A Second Civil War in “Bushwick”
When the action thriller “Bushwick” premièred, at Sundance, during the same week as Donald Trump’s Inauguration, its plot seemed like a fanciful nightmare, in a “Red Dawn” kind of way: an army of militiamen from Southern states, hoping to secede from the Union, invades the transitional Brooklyn neighborhood, bringing black helicopters and automatic weapons. It’s a Fort Sumter moment for a second American civil war.
“We thought it would be a cautionary tale for maybe ten years in the future—not now,” Jon Milott, one of the movie’s directors, said the other day. But just before “Bushwick” opened, in August, Confederate flags were flying in Charlottesville, and a new civil war suddenly seemed a little less hypothetical. “A Brooklyn radio host asked me if I would punch a Nazi in the face,” Cary Murnion, Milott’s co-director, said.
The filmmakers were standing outside the Jefferson Street subway station, their first return to Bushwick since they shot on location there in 2015. Retracing the route of their movie cameras, they pointed out sites of mayhem in the film, sounding like the world’s worst Realtors.
“There was a sniper in the window up there,” Murnion said, on Willoughby Street. “And we had a burning car on this corner.” He had a scraggly beard and wore a NASA T-shirt and had bicycled over from Clinton Hill.
“This is where we had to wait for the graffiti tour,” Milott, in a black T-shirt and sunglasses, said. “We’re in the middle of a shot, there’s guns and explosions and smoke, and a graffiti tour goes by.”
In the film, Bushwick’s hipsters, Latino shopkeepers, Hasids, and gang members surprise the invaders by fighting back. “The film’s militiamen thought the neighborhood’s ethnic diversity would weaken the resistance,” Murnion said. “They had faulty intel.”
Murnion remarked on how the area was changing. Skirting new construction on Wyckoff Avenue, he nodded toward an orange Jaguar parked outside a natural-food store. “When I moved to Bushwick, it was sold to me as East Williamsburg,” he said. “If I got into a cab in Manhattan and said, ‘Bushwick,’ they would say no.”
The two men entered a bodega and searched for the spot on the floor where, in the film, the shopkeeper lies bleeding, having been stabbed by looters.
“This is like a Whole Foods now,” Murnion said.
“Maybe he used the ten grand we gave him to let us shoot here,” Milott said.
The directors were classmates at Parsons, and before “Bushwick” they made comedies. Their breakthrough was “Boob,” a short horror parody, screened at South by Southwest in 2009, about a breast that goes on a rampage after a botched augmentation. “In horror films everything comes to life,” Murnion said. “But we had never seen a boob come to life.” (They learned only later about the disembodied-breast sequence in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex*.” “We decided to tell people what a great influence Woody was,” he added.)
They dreamed up “Bushwick” in 2009, when Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, joked that his state could secede. Murnion and Milott started what-iffing military scenarios and pitched a movie. When Brittany Snow (“Pitch Perfect”) and Dave Bautista (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) signed on to co-star, XYZ Films raised the $3.3 million needed for the film. Being pacifist comedy geeks, Murnion and Milott boned up on combat tactics by studying “Generation Kill,” a miniseries about the 2003 Iraq invasion. From that, Murnion said, they learned that “you go to a soft spot, take it, and attack from there. Bushwick works because it isn’t very populated. And there’s a waterway a few blocks from here, so you could bring in boats if you need to.”
“It’s just the beginning of invading Manhattan,” Milott said.
Murnion recalled how he’d taken a map of Bushwick and plotted a serpentine escape route for the movie’s heroes. “A lot of this came from our experience with 9/11,” he said. “Nobody knew what was going on that day.”
In the opening sequence, Snow scrambles past a burning ice-cream truck (“We looked into getting the rights to the Mister Softee music,” Murnion said), and sprints by the Owl Juice Bar and Do or Die Tattoo, on Wyckoff. “But a block and a half later there was a busted-up car in an alleyway that was perfect,” Murnion said.
As they crossed Cypress Avenue, they pointed to an alley. “This is where the Hasids fight back,” Murnion said. “We gave them old-school rifles rather than big M16s because we thought they were more traditional.”
The tour ended, as the movie does, at Grover Cleveland Playground. The final scene is a night skirmish amid the swings and jungle gyms. “At 3 A.M., we had live mortars going off,” Murnion said. “We thought we’d be hearing from the neighbors. There was not one complaint. Those are true New Yorkers.”
On the grass nearby, a sunbather was splayed face down, motionless. “That’s very bizarre,” Murnion said, somewhat alarmed. “That’s the exact location of the final death in the movie.” He and Milott waited and watched until the sunbather wiggled a foot. ♦
