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August 25, 2009
Atlantic Yards saga put into focus
NY Daily News
by Erin Durkin
It's Atlantic Yards - the movie.
For six years, Clinton Hill filmmaker Michael Galinsky has been filming scenes from the fight over developer Bruce Ratner's proposed Nets basketball arena and 16 residential and commercial towers - and now he's working to turn more than 300 hours of footage into a documentary dubbed "The Battle of Brooklyn."
The Prospect Heights project caught Galinsky's attention soon after it was announced in 2003.
"I got a sense there's a lot more here than I'm reading," he said.
He kept shooting so long because it remained uncertain how the project, bogged down for years by lawsuits and economic troubles, would turn out.
"You can't really edit a documentary until you kind of know the end of the story," he said.
Galinsky, 40, plans to wrap up shooting in the coming months - as Ratner scrambles to get financing, beat back remaining lawsuits and break ground by an end-of-year deadline, and begin screening the documentary at film festivals next year.
"We don't know the end, but we do have a sense of an arc, and the end is coming," he said. "By Dec. 31, either shovels will be in the ground or they will not, and that will be the end of the story."
Click "Play" to view the trailer for "The Battle of Brooklyn."
Posted by eric at August 25, 2009 11:23 AM