Pop Culture Confidential

Episode 9: Show Me A Hero

Guest: Lisa Belkin Race, community and politics – topics just as relevant today as they were in 1988 when Mayor Wasicsko fought an aggressive battle to set in motion a housing desegregation plan for the city of Yonkers, New York. These dramatic real-life events are the inspiration behind the new HBO miniseries Show Me A Hero, written by The Wire creator David Simon, directed by Oscar winner Paul Haggis and starring the critically acclaimed Oscar Isaac. The series is based on the gripping book Show Me A Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption written by Lisa Belkin who followed the events and citizens of Yonkers for seven years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duration:: 26m
Broadcast on:: 11 Sep 2015
Audio Format:: other

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hi, I'm Christina Yarlink-Biro, thank you for listening. Wire creator David Simon's new HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero is about to premiere. It's written with Wire collaborator William Zorzi and directed by Oscar winner Paul Haggis. The themes of segregation and fear seem more timely than ever. Simon once again showing that within small, local politics and issues you can find real stories, fears and the deepest humanity. Show Me a Hero is based on real events in the city of Yonkers, New York, just 20 minutes outside of Manhattan in the 80s and 90s. The NWACP filed a lawsuit stating that the city of Yonkers illegally and intentionally fostered segregation by concentrating all of its public housing and minorities in one section of the city. Judge Leonard Sands found this to be true. He ruled that Yonkers built 200 affordable housing units in the city, including in the traditional white middle class neighborhoods. The battle to build these houses would cause a racial and class fight, rage and fury by the politicians and citizens, draining the city of money and paralyzing Yonkers and destroying political careers for many years to come. The actor Oscar Isaac, whose performance is already being compared to that of a young Al Pacino, plays Mayor Wysisco. Nicholas Wysisco was at 27, the youngest mayor in America. He ran his election first promising to oppose the new housing, a campaign tactic that would win him the election, but later changing his tune and becoming a believer in housing reform. The events would completely overturn and shatter his political career and life. Well, don't tell anybody, but I always wanted to be the mayor. I used to talk about it all the time growing up. For the first time in my life, I am on the right side of something, and I am all alone. The city intentionally segregated its housing for 40 years. Mayor Wysisco, it's time to come together. It's people. They don't live the way we do. The trash, the drugs, we will die from what the city is trying to shove down our throat. The series is based on the former New York Times journalist Lisa Belkin's reporting. She followed the events and the citizens of Yonkers for seven years. This resulted in the book Show Me a Hero, A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption, which David Simon already started adapting nearly a decade ago. I'm honored to talk to Miss Belkin about the events she wrote about and the new series. I started by asking Lisa, a 30-year veteran of the New York Times and other publications, what David Simon has meant to America in terms of awareness of social issues and how she felt about him wanting to adapt her book. David is my hero. He tackles issues like these in a way that makes them so gripping, so accessible and yes, he sticks to real life. There is nothing over the top or out of character or anything that isn't completely human about the work he does in the stories he tells. We all just stand around and marvel as he does. I knew David. I knew his work when I first called about this, but remember it was 2002 when HBO first option to this book. So the wire hadn't come out yet. I knew David as a journalist because journalists knew David then even if the whole world hadn't quite caught on the way we had. He had done The Corner, which was one of his books that was made into a mini series. He'd done Homicide, Life on the Killing Streets, was his book, it became Homicide Life on the Streets. But the whole time HBO was, my agent kept saying, "David this, David that," and I truly wasn't paying attention because these things never happened, so why should I pay attention after a while? It was sort of embarrassing to say, "I honestly don't know what David you're talking about." So we did the deal and my phone rings. And this voice says, "Lisa, hi, this is David Simon." And I was extraordinarily nonchalant. I was like, "David Simon, did you even sign it? Did you even sign it from the reporter?" And there's a pause and he says, "Lisa, didn't your agent talk to you?" I said, "Yeah, but I wasn't paying any attention." And so I watched David become David or become more David's while this whole thing went through which it's development process. And that was a really wonderful perspective because I saw him doing for all of his material what he was also doing for the script he was writing in his spare time for me. And I like to think he had big material to start with in this case, but he's a master at this. So you were actually living in Texas in 1988. What drew you to the events that were happening in Yonkers? Right. So I was not here when the worst of the Yonkers fight happened. I was, as you say, I was living in Texas. I was covering something completely different for the New York Times, which was that part of the world, Texas, Louisiana. And even there though, even there you heard about Yonkers. I mean, it was national news. And it was resonant for people everywhere in the country, the idea of, "But wait a second, what do you mean somebody can just plop some buildings in the middle of my neighborhood?" And so I read those headlines as a casual reader. And then in 1992, I moved to a town about two towns north on the Sommer River Parkway from Yonkers. And suddenly this was my backyard. And it was right about then that the houses, you know, Yonkers eventually lost the fight and they eventually built these townhouses on the white middle-class side of town. And they were holding a lottery among people who at that point were still living in the awful projects on the poor, mostly minorities side of town. And only a certain number of them could move. So there were so many who wanted to move that they had a lottery. And they literally put names in a bingo drum and picked out the names of the people who got these first 100 or so townhouses. And I was just transfixed by the image, by the metaphor of choosing people's futures out of a bingo drum. So I went. I thought it was going to be a magazine piece or a New York Times article. And I ended up working on it for seven years. Let's go back a little bit, because there are some key players in this story that you followed for these seven years. Describe Yonkers before in the '80s. Oh, I don't know that you can understand Yonkers from Sweden. I don't know that people understand Yonkers in Yonkers. It is, you know, towns develop personalities and psyches. It's almost an organic living organism. And Yonkers was a city of immigrants. It was where people came on their first stop out of the, the ghettos of New York. And it was also a very racially divided city. And it, it wasn't an accident that it was a racially divided city. The NAACP, what was then known as the National Association of Colored People, brought the lawsuit in 1980 and said, you know, the reason that all of, that 90% of your minority citizens live in one square mile of town is because you put them there. And we can prove that you put them there because, well, the, the leaders of Yonkers left a really remarkable paper trail of memoranda and quotes and decisions that said, you know what, put them there. No one else wants them, go put them there. And a judge ruled that this was deliberate discrimination, 40 years of deliberate discrimination. And that you are not allowed to put people there because of the color of their skin. And to remedy this, the court ruled that they had to build housing specifically for public housing residents paid for by the government and build with poor people of color on the white middle class side of town. So this fell in the middle of a place that was already so territorial. And your identity, it was so much about where you lived. And it fell like a bomb. It all but destroyed the city because people thought it so vehemently. And then there was a young, the youngest mayor in American history at the time, Nicholas was Cisco, you describe him already as a child, almost as a political animal. Describe him. Yeah, again, only in Yonkers, but Nick, Nick as a kid used to basically drive all his friends crazy and get teased on the playground because he would say things like, you know, I'm going to be mayor and his friends would call him mayor and they, as he says in the film, you know, it wasn't meant to be compliment, but they would call him the mayor on the basketball court. And this was all he wanted was to be the mayor of Yonkers. And he was a young, he was 27, 20 years old when he first joined the city council. And he was run for mayor as a sacrificial lamb. The political high-ups realized they had to run someone and then there was this housing while he did win because there was one vote that separated him from the mayor. The mayor realized totally correctly that there was no way to fight the housing anymore, that the courts had ruled that we are a nation of laws and that this was going to be dealt. And so the mayor, when a vote came up to appeal this further to the Supreme Court of the United States, said, we're going to lose and we're going to spend an awful lot of money in losing and it's not worth doing. And Nick voted for the appeal saying, you know, why not? Let's have our day in court. And that one vote basically energized the city, they weren't voting for an equalist though. They were voting against the guy who wouldn't appeal. They were voting against the housing. And this 28-year-old kid was suddenly mayor and within days after he won the Supreme Court in fact ruled that no, they weren't going to get the case because no, there was no case and yes, they had to build the housing. And now he was stuck. And he changed his tune. And he eventually came to change his mind and a lot of the story was the story of Nick was just still growing up and becoming the leader that, you know, people laughed at him but he was becoming the leader that he always didn't even realize he wanted to be. Like the book is based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, the title show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy. Is that what you were thinking about? Oh, absolutely. I mean, that is the perfect summation because he stood up, he did the right thing, the housing that built, in many ways this was a story of triumphant success and the right thing happening in the end. And in so many ways in particular it was a tragedy, it ruined him. Tell me a little bit about the Yonkers citizens that you portray. For example, Mary Dorman, who's also a character in this series, what drove their opposition to this? Would you say it's fear? It's racism? Oh, it looked like racism but I think it felt like fear and from the outside it was easy to call them racist. They were like people who didn't want black people in their neighborhood but I don't think they saw it that way. I absolutely believe them when they simply thought but I have everything I have invested in this house and you are telling me that you're going to change my neighborhood. You are going to re-design it out from under me. You can't do that, that's not fair. So I think they were terrified and I think Mary Dorman was one of those who was terrified and her story also is a story of change. She was one of the most citrus opponents of the housing, I mean it was ugly. There are photos of Mary on the front page of the local paper, just her face contorted almost beyond recognition and anger, just screaming at the city council and then when the fight was finally lost she got this phone call kind of out of nowhere. She was never quite sure how her name was put forth for this but she was asked to participate in a program that would help the new tenants adjust to the new side of town and as she got to know people one on one as she became their guide she changed her mind and that's possibly the hardest thing for us humans to do but she changed her mind and became a fierce supporter of the housing and the policy behind it. And what about the tenants themselves, what was it like for them to be moved in or move into these neighborhoods during this battle? Well people are always asking me so who is the hero, you know your title says show me a hero, who is the hero and there were a lot of choices I mean that's partly why I chose the title because it's really, there can be so many people and nobody at the same time. Nick certainly thought of himself as a hero but as one character says to him, "Isn't that the kind of word that other people are supposed to use about you, not a word that you use to describe yourself?" Mary I think was a hero, I think changing your mind makes you a hero but when I am asked to who you think of in the title, who was the hero, I think exactly what you just said. I think of the people who picked up and moved to a neighborhood where they knew they were not wanted and they did it less for themselves than for their kids. Those 201, they did it to get their children out of the huge high-rise, high-density projects and into the scattered site townhouses around town but their backyards and their frontyards I mean they looked like houses and it took courage. There are scenes in the book of the first nights of a lot of these women and almost all of them were women, when one woman switched with a knife under her bed, she had grown up in the worst part of town and never felt in physical danger inside her own home and now here she was in the safest part of town and she went downstairs, got a kitchen knife and put it under her bed. It was uncomfortable and some of them sort of handled better than others, some of them eventually felt at home there, some never did. And under the process of writing this book and meeting these people, what did it show you about human nature? We all want the same thing, I mean all anybody in this book wanted was a place to feel at home. All sides. Everybody, that's what everyone was fighting for, a place to belong, a place to feel at home, a place that was yours and so in that way we are all the same. It made me confront my own fears and prejudices. I had just bought my first house, my only house that I've ever owned when I started writing this book and I had to be very honest with the fact that if someone were to put these things on my block, I would have the same fears and yet these women who moved, I consider them friends. Our lives are different in a lot of ways and really the same in a lot of ways. What happened to the mayor? What happened to Nick? Well Nick, yes the judge imposed fines and that was when the Yonkers City Council finally had to give in because either way they had no choice, does the city exist when it has to lay off its entire police force and its entire fire department? What is a city? If they have no money and the fines were reaching a million dollars a day and they were wiping out the entire city but so the city council gave in, Nick ran again from there and lost. He was basically professionally and in some way it turns out personally destroyed by this. He did the right thing and he paid the price and he spiraled downward and he paid the ultimate price for this. Our city is at a crossroads. You don't want to live where people were angry at you? This is the only responsible option we have. Justice is not about popularity. No, it's not. But politics is. Underneath it all people just want to home. It's the American way, right? How much of a part have you been on the show? I was there a lot. It was filmed. It was filmed on location and remember location was pretty close to my house which is how I wrote the book in the first place. So all the city hall scenes were filmed in the actual city hall. The wedding of Nick and I was in the church where Nick and I got married and in fact, the stand in for the actress who plays nigh was not there. And so nigh stood in for nigh in her own wedding scene and it's the actual people and the actual city is just so interwoven in this. That must have been very emotional for nigh to stand in on her own wedding. It was. I don't know how she did it but for her it was a kind of closure. It was doing honor to this huge chapter in her life and she was there and she was generous with her time and her memories and her possessions. Nick Oscar Isaac who plays Nick Francisco. The tie pins he wears were Nicholas's goes. There's a green sweater that opens and closes the mini series that he's wearing. That was Nicholas's goes. The wedding gown that is in the wedding scene is an exact replica of nighs gown. And I think the result is infused with that feeling that just respect for history and respect for fact. And that's another way that I won the lottery. I mean it's a group of journalists that produce this who were religiously scrupulous about fact. They weren't trying to make things up to make them more dramatic. They were trying to actually capture the reality of what happened. You have an election coming up. We have many things going on in the States from Ferguson to otherwise are you hopeful and has Yonkers healed. Am I hopeful? I think Yonkers itself is a better place than it was in 1988. I think Yonkers has grown up and I think an awful lot of the reason that Yonkers has grown up is because of what it went through. I think it saw itself in a way or the nation saw it in a way that it came to dislike and I think Yonkers has matured. The country as a whole, I really wish this warrant true but I think this story is more resonant here now than it was when I wrote it. We filmed with Ferguson as a backdrop. We edited with Baltimore burning. We have not fixed, you said David talks often about the two Americas, we have not closed the divide. If anything, it seems to have widened over the years and so, yes, this story speaks to today as much as it recreates 1988 and I am sad about that but if there is a small chance that perhaps watching this will make other people recognize it as Yonkers did that wait, we are fighting a fight, we're vociferously fighting a fight that maybe is the wrong fight. Then, yes, I guess I'm a little plainly bit hopeful. Ms. Belton, thank you so much for talking to me and good luck. I've been the trailer looks amazing and I think this is a hugely important series as was the book, of course, and which will be reissued on September 1st with the forward by David Simon. Yep, new forward by David, new afterward by me and a lovely picture of Oscar Isaac on the cover. Thank you so much to Lisa Belkin and thank you for listening. There will be more coming up on pop culture confidential next week. You can follow on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This episode was edited by Moa Loshon, a music by Call Boy, produced by Renee Vitichteth and myself. I'm Christina Yerling-Biro, thank you. Hello podcast fans, it is I, Bruce Volanche. For over 25 years, I worked on the Academy Awards, so you didn't have to. In that time I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly felt. And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win. Why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work. This is the Oscars, what were they thinking? Available wherever you get podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]