The History of Concrete

Idle during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, documentary filmmaker John Wilson attends a Hallmark holiday-movie screenwriting workshop, where instructors break down the commercial formula for churning out feel-good Christmas rom-coms. Struck by the crumbling foundations of his own apartment building, Wilson decides to apply that same aspirational, crowd-pleasing formula to an unlikely subject: concrete — the second-most-used material on the planet after water. What follows is his quixotic attempt to pitch, fund, and sell this concept to the film industry. The bulk of the documentary tracks his real-life pitch meetings with investors and producers, nearly all of whom decline. Undeterred, Wilson embarks on a loose pilgrimage that moves from the celebrity handprints embedded in the sidewalk outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles to the ancient unreinforced concrete dome of the Pantheon in Rome, using each stop to meditate on permanence, decay, and what human beings choose to preserve or abandon. Along the way Wilson befriends Jack, a liquor-store clerk who plays in a band doing dive-bar gigs around the city. Wilson spends the better part of a year and a half in Jack's orbit — attending shows, sharing evenings drinking leftover promotional booze in motel rooms — and comes to see Jack as a kind of alter ego: someone who makes art purely for its own sake, unconcerned with industry validation. The film also captures Wilson at a GQ event alongside comedian Tim Robinson and Kim Kardashian, using the encounter to lampoon the vacuousness of celebrity culture in contrast with concrete's anonymous ubiquity. Throughout, Wilson reflexively applies (and gleefully subverts) the Hallmark formula he studied, turning the film into a humorous meta-commentary on commercial storytelling, artistic ambition, and the gap between what gets funded and what gets made. The documentary ultimately becomes a philosophical meditation on life, death, impermanence, and the things — material and otherwise — that people either let crumble or care enough to repair.

Sources: Web search summaries (Sundance/Magnolia/MIFF press materials), Wikipedia (The History of Concrete article), AnOther magazine interview with John Wilson