by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Photographer and filmmaker Richard Sandler fell in love with New York City's Times Square at the turn of the '60s, at the age of 14. He saw the real Minnesota Fats hustle at the pool rooms and soaked in the surrounding porno shops, grindhouses, jazz joints, theatres, strip clubs and pizza parlours - the true Times Square, before Disney took over.

"It had always been this place where uptown could meet downtown, black culture could meet white, jazz could meet classical and burlesque and Shakespeare," says Sandler over the blower from Martha's Vineyard, where he's currently working on his latest doc. "I mean, there was so much there.

"It always had the function of being a place of greater choice, shall we say. Not only in the sense of the entertainment but also in that you could speak your mind a little bit more freely there. Of course, I think the religious people were attracted to it for that reason, but also because of the sin."

Of course. The "kooks," as they're called. Preaching to the perverted at the top of their lungs, as much a Times Square fixture as the porno shacks and movie-script hawkers. These are the people Sandler sought out from '93 to '98 to capture on videotape and eventually in his documentary The Gods of Times Square - the wound-up witnessing, the crude, handmade tracts, the passionate and even furious harangues. They're Christian (and in the case of "Jim," Christ himself, albeit with a rock album in the works), they're Muslims and they're Jews (from the Mitzva Tank Hasidim to the virulently anti-gay, anti-white black Hebrew Israelites to the ex-gay goyishe Jew for Jesus).

Getting his subjects to open up was little problem for Sandler, already well versed in Big Apple street photography. "The fact of the matter is, people want to talk. If you're in Times Square, chances are you're there for some kind of relating. There's great comfort in bathing in a human sea like that, to dive into this mass of humanity.

"Every day something would happen that would blow my mind. It felt to me like Through the Looking Glass, like Lewis Carroll. Like I'd gone down some strange hole and wound up in this alternative universe that was both sweet and severe. You know, I hope that when people watch the movie, they walk away with a feeling of the beauty and the wonderful unexplainability, celebrating the fact of existence itself. There's just so many characters, everybody's so different - hopefully it feels like a celebration of life itself in all its imperfections."

It's a melancholy celebration. The film's second, largely unspoken phantom narrative is the death of the Times Square of legend. Sandler's eulogy comes mostly through careful juxtapositions, framings and reflections, balancing the unhinged street preaching with the area's oversized, overstimulating noise - visual and auditory. The two both contradict and complement each other.

"The whole point is to disorient - that's how you get consumers to consume, put them in a milieu of bedazzlement and wonder. Then people will part with their money, or partake of various attractions in this theme park. But what I was doing was the theme park of religion, because at that point the writing was on the wall that Times Square was gonna change. I really believe that because of that, people came out even more to speak their minds. It was as if Times Square was recapitulating its whole history as it was ending."

The Gods of Times Square screens at Cinéma du Parc Friday, Oct. 1 and Saturday, Oct. 2

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