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I've seen . . . 57s . . . I've seen 12-gauge shotguns, I've seen 12-gauge pumps . . . I've seen a .45 military special with a clip on the street . . . I've seen fuckin' Thompsons. A damn Thompson! I've seen it! I've seen hand grenades, I've seen damn beer-can bazookas getting made. That thing hit you, just the same as being hit with a gun! I've seen .22 zip guns, I've seen .38 zip guns. I see things you never think you'll see on the street. I've seen dynamite. I've seen all this, man; you'd be surprised. Pretty soon, they're going to steal the damn atom bomb!"
The young man recounts his amateur arsenal to the camera with a complete lack of drama or hyperbole, quickly ticking off the hardware of his daily life as though he were running through a shopping list. And an enormous black man known only as "Heavy" furrows his brow while recounting how he watched a gun fight breaking out on a crowded afternoon street among playing children and nobody ran away, the bystanders simply watching the violence unfold. "It simply was not that unusual," he says softly.
These two accounts sound like something from a modern-day war zone, but are actually from the opening scenes of Gary Weis's long-lost documentary 80 Blocks From Tiffany's, an unvarnished, ambivalent portrayal of life in New York's south Bronx from 1979. Never screened theatrically and only briefly released previously as an educational VHS in 1985, the film has long been championed by the likes of hip-hop media organisation Ego Trip and finally gets a full DVD release this month.
The roots of the film lay in a lengthy 1977 Esquire article written by Jon Bradshaw about two gangs who operated in the south Bronx - the Savage Skulls and the Savage Nomads. "I'd always liked non-fiction and I read that piece," Weis tells The Guide down the phone from California. "Bradshaw was a guy who wrote about Baader-Meinhof, went to Angola . . . one of those hard-drinking journalists who went...