The Gods of Times Square

Sandler is a believer. And for many of them, Times Square was like an open-air cathedral. This obligatory junction for any self-respecting New Yorker, where sex-shops and by-the-hour hotels proliferated, was the ideal place to call lost sheep back to the straight and narrow path. Preachers and exhorters of all sorts sermonizing loudly were part of the daily hyper-activity of the site. For six years Sandler filmed these crackpots, during a pivotal time for the square because of its purchase by Disney in 1994 and a radical clean up by Rudolph Giuliani. Throughout his film, Sandler reports Times Squares’ transformation from a place of debauchery to the glorious commercial symbol of capitalism, as if it were an answer from God to the long-gone preaching loonies.