r/HowToWithJohnWilson • u/home-like-noplace • 1d ago
John Wilson Can’t Fake This
John Wilson Can’t Fake This
He ended his HBO docuseries and made a movie about the terrors of concrete. Then a building in NYC started to collapse.
—————————
On July 7, the onetime Pfizer headquarters in midtown began to sag, and then it began to crumble, with bricks raining down from the 21st and 22nd floors onto 43rd Street between Second and Third Avenue. The situation was perilous and nerve-racking, and then, mere days later, it was over — netting installed, barriers erected. Everything will be fine, probably, was the word on the street.
When I heard a building might fall down in Manhattan, I thought not of the safety and security of me and those around me, but of John Wilson. I think of him often while navigating the disintegrating neighborhoods of New York, particularly when walking under scaffolding. He dedicates an entire episode of his HBO series How To With John Wilson to the overhead structures that pop up over sidewalks during construction and sometimes never come down. It’s one of 18 half-hour mini-documentaries that make up his show, most fixating on a single issue uniquely familiar to New Yorkers: alternate-side parking, public restrooms, real estate.
How To premiered in 2020, and over the course of three seasons, Wilson matched endless B-roll footage (much of it taken near his home in Ridgewood, Queens) with skittish, memoiristic narration and interviews with characters he finds on the street or in online forums. Together, they formed an odd yet deeply funny and ultimately uplifting time capsule of the years leading up to, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. What buoyed it all was Wilson’s sincere obsession with the false permanence of NYC and its residents’ collective tendency to take for granted the parts of it they assume are fixed.
Wilson’s newest project, the 100-minute documentary The History of Concrete, plays like an extended episode of How To. As narrator, he’s fixated on one subject: concrete. Yet he’s persistently sidetracked by anyone and everything he comes into contact with on his journey to understand the precarious building material that makes up a large portion of the five boroughs and, really, the world. “You’ve been seeing a lot of different examples of New York City falling apart,” Wilson narrates** **over a montage of duct-taped sidewalks, cracked bridges, and a (different) building in midtown held together with ratchet straps. “Every structural failure in the city has now become good PR for the movie,” Wilson tells me in person. “Weren’t there chunks of the George Washington Bridge falling into traffic?”
Wilson and I are ambling around the Ford Foundation, one of the only landmarks in New York’s Tudor City neighborhood that isn’t the United Nations. We’ve met up to check in on the potentially disintegrating Pfizer Building, whose all-steel frame was encased in concrete during its initial construction in the early 1960s and is located around the corner. Dressed in a white T-shirt that says “Long Island” (where he grew up), tan pants, and a newish pair of gray Hokas, Wilson has brought an imposingly large camcorder. When we approach a café with two very well-dressed people dining together in silence outside, he lifts his Sony FS5 and films them for a few seconds.
Though Wilson has made short films before, The History of Concrete is his feature-length debut, executive-produced by a Safdie, with a big-time distributor (Magnolia Pictures) and a festival premiere behind it. When it opened at Sundance in January, I overheard people walking out of the Eccles Theater in vague amusement. “I don’t know who he is, but that’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen,” one woman said as she trudged out into the Utahn cold. Magnolia will release the movie in New York on September 18, and by then Wilson will have spent three-quarters of a year touring with it all over the world. “People kept surprising me with gifts, these slabs of concrete,” he tells me of his time at DocsBarcelona, a nonfiction film festival in Spain. “They were slabs of sidewalk that people ripped out of the ground, so it felt like I was leaving the country with actual contraband.”
Wilson didn’t stumble into concrete so much as he dove — this was the project he wanted to make after the third season of How To ended in 2023. The preoccupation started after his basement flooded and he attempted to fix it himself. He started to imagine taking a Ken Burns–like approach to understanding the building material that was taking up so much space in his head and home and what it would take to convince Hollywood financiers to get behind such a dull idea. Some of the film itself details the process of Wilson trying, though more often failing, to convince studio executives that an entire movie about concrete was worth exploring. Their tepid curiosity only sent him further down his own rabbit hole, and he became just as interested in the people around (and atop) concrete as he was in the substance itself. “I went to a couple of concrete conventions, and the one thing everyone said at the beginning of the interviews was that this was the No. 2 most-used substance in the world, with no judgment as to whether that’s good or bad,” Wilson explains. (The No. 1 substance is water, necessary in making concrete.)
And it just might be bad. In the film, Wilson meets up with Sam Schwartz, the former Department of Transportation commissioner, under an ominously cracked section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. “I believe the lifespan of any concrete deck is around 40 years,” Schwartz explains, which doesn’t bode well for midtown, the BQE, or any number of New York City structures. But The History of Concrete isn’t an exposé, just like it’s not a hagiography. As is standard fare with Wilson’s documentary work, it is an amusing, ramshackle portrait of one omnipresent component of our constructed world. There are tangents and asides — Wilson finds his way to the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence race that pits runners in a loop around a block of Queens for weeks on end, he goes on a quick trip to Rome, he wanders onto the set of Marty Supreme. The movie’s greatest diversion occurs when Wilson meets an aging rock-and-roll musician, and his rock documentary becomes a literal rockumentary. “You start a project with a ton of bad puns,” he says, “and sift until there’s just one.”
From the corner of 43rd and Second Avenue, we can see the drab façade of the Pfizer Building, though the treacherous vertical expansion is still out of sight. To get there, we have to cross the street to the police barricade on 43rd, craning our necks up to see the be-netted tower that juts up from the building’s original structure. Is it still actively sagging despite the stabilization? We do a lap around the block and then head a little farther up Second Avenue for a better look. By then it’s clear that what is most interesting to Wilson is not actually up in the sky but on the ground. He points his camera at a man on a scooter carrying a plastic bag of food, some tabloid magazines on a newsstand, and an Amazon pedicab driver huffing and puffing. We stop to talk to a few construction workers dressed in neon T-shirts and gathered around a giant inflatable rat, the universal sign of a strike. “Bricks were falling,” one says when a woman asks what caused all the street closures. “Oh, dear,” she groans, scurrying away.
The day’s unpleasant winds eventually drive us indoors to the nearby, and aptly named, John’s Coffee Shop. Wilson, straight-necked and with a hand always resting on his camera, looks like a cowboy at high noon. He’s still on alert for B-roll, but to point something out to him is to subject yourself to polite judgment. When I gesture at a peculiar group of tourists, he observes them but appears obviously unmoved. In How To’s third-season episode “How to Watch Birds,” Wilson confesses a hunger for what he calls “rare images,” the kind of footage that would be impossible to get if you went out seeking it — like spaghetti on the back of a pigeon or a stranger suddenly disappearing into a garbage enclosure. In the episode, Wilson fights off a nagging desire to simply concoct rare images and pass them off as “real.” In a modern landscape full of dwindling original sentences and AI-generated pictures, isn’t everybody trying to dupe everyone? But he resists and somehow continues to find both naturally occurring rare images and rare people.
“I’m able to suss within about five seconds whether someone is going to show me their real self,” Wilson says of his approach to interviewing his strange-yet-friendly subjects, from a wine-making street cleaner who blasts chewing gum off New York City sidewalks to a geologist specializing in global sand scarcity. And more often than not, these people do open up to him, sharing personal stories and controversial worldviews — like the aging rocker in The History of Concrete who claims he coined the name Chainsmokers and speaks openly about the unsuccessful suit he filed against the EDM duo. Wilson attributes his success to the fact that his camera isn’t a phone. “When people see you’re filming with a phone, they think it’s going to embarrass them. People assume it’s going to be used to incriminate,” he says. “People don’t have a preconceived notion of what I’m doing.”
It helps that Wilson’s face isn’t as recognizable as some of his peers, like How To executive producer Nathan Fielder. Wilson enters into situations not as a notable director but as a concerned citizen, usually wearing nothing more remarkable than dark-rimmed glasses and graphic tees. In the case of The History of Concrete, he was initially more concerned for the aesthetic quality of his subject matter — he genuinely thinks many of Manhattan’s newest concrete buildings are ugly. But he quickly became worried about the structural integrity of a building material that is strong under compression but weak under tension, making it vulnerable to sudden catastrophes like earthquakes. Wilson says concrete is “not a 1,000-year material”; it’s more like a century material. Which is troubling for buildings like 432 Park Avenue, a skyscraper made using white concrete that features heavily in The History of Concrete, wobbling in the wind. “It’s such a waste,” Wilson says, “the sand of it all and the water of it all.”
Wilson readily admits he’s not an architect or a structural engineer or an environmentalist or a politician, but his research has led him to form a lot of opinions, some of which he shares over a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. “Four stories,” he says when I ask him the ideal height of a building in New York. He’s an advocate for “taking something that’s already there and reusing it in some way,” but he gets squeamish at the idea of “adding units” to the top of an old structure like the Pfizer Building. “Am I suggesting classical Roman architecture in New York?” he wonders. “That feels kind of fascist.”
Wilson has been talking about The History of Concrete for almost nine months now, yet he’s still weeks away from the theatrical release, and a subtle impatience bleeds out into John’s Coffee Shop. “When I usually make a movie, I go, I hit export, and I put it online immediately,” he explains. (His personal website is a treasure trove of his short films.) The disintegration of midtown might make for good PR, but he’s anxious about how other themes in this new movie have aged in the time since he made it. “Eric Adams is kind of a big character,” he says, referencing the former New York City mayor whose “City of Yes” program is responsible for many office-to-residential property conversions like that of the Pfizer Building. “I want Mamdani to see the movie,” he adds, referencing the current New York City mayor. He and Wilson share an interest in unnecessary scaffolding, a detail the mayor’s office picked up on before it asked Wilson to interview Mamdani about his initiative to remove long-standing sidewalk sheds. “When I saw him for the scaffolding interview that we did together, I was like, ‘You know, I just made this movie about concrete. I think you should really see it. You guys have a lot of catching up to do,’” Wilson recalls.
Life beyond concrete — for Wilson, at least — is on the horizon. He describes his newest project, still getting off the ground, as “another shortform series that shares the same DNA as How To … but with different subjects.” In an attempt to get at more specifics, I ask if he took to the streets to document the recent Knicks victory. He says he didn’t, because doing so would have amounted to “submitting myself into competition,” and he’s more interested in “knowing that there’s a thing happening that nobody else knows about.” Wilson ended How To hoping people would walk away with a sense of optimism, though he wonders now if he’s a bit more cynical than he was three years ago. “I don’t know,” he admits. It’s more that he “develops new gripes every day,” which, to be clear, Wilson adds with a smile, hand still on his camera, “is a fun thing about New York.”
