Matt Tyrnauer | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Where’s My Roy Cohn? [2019]

2019/10/242020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

A love of a good fight. The documentary about the man who one interviewee calls “The Teflon Fraud” starts and ends with another: Donald Trump. A close personal friend of Roy M. Cohn‘s as well as a client/protégée, the real estate magnate’s ascent from reality television host to President of the United States is easily attributed to the cutthroat and disingenuous tactics learned from his New York City lawyer. So when Trump encountered one of many 2018 reports shining him and his administration in a criminal light they’ve done well…

TIFF17 REVIEW: Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood [2018]

2017/09/092017/11/15 Jared Mobarak

“Get what I mean?” If the phrase “tell-all” hadn’t been coined before 2012, Scotty Bowers‘ memoir Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars would have done the job. Here’s a Marine Corps veteran of World War II born in Illinois who decided to land in Hollywood upon his return on a whim. He answered a “wanted” advertisement to work at a gas station, was hit on sexually by Walter Pidgeon while pumping gas, and realized he could use this well-trafficked locale to help…

INTERVIEW: Matt Tyrnauer, director of Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

2017/05/122020/03/21 Jared Mobarak

Debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016, Matt Tyrnauer‘s Citizen Jane: Battle for the City has received rave reviews across the country as it opened in limited release April 21st, 2017. Centering on Jane Jacobs—a journalist, author, and activist—the film showcases the problems inherent to how urban planners in the mid-twentieth century worked. One of the key proponents of this movement to teardown what he deemed “slums” for new, mammoth housing projects of concrete erasing the very communities they sought to “save” was New York’s Robert Moses. His…

REVIEW: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City [2017]

2017/05/092017/05/11 Jared Mobarak

“If you can understand a city, then that city is dead” The 1960s were a hotbed of activism by necessity. You had civil rights battles for racial and gender equality, protests standing in opposition of new wars coming down the pipeline after just finishing one that risked destroying everything, and America’s growing wealth disparity reaching an apex yet to be solved even today. You had an expanding populace surviving domestically in cities that were falling apart and in desperate need of resuscitation. Suddenly the “first world” hit a decision point…