An Underground Drink Cast as a Film Star

A tall plastic soup container is filled with ice, rum, cheap liqueurs and fruit juices and stashed in a brown paper bag. Some money changes hands. What happens after that, at least for the buyer, can get blurry.

The potent street cocktail is called a nutcracker. It is best known in uptown Manhattan neighborhoods like Inwood and Washington Heights and it is unlikely to be confused with the ballet that is a Christmas season tradition.

Now, it is having its story told. The drink is the subject of a planned documentary, still in its early stages, that aims to cast the underground mix not as an illicit scourge but as an entrepreneurial success.

The film is to focus on Washington Heights, where the nutcracker rose to popularity early in the millennium among the Manhattan neighborhood’s Dominican diaspora. The filmmakers plan to touch on the ire stirred by the drink’s unregulated sales, but the emphasis will be on the go-getter immigrant attitude epitomized in the marketplace that arose for this fruity concoction, called by some “Dominican moonshine.”

Especially bountiful during the summer, nutcrackers are sold in barbershops, bodegas and under the shade of a park tree, the sellers sometimes operating out of a shopping cart loaded with spirits. The standard price is $10.

At a small, crowded bookstore called Word Up, on West 165th Street, last week, the filmmakers, Leo Fuentes, whose pen name is Led Black, and Jonathan Ullman, showed some of the footage accumulated since they began recording two summers ago and spoke about the experience.

“When we started this was the story of the drink,” Mr. Ullman told the crowd. “But it turned into a story about paying rent, food for the family, and about how not all of these people have the same opportunity.”

At a table beside the stage, free nutcrackers were served in small plastic cups. “True to fame, it goes quick,” remarked a guest, noticing the supply starting to run low, as he accepted a cup of the bright red liquid.

Mr. Black, 39, who grew up in Washington Heights, runs UptownCollective.com, a hyper-local blog about Northern Manhattan. Mr. Ullman, 46, has worked on other projects about urban life. They need more funding to finish and release the film, and the event was an attempt to spread awareness.

Over a beat-laden soundtrack, one clip shows a nutcracker sale playing out on a sidewalk. “It seemed like the perfect New York drink,” a voice muses later. “All we know was to hustle for anything,” says a heavyset man wearing sunglasses and a cap. “Whether it’s pastelitos on the block, to learning how to make nutcrackers.”

In other footage, several pedestrians answer the question what the word conjures for them - “Happy magical fun times?” “I think of ballerinas.” Eventually, a construction worker smiles knowingly. “Washington Heights,” he says. “Uptown.”

There’s a segment about the drink’s invention. A Peruvian-Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side, Flor de Mayo, is widely credited with its creation in the early 1990s. The story goes that after the drink became popular, the restaurant started selling it to go, and entrepreneurial individuals from Washington Heights eventually decoded the recipe, and took it a few miles north.

For the documentary, the filmmakers interviewed five sellers, who were filmed with their faces obscured.

“Not everybody agreed to talk to us,” Mr. Ullman said of some “bigger nutcracker purveyors.”

The biggest day for nutcracker sales, they discovered, might be the annual Dominican Day Parade in August. Mr. Black spoke of a man who takes in more than $60,000 over the course of the weekend, and said some that nutcracker businesses are family run.

At the bookstore, Desi K. Robinson, 41, tried her first nutcracker. “I would say it’s a kind of hood rum punch,” she said. “It’s sweet and sassy.”

Others at the event shared their nutcracker memories.

Jason Paulino, an author, recalled consuming a large quantity of banana-flavored nutcrackers one summer with friends when he was 19. They visited Rockaway Beach, drinking on the train ride there. Once in the water Mr. Paulino swam out too far, and struggled to stay afloat. “I honestly have never been more scared for my life,” he said.

Robert Bohan, who appears in the some of the footage shot for the film, said he benefited from the drink’s underground economy in a remarkable way. In the early 1990s, he said, he was working for a gang involved in the crack trade and in 1993, he was arrested in connection with a homicide.

“My family started selling nutcrackers and the money paid for the lawyers,: he said. “I owe a lot to the nutcracker.”

Mr. Bohan, 39, who was convicted in 1995 of second-degree murder, was released from prison in 2005

He never tasted a nutcracker until soon after his release. But he can still recall its cherry flavor, and speculated that his was prepared extra strong for the occasion.

“The first day I drank one?” he said. “That was a ride”