Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee's tale of failing empire, sits on the table of a Nolita restaurant as Jamie Johnson stares at a woman eating noodles across the way. "A good book," says the 28-year-old Johnson. He taps the cover illustration of a boy propping up scarecrows dressed to look like soldiers. It's a picture that hints at the social and political themes in Johnson's new documentary, The One Percent, his follow-up to the 2003 film that brought him broad fame and specific infamy: Born Rich, in which his fellow scions leapt into nooses of their own words to delightful effect.
Johnson's own background as an heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharma fortune overshadowed the more interesting aspect of the Born Rich brouhaha — his distrust in the basic goodness of the American system. At the heart of his work is a questioning of the old Puritan ethic — the idea that God rewards his favored sons and daughters with fortunes — along with a more continental attitude that perhaps Balzac was right, and behind every great fortune lies a crime. "It is entirely true," Johnson says, when asked about this quote in relation to the suspicion of capital in The One Percent.
The new film — which premieres on HBO this month — sets out to unlock the secrets of wealth disparities in America, with a lurching narrative that touches on the sugar industry, Hurricane Katrina, trickle-down economics, Iran-contra, and Palm Beach croquet. If it all sounds overly idealistic and wildly ambitious, well, it is. "It's a big topic," acknowledges Johnson, who began work on the film in 2003, when he was freshly graduated from NYU with a degree in American history. "I was a younger man when I made it and wanted people to answer for their actions in a way that some of them couldn't. And at this stage in my life I'm more comfortable with that ambiguity."
Johnson's quest for the bogeymen of iniquity feels enthrallingly quixotic from the start, and only grows more so as it goes on:
"There's nothing wrong with nepotism as long as you keep it within the family," Steve Forbes tells him with a nudge and a wink.
"There is no equality in life," arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi advises.
"You've exhausted my patience!" erupts the late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. "I have?" replies Johnson in disbelief.
This recurring inability to discuss the nature of American wealth impedes the film Johnson set out to make, but charms the one he ended up creating. In the final scene, Johnson approaches his father, Jimmy Johnson, who disowned a youthful film project of his own back in the seventies after Johnson & Johnson executives objected to its critique of their dealings in apartheid-era South Africa. "I remember going down to meet with the CEO at the time, and I began to realize that it was a story with two sides that...ah...they didn't pay that high — " says the elder Johnson, then breaks off.
"He was about to try to tell me there was another side to this story — then he abandoned that argument," says Jamie. "It's an interesting moment of honesty. He doesn't believe it enough to say it." Though Jamie takes notable glee in crashing his family's wealth-planning meetings with cameras in tow, he ultimately avoids playing the part of a genteel Bam Margera by presenting his father in human tones.
The One Percent has less sympathy for the Fanjul family, the Florida sugar barons accused of polluting the Everglades. When I mention that — his own East Village residence notwithstanding — his social calendar may set him across from a Fanjul in Palm Beach or Manhattan at some point, he grows uncomfortable. "I don't know what that's gonna be like," he says. There follows talk of the difficulty of one person to really judge another, then a few failed sentences, finally a long breath. And for a wavering moment, Jamie Johnson looks like someone in a Jamie Johnson film. Then he decides to say what he means. "We're subsidizing an industry that trashes the environment, and then we're using tax dollars to pay for the cleanup and repair. It just so happens that the Fanjuls represent that."
We talk about the decline of empires British and American, the rise of China, and Johnson's desire to direct scripted films. Soon we're walking north on Elizabeth Street. "Did you notice the girl next to us?" Johnson asks. "She had those noodles, and then pie. A beautiful girl, eating alone. You never see that in this city."
