Brooklyn Boheme, a new documentary from filmmaker/historian/author Nelson George and director Diane Paragas, explores the rise of the black artistic community (from which the documentary takes its name) that took root in Fort Greene in the 1980s.  The "boheme" included greats like Spike Lee, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Chris Rock, Rosie Perez, Erykah Badu and Talib Kweli and many of whom still live in the neighborhood today.  George, who grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn before moving to Fort Greene in 1985, is intimately connected to his Brooklyn Boheme subject matter having spent the beginning of his career writing for publications like Billboard Magazine and the Village Voice before authoring several black music histories and, later, producing and directing films including HBO's Life Support, for which Queen Latifah won a Golden Globe for Best Lead Actress.   

Although artists and writers had been settling in Fort Greene as early as the 1960s, it wasn't until the 80s that the community began to flourish and solidify, George told PAPERMAG.   Speaking of the neighborhood's appeal, Branford Marsalis says in the film's trailer, "It wasn't just a black neighborhood--it had people who were upwardly mobile in their thinking, not necessarily in their wallet.  It had the feeling of a college town."  In addition to Marsalis, the documentary includes interviews with Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Rosie Perez, Talib Kweli, Branford Marsalis, Lorna Simpson and Saul Williams, all of whom can trace their careers back to the neighborhood and to the prodigious creative outpouring during the "Brooklyn Boheme" era of the 80s and 90s.  "I think it was also a period that was prolific.  I even see that in my own work," Simpson says in the documentary. "When I look at it now, it's like, 'Okay, how'd I do all that?' I think it has to do with the people I was around.  Everybody else was doing that too."  Perhaps one of the best known products of the movement is Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, a movie that fixed a new light on the neighborhood just as much as it fixed a new light on the image of a cosmopolitan, single black woman.
 

Now, nearly three decades since Lee's seminal film, the neighborhood has undergone significant changes.  Though crime has lessened and crack may no longer be "claiming street corners" as George says in the film, gentrification has also pushed artists and upstarts to newer, more affordable areas, leaving young families and creative professionals to colonize Fort Greene. But many residents have stuck around since the Boheme days, and their changing lifestyles in some way mirror the changes to the neighborhood itself. Just as Lee and George have found professional success, so too has the neighborhood matured and kept apace with their changing needs and more affluent lifestyles. (Author Colson Whitehead, another Fort Greene resident, presents an interesting case as someone who lived in the neighborhood during its scrappier days, wrote a 2004 article lamenting its gentrification, which forced him to leave and now, apparently, has moved back.)

Though the neighborhood may have changed (there wasn't a line of strollers waiting to get into The General Greene back in 1987), the writer/filmmaker sees the legacy of the Brooklyn Boheme living on in the "mammoth amount of work that has an impact globally."  It is not only the work--films by Spike Lee, music by Branford Marsalis, art by Lorna Simpson and hip-hop and spoken word poetry by Mos Def--that George finds inspiring but also the work environment the Boheme once shared. "You got this sense that all of these artists were in the community--they were living around, you'd see them during the day--but you knew there would be nights when they were seriously working," the filmmaker says.  And, when George himself needed a break from writing to grab a slice of "cheesecake from Junior's," he'd "hear all kinds of musical instruments talking throughout the night."  


Brooklyn Boheme will be screened at BAM on February 27th as part of a double feature alongside Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It.  It can also be viewed through the end of February on Showtime.