I’ve always been intrigued by the history of Coney Island. Before destination amusement parks like Disneyworld and Six Flags existed, Coney Island was where millions of New Yorkers had fun for decades. However, Coney Island has undergone significant changes in the last two decades, with New York City and private investors wanting to attract more contemporary corporate clients to the amusement area and Coney Island residents largely wanting to keep the area the way it is. ZIPPER: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride is one of several documentaries that have been released about the battle over Coney Island in recent years, and first-time feature documentary director Amy Nicholson does a far better job of telling the story of the casualties than any other documentary I have seen on the subject.
ZIPPER focuses on Eddie Miranda, who owned the titular thrill ride and ran it with a handful of operators for years. By the mid-2000s Thor Equities, a real estate company owned by Brooklyn-born Joe Sitt that has bought most of Coney Island in the hopes of building condos and attracting national business chains, also bought the land Miranda rents to operate his ride. The closing of the Zipper ride serves as a microcosm of all the issues faced by Coney Island’s shrinking amusement area over the last decade.
There are two stories going on here: the story of Miranda and the other operators, who enjoy their work operating a carnival ride even if they weren’t making millions, and New York City’s varied plans on revitalizing Coney Island. As other documentaries have shown, many of the people who live in Coney Island don’t want the area to be “revitalized” in the way the city plans to do it — in other words, they’re worried it will turn into Times Square and soon they — and Coney Island’s unique character — will be pushed out. Nicholson has spoken to all the key players including Joe Sitt (who in some cases states his case well, even if the documentary clearly aims to demonize him), but curiously these two storylines never fully intertwine. That reflects the reality of the issues surrounding Coney Island’s future — there is a wonderful montage of political talking heads talking about what Coney Island wants and needs set to a waltz on the soundtrack — every few minutes the camera returns to the Zipper operators, who are silent. Symbolically this shows the problem — the people who intimately know Coney Island aren’t being listened to while politicians and real estate moguls dance around the issues.
Roughly halfway through the film we drop into Wichita-based Chance, the company which manufactures the Zipper rides, which is accompanied with amateur-shot video of people riding the Zipper and enjoying it immensely. I’m not sure why the documentary was structured this way since those scenes seem to have more to do with the opening which established the ride’s history than with the economic changes faced by Coney Island, which the latter half of the documentary focuses on. In fact, because the documentary is ultimately about Coney Island this sequence seems out of place since it takes us out of New York City. Then again, another slight flaw with the documentary is that its short runtime (77 minutes) doesn’t give enough background on the unique sideshow culture of Coney Island to bring unfamiliar audiences up to speed. However, those were really the only headscratchers in terms of the way the documentary was made.
Though the City has brought new amusements to Coney Island (the “Scream Zone,” which is owned by an international corporation — not Coney locals) to popular success in the last few years, the battle over the development of Coney Island continues. It’s not clear how successful the City’s plan will be in revitalizing the area’s future. Unfortunately, the Zipper will not be part of that future. The documentary ends with a list of all the attractions and small businesses that went out of business since the battle over Coney Island again. However, to cure that depression the final images are of the Zipper delighting audiences in its new home — proving that in at least the case of the Zipper it had no need to be “revitalized.”
Those still interested in the issues surrounding Coney Island’s redevelopment ought to track down Last Summer at Coney Island. That documentary is a better about giving the economic details, but I preferred Nicholson’s focus on the little guy getting screwed by big business. It makes a far stronger message and resonated with me on a deeper level.
RATING: When people talk about big business and gentrification, talk to the guys who operated the Zipper (7.5/10).
ZIPPER will screen on Friday, March 1 at 3:00 PM at Loews Village VII (66 3rd Avenue, New York, NY) in competition for the First Time Fest 2013.
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