NEWARK, N.J. (1010 WINS) -- Most movies take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, or even a few years to make. For filmmaker Jon Alpert, it took a few decades.
In fact, the title of Alpert’s latest alone should give you a good idea of how long he spent behind the camera. Simply titled ‘Life of Crime: 1984-2020’, the film features 36 years of sporadic footage taken from the real lives of three local criminals.
From petty crimes to their home lives to the hard time they’d inevitably serve for their actions, Alpert’s documentary gets up close and personal in ways that most audiences haven’t seen before.
Now, how did Alpert convince his subjects to participate? More importantly, why would they allow him into their lives so intimately and for so long? In an exclusive interview with 1010 WINS, he explained that three criminals the film follows were also his friends.
“On one hand, they were really good criminals - very creative. They could show up at 1010 WINS, walk around, and in five minutes come up with five really interesting schemes to make money that would be completely illegal,” he said. “And the fact that I expressed a sort of tempered admiration for the way in which they could shoplift and do other criminal activities, they felt that their craft was being appreciated.”
They weren’t always his friends though. Interestingly enough, Alpert didn’t know who any of them were until he found them, or until misfortune found him rather. He told WINS that prior to shooting he was a victim of crime.
He said, “I was a regular part of the ‘Today Show’, and I used to take and ride my motorcycle up to Rockefeller Center and drop off my tapes prior to the broadcast. [One day] I went downstairs to get on my motorcycle and it was gone. I was really mad, somebody had stolen it.”
“There was a lot of crime in those days,” he added, “and this was also the beginning of some of these police ride-along shows like ‘COPS’.” Despite his experience, Alpert confessed “I really was more interested in the criminals than the cops.”
He said he wanted to understand a criminal’s true motivation. And he could only do that by following real criminals around and getting to know them. That proved to be a pretty difficult task, however, mostly because it was such a strange ask. He joked that you couldn’t just ask a bank robber if you could follow them into a robbery.
Eventually he got the idea to call up an alternative high school. There, he said, “[I spoke] to one of the teachers there and said, ‘Listen, we're looking for current criminals or potential criminals. Could you recommend any?’ He says, Yeah, the whole student body. How many do you want? One or one hundred?”
The next day he met with the film’s first subject and the rest was history.
While this documentary spans the longest amount of time, it’s actually the third - and final - in his ‘Life of Crime’ series. The first film, released in 1989, captures a single year in the lives of his subjects, The second, released in 1998, acts as a minor update as it chronicles their lives for a little over a decade.
'Life of Crime 1984-2020' sadly caps the series because none of its subjects are alive anymore, falling victim to their own vices over the years. Regardless of their records or the lives they’ve led, Alpert says that their stories still matter.
“[I believe] one of the things that let them open up to me was the fact that they were smart enough and self aware enough to know that they were in the process of destroying themselves, destroying their families, and destroying their communities,” he said.
"Participating in this film, as a warning to other people, was the one big constructive thing that they were doing in their lives,” he added. “[It] would be their legacy, no matter how tragically, their lives ended. The fact that they were sharing their lives with other people could help other people. That was very important to them.”
'Life of Crime: 1984-2020' is available to stream on HBO Max now.