‘An extraordinary disturbing 45-minute piece of urban anthropology’, wrote the Village Voice. Doin’ Time in Times Square came about through Ahearn’s need to make home-movies. He had already made several films when he bought a video camera to record the growth of his child. The father however was too much of a film-maker only to take family snapshots and Ahearn started using his video camera to record sights in his surroundings which most young fathers would ignore.Ahearn lives in New York City on the corner of 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue, with a view of Times Square. Facing his apartment is ‘Sally’s Hideaway’, a bar for transvestites and transsexuals. The street is further inhabited by whores, pimps, evangelists, nut cases, artists, the homeless and drug dealers. An emphatic police presence tries to keep the chaos under control. Ahearn always found cinematographic sensation literally and metaphorically on his doorstep. ‘There was always some scenario going on. We have a fire every single night. I never set out to make a video-tape. I was just living’, according to the film-maker himself. And Carlo McCormick wrote in Paper Magazine: ‘It’s enough to entertain even the most jaded b-movie fan except that what we see is all too real.’Ahearn filmed for three and a half years – the time between the birth of his first and second children. The result is a personal portrait of the underbelly of society.
