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New York on Film

TheOldMole Apr 30 2006 10:55 AM

]Even as more and more movies and television shows are being shot in New York, the city that turns up on the screen is far more likely to be the teeming, terrifying, exhilarating, unforgiving New York of the popular imagination. Kevin Lima's coming film "Enchanted," for example, is about a peasant girl who is banished from her fairy-tale world to a New York that is both gritty and romanticized. As Mr. Lumet put it, "If a director comes in from California and doesn't know the city at all, he picks the Empire State Building and all the postcard shots — and that, of course, isn't the city." To many filmmakers, the postcard is all that's left. David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, said: "There's been a sea change. I can remember well into the 70's films where there is the terrific sense of New York as being this adventurous place. Certainly if you go back to the 30's and think of a film like 'My Man Godfrey,' New York is a great, dangerous playground. Those films really had a sense of how jazzy and exciting it was to be in New York. I can't think of the last film I've seen that had that feeling." Paul Mazursky, the Brooklyn-born director of New York films like "Next Stop, Greenwich Village" (1976) and "An Unmarried Woman" (1978), echoed this view: "I'm trying to think of the last good New York movie." (He's still thinking.) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/movies/30clar.html

Edgy DC Apr 30 2006 02:39 PM Edited 1 time(s), most recently on May 01 2006 02:30 PM

I actually like Hitch (a surprisingly good wisecracking Will Smith thingie), but it seemed like it was underwritten in part by the New York City Board of Tourism the same way So I Married an Axe Murderer was clearly underwritten by the San Francisco Board of Tourism. But there's enough studios an directors there in NYC that you'd think there should be somebody that makes an authentic character of the city. Spike Lee? Scorscese?

Vic Sage May 01 2006 02:25 PM

once upon a time, we had an interesting thread on NY movies, but i think it was lost in the Great Crash, and i'm not investing the time to reconstitute my contributions to it.