During the beginning of evening rush hour on November 9, 1965, WABC radio disc jockey Dan Ingram commented on-air about the slowness of the record he was playing (Jonathan King’s pop debut “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”). Within the next 10 minutes or so, the audio on the station halted, as power across parts of Canada and much of the Northeast went out for approximately the next 12 hours.
Frightened and confused as most of the affected populace was, it came to be characterized as “the good blackout.” According to the New York Times, “People voluntarily directed traffic, handed out candles, and settled down at Grand Central Station for a night of sleep, without much of a worry about their wallets.”
The prevailing narrative around events of the blackout eight years later, in July 1977, bear a decidedly different characterization. Much of the coverage of the 1977 blackout has focused solely on incidents of looting and other violence. Oscar-nominated director Sam Pollard (“4 Little Girls,” “Eyes on The Prize,” “Mr. Soul!,” “MLK/FBI”) has set out to fully explore that narrative as he prepares to direct a documentary about the historic power interruption.
“That was a momentous moment in history—a major blackout put the city into darkness,” Pollard told the AmNews. “When [the producers] approached me, I said, ‘Man, if we can find stories and footage and audio recordings from that night, diverse accounts and different perspectives, I’m in.’”
He is also banking on members of the public being part of the process. “We’re hoping to have people give us personal material, personal video, personal photos, personal audio recordings that they might have [that] documented what was happening to them on that particular day, that evening.”
Producer Clive Patterson, in an interview with the AmNews, said of the decision to make this documentary, “We were just thinking about archive-driven sort of stories that feel like they’re worth revisiting. The New York blackout was just one of those stories and the 50th anniversary is in two and a half years. It was like, ‘The New York blackout is an incredible story, and it’s never really been properly told.”
Pollard plans to dramatize not just the more popular renderings of the events of July 13–14, 1977, which resulted in more than 4,000 arrests, but the differing structural realities of New York City and the nation compared to those of a decade earlier. “By 1977, we had watched Nixon resign from the White House, America had been in Vietnam,” he said. “The Civil Rights Movement had changed radically because Dr. King had been assassinated, the Black Panther Party had been snuffed out, New York was barely surviving economically.”
He noted that the summer of 1977 was infamous for another historic event—the string of homicides of young women by serial murderer David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam, that led to it being dubbed “Summer of Sam.” “There was tension in the city. It was a different country and a different city [from 1965],” Pollard said.
In addition to crowdsourcing archival footage from the public along with traditional sources of video, audio, and images, Pollard would like to present a fuller picture of New Yorkers’ experiences during the 1977 blackout. “People were dealing with having children born that night, the crew of the ‘Superman’ movie were still trying to do filming. You also had people who were just helping each other. You also had sort of the incubation of hip-hop musicians—DJs were playing music at that time. People were celebrating and having parties on their roofs that night. There was a political perspective, with the presence of people like Bella Abzug, Ed Koch, Abraham Beame, and Mario Cuomo.
“There were many different stories, many different aspects. We want to immerse the audience into these extraordinary stories, when 9 million people were thrown into darkness.”
If you have images, audio, footage, or extraordinary stories from the 1977 blackout in New York City, contact the film’s producers by email at blackout.project@insight.film; by phone at 917-300-9631; or via Instagram / X / Facebook at @InsightFilmUK.