Surveillance and Madison Square Garden: An Open Letter to James Dolan

To: James Lawrence Dolan, aka JD, aka “Lord Jim,”

I greet you at the beginning of a great revival for our beloved Knickerbockers, jam-packed with the types of thrilling drives, celebrity encounters, and unbearably suspenseful long-shots at Madison Square Garden that remind us what we adore about New York basketball. The haters can no longer say you’ve consigned the Knicks to a permadrought. You feel OK about booting Tom Thibodeau, and you sufficiently motivated the team into a Finals-or-bust mindset. They smothered the Hawks, after landing the largest halftime playoffs lead in league history! You even took time out from rehearsing with the Straight Shot to chat with the stinkin’ press at the arena this year! What more could everyone want from you?

Anyway, I’m not here to relitigate a season that all the gambler-subsidized podcasters will continue picking over for months to come. Rather, I approach with a different, more unorthodox request, one that has nothing to do with all the athletes or musicians (Bruce Springsteen! Rosaliá! Rick Ross! That Alex Warren guy!) set to bless the stages of MSG this summer, alongside your blues-strumming bandmates. I’m not even going to bring up all the surveillance stuff, no matter how many quirky photos you may have of my face from the annual Michigan State vs. Rutgers matchups. I come before you today, rather, with a simple proposition, one that may appeal to your heart as a fellow artist, student of history, lover of this city, and custodian of a capital-E empirical legacy. I refer to the legacy of The Garden, the loving documentary tribute to MSG filmed by the late, great Frederick Wiseman at the tail end of the millennium, yet blocked from public view ever since. Thanks to you. Allegedly.

Wiseman passed this year at the age of 96, leaving behind an indelible record of this city through a corpus of splendid New York films. It seems an ideal moment, then, to complete that set with a belated public release of The Garden, a vantage point on MSG that preceded the buildout of your ubiquitous panopticon, featuring memories of the circus coming to town, the Knicks’ last pre-lockout season, and even the dog show. The gamut of the Garden, in all its glory, filmed in 1998 and booked for a big film-festival-and-PBS release in 2005—before you and your fellow Garden/Cablevision executives nixed that.

Some have alleged that The Garden was obstructed because its final cut includes “three closed-door meetings in which Garden management discusses its strategy for labor negotiations.” Just take out a couple bits of this secret chatter, your team insisted—but even if Wiseman had consented to leaving the fate of his hard-wrought film in MSG’s hands, he was not going to compromise his artistic integrity. As a businessman you may be thinking, what’s a few lines from a long-ass movie? But I urge you to consider it from your experiences as a singin’, strummin’ bluesman familiar with the principles of craft: What isn’t a few lines, especially when it comes to MSG’s historic operations?

Anyway, it’s been nearly 30 years since The Garden was shot and a little over 20 since it was cast to the legal vaults. Hopefully we can agree it’s been more than enough time to rethink this historical erasure. There’s a lot to celebrate and appreciate about MSG right now, and you have the opportunity to ride off that and engender warmer feelings from New York’s struggling artists by granting The Garden the proper release it deserves. Hell, you could debut the screening at the Garden itself! I guarantee the sheer novelty would have butts in seats, all appreciators only.

And you’d be helping to consecrate the memory of a legend who’s done so much for this city. “All I know is that I made a movie and I want the public to see it,” Wiseman once said of The Garden. The public wants to see it, too.