American Gangster by Mark Jacobson

We told them they could have points. On the back end. That shut ’em up.
    â€œAll 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!
’
    â€œAnother 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.
    â€œâ€˜Brains?’
    â€œâ€˜Zombie brains.’
    â€œNow 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.
    â€œMr. Chairman,” Rather said, with a slight nod of