One Track Mind

Philip Ashforth Coppola has devoted all his free time in the last thirty years to cataloging and archiving every station in the New York City subway system. Using his own resources, this humble New Jersey printing press operator has self-financed a multi-volume "study" of his true passion: the rich, even rapturous design-work found within New York's underworld, conceived and constructed at a more adventurous time in our city's public-building history, and today forming the basis of unlikely - and often unnoticed - cathedrals of mosaic, faïence, terra cotta, tile, and steel. The film is a profile on Philip and his extreme obsession of the design and decoration of New York's 496 subway stations. Filmed over a course of four years, ONE TRACK MIND is a portrait of a man consumed by a singular passion --- a passion that few others share. The documentary, shot almost entirely in the subway system in post-9/11 New York, is also a loving portrait of a city's artistic idiosyncrasies.