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This article by Nicole Plett was prepared for the

March 28, 2001 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.

At the Movies

When we first meet filmmaker Jason Rosette, he’s

"On

the Road" — speeding down a highway somewhere out West in

a car, his pine-tree-shaped auto deodorizer bobbing merrily from the

rear-view mirror. But the Rosette we meet is a three-year veteran

of pedestrian culture par excellence. In his former life as

a full-fledged member of the Manhattan street booksellers’ tribe,

Jack Kerouac’s beat classic was a volume he never wanted to be

without.

Rosette’s funky and entertaining 80-minute documentary "Book

Wars,"

can be experienced as much like a jazz jam session as poem or novel.

In a voice-over narrative, sometimes breezy, sometimes earnest in

tone, Rosette tells the story of his journey from student to

bookseller

to self-made filmmaker, and lets us in on some of the tricks of the

trade. He’ll share this story when he makes a guest appearance at

the New Jersey Film Festival Screening of "Book Wars" on

Friday,

March 30, at 7 p.m. The film screens Friday through Sunday, March

30 through April 1, on a double bill with "Live Nude Girls

Unite!"

a documentary about street vendors of another kind — San Francisco

sex workers — by Julia Query and Vicki Funari.

In the movie he wrote, edited, and directed, Rosette assembles a

fascinating

and often funny portrait of the stubbornly independent booksellers

and their sidewalk lifestyle. We watch them man their tables, set

up shoulder to shoulder on West 4th Street in front of NYU’s vaunted

Bobst Library near Washington Square. Complementing this village

egg-head

hangout is the group of vendors whose rickety tables on lower Sixth

Avenue are mostly arrayed with tatty old magazines and

"collectible"

comic books.

Armed with a hand-held camera, from his post behind his book table,

Rosette serves up an unvarnished gallery of portraits of aimless

literate

pedestrians and those only slightly crazed denizens of the Village,

the ones who usually mutter to themselves as they walk. Even more

compelling than the odd buyers are his portraits of the idiosyncratic

personalities of the booksellers themselves. His movie aims to debunk

the myth that the street sellers deal in stolen goods or that they

are homeless losers.

The key to these vendors’ livelihood is New York’s famed propensity

for addictions of all kinds — in this case books. From the

autobiography

of Star Trek’s William Shatner to perennial favorites by Carlos

Casteneda

and Kurt Vonnegut, these vendors fulfill the needs and fantasies of

passersby. Furthermore, until recently, the First Amendment apparently

protected book vendors from most authoritarian meddling.

Far from being poor and homeless, many of these entrepreneurs

(particularly

the oddball Paul who shares his home with a terrarium full of toads),

work tirelessly, from early morning to late at night, for the

satisfaction

of a cash income of somewhere between $100 to $300 a day.

Homeless no. But anti-establishment, certainly. Some are bibliophiles.

Others just latched onto New York’s book buying addiction as a logical

way to earn $100 a day and up — in cash. Vendors may scavenge

(aka recycle) goods from Manhattan’s notoriously upscale garbage

heaps,

but mostly they build their stock from library sales, church fairs,

and any number of basements of the esteemed state of New Jersey, here

dubbed "The Land of the Ten-cent Book."

Mayor Giuliani’s so-called quality-of-life campaign against street

activities of every sort is the snake in the grass of this story.

It provides the film’s only real element of drama and its provocative

title. Rosette chronicles how his "Edenic" community is

gradually

scattered by Guiliani’s campaign that introduces pressures of tax

ID numbers, shrinking sidewalk space, and a police presence that

includes

impounding the merchandise. The police crackdown comes late in the

film, impinging on the freedoms of a cast and characters both sane

and insane that we’ve come to respect.

But Rosette, too, has come to the end of an era. He tells us he’s

also sick of three years of "standing around." Maintaining

his place at the vortex of the literary tradition, like Kerouac, he’s

"On the Road" again.

— Nicole Plett