Feeling nostalgic these days for the New York City of 1977, are you?
If ESPN’s “The Bronx Is Burning” isn’t enough to bring you back to those halcyon days of serial killers, looting mobs and midget mayors, then VH1’s excellent ” “NY '77: The Coolest Year in Hell” (Saturday at 9 p.m.) is sure to satisfy your jones big time.
The VH1 doc crew has done its homework here. It's hard to believe the same channel that asks us to take Flavor Flav and Scott Baio seriously could produce such an insightful and fascinating film.
You want Son of Sam? You got him, along with the July blackout, The Koch-Cuomo-Beame-Abzug mayoral smackdown. Studio 54, Plato’s Retreat, the birth of hip-hop, CBGB.
Dig this commercial for Plato's Retreat, the Upper West Side swingers club (no, that's not where people like A-Rod and Barry Bonds hang). Don't worry, it's PG-rated.
And while you're being moved by the Spirit of '77, check out the Ramones rockin' the Bowery.
For more good, clean fun, head uptown to Studio 54, the disco where fascistic doormen ushered the high and mighty into its innards. Schlubs like you and me need not apply.
The two-hour doc is filled with commentary by such luminaries as Geraldo Rivera, Gloria Gaynor, pioneering deejay Jellybean Benitez, Richard Hell, Ed Koch (he utters the F-word!) and Jimmy Breslin (he says Times Square was better when it was full of whores instead of suburbanites going to see “The Lion King.”)
"NY ' 77" was co-written by Jonathan Mahler, author of “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning,” the book on which the ESPN miniseries is based. But thankfully, there’s nothing about Reggie, Billy and the Yankees here. But there’s also nothing about the Midnight Massacre in which the Mets dumped Tom Seaver on the Reds for a bag of golf balls on June 15.
That's what I remember being most obsessed with during the summer of '77, not whether I could get into Studio 54, from which I most assuredly would be barred.
