MAN PUSH CART: ME FUCK STORY?

A few months ago, I started a new section at the paper entitled “Cinema.” I write articles for it every two weeks, which cover films set in the outer boroughs, directors who live there, or both if I’m lucky.

This past week, I wanted to write about “Man Push Cart,” a film you may have heard something about. It tells the story of a pushcart vendor, one of the many souls we see selling bagels and coffee on street corners in Manhattan every day. Naturally, there’s more to it than that, but I really can’t say more without giving away crucial plot points.

Also, I hadn’t seen the movie yet. Still, I very much wanted to interview Ramin Bharani, “Man Push Cart’s” director, prior to his film’s screening at the Queens Museum of Art. Since QMA wanted to generate as much publicity and interest in the picture as possible, they enthusiastically got me into contact with Bharani, with whom I set a date and time for a phone interview.

Until then, being pitifully self-conscious of my own nascent journalistic prowess, I planned to read every interview Bharani had ever participated in, to study his bio, look him up on the Internet Movie Database, etc., etc., so that I would be able to write a strong piece about him.

Then I got an assignment on the date of the interview and totally forgot to call.

To be fair, I did not forget so much as remembered several hours later. Unfortunately, I never did any of the homework I had carefully plotted out, so my call to Bharani – preceded by a mutter of “Oh, crap,” and my spilling onto the floor of the bedroom, where I had been peacefully reclining – was more or less cold. What followed was approximately ten minutes of questions that traveled in no certain direction, or in multiple ones at the same time. I was also in a slight panic mode, which meant I scribbled down information haphazardly, often with a short-handed version of shorthand. That will become important in a few lines.

Yesterday morning, I took those pages of notes with Bahrani and spliced together the preview article, sending it to my editor as soon as I finished proofreading it. With the day’s work done, and at least half-an-hour to kill before leaving for the office, I puttered around the apartment doing random things, checking my e-mail, thinking about the coming week’s stories.

I’m still not sure why, but I decided at length to e-mail a copy of the article to Bahrani. I expected to get a thank you note in reply, maybe a few slight suggestions for changes. After all, I reasoned, I couldn’t have fucked up the facts of the piece too badly; it wasn’t a long article to begin with, so there weren’t enough facts to really fuck up.

Oh, but there was at least one, and one fuck-up can be too many.

As it turned out, I got Bahrani and his film’s star, a Pakistani actor named Ahmad Razvi, confused with each other. One had spent years observing pushcart vendors as preparation for his role in “Man Push Cart;” the other had actually been one. On that topic, I confused Bahrani to Razvi, and vice versa.

Luckily, the former e-mailed me back just as Blaine, the managing editor, was about to leave the office. Bharani pointed out exactly where the mistakes had been, and I forwarded his notes to Blaine, who made the necessary changes. It was especially fortuitous timing since I cannot edit the layout myself, and we were going to press. Also, had we gone to print with the mistake, I have no doubt that some movie geek in Brooklyn or Queens would have caught it, causing the paper, myself, and the subject a heap of embarrassment.

For his part, Bahrani took the error in stride, and did thank me for the article. However, I don’t think of myself as being out of the woods yet, especially since he knows I will be attending QMA’s screening of “Man Push Cart” this Saturday.

Looking ahead to that date, I can’t help wondering what may transpire if I approach him, or ask him a question during the question-and-answer period that will follow the movie, and he notices the press pass dangling from my neck. Will he realize who I am? Will he immediately think, “There’s that newspaper reporter who made the bush league mistake?”

In the meantime, what I’m also wondering is, “Did the mistake come about because I was pressed for time last week? Or was this incident indicative of the rest of my work?” I guess I won’t know until the next article, the next phone interview, or the next response from a subject.