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June 3, 2010
Stadium Status
Internets Celebrities
Sports fans know when the fix is in, and it's in big in New York City. The Internets Celebrities deconstruct stadia mania.
Stadium Status from Internets Celebrities on Vimeo.
"It's hard being a sports fan these days."
Stadium Status is a documentary which examines the rush of new sports stadiums in NYC as the latest example of an obscene national trend. New stadiums are built every year and the private businesses that own them benefit from huge sums of public money for their creation. Are we getting our money's worth?
Internets Celebrities are Dallas Penn, Rafi Kam and director Casimir Nozkowski
Featuring Neil deMause and Killian Jordan
Additional Cinematography - Ian Savage
Original Music - Bless-1
Additional coverage...
Atlantic Yards Report, From the Internets Celebrities, short film "Stadium Status" takes a cheeky look at two new stadiums, with a segment about Atlantic Yards
The Internets Celebrities--guerrilla filmmakers and comedic investigators--have done short films on such subjects as bodegas and the "Ghetto Big Mac."
They got some ink from the Times the other day as their more ambitious new film Stadium Status debuted.
I'll get to the Atlantic Yards segment in a bit, but first, their explanation for the project:
Our starting point for this movie was simply asking the question: why did the Yankees and the Mets get to build record-breakingly expensive stadiums in the SAME YEAR? Considering we were on the brink of a massive recession and now face massive budget shortfalls in New York state, it seemed problematic that so much public funding went into these buildings – with little assurance of any tangible public benefit.
From there, we employed our usual investigation methods. Namely, go to a place and start filming. We actually got into Citifield and were able to film there. Yankee Stadium confiscated our tape – but we still managed to talk to people and capture the exterior of the massive new structure.
We looked at the communities being affected by these stadiums and tried to see who exactly was benefiting from these teams getting to build new revenue-maximizing ballparks – directly across from the old ones.
Sources
Their on-camera sources include the indispensable Neil deMause of the Field of Schemes blog--"Yankee Stadium is about half public money," he says. The problem isn't that the city's fronting the money in the first place, says deMause, it's that they're not getting it back.
Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, Watch "Stadium Status": The Funniest Take Down of Bloomberg's Stadium Mania
The short includes something we've not seen through all these years, a sped-up real time walk around the permiter of the project site to show just how enormous it is.
Posted by eric at June 3, 2010 10:58 PM