John Wilson on his unlikely concrete movie: ‘There might be a kind of sickness in shooting things this way’

The creator of How To with John Wilson has returned with his first film, a documentary about how to sell a documentary about concrete A s mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has frequently demonstrated impressive media savvy, but arguably nothing has proved his genius for in-the-know promo more than a video , released in April, with the documentarian John Wilson . The spot, in support of the mayor’s plan to reduce the presence of the city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds, suggested that either he or someone on his team was a fan of How To With John Wilson, the film-maker’s cult-beloved HBO series that remains a taste signifier for alt-humorous New Yorkers. It was because of that scaffolding episode, released in October 2020, that I, like some smart Mamdani staffers, began to perceive the sidewalk shed shadowing my block not as an inevitable fixed entity but an obtrusive, if well-intentioned, symptom of neglect. But it is not what one might call a marketable idea. The show’s digressive style “wasn’t a shtick.

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Scoop News DeskNew York City, New York · Published Saturday, September 19, 2026 at 10:23 AM UTCUpdated Sunday, September 20, 2026 at 5:30 AM UTC

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The film finds Wilson in a strange place after the high of How To’s 2023 – directionless, anxious, famous enough to be the $2,000 Jeopardy question no one gets but not to secure financing for his dream of a feature-length documentary. “I was having a lot of strange thoughts, crazy problems with self-esteem, especially when nobody wanted to take a chance with something like this, at least at first,” he recalls in the same halting, nasally speech of both his How To narration and, as seen in the film, someone’s AI-generated ad to sell gutters on TikTok (“I would’ve done it for free, if they asked,” he deadpans).