The Making of Schmatta

Kheel Center / HBO Documentarian Marc Levin turns his lens on the ailing New York City garment industry and finds not just clothes, but a microcosm of the current world order.

In the fall of 2008, as Citigroup was slashing tens of thousands of jobs, Lehman Brothers was folding, and AIG was right behind it, documentarian Marc Levin got a call from HBO, for whom he was finishing up a film about the decline of New York City’s garment industry.

HBO senior producer Nancy Abraham was on the line. “Maybe you were right,” she said. “Maybe you should have done the Wall Street documentary.”

But Levin wasn’t doing the Wall Street documentary. That idea had been nixed by HBO a year earlier. Instead he was doing the Schmatta—Yiddish for “rag,” for those who weren’t raised on bagels and lox—documentary, and he figured he was screwed.

At the Marc Jacobs show during Fashion Week of 2008, Marc Levin thought, “The economy has no clothes.”

“You can imagine my reaction,” Levin said in September, following a screening at the Toronto Film Festival of his film, Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, which airs October 19 on HBO. “We were, like, editing. We were still gonna do some final shooting—for fall Fashion Week and the holiday shopping season but we were almost done. It was a moment of panic.”

The panic was short-lived, however. Over the next several months, Levin and his producing partner Daphne Pinkerson wove together a rich and complex story that shines a light not just on Seventh Avenue, but on the world as Americans now know it: precarious, angst-ridden, and nothing at all like it was just a few years ago.

In this way, Schmatta is in no way a film just for fashionistas, or people familiar with behind-the-scenes players in the garment industry, such as Bruce Raynor, president of Workers United, SEIU, and Julius Stern, a Holocaust refugee who was the first president of Donna Karan Inc. (A fair share of celebrities and designers also sashay through the film, including Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Isaac Mizrahi, who declares, “Greed is out.”)

Rather, Schmatta is an entertaining, lively tapestry that brings together New York history, including seminal moments such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911; the American Story, as experienced by mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants who found in the garment industry a gateway to success in their new land; and firsthand accounts of that story, from people like Joe Raico, Schmatta’s Joe the Plumber, who, in this case is Joe the Cutter.

After 43 years in the business, Raico decided not to stick around to see his industry completely die, due to rampant outsourcing (today only 5 percent of American clothing is made in the U.S., compared to 95 percent in 1965), and Levin catches up with him just as he opts for early retirement via a buyout.

“All we did was work hard to support our family,” Raico, a sturdy-looking man with a goatee and a thick Queens accent, said in Toronto. “We’d like to do that again.”

Schmatta points out: easier said than done.