands, he was not going to compromise his artistic integrity. As a businessman you may be thinking, what’s a few lines from a long-ass movie? But I urge you to consider it from your experiences as a singin’, strummin’ bluesman familiar with the principles of craft: What isn’t a few lines, especially when it comes to MSG’s historic operations? Not sure if you’ve seen any Wiseman flicks—though you should, especially the NYC ones!—but if and when you do, you’ll find that there’s a deliberate structure to the pacing, a careful curation of the interpersonal moments displayed from the projector, a rhythm that makes even six-hour installments feel like no time at all. Heck, if it were me, I’d consider it an honor that Wiseman would sift through his hundreds of hours of footage and find some of my quotidian corporatespeak worthy of exhibition on the big screen. We love an “Overheard in New York” quip, don’t we, folks?
Anyway, it’s been nearly 30 years since The Garden was shot and a little over 20 since it was cast to the legal vaults. A lotta the people involved with the original decision don’t work at MSG anymore, for whatever reason, and that’s none of our business. Plus, this isn’t going to earn even a quarter of the viewership of, say, the NBA YoungBoy doc. The Garden is something for the real New Yorkers and MSG lovers, those unthrifty ticket-buyers who preserve your perch of influence. Hopefully we can agree it’s been more than enough time to rethink this historical erasure. We know you don’t always have the warmest relationships with filmmakers, including those who happen to be dedicated Knicks fans. And you donated to and probably voted for a president who’s defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But people forgive and forget a lot, not least when a brand-new Knicks team is pulling off what may have seemed unimaginable amid the turmoil of the mid-aughts. There’s a lot to celebrate and appreciate about MSG right now, and you have the opportunity to ride off that and engender warmer feelings from New York’s struggling artists by granting The Garden the proper release it deserves. Hell, you could debut the screening at the Garden itself! I guarantee the sheer novelty would have butts in seats, all appreciators only.
And you’d be helping to consecrate the memory of a legend who’s done so much for this city, even though he didn’t even grow up or live here. “All I know is that I made a movie and I want the public to see it,” Wiseman once said of The Garden. The public wants to see it, too.