Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet
New York and Cleveland-Koch and Kucinich: two cities, two mayors, two vastly different approaches to the urban fiscal crisis. Tight Your Belts, Bite the Bullet is a tough, polemical film contrasting the two mayors in their relationships to their cities' powerful banking interests. "The best scene...takes place outside Lincoln Center. Shiny limousines unload furred and bejeweled guests to a dinner in honor of Felix Rohatyn of the Municipal Assistance Corp., the banking group that now virtually runs the city (of New York). One tuxedoed banker...: ‘It's great. It puts an intervening layer in there. It separates the politicians from the constituencies.' That's about as clear an explanation of what's been happening to our cities as you're going to get. This film shows how and why that has happened and highlights opposition struggles that, too occasionally, have been successful...." --In These Times
The film details opposition within New York to its mayor's willful abdication of power to corporate interests. But the main counter-thrust comes from a portrait of Cleveland's mayor Kucinich, whose efforts to thwart the banks' takeover of the city power company are shown against the local media's attempts to distort and ridicule his campaign.
Newsweek found Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet (which screened at the 1981 New York Film Festival) "an eye-opener...wildly provocative."