[Vito Marzullo raw #6]

Raw tape #6 for Vito Marzullo documentary. Ward Office. Marzullo meets with community members, covering matters of employment and pothole repair.

00:00Copy video clip URL Winding down his office hours for the night, Marzullo chats with the video crew about which city officials, including a county commissioner and two judges, have visited his office that day.

01:38Copy video clip URL A ward resident approaches Marzullo, saying that he recently applied for a job as a guard with the Cook County Jail and was told that he should contact his alderman for support. Marzullo tells him that he can’t help him. “There’s so many things people think you can do,” remarks director Tom Weinberg once the man has left. “That’s the goddamn problem. You run away from them and they think you don’t want to do it. And that’s how mistakes are made,” the alderman replies.

03:28Copy video clip URL The mood turns tense when Marzullo and a community member argue over the repair of a single pothole that was assigned to an official in Marzullo’s organization. “I gave it to him,” Marzullo says of the job. “You gentlemen gotta learn one thing. If you go to the doctor and tell him your aches and pains, don’t tell him about how to cure it…I told him to do everything possible, now what he didn’t do means he can’t. You know, these fellas aren’t going to jeopardize their own job either.” The conversation turns more heated, and Marzullo even whips out a phone to call the official, but the situation diffuses and the man thanks Marzullo for his time.

07:51Copy video clip URL Marzullo seems puzzled — his exact words are, “What the hell is he doing here?” — when a man from the 50th Ward approaches him “with regards to employment.” Marzullo turns him away, telling him to see his own alderman instead. “When you’ve got 65,000 people in a ward, you’ve got a city on your back and we’ve got no employment office,” Marzullo says. Even when the man offers to volunteer, Marzullo tells him that volunteers should come from inside the ward. “In a ward like this, they don’t pay no attention to outsiders. They want people who live with them, go to church with them, go to wakes, go to social fairs, not just come out here and volunteer when election day comes.”

11:08Copy video clip URL Ready to head home, Marzullo discusses future taping plans with Weinberg before the camera cuts out.

12:30Copy video clip URL When the video resumes, Weinberg and Marzullo mull over the finer points of the shooting schedule in Marzullo’s office while the camera crew, posted in the waiting room, peers into the office through a crack to capture their talk. Weinberg says that he wants the documentary to capture some “real stuff.”  “It might take us a few weeks. If you could just bear with us and help us…” The camera then surveys the standing room-only waiting area before Marzullo emerges to meet two gentlemen who have just arrived and show them back into his office. The tape ends before he identifies the men.