As mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has frequently demonstrated impressive media savvy, but arguably nothing has proved his genius for in-the-know promo more than a video, released in April, with the documentarian John Wilson. The spot, in support of the mayor’s plan to reduce the presence of the city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds, suggested that either he or someone on his team was a fan of How To With John Wilson, the film-maker’s cult-beloved HBO series that remains a taste signifier for alt-humorous New Yorkers. And for good reason: over three near-perfect seasons, Wilson, armed with his ever-present camera and diffident, memoiristic narration, explored the city’s disintegrating streets with a singular eye for the weird and unintentionally hilarious, turning the most mundane of NYC preoccupations – public restrooms, parking spots, scaffolding – into profound meditations on the glories, indignities and absurdities of modern life.
It was because of that scaffolding episode, released in October 2020, that I, like some smart Mamdani staffers, began to perceive the sidewalk shed shadowing my block not as an inevitable fixed entity but an obtrusive, if well-intentioned, symptom of neglect. Shortly after the mayor’s video, said scaffolding miraculously came down – revealing, to my shock, a three square-wide swath of concrete that had not seen the sun in six years. When I credit Wilson for this upgrade, in person at a film office in Manhattan, he reacts with a modest “I’ll take it,” as dry as the dusty footprints of the recently departed metal poles.
Fitting, for though that newly revealed concrete, speckled with old gum and anonymous residue, is certainly better, if not exactly beautiful, perhaps only Wilson could see it as cinematic. His debut feature film, The History of Concrete, takes on the granddaddy of all urban materials, tugging wry insights on our terminal human condition out of the crumbling facades of New York’s most pervasive substance. Concrete is many things: a mixture of cement, water, sand and crushed stone; arguably ancient Rome’s greatest invention; the second-most used substance on earth, behind water; the foundation of buildings and bridges and “everything I’ve done before” Wilson says, a “Marvel supervillain origin story” to How To’s many bricolages of unfortunately named streets (“Titman Road”) and sidewalk characters.
But it is not what one might call a marketable idea. The general response on pitch calls was crickets – “an absolute emotional flatline,” Wilson tells me during a break from signing film posters featuring a single giant cinderblock. It didn’t help that Wilson, languishing in a post-How To malaise and without the structure of an HBO contract nor writer’s room, didn’t have much of an idea what it would be about, beyond realizing, through a poor DIY attempt to fix the cracked foundation of his Queens apartment, how strange it is to know so little about the dominant element of your visual environment.
Wilson initially tried pitching it as an environmental doc, a new riff on the enshittification of American infrastructure. The response was, roughly, “I don’t want to think about this,” he laughs. I want to try, and then experiment and get lost along the way as I usually do.” A strike-era Writer’s Guild of America workshop on how to make a Hallmark movie offered salient advice – “trauma is FINE, if it ends on a high note” – and a pressing question: if Hallmark could make movies about property developers, why not concrete?
So goes the 100-minute film, which plays like an extended episode of How To and, in true Wilson fashion, is as much about the difficulty of figuring out your next thing, let alone making and selling it, as it is about the composite material (though he does visit one science lab and, naturally, a corporate meet-up for “the women of concrete”). The film finds Wilson in a strange place after the high of How To’s 2023 – directionless, anxious, famous enough to be the $2,000 Jeopardy question no one gets but not to secure financing for his dream of a feature-length documentary. The pressure to follow but not repeat the show was creatively dead-ending.
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