Shot from the end of 2020 through summer 2023, Penn F-ing Station originated when documentary producer and director Claire Read—raised in lower Manhattan, now a Brooklyn resident, lifelong commuter through the titular transit hub—noticed the structure was starting to be renovated. She wanted to capture it before the changes were finished: “I had some nostalgia and love for this most detested place. Certainly, I’m one of the few people who points a camera at it, because why would you?”

The resulting 30-minute vérité documentary depicts Penn Station below ground by documenting the construction and interpolating interview snapshots of average commuters—a couple on their first date, a formerly unhoused man who used to live in the station. Above ground, proposed renovation plans cover not just Penn Station but the surrounding area. With the endorsement of Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams, developer Vornado wants to tear down adjacent blocks to build even more office buildings (in a post-COVID economy!). Read follows long-shot state Assembly candidate and development opponent Layla Law-Gisiko during her 2022 campaign, as well as her enthusiastic ally, neighborhood music studio owner Steve Marshall, who at one point introduces Layla to an ad hoc neighborhood band that launches into a rendition of “Everybody’s Talkin’.” That cover then soundtracks a montage of the area while evoking Midnight Cowboy’s apropos documentation of a much less over-developed Manhattan.

Read’s always been interested in nonfiction and made her first documentary in high school. “That film was about the proposed Muslim community center near Ground Zero,” she notes, comparing its themes to Penn F-ing Station’s: “I guess I must be attracted to these kinds of stories of city politics drama,” in part because “I grew up in lower Manhattan post-9/11.” After studying film and history at Oberlin, Read’s career began with PA and field producer jobs for VICE’s weekly HBO show, which she describes as “a crash course in film school.” She then went on to work on its show States of Undress with Hailey Gates (a current collaborator on a feature documentary in development). When Read moved to Los Angeles for a few years, she got in touch with documentarian Jehane Noujaim and began working for her on The Great Hack, “but very quickly she brought me into the fold of a different story that was unfolding”—the saga of the NXIVM cult that swelled into two seasons of The Vow. Says Read, that series “literally started with filming some people in a backyard in L.A. I learned from the cinema vérité of it all, starting on something and not knowing where it’s going to go.” (There’s also a vérité connection through Noujaim back to that filmmaker’s own mentor, D.A. Pennebaker, whose Town Bloody Hall inspired Penn’s title.)

Penn production began during COVID, when Read wasn’t “traveling as much for other projects. It was this drama that was unfolding in midtown every day, and I could just get on a subway and go there, so there was a practicality to it.” The project’s “scrappy lo-fi nature,” Read says, was likely “influenced by making Telemarketers at the same time.” Her work as the sole producer (alongside many associate and executive producers) on that three-part series began when production company Elara sent her “a hard drive of footage.” She “started watching and couldn’t look away. There’s so much what I’ve come to call ‘fast filmmaking,’ where people just get the rights to a story and turn it around,” she notes. “It’s become so formulaic, and this was so not that.”

In addition to a documentary being developed with Gates and another independent project that is “art-world related,” Read says, “I’m working on producing another HBO feature doc currently.” And, “to have some narrative experience, I just produced a friend’s narrative short.” As for Penn Station, the development saga is unresolved, and Read is considering continuing to film it in some way—“not to devote the rest of my life to it, but perhaps to keep up some form of documenting it. I could make a whole film about the demolition of the ’60s station, and a whole different film about what’s going to happen from here.”—Vadim Rizov/Image: Georgia Read