By George: It All Comes Down

A one-hour documentary about our first real moment of declaring independence 250 years ago, when New Yorkers toppled the statue of King George III at Bowling Green after a first public reading of the freshly inked document on July 9, 1776. What happened to the statue after that? The answer might surprise you. Made of iron to look like a Roman statue of Marcus Aurelius, it got melted down by a Connecticut girl into artillery balls to kill the enemy. Its decapitated head got smuggled back to England, probably hiding to this day in a colonist’s estate. In this film, we consider the rise and fall of empires, the toppling of statues, and the removal of monuments to Confederates and slave holders in the afterlife of George Floyd. We follow historian Abby Suckle on her trail to finally find the missing head of King George III, telling the story of how it all happened, along with reflections from Ivan Schwartz whose Studio EIS in Brooklyn has spent a half century sculpting statues of legends from American history in all its complexity: from Presidential libraries, to a re-creation of King George's statue.