Frequently Asked Questions       

Below are questions and answers with the director of Street Fight, Marshall Curry.

Q: How did you become interested in this story?
MC: I first got to know Newark when I took time off from college to set up a literacy program there. It's an amazing city with people who are tough and warm and who tell you what they think, which is great if you are making documentary films. At that point I really had a positive opinion of the Mayor, Sharpe James, and I considered him a funny and charismatic reformer who was going to bring a renaissance to Newark.

Years later, my brother, who raises money for a lot of Democrats, began hitting me up for a donation to this young guy, Cory Booker, who was running for mayor of Newark. He kept talking about how Cory was going to be the first black President of America which seemed a bit excessive to me, since Cory was only 32 and had only won one election-- as a city councilman.

But I went to a fundraiser and met Cory, and thought-- wow. He's smart and charismatic and idealistic-- and an interesting combination of policy wonk on one hand and 60s style activist on the other. I didn't know what was going to happen when these two men got into a ring together, but with two characters as colorful and complicated as they were, I knew it would be interesting. So I bought a camera and a few days later started shooting.

Q: What are Cory and Sharpe doing now?
MC: (If you haven't seen the film yet, you might want to skip this one-- it gives away the ending...)

Cory had to give up his city council seat when he ran for mayor, so he spent the following few years working as a lawyer in Newark. He also founded a non-profit called Newark Now, and, of course, continued running for mayor-- raising money, going door-to-door, assembling a campaign team and setting up offices.

Most people expected the next election to be a rematch of the 2002 race, but as election day got closer and closer, Sharpe James still had not started his campaign.

On March 16th, hours before the deadline for filing petitions to get on the ballot and less than two months before election day, Sharpe showed up at City Hall in a tank top and straw hat. He rode a lap around the hallways of the building on a Newark Police bicycle and delivered the signatures to the city clerk. It was classic Sharpe James-- outlandish and puzzling to his opponents, and humorously eccentric to his supporters.

The Star Ledger did an interesting review of the petitions, showing that they were full of duplications, but 11 days later, none of that mattered. Sharpe James suddenly dropped out of the race.

No one knows for sure why the mayor dropped out-- or why he waited until the last minute. Most people think that his campaign's poll numbers showed that he was trailing Booker, and he preferred to retire as the undefeated champ rather than risk a defeat. In the preceeding months, Booker had raised millions of dollars for his campaign and had won the support of much of the political establishment that backed James in the previous election, including the SEIU and the police union as well as many state and county officials.

Sharpe endorsed State Senator and former City Councilman, Ron Rice Sr., but his support was tepid. He didn't show up at a rally where he was expected to stump for Rice, for example, and he didn't put any significant financial resources behind Rice's candidacy. Instead he put his efforts behind his son's campaign for city council. (Interestingly, Ron Rice's son, named Ron Rice Jr., was also running for city council-- but on Cory Booker's slate of candidates.)

On Election Day, May 9th, 2006, Booker won every ward in Newark and was elected mayor with 72% of the vote-- the biggest landslide in Newark history. In addition, Booker's slate of city council candidate won every council seat in the city.

On Election Day, I was filming in the city and bumped into Sharpe James who was out campaigning for his son. His security guard -- an NPD detective -- told me to stop filming and stood in front of me, tapping my chest and asking whether I wanted to take a swing at him. (I didn't.) I guess some things never change... (You'll be able to see it as an "extra" on a future version of the DVD that will probably come out next year.)

(BTW- here's an interesting resource with info on photographers' right to take photos in public. http://www.krages.com/bpkphoto.htm.)

UPDATE (9/25/06): Newspapers reported that state and federal investigators are looking into some of the trips and entertainment expenses that Sharpe James charged to the city while in office. Documents have been subpoenaed, and police officers who served as the Mayor's security guards have been called to testify before a Grand Jury. (Among the officers being questioned is the female member of James's security detail who appears a few times in Street Fight.) For more info, read the Star Ledger article.

UPDATE (4/15/08): Today Sharpe James was convicted of fraud in Federal Court for "conspiring to sell city-owned properties to a former girlfrined, who quickly flipped them and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits." (NY Times) He has also been indicted in separate charges that, while in office, he misued city funds for personal vacations and entertainment.

UPDATE (7/29/2008): Today 72 year old Sharpe James was sentenced to 27 months in prison and ordered to pay a $100,000 fine.

Q: What size crew did you have; what kind of equipment did you use; how much footage did you shoot?
MC: I shot the film on a Sony PD-150 and usually shot alone. It wasn't easy-- I was shooting, doing sound, lugging my gear around, driving the car, getting release forms. But shooting alone also made it possible for me to get more intimate footage than I could have if I had a crew with me. I could jump into the backseat of car or duck into a meeting, and people didn't pay much attention to me.

There were some days when I had another person working with me, doing sound or a running a second camera. And on election day we had four crews around the city, trying to capture everything that was going on.

Over the five month election, I shot 200 hours of footage (that is five weeks of 40-hour weeks just to watch it once...) and I edited it with Final Cut Pro on a Macintosh. We did our online edit on an Avid.


Q: What were the biggest challenges in making the film?
MC: Obviously it was tough shooting in some of the situations where Sharpe James's police tried to stop me. When I began making the film it had never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to spend some time with the mayor -- do interviews, hang out in his headquarters, ride around with him a bit on the campaign trail. When I realized that wasn't going to happen, I thought seriously about quitting the project because I didn't think you could make a film about an election with only one character. But I'm stubborn, and I guess I felt that if someone in power doesn't want you to tell a story this much, maybe it's a story that needs to be told.

The other main challenge was how to be fair to both candidates without falling into the "he-said/she-said" style of covering a campaign that we see so often. Too often, I think, the media allows itself to become just an amplifier for two campaigns -- "Bush said X; Kerry said Y" -- without analyzing whether, for instance, one side is telling the truth. In their attempt to be fair, they end up giving a less accurate image of what's really going on.

I decided early on in editing that I wanted the film to have a point of view, and that I wasn't going to pretend that these two candidates were ethically equivalent. I think a filmmaker should be like a referee, and a good referee doesn't call the same number of fouls on both sides; a good referee calls fouls when he sees them.

Of course I also wanted the film to be complex -- and fair. I wanted the audience to see Sharpe James' charisma, his accomplishments, and his compelling life story, and I wanted them to understand why some people loved him and didn't like Cory. I also never took words out of context or edited in a misleading way to make anyone look good or bad. In the end I set as my goal to make a film that accurately and honestly depicted what I saw and experienced on the campaign -- and I think that Street Fight achieved that.

Q: How have Cory Booker and Sharpe James responded to the film?
MC: I think that Cory in general likes it. He had no creative control over the film, and the first time that he saw it was when it was essentially done, which was pretty nerve-wracking for both of us, I think. There were some things that he was unhappy with. He hates the scene, for instance, where he is arguing with his press secretary in his apartment before the debate. And there were a number of things that his campaign would prefer were not in the film (people speaking well of Sharpe James accomplishments, Cory fundraising in the suburbs and New York City, etc.) But I think he feels like -- net -- he came across well and accepts that it was an accurate portrayal of the election.

Sharpe James, on the other hand, refused to say anything to the press about the film in the lead-up to its broadcast. He assumed, I guess, that the less he said, the less attention the film would get. On the day after broadcast, however, an anonymous mailing went around Newark comparing me to Adolph Hitler. ("Would you trust a film about the Holocaust made by Adolph Hitler? Would you trust a film about the Alamo made by a Mexican? Then why would you trust a film about the Newark election made by Cory Booker supporter, Marshall Curry…")

Sharpe James says that he has never seen the film, but that he knows it is propaganda. No one, however, has claimed that there is anything inaccurate in the film. No one has said that I took their quote out of context, or that it wasn't Sharpe James who accused that Booker supporter of being a terrorist, or that business owners and city employees weren't really punished for supporting the wrong candidate.

Q: Does Sharpe James' press spokesman still work for him?
MC: The spokesman in the film actually worked for the state Democratic party and had been sent in by the governor to help Sharpe. He'd been in NJ politics for a while so he was not naive, but I think even he was surprised by what he found in the mayor's campaign. I came to like him, and I think that his discomfort with the job he was being asked to do speaks well of him. There are a lot of political hacks who would say or do anything without thinking twice about it, and he obviously was not one of those. Some people have asked whether I used a hidden camera to shoot the two scenes that he appears in, and the answer is no. In both scenes my camera was on my shoulder, and while filming the second scene, I actually interrupted him to remind him that I was filming, which he said was ok.

Q: I heard that Cory Booker supports school vouchers-- why wasn't that in the film?
MC: (Actually, this is not really a frequently asked question, but I had a little back-and-forth with Mickey Kaus of Slate.com about it. If you are interested, you can read it here.)


Q: Will you make a sequel?
MC: I won't make an entire movie, but I did spend some time shooting in Newark during the 2006 election. I'll make a mini-feature for the next version of the DVD that will probably come out next year. I started this project in 2002 and finished in April, 2005-- so I'm pretty eager to get going on something new.

Q: How were the Oscars?
MC: They were fun. The scene is a little ridiculous-- all of the limos and hype-- but we had a good time, and the nomination has drawn a lot of valuable attention to the film. Among the stars, though, it's pretty clear that documentary folks are at the bottom of the pecking order -- just below the makeup artists, I think. I did speak with Steven Spielberg, who mentioned that he'd made a donation to Cory Booker's campaign, which was interesting. My wife and I made it into People Magazine's "best dressed" spread (sort of) as we passed by in the background of Ziyi Zhang's red carpet photos. We're on the left and you can also see Street Fight's Executive Producers, Liz Garbus and Rory Kennedy on the right.

My moment of TV glory came when I was almost hit in the head with a stuffed penguin as the March of the Penguins guys squeezed by me on their way to the stage.

Transcripts of other interviews can be found at:
-Tavis Smiley Show
-PBS/POV